Saturday, August 28, 2010

US Nationals Tournament Report!

Featuring a decklist you wouldn’t want to play, and draft strategies
that aren’t advisable.

I am fortunate enough to live in Minneapolis this summer (or unfortunate enough,
depending on how you look at it). So I ended up staying with the vanload Kai mention
in his article, but didn’t have to drive the 10 hours. As it turned out, I had a pretty
successful weekend, grinding into the main event and finishing 18th. Here’s the report.



Well the first step to writing a Nats report is qualifying to play in the tournament. So I’ll
begin with the sealed grinder I won!

The pool was