Top 8 at Ble Bell game day 12 with COBRA STORM

NICK - I want my 10% off the next event =) I think this is a great idea, by the way. For $3 he gets a great promotion for his event, gets people to come back to the next one and gives the community stuff to read. Good deal!

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Judge Abe Corson was going up to Blue Bell to judge Nick’s latest Double Power 9 tournament, and I was happy to have someone to ride along with. A bunch of my friends from the DC Vintage group were going to Richmond to play for a Grim Tutor, but I had confidence that my Cobra Storm deck was ready for a higher level of competition, and potentially better prizes. I had just played it the previous week in Bloomsburg, and was pleased with the result, although the deck really failed me in the Top 8 and I just couldn’t draw mana to save my life.

This week, I added in the Time Vault combo, because I felt like the deck had a lot of tutors and having another easy road to victory seemed to fit the theme. Here’s what I played:

Oops, I won!
A Vintage deck by Paul Mastriano and Team Meandeck

3 lotus Cobra
4 FOW
4 preordain
4 gush
2 Thoughseize
1 Fastbond
1 Acall
1 Ponder
1 Time Vault
1 Key
1 walk
1 Necro
1 Tendrils
1 Yawg Will
1 DT
1 Vamp
1 Mystical
1 Brainstorm
1 Hurkyl's Recall
1 Jace TMS
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Tinker
1 Blightsteel
1 Gifts
1 Imperial Seal

5 Mox
1 Blotus
1 Petal
1 Sol Ring
1 mana Crypt

8 fetch
3 Sea
2 Trop
1 island

SB: 1 Slaughter Pact
1 Doom Blade
1 Forest
3 Nature's Claim
2 Duress
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Yixlid Jailer
1 Rebuild

This deck is not easy to play optimally. If you try it and it's not working I recommend reading Steve M's book on how to play Gush.

I lazily copied the Sideboard off my list from the previous week, and it’s really not the best. Shop decks often come at you with chalice for 1, so Nature’s Claimx3 might not be the right idea.

I had been trying to come up with a good Gush combo deck for weeks and kept failing. Either my list couldn’t beat Shops, or was so skewed towards beating Shops that I couldn’t beat anything else. This led me down the road of playing Oath instead. At Bloomsburg in January a guy named Vito beat my Oath deck with his Cobra Gush combo thing and I decided to take another crack at it. Eliminating Dark Rituals was a good start, and Cobras helped me have better game vs Shop without sacrificing much in my other match-ups. This one looked like a winner.

Rd 1 MUD

This guy was a pretty inexperience Vintage player, but he was playing a good deck. He played Pithing Needle naming mana Crypt in game 2, which does nothing, but still managed to win that game. Luckily I won games 1 and 3 (one with Blightsteel, one with Tendrils) and I was able to get it.

1-0

Rd 2 MUD again

I had great hands here and won both with Blightsteel. I think he had to mulligan in both games, and in Game 2 I kept a really risky one that lost hard to chalice = 0, but he didn’t have it so I won.

2-0

Rd 3 Oath

I had to face off with the TO from Bloomsburg here, so he definitely had seen my deck before. Embarrassingly I got deck checked this round and had misredged. I had to take a game loss, and got steam-rolled by a fairly early Oathing.

2-1

Rd 4 Brian

I think I won one game with Time Vault and one with Tendrils. I def had a hand where I played Sea on turn 1, sea on turn 2, tapped both for black on turn 3 and Gushed. My intention was to replay the Sea and play Necro with 3 black mana, but my Gush yielded Demonic Tutor – so I instead tutored for Fastbond, played a Trop and combed out that turn! I cant quite remember what he was even playing, all I can remember was that he had just moved to Baltimore and wanted to possibly test with me and some people so we exchanged emails and such – pretty cool, I got +1 friend in this match. =)

3-1

Rd 5 Jeff F.

I was not happy to have to face Jeff in the critical round for contention. We seem to have to face-off in every tournament, and its always close. The last time, we were able to ID, and the time before that he combed out with Time Vault, but died to a Bob flip before he could finish me off (he had some serious balls to play a Bob deck with Gush in it. I actually drew up about three different lists of that after the tournament).

This time he was rocking a Gush deck that had City of Brass in it. I’m still not sure what that was all about, but my deck performed at all-star level here. In game 2 I remember having the INSANE nuts, and I Duressed him revealing a weak hand that unfortunately had two Duress effects in it, so he was able to take my Ancestral out of my hand on his following turn. The rest of my hand was still good, though, so that didn’t really mess me up too much.

4-1

Rd 6 ID

Seth was hanging around the standing and I told him that he could ID in if he was paired with an opponent that has the same or better record than him. I also said that if it’ me, I’ll happily ID with him. He had never made top 8 before at one of these events so when he saw that we were paired he was pretty psyched.

Top 8 John Jones

John Jones apparently has the distinction of being total a terror online. I found this to be pretty funny, and we had a pretty enjoyable match. In game 1 I combed out really quickly and won. Game 2 and 3, though, I got bent over by his sideboard. I saw his deck after the tournament and I think he had 4 REBs, I didn’t really expect him to have so many! Those REBs really caught me at some critical points and allowed him to get ahead on cards and run away with the games.

Final record 4-2-1

Props to the DC Vintage crew for testing with me, Abe Corson for Driving, Team Meandeck for help with design, Nick for running another great event, and all the cool people at Blue Bell for making it fun – because if you aren’t having fun playing Vintage then you’re playing the wrong game.

See you all at the next one!

-Paul