#scgdc

Sorry for the delay. Here is my usual short form tournament report for the Starcity Games Open tournament in Washington, DC. Since I don't really play Standard, I went to bird friends until the Legacy Challenge on Saturday and planned to use that to decide if I wanted to grind out 7,000 hours of Legacy on Sunday.

Legacy Challenge

I played my BG Loam deck that I brewed up featuring Worm Harvest and Raven's Crime as Entomb targets for value, Deeds, Pulses, a utility GSZ package, Smallpox and some spicy lands and discard. Apparently my own brewing stumbled upon a strategy which did quite well in the event. I'm interested in Dave Price's list and will probably try to acquire the cards to play a slightly modified version as the next evolution of my BG deck.

At any rate, I signed up for the Legacy Challenge, crossed my fingers that I didn't play combo the entire event and waited for the pairings.

Round 1 - Enchantress Combo

Game 1 - I don't know what he's playing but he wins the die roll and leads off with forest into Utopia Sprawl. I've played Enchantress with BUGStill before and Deed is a beating. However, he manages to basically go off the turn before I can wipe his entire board.

Game 2 - I side in Nature's Claims and a Pithing Needle for Sterling Grove. In a nutshell, he starts with Leyline of Sanctity in play, preventing me from using discard and plays a turn 2 Nevermore naming Pernicious Deed. I Nature's Claim his first and second Sterling Grove with him tapped out, then Pulse his Nevermore with a Deed in hand. His only out at this point is Replenish, which he obviously peels off the top in his draw step and goes on to lock me out.

Round 2 - Sneak/Show Combo

Combo. Again. Ugh. But at least it's a combo that relies on large creatures and a weak mana base. Maybe I'll get lucky.

Game 1 - He mulligans twice. I'm on the play. Feeling good. I don't have discard in hand, but I'm set to cycle a land, untap and Loam to pull ahead. But he goes all in on turn 2 Emrakul, leaving no cards in hand and only Ancient Tomb in play. Since I'm tapped out, I can't Entomb Vengeful Pharaoh, kill Emrakul and then draw back into the game. That's a reasonable line of play since I have land in hand, Loam and a cycler and he has a colorless land and no other permanents or cards.

Game 2 - He keeps a hand with Leyline. I Thoughtseize him and see Preordain, Ponder, Lotus Petal, Show and Tell and Jace. I take the Show and Tell and hope he bricks on finding a basic land for a few turns while I set up. He finds a land, but I Smallpox it away, he draws blanks for a few turns and I cast Thrun and go the distance. I tell him that I sided out Loams, so I'm glad he had the Leyline mulligan. I didn't, of course, and post-board he put the Leylines back, which would allow me to Loam/Wasteland again as a game plan in game 3, since his deck relies so heavily on non-basics.

Game 3 - Long story short, we fight out a pretty good game. He eventually gets to keep enough land around to Show and Tell Progenitus and I have 6 mana, 3 cycling lands in hand and two draw steps to hit one of four Smallpox or a Liliana. I burn through about 10 of the last 30 cards in my deck and see none of them and lose. I felt okay with this, considering I played well, had the win and he just lucked off the top better than I did. Magic is a game of variance.

Round 3 - Fire Maverick "Fair Deck"

Game 1 - I'm on the play and open with a Verdant. He plays Heath, fetch Savannah, Heirarch and I think "SWEET" in my innermost thoughts. I untap, play a Swamp and Smallpox him so brutally that it shows up in his ancestor's medical history. I strip his graveyard with a Scavenging Ooze that he has to Plow, slow roll a sweet 6 for 1 with Deed and then comfortably beat him to death with 5 Worm tokens when he runs out of resources.

Game 2 - I board in Phyrexian Crusader and tell him "you just activated my experimental anti-Fire Maverick trap sideboard!" I'm para-phrasing, there. I fan open a hand with mana, Phyrexian Crusader, Maze of Ith and Deed. Sweet. I stick the Crusader. He tries to Plow it. Then he tries to Punishing Fire it. Then he tries to block it with a Pridemage. I Deed away his board, drop a second Phyrexian Crusader and poison him to death. He admits that his only out in the entire deck is Scavenging Ooze.

Round 4 - Reanimator Combo

Game 1 - He's on the play and does EOT Entomb for Jin-Gitaxias, Exhume, win. He actually shuffled his deck facing me, so I knew what he was playing and kept a hand with Thoughtseize and Smallpox, but he had redundant Entomb and won the die roll, so it wasn't enough.

Game 2 - I board in Faerie Macabre. He goes for an Entomb, Reanimate on Iona, I Macabre her, then wipe away all his land and stick Thrun, at which point he scoops.

Game 3 - I mistakenly think that I am on the play for some reason and keep a hand with multiple discard, Smallopox, sufficient mana and a Wasteland but no Faerie Macabre. It turns out I'm not on the play and he has the Force for my first discard, Swamp, EOT Entomb for Jin, Reanimate sequence again (must be nice!) and obviously draws enough protection that my Smallpox fails to resolve. Anything but Jin-Gitaxias and I probably had that one. Lesson - mulligan more aggressively.

