Uncategorized

Today I Learned…

A couple of weekends ago, a select group of Magic players competed in a multi-day, multi-format event that tested their mettle across the gamut of skills required to play Magic: The Gathering. The inaugural Midgard Invitational was a fun, challenging and emotional (for me, anyway) event that had much of the local community abuzz.

Oh, and there was some Pro Tour somewhere too.

The Midgard Invitational was a sixteen-player, invitation-only event with 9 Swiss rounds and a cut to top 8. Top performers in events held at Midgard across Limited, Standard and Constructed formats were all invited, and I was lucky/good enough to be among them. With 3 rounds each of Standard, Draft and Modern with a Standard top 8, I felt like I was in a good position to do well as I was one of the few people who played all three formats often.

It’s also very likely that winning the event meant more to me than to anyone else. Sure it would be sweet to win a box in a free tournament, but the bragging rights and the ability to prove everyone wrong about my perceived lack of play skill were huge for me. I had a very interesting and revealing weekend, learning a lot along the way, and I thought I would share some of those things with you.

Pre-Event Prep

Possibly my biggest mistake here was in my playtesting. I decided right away that I was playing some sort of RG(x) Monsters deck, as I have been playing some sort of Domri deck since before Theros came out and I know how to pilot it. I was also slow to pick up a lot of Born of the Gods staples for Standard, meaning that all my FNM play was in Modern. Being swept up in the Pro Tour hype also didn’t help.

So I built and tested a few Modern decks. I tried Affinity, and found it completely unsurprising and not at all my style. I tried a UR Delver Tempo deck that was very close to the Blue Moon deck that was the breakout from the Pro Tour, but playing it bored even me. All the while I was thinking Pod, Junk or Hate Bears would be the best choices. Then I built a Bant Good Stuff deck based on the idea that turn 2 [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] into turn 3 [card]Elspeth, Knight-Errant[/card] was pretty damn good. The deck needs work but with 7 main-deck counters AND a suite of efficient game-winners I think it has potential. Here’s the list I considered:

[deck title=Bant Good Stuff by Chris Lansdell]
[Lands]
4 Temple Garden
4 Breeding Pool
2 Hallowed Fountain
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Verdant Catacombs
2 Marsh Flats
1 Forest
1 Island
1 Plains
2 Horizon Canopy
1 Gavony Township
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Noble Hierarch
2 Birds of Paradise
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Voice of Resurgence
3 Spike Feeder
4 Geist of Saint Traft
2 Knight of the Reliquary
1 Courser of Kruphix
2 Kitchen Finks
2 Archangel of Thune
[/Creatures]
[Other Spells]
3 Remand
4 Mana Leak
3 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
[/Other Spells]
[Sideboard]
3 Path to Exile
1 Stony Silence
2 Leyline of Sanctity
2 Loxodon Smiter
1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
2 Rest in Peace
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Rhox War Monk
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

The problem with this approach was that I had not played a single game of new standard by the time the event rolled around. Two nights before I had audibled to Cedric Phillips’ Jund Monsters build after consulting with The Angry Birds (for more on that team, check my archive), thinking that it was similar enough to the deck I knew that I would be fine. I also hadn’t settled on a Modern 75, still thinking I might even play Storm and go back to my combo roots.

The end result was that I 0-3ed Standard, which was the first format, leaving me needing a 5-1 in the remaining rounds to top 8. Some of those losses were due to just poor play (as you will see in a moment), but the biggest failing was that I didn’t know the deck I was playing, I didn’t know the new format and I was just not prepared.

Those Who Forget The Past…

My first match in Standard was against Kyle “Spider-Man” Allen who was on Boros Burn. He knew it was a bad matchup, I knew it was a bad matchup, and as a result I was super confident. I lost in 3 because [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] is a heck of a Magic card, but mostly because I did not learn from my own notes and mistakes between games.

I lost game one stuck on 3 land after losing my turn 1 Mystic and turn 2 [card]Gyre Sage[/card] to burn spells. Shocking, I know. I don’t think it was a bad keep given that my game 1 could have been rocky anyway, but that wasn’t terribly important. I won game two on the back of prioritizing removal over playing threats. I realised I was NOT the beatdown in this matchup and played accordingly, keeping his Reckoners off the board with [card]Abrupt Decay[/card]s and [card]Dreadbore[/card]s. I’m looking at my notes right now and it says in big blue letters “removal over dudes is the better choice.” Yet for some bizarre reason I chose to ignore that completely in game 3. I managed to hit him pretty hard in a hurry, getting him down to 11 while being pretty stable at 13 life, but had left a [card]Satyr Firedancer[/card] and a [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] alive. He was able to burn my team, scry a burn spell to the top and kill me from 13 when I couldn’t block his Reckoner. I’d like to say “lesson learned” but seeing as how I forgot it after 2 minutes, I doubt it has been.

