Hey Tobias, congratulations on your top 8. Is this your first Grand Prix?
This is my first GP top 8. First Pro Tour, I’m pretty excited. I’m probably played 7-8 GPs now. Kind of been a local Vancouver grinder for a few years.
What was your final record after Swiss?
12-1-2.
[deck title=Dredge – Tobias Roos]
[Creatures]
4 Bloodghast
2 Golgari Thug
4 Narcomoeba
4 Prized Amalgam
4 Stinkweed Imp
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Cathartic Reunion
2 Conflagrate
4 Creeping Chill
1 Darkblast
4 Faithless Looting
4 Life from the Loam
4 Shriekhorn
[/Spells]
[Lands]
1 Arid Mesa
2 Blood Crypt
1 Bloodstained Mire
1 City of Brass
4 Copperline Gorge
1 Gemstone Mine
1 Ghost Quarter
2 Mountain
2 Scalding Tarn
2 Stomping Ground
2 Wooded Foothills
[/Lands]
[Sideboard]
3 Ancient Grudge
1 Damping Sphere
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Leyline of the Void
3 Lightning Axe
4 Nature’s Claim
1 Surgical Extraction
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
What was your one loss?
Merfolk. I lost to Merfolk. I had no plan for it. I kind of didn’t know really what was going on. Game 1, kept mulliganing and didn’t see any keepable hands. Same thing happened in game 2.
I heard that you picked up Dredge the night before. Is that true?
I started playing this at 3 a.m. Saturday morning. I played the deck a few times online. I played a few Leagues. I was playing Grixis Shadow for like a year and a half and I stopped winning with the deck for the past 3 months. I think Dredge is actually the best deck in the format. Creeping Chill just breaks this deck so wide open. I just thought well, Faithless Looting and Creeping Chill are busted, so I’m just going to register 4 Faithless Looting, 4 Creeping Chill.
You’re playing a stock build but with 1 Ghost Quarter in the main which my friend Jonathan Zhang of Grishoalbrand fame hates. Tell me why you’re including it.
So instead of a Ghost Quarter, Jon is playing a 7th Dredge fetch but the Ghost Quarter/Life from the Loam combo in some many matchups just wins you the game. Tron was the deck I was just most scared about going into the tournament. I think it’s a really bad matchup. They have main deck Relic. You can’t beat Wurmcoil. You can’t beat Ugin. Tron was the only thing I was really scared of. Everything else I felt like my deck is just better than theirs.
If you ever see Ghost Quarter game 1 against Tron, you just win. You have Ghost Quarter and you just Loam is back every single turn and they can never assemble Tron. The only cards Game 1 that are really going to kill you are Wurmcoil and Ugin, but they’ll just never be able to cast it.
Jon has the Ghost Quarter in the sideboard but I just think it’s a lot worse in the sideboard because after Game 1, they bring in Thragtusks, so it doesn’t really do anything anymore because they’re just going to cast Thragtusk and stabilize. In Game 1, they don’t have any 4-5 mana spells.
What do you say to people that think Izzet Phoenix is the best deck?
This deck destroys Phoenix. I am 3-0 against Phoenix on the weekend. All of my Phoenix opponents have Surgicaled-Snap, Surgicaled-Surgicaled-Rav Trapped me and I still win the game. People think there’s so much graveyard hate right now but that doesn’t matter because my deck is just so much more powerful than everybody else’s. I’ve won multiple games where I just cast Stinkweed Imp and they can’t attack me anymore.
Is there a matchup you don’t want to see?
Tron. I still don’t want to see Tron even with the Ghost Quarter. You can definitely still beat Tron. I didn’t see any Storm or Ad Nauseaum and I don’t want to see them.
Tobias would go on to lose 1-2 to Attila Fur’s Jund Breach deck in top 8.
Kar Yung Tom (KYT) is the Digital Content Manager for Face to Face Games. He oversees the F2FTour.com and Magic F2F websites. He is also the lead host of the First Strike podcast.