[Premium Article] So Many Insane Plays – Saved By The Bell: A SCG Tourney Report

Since I am Albert Kyle, I am going to go ahead and react. The big question on everyone's mind began with why Steve ran out of time in so many of his matches. I suppose some folks only like to read the first few paragraphs of an article and saw that he and I spend 15 minutes on shuffling/mulliganing in game 1 of his first match. This MUST explain why Steve ran out of time in some many matchups! There are several problems with this argument.

1) We did not run out of time. Steve had several ties that day, but this was not one of them. We finished the full match, although we did use extra turns.

2) Game 1 took about 15 minutes since I scooped on Steve's first turn as soon as a saw Dryad and thus knew he was playing GAT.

3) I have taken Dredge to a over a dozen tournaments and played over 100 matches and only once did I not finish. This involved a match where I lose game 1 to Cullen Control thanks to Moat and then game 2 went very long as he Orim's Chanted me 3 turns in a row before I finally won game 2. We ran out of time game 3. In the other 99+ rounds I have always finished the round.

4) It was game three which took over half an hour that actually caused us to go to turns. As Steve points out in his article this was a VERY close game. Steve consistently played at his normal pace, which is somewhat slower than average but within the rules. As an example Steve regularly uses his full minute to resolve a Brainstorm. This is not an attempt to cheat, but rather using all the time available to make a very important decision. Only once, was I concerned that Steve was using too much time. I asked him to play quicker and he did. At no point did Steve feel the need to ask me for more time. So far as I understand it, neither of us had the impression that the other slow played or "cheated." Neither of use was asked to play faster by a judge. This is despite the fact that the final few turns of the match were watched by judges since we were one of the last to finish that round.
The longest single event in the game occurred in extra time when Steve actually went through my entire graveyard and RFG pile to try to figure out how many black creatures my be left in my graveyard. This was important since Steve had do decide whether to Echoing Truth or Brainstorm and this decision hinged on whether I had another black creature to pitch to Ichorid so I could swing for the win without Bridge tokens the next turn. Judges were watching and no on asked him to play faster.