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Quilt's Ravnica-PrereleaseBy Quilt on September 29th, 2005 · Filed in Limited · 16 Comments
So I went. While good people like me arrive timely, a legion of lollygaggers decided that 10.15 or 10.30 was just as good. Since the organiser is a money-hungry crook from Dickensian times, the latecomers can always join. As a result, everybody comes later and later. I'm not a person who gets hung up on emotions, but this phenomenon annoys the crap out of me. The decks. I pack I opened for registering had a lot of good stuff, including a BoP. Seatings for deck registration are usually based on the alphabet, so I got to sit at the end of the table (my name starts with an A). And - surprise surprise – I got my own deck back. Heheh. Having seen it before gave me a little advantage in deck building. This is what I played:
No real tough decisions in deck building. Green/White/Red were the strongest cards in my pool. I was slightly afraid that the mana would become a problem, but I figured that two two-coloured lands and the Birds Of Paradise could be enough. In fact I hardly had any mana-problems throught the day, and that might have been an indication that I played too much land. (I should have counted the two-coloured lands as more than one.) In SB I had two extra Golgari Brownscales. They offer a certain synergy with recollect, but I was a little afraid for the double casting cost. (I had another one in the SB). The rest of the deck was nothing to write home about, but since you dream about pointing out the rest of my deck building mistakes, I'm giving you a quick overview anyway. White had some weenies with vigilance that didn’t get in because of the general lack in pumping, a pair of Walls [creatures with defender  -Ed] and some of those weird damage preventing cards. I also had enchantment and artifact removal in White, Green and Red. Good for SBing. There was an Overwhelm in Green, but it couldn't convince me because of the high mana cost and absence of trample. There were hardly had any Black cards (I even opened a booster without Black in it), and the best one would have been Keening Banshee, but that isn't really splashable. The only thing interesting in the remaining Gold cards were my two Golgari Rotwurms, but Green/Black would generally have been too weak to build a 40 card deck with.Just for the record, the other rares were Mindleech Mass and Dimir Doppelganger. Already on the internet... Round 1. After almost two hours... There is a strange thing going on with large tournaments. You always turn out playing the wrong people. In round one I had to face Chris, who's a friend. It might be just me, but sanctioned matches against friends are not very nice, since I don't like to see my friends lose. Chris played a Green/White deck that splashed Black. He had some mana acceleration and token generators, but I didn't see any real bombs. Courier Hawk was good for a little damage in game 1, and after trading some creatures 1-for-1, I could cast my Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi. He could stabilize the board after a few turns, but then I drew Cloudstone Curio, the engine for my game-winning combo. For those who don’t see it. I have 2 Galvanic Arcs and 2 Faith’s Fetters (plus a Recollect) in my deck. Pretty devastating with the Curio. 1-0 for me. He did get in a few points with Spectral Searchlight, though. Game 2 wasn’t that different. A quick equilibrium was reached, and then I cast Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi (free attacks), while Selesnya Evangel kept improving my board position. Too bad for Chris; he’s really a nice guy, but I won easily with 2-0. Against Tom. His surname is, seriously, “the decker”, so I asked if he was going to deck me. Not only was this the first time he heard this joke, he also couldn’t laugh at it. He seemed a little manascrewed in game one; a common occurance among those who don’t laugh at my jokes. His Red/White-deck got a quick start, but by the midgame he didn’t have more land than three Plains and a Mountain. My life went down to 7, and he did some nifty tricks with these crappy White instants most of us have learned to ignore in deck construction. Then I could cast a Faith’s Fetters on his biggest threat, and Selesnya Evangel started to make tokens. Eventually, I made an alpha-strike for the win. 1-0. I guess he didn’t draw as many creatures in game two, because he failed to develop his board position as fast as in the first game. After a while, my blockers started to trade with his attackers, and then I cast a 4/7 creature with vigilance. Red-white isn’t the correct colour combination for handling Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi. He ignored it for a few turns. Then he chumped it. Then it killed him. Another pretty easy round. I remember making multiple mistakes, but none of them had any real impact. This was a pretty good matchup for me. 2-0 in this round, and also a 2-0 overall. Round 3. Against a guy named Frederick. If you start with 2-0, you are pretty safe from bad decks or terrible newbies. Not that I don't like to play against newbies, most games are usually pleasant and I can teach them stuff too, but beating a starting player 2-0 is not very rewarding. But back to Frederick; I lost the first game against his armada of green beef and unblockable blue and black stuff. There really wasn’t anything I could do, and I wasn’t lucky with my draws either. (Low on removal, nothing flying or against flying.) The second game was a nice one. As often happens in Sealed play, the board deadlocked after a few turns. He kept casting stuff, but eventually my Hour of Reckoning came. Nothing he could do against it, especially with three saprolings from Scatter the Seeds on my side of the board. (1-1) According to my life saldo, game three was even closer, and it stayed that way untill the time limit passed. (I like to eat things from time to time, at that time, break between the rounds would have been nice.) A draw in this round. 2-0-1 overall. Against Vincent; he's a very competent player. But in desperate need of fashion advice. Black pants that came from from a black suit. A grey-and-white plaid jacket that didn’t match at all. Red sneakers. And – this really killed me - a T-shirt that said “Pro-tour participant”. He probably wore the same T-shirt yesterday too. Just like so many others, he had a Green deck with lots of aggressive creatures. I had the luck of drawing my Cloudstone Curio combo in my opening hand, and decided to go all the way with it. That might have been a smart decision, but I screwed up myself. He had three creatures on his side, one enchanted with my Faith's Fetters, and when I cast my Galvanic Arc, I put too many eggs in one basket by targeting his pacified Golgari Guildmage with it. (The correct play would have been to target one of his other creatures. It is true that it would have first strike, but that was pretty irrelevant without blockers.) He responded with a Putrefy, so I lost my two enchantments. Smart move. Then he overran me. During the sideboarding, as always I replaced a Plains with a Plains and a Forest with a Forest. Mr. Pro-Tour approved of my combo and asked if I had a lot of auras in my deck to go with it. That's the oldest trick in the book, Mister Bond. Game 2. There used to be a rule for designers that forbade them to give beatdown decks card advantage. Not so in game two, when our Vincent could dredge everything right back on the board, and that was a lot more than I could take. No real chance here. Green/black is a powerful combination. This was one of the things I started to like the least about this set: everybody was playing the exact same decks. Lots of Black/Green or Green/White and maybe a little Red/White or Black/Blue. It will, of course, change with the release of the next sets, but Sealed Ravnica is doomed to mirror matches. I didn't win and I did not deserve to either. One strange thing about the match: he faked that he couldn’t speak any Dutch; I faked that I couldn’t speak any French. After the game we had quite a pleasant conversation, he was so polite to speak my language, and I had the courtesy to talk in French… 0-2 loss. 2-1-1 overall. Round 5. ****. **** **** ****. (This does get starred, right ?). One of the saddest days in history of Magic. Against a 40-something guy named Peter. Knowing the second name of this grey loser isn’t enough, I want to know his his address, for he stole my victory. Game 1. He mulligans to 6, 5, 4, 3 and scoops. Game 2. I have a good hand with my BoP, two Plains, and my White/Red turn 2 drops. I decided not to mulligan, a very bad call. No lands showed up in the first five rounds. He does some random stuff with Green and Black creatures and kills me. Game 3. I still can’t believe I ran into his cheap trick. Here’s what happened: I took a good start, and then the game went to a standstill. All my draws went completely wrong, e.g. the Hour of Reckoning in my opening hand. He had quality cards and could dredge most things back on the board. By "most things," I mean Grave-Shell Scarab, Stinkweed Imp, and Shambling Shell. I had some tokens, Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi, a Siege Wurm with Galvanic Arc on it, and some random stuff that could survive his Drooling Groodion. The game came to a total deadlock. But dredging (twice for Stinkweed Imp, btw) is a dangerous game in Limited, and he realized that he would deck himself if he couldn’t beat me. I was pretty confident about the game with the Hour in my hand, and all I had to do was make sure that no alpha strike would come. Guess what happened then... He started to do the crazy stuff like asking me if I did something in his upkeep, counting first strike damage without blockers, doing complex dredge manoeuvres, etc., etc.. I really didn’t see it at that point, but he was trying to stall the bloody match. This is a Prerelease. He’s forty years old. We are both holding cardboard cardboard in a smelly polyvalent room. Is drawing this round worth playing unfair ? The even more silly dredging and making stupider sacrifice-moves in response to my pinging. (By the way, throughout the Prerelease Wojek Embermage did a very good job against Saproling tokens). He stalled. And stalled. Then the time came for me to cast my well-timed Hour of Reckoning just before the judges started the end-of-match procedure. The game ended in a draw with him having two cards in his deck and no serious threats on the board. Pure theft, and a very disappointing draw. 2-1-2 so far. I’m pissed as hell. Against a younger guy named Gies. Not to much to say about this round. I managed to play the combo and won with 28 life. He has a BGw deck with lots of dredge and some removal. The only damage he did was with a Courier Hawk. He was nice guy to play against, and my mood got better thanks to him. In the second game he took quite a good start. We made some little mistakes. Later the game came to a standstill. Again. We both deployed a huge force of strong creatures, but never enough for any alpha strike and without serious threats with evasion. He got rid of my cambio with Dimir Machinations. I used my tech against the things that could hurt me (Lurking Informant, Dimir Infiltrator). Then I drew the good old Hour of Reckoning. Eventually it was time and so I blew the board with my wannabe-Wrath. Some tokens survived, and I had saved a few creature spells. Classic play. I like this stuff. 3-1-2. Round 7. Against a kid named Emmanuel. He sat two chairs away from me for registration, and we gave him enough deck building tips to do pretty well actually (considering that it was his first time and that we told him to make a 40-card deck, instead of the 60-card deck he built). His deck was Black-Blue-Green, and he had quite an amount of strong flyers. It was too bad for him that I could engage him into small playing mistakes, usually in attacking/blocking. That way, I could force 2-for-1 combat situations, and I broke through in game 1 with Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi and the Cloudstone Curio combo in game 2. One playing mistake he made was not keeping his Stinkweed Imp as a blocker, but using it for the offense. He wasn’t the first I saw doing that. This gave me a final score of 4-1-2. Guess what this means in a 135-player tournament? 21th place. (That’s within the first 20%) Guess what you I got for that? One measly little booster. How nice is that? A big disappointment. My deck was good. I played well when I had to. But this whole set tends to stalemate continuously, and through a whole day I faced a lot of similar decks in very long rounds, usually based around the same commons. The game play itself wasn’t very special. I cannot recall too many memorable tricks. (A friend of mine received 4 Faerie tokens from Hunted Troll and won a turn later with Overwhelm). My overall result wasn’t exactly bad, but it feels like a loss because of the stalling incident and the single booster I won. A good suggestion to the DCI or Wizards would be to force minima in the amount of prize boosters for tournament organisers (in relation to the number of participants). Or limit the number of participants to, let’s say, something like 64 and create two different tournaments with fewer rounds. I know a black-bordered BoP isn’t bad. And I have a foil Boros Swiftblade too, but the whole day had a lot more potential, and it’s a pity that this didn’t come out. Hope you guys had more fun during your prereleases. And a black-bordered BoP  Banner by iloveatogs; edited by Goblinboy By Quilt on September 29th, 2005 · Filed in Limited · 16 Comments |
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