Take-away points? You are not safe at 13 life against that deck. [card]Satyr Firedancer[/card] dies on sight. If you make notes, USE THEM. [card]Boros Reckoner[/card] is a heck of a Magic card.

You Kept WHAT?

Round 2 I end up paired with Marcel Warr, playing Blue Devotion. The addition of black to the GR Monsters deck is meant to improve this matchup, but it’s still not in our favour. [card]Golgari Charm[/card] and [card]Ultimate Price[/card] out of the board give you additional outs to [card]Master of Waves[/card] but you can’t always sandbag them. I managed to win game 1 on the back of double [card]Stormbreath Dragon[/card], which is pretty darn strong against almost any deck. Having done that, I drew my opening hand for game 2…6 lands and [card]Stormbreath Dragon[/card]. There is not a single matchup in which I’m supposed to keep that hand, so of course I kept. His double [card]Tidebinder Mage[/card] draw was way too good for me to stand a chance, even though I did draw pretty well.

Why on earth would I keep that? Partly because I had just won on the back of the Dragon and figured I could do it again. Partly because I figured that if I didn’t draw out of it, I would just go ahead and win game 3. As bad and as wrong as the first point is, the second is insidious and needs to be eradicated from my make-up. I do it a lot, it’s a terrible habit and it makes little to no sense. I’m not sure why I keep doing it other than it makes for great stories when I pull off the improbable recovery, but PLEASE don’t do what I do. I would go on to lose game 3 when I misplayed the only board card I drew (a [card]Gruul Charm[/card]). That was a marginal misplay that I would probably not be upset about had it been the only mistake I made, but I’m pretty sure I punted this match away too.

Get Your Head Straight

Not every lesson learned from that weekend was a bad one. Having gone 0-3 in Standard (losing round 3 to BW midrange because Monsters can basically never beat Obzedat), I was about as down as it gets. I wasn’t going to drop and miss a free draft but I was mad at myself for the obvious punts and hating Magic with a passion. As I had been doing all weekend, I started overanalyzing the tournament format and tried to figure out what draft archetype I needed to have a shot at the 3-0 I thought I needed. Being 0-3 I was in the bottom pod, but surrounded by good drafters who like me had had lousy starts. What I ended up deciding was that it made no sense going into a draft, with good drafters to my left and right, looking to force an archetype. I had to clear my tilt and just draft the correct deck for my seat. Pack 1 pick 1 I took [card]Akroan Phalanx[/card] over [card]Ghostblade Eidolon[/card], a pick I’m happy to make because Phalanx is better in more situations, and ended up in the RW aggro deck with 15 lands.

LQ1rqtt

About halfway through pack 2 I started to see ridiculously late green/black staples going around, having seen [card]Graverobber Spider[/card] go 13th pick in the first pack. At this point I had double [card]Phalanx Leader[/card] and was basically all-in on RW, but I think I missed some subtler early signs that GB was open. And open it was: only two players were anywhere near black (one was mono black) and two were in green, while FOUR were in some version of white heroic including someone else in RW. I had read the draft almost perfectly, only misreading what the player left of me was on (I had him on GB given what I passed him, but he was GW), and I could only do that because I had calmed myself before drafting. I managed a 2-1 in the draft, leaving me needing a 3-0 in Modern to top 8. My loss in the draft was arguably due to both me and my opponent misreading the trigger on his [card]Forsaken Drifters[/card]. He milled 4 when it entered the battlefield and cut through 4 Swamps on the top of his deck, which would have severely hampered his ability to weather my early onslaught.

And The Rest…

I ended up playing Storm in Modern, virtually identical to Jon Finkel’s Pro Tour list, and piloted it to a 3-0 record to make top 8 in 8th place. I didn’t really learn much from those rounds; I know how to play combo decks in Modern and Storm isn’t very different from the Eggs deck I used to play. OK well it kind of is, but the principle is the same: go off the turn before you would die, or when you have less than a 20% chance of fizzling. The highlight for me was in game 3 against UWR. He kept a one-land hand based on having [card]Lightning Bolt[/card] and double [card]Spell Snare[/card]. I was on the play and he missed his second-turn land drop, at which point I top decked the [card]Blood Moon[/card] to all but end the match on the spot.

I would lose in the top 8 in a close match to Esper Humans, a deck I hadn’t played against and wasn’t entirely sure how to beat. I took a line of play in game 3 that was slightly risky, casting [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] on a [card]Detention Sphere[/card] to free my Polukranos which I could monstrous and swing for lethal with on my turn. He had to have the removal spell, and of course he did which left me dead on board. It was certainly not the conservative play but I reasoned that I needed to win before he found his [card]Whip of Erebos[/card] and started putting the game out of reach.

I’ll be back to posting brews and such next time, I just needed a little break from the game after saturating in Magic over the past 2 weeks and also with a new lady friend on the scene. The next article will hopefully be a report on how two of my theoretical brews from a few weeks ago have played out and the changes I would make.

Brew on!

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments