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Back to Back: San Jose and Seattle

Man what a crazy week! The whole back to back magic weekends is something I only ever do at prereleases, and you can imagine this was a bit different! I really liked that I would get two chances, since if I do poorly at an event I always want to make up for it right away and get back into the action.

It started off with a Thursday flight to San Francisco, since Air Canada does not fly direct to San Jose, and the Friday flights looked a lot worse. It was somewhat last minute and Pascal hadn’t booked our room until Friday so I needed a place to stay for a night. After trying to find a REAL place to stay, my only option ended up being a San Fran hostel (yuck) with the Costa Ricans; Carlos Pal, and Miguel Gatica, who I have known forever, and their buddy Fernando, who I had not met before. They had reserved a three person room, so when I arrived at 1 am California time (4 am Toronto time) I was bundled in to another room that contained a European couple sleeping together on the big bed below, and some snoring ogre up top whose feet occasionally crossed the border from his bed frame to mine. I really hate hostels.

I woke up Friday morning and there was a long queue for the showers, so since we needed to all cab to the CalTrain station I had to spend the majority of the day filthy. Still hate hostels.

A bunch of magic players had stayed in the hostel, including Levy and the other French guys, but they went their own way leaving us with Miguel, Carlos, Fernando, James Searles, Melissa DeTora, Mary Jacobson and myself. They were all really nice and we talked a bit in the cab (though I passed out on the train). I hadn’t been to a GP in a while so I resolved to try to make as many new connections as I could. Things were starting off well.

We got to the convention center, which was attached to the hotel most people stayed at so I took the opportunity to steal a quick shower before heading to the site. I met up with Pascal and he was in the middle of a team draft so I walked around and noticed we had a Face booth set up so I went to say hi. At some point Rich Hoaen found me and I jumped in a team draft consisting of him and his GP teammates against me, Ben Seck (TBS) and Brian Kibler. Ben and I both 2-1d, and it came down to Rich vs Kibler to see which of them would 0-3 and lose the draft. We (Kibler) lost but I managed to get another 3 drafts in before the day was done and learnt a lot about the format.

For the actual GP, I was teamed with Pascal and Hayne, so I liked our chances. Our pool was pretty good, and I really like how we ended up building the three decks, avoiding what I thought were some traps. Pascal had a nutty Rakdos deck whose curve topped off at three plus a couple of [card]Traitorous Instinct[/card]s, Alex had an Azorius deck with 3 [card]Stealer of Secrets[/card] and a ton of Detain, and I had a 7 rare Golgani splash Selesnya deck featuring a Pack Rat and a [card]Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage[/card]. After our two byes we sat down against Rietzl, Sperling and Williams and promptly crushed them 3-0. The next round was against the Costa Ricans! Jeez this wasn’t an easy tournament. We beat them 3-0 also, and we ended up being their only loss all day.

The tournament was 11 rounds (!?!) because they didn’t want more than 30 teams to make day two, which meant that there would likely be some teams with records worse than 9-2 that made the cut. We ended up 8-3, but thought we still had a chance. Our breakers were really good after our first two opponents kept crushing, but we thought only maybe one of the 8-3s would make it and it was close on tiebreakers between us, Calcano’s team and Tzu Ching Kuo’s team. The final standings went up and as I rushed over I said to Pascal “just look at who finished 31st, that’s where we’ll be” and BAM I was right. It ended up that we were the top 8-3, so it was a clean cut to 7-2-1 and up but it still felt a little sour.

It was already nearly 1am so we were about to leave when an announcement went up “can the team that finished 31st please come up to the judge table. That’s Anderson/Hayne/Maynard, please come up to the judge table”. What was this? Hope? Was there a DQ?

“So we really really want there to be 30 teams tomorrow, since if there is an odd number, we’d have to give a team two byes. Would you guys be willing to show up tomorrow morning? If any of the team members don’t make it you would take their slot”. Hmmm ok! Sure why not I’ll take a chance. “Day two starts at 8 am….” Blergh.

So we show up early and of course everyone arrives on time for the 8am start. Even worse daggers is that Scott Larabee then tells us that after the first draft a team might drop and we could also get put in if that happens, but obviously nobody drops. They were kind enough to give us each two draft sets for showing up though, which was a nice touch. Big congrats go out to Jamie Naylor, Lucas Siow and Maksym Gryn for ending in 1st after the swiss and ultimately 2nd place overall!

So it was off to the Pro Tour and our test group was fantastic. We had:

Lucas Siow
Jon Stern
Tzu-Ching Kuo
Hao-Shan Huang
Pascal Maynard
Alex Hayne
And me!

Noah Long and Adam Yurchick were both supposed to be there as well, but Adam couldn’t make it and Noah ended up staying with another friend so we ended up with 7. It worked out fine because we were all pretty comfortable with Limited from the GP, and those who weren’t could use MODO, which was released earlier than usual.

Early on we found Jund with [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] to be really strong, and the Shaman did a lot more work than it looks like it would. For a long time the majority of us were going to play Jund, then on Wednesday we did a mock tournament just to run the gauntlet and we laid out the following decks:

Lucas: Valakut
Jon: Jund
Kuo: UW
Hao: [card]Blightning[/card] Jund
Pascal: Blue Affinity
Alex: Pod
Me: UWR Geist

Hao and Pascal did the best, but most importantly we found that Affinity’s Jund matchup seemed pretty strong. Pascal was very happy with the deck and started running it against more decks, and it just kept winning even through quite a bit of hate. The addition of Thougtcast over Blasts proved to be nuts, since in every Affinity hand you just want a good mix of lands, cheap artifacts and gas, so drawing extra cards made you more likely to even out the distribution. Plus there were games you’d just empty your entire hand (one game Jon played 11 cards on turn 1…).

By the night before, the whole house aside from Kuo were on Affinity (who ended up running UW), and there was a bit of a scramble to get cards. I ended up borrowing most of the deck from Thomas Holzinger and some of his German friends, so huge thanks to them. I still had to buy about $10 worth of commons and uncommons, but it could have been much much worse.

Everyone ran the same 60, but sideboards were a card or two off from each other. I ran:

4 [card]Ornithopter[/card]
4 [card]Memnite[/card]
4 [card]Signal Pest[/card]
4 [card]Vault Skirge[/card]
4 [card]Arcbound Ravager[/card]
3 [card]Steel Overseer[/card]
3 [card]Master of Etherium[/card]
4 [card]Mox Opal[/card]
2 [card]Welding Jar[/card]
4 [card]Springleaf Drum[/card]
4 [card]Cranial Plating[/card]
4 [card]Thoughtcast[/card]
4 [card]Blinkmoth Nexus[/card]
4 [card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card]
2 [card]Island[/card]
2 [card]Glimmervoid[/card]
4 [card]Darksteel Citadel[/card]

Sidebaord
4 [card]Etched Champion[/card]
3 [card]Relic of Progenitus[/card]
2 [card]Thoughtseize[/card]
2 [card]Ancient Grudge[/card]
2 [card]Grafdigger’s Cage[/card]
2 [card]Dismember[/card]

I felt like I played against more pros than at other PTs, but it’s also possible that in the last few PTs I’ve just been getting lucky. Over tahe 16 rounds, I played against (number indicates the round):

3. Max Tietze
5. Andrejs Prost
7. Naoki Shimizu
8. Ben Stark
9. Cedric Phillips
11. Shahar Shenhar
15. Brian Demars

And ended up with a pretty mediocre 24 points, good for 162nd place, aka nothing. My Constructed record was ok, going 6-4 beating Jund, Poison, 2x Delver, Doran, and Dredge, and losing to Pod, Merfolk, Jund and UW. Nobody in our house did better than top 75, but there were a number of notable performances from Canadians (as well as a Costa Rican sporting ManaDeprived gear). So props to Maksym Gryn (11th), Miguel Gatica (12th), Sebastian Denno (15th) and Anthony Berlingieri (37th). I met a ton of awesome people, and it was great to hear people chatter about the number of ManaDeprived shirts we had at the PT (about 20) so hopefully we can continue to grow from here!

I should have another piece up next week on my thoughts on RTR limited. I feel as though my overrated/underrated list was fairly accurate last time so hopefully it will be of use for you.

Thanks,

Marc Anderson

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