In the end, the decision to not play Mindbreak Trap worked out. None of the combo I faced would have given me value for that card. I almost beat all the combo decks even without Force and Brainstorm (or tied, in the case of Enchantress where the first game took 35 minutes and the second one plus sideboarding took 700 more). The Crusaders did exactly what they were supposed to do. I played very tight, played to my outs, didn't make any mistakes and did my best against tough matches. It was reasonably fun. But I was pretty upset with 1-3, which was my first failure to win a prize in a Legacy Challenge. So I decided that my deck wasn't good enough to burn $30 and several months of my life on 9 rounds of Legacy the next day. So, when Sunday rolled around I did a...

$10 Draft

I decided to test my new found love and recent success at Limited in a more competitive event than my normal FNM. I did not want to do the Draft Open, however, as I need much more practice first.

I started out taking blue cards with pretty strong signals that they were coming my way, including information about the starting DFC picks at the table. I decided to feed white to the guy left of me who would be in the other bracket. My plan was to assemble the Becker. I got the combo comfortably in late picks in the first pack and had taken almost entirely quality blue cards, so I was in a good position to pick up any color in pack 2 that would give me an end game. I mostly had to decide between red for Brimstones and such or to go for a Spider Spawning.

In the end, pack two started with a Bloodline Keeper, so I went all-in on blue black control. I had seen black as fairly open and was able to take high quality black cards pretty freely in pack two. Pack three started with an Olivia Voldaren and a Murder of Crows. I decided that I could handle Crows and would much rather not face Olivia in the draft given that my removal was all ineffective against her. So I took Olivia, but avoided further red, didn't see any Grottos or Amulets and ended up not playing her rather comfortably. In the end, here's how my deck ended up:

8 Island

8 Swamp

1 Nephalia Drownyard

1 Mask of Avacyn

2 Claustrophobia

1 Dead Weight

1 Silent Departure

1 Blazing Torch

1 Ghoulcaller's Chant

1 Think Twice

1 Dissipate

1 Forbidden Alchemy

1 Moan of the Unhallowed

2 Typhoid Rats

1 Manor Skeleton

1 Deranged Assistant

1 Walking Corpse

1 Vampire Interloper

1 Stitched Drake

2 Selfhoff Occultist

1 Bloodline Keeper

1 Manor Gargoyle

1 Battleground Geist

Not too shabby. A nice UB control deck with powerful cards, good removal and a solid curve.

Round 1 - RG Werewolves

Game 1 - I mulligan to 6 and keep Rats, Corpse and 4 land. My next 5 draws are all land and I die to Falkenrath Marauders.

Game 2 - I curve out into turn 4 Bloodline Keeper, turn 5 Manor Gargoyle and beat him senseless.

Game 3 - No notes, but I see my life going to 10 in iterations that look like a Gatstaf Shepherd, whereas his life goes 20, 16, 8, dead. So I bet I used Silent Departure on a Gatstaf, then played Bloodline Keeper and took over.

Round 2 - Boros

Game 1 - We play a close game and I manage to correctly sequence my plays to defeat a Geist-Honored Monk and Galvanic Juggernaut to win at 5 life (Fateful Hour? Huh?). I also note that he has Pyre and Geistflame.

Game 2, he takes a mulligan and I am on the front foot all game with Rat into Corpse into Occultist into Moan and I beat him down, taking only 3 damage. He again played Geist-Honored Monk, but I bounced his tokens to shrink it and plowed through. I played around Rally the Peasants carefully both games, but confirmed afterwards that he did not have one.

Round 3 - U/W Stalker/Cleaver

Another guy in the draft tells me that I'm up against the easy button and that the guy *also* has Priest, Midnight Haunting, Cloistered Youth, Feeling of Dread and a Fiend Hunter. Whee.

Game 1 - I curve into Bloodline Keeper and annihilate him without taking any damage.

Game 2 - We both mulligan. I keep a great hand and play tight, but lose to Stalker/Cleaver.

Game 3 - I mulligan twice, but keep a really good 5. I peel really well for a few turns, but then I hit Bloodline Keeper and miss a Swamp for 6 turns in a row. I carefully use my card draw, bounce, trades and such to keep stabilized with his slightly flooded hand. But he gets Stalker/Cleaver the turn before I hit my second black source and I lose. One swamp in any of the three prior turns and I would have completely obliterated him.

All that and my only prize was rare drafting enough value to more than pay for the event. Darn! I sent an angry tweet to Aaron Forsythe, requesting a consolation prize for how lame Stalker/Cleaver is and then found my friends to get in some Modern practice with Merfolk for the rest of the day.

Final Thoughts on the Event

First off, I noted that U/W did awful in the Standard event. It performed so poorly that it actually allowed a single non-U/W deck to make the top 8. R/B! Can you believe it? They should probably ban Stensia Bloodhall for safety.

All kidding aside, I had a good time. I needed to get away for the weekend and think about some imaginary wizard fighting. I think my only criticism of the event was that everyone's play space was approximately 2 inches narrower than a standard playmat. It was like eating lunch on a military submarine. You had to pray you didn't sit next to Elbows McGee and you had to apologize to everyone for getting inside their bubble all day.

I'm starting the process of going vegetarian again (at least when I'm not at home), so I can't say first hand whether the hot dogs were worth $7 at the event. I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.

I also remembered to take a picture for Don's Magic and Sundry with a promo sticker against the SCG Open DC banner. Sweet.