Welcome to another weekly Showdown Recap, where we take a look at what happened at Face to Face Games Toronto’s weekly Sunday Showdown, a series of 1k events feeding into the Ultimate Showdown 5k Invitational. This week players battled in the brand new War of the Spark Sealed format at our Pre-Release Showdown.
There are few things as exciting as a brand new Limited format in Magic. Particularly one as sweet as War of the Spark. 36 brand new planeswalkers, some at rare and uncommon and one in every pack. These are certainly waters we’ve never traversed before.
That said, Andrew Gordon was able to paddle into those uncertain waters and come out victorious on Sunday.
A funny piece of inside info that reinforces how awesome Andrew’s victory was is that he took only one loss all day, in the first round, because he didn’t show up on time. That’s right, he took a first round loss because he physically was not in the building and then ran the tables with back to back Sealed pools to take down the whole tournament.
He told me on Sunday that he thinks the format is largely about getting to play as many of your powerful cards as possible. And that finding room to splash all of these awesome planeswalkers is a good way to make sure you have success.
In addition to Andrew, we had several other familiar faces in the Top 8. Local hero Chris Ha, teammates Gab Tsang, Shawn Dhaliwal and Andrew Abela, Zack Reiber back from the dead, Yann Giffaux and William Anderson all made the elimination rounds.
Notably, those three teammates made up three of our Top 4 on Sunday. Tsang, Dhaliwal and Abela have been working together for a while now and it’s clearly paying off after such a dominant performance on Sunday.
Below, you’ll be able to take a look at the decks they constructed for their Top 8 rounds. This should give you a good place to start when you’re attacking War of the Spark Limited going into Release weekend.
If you take a look at these decks you’ll see a lot of what Gordon said about the format reinforced. Across the board players are making concessions to power level. Almost the entirety of our Top 8 were splashing extra colours into their two-colour base and if you take a close look, the power level of this set is hard to argue with.
Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this was our first Showdown in our brand new location. From everyone at the shop we want to thank each and every person that came out for pre-release all weekend long and welcomed us into our new home. It was an absolute blast! With that said, once more here’s our updated weekly event schedule for the new location:
With his win on Sunday, Andrew cements his spot in the upcoming Ultimate Showdown, while the rest of our Top 8 have begun their march up the leader board to qualify. If you’re interested in your Ultimate Showdown point total, you can check it out here. If you’d like to inquire about your point total or report a discrepancy, please email Toronto@facetofacegames.com. This upcoming weekend at Face to Face Games Toronto we’ll be hosting yet another Sealed War of the Spark Showdown in honour of War of the Spark release weekend. This time with a Top draft. Make sure to pre-register and we’ll see you at the shop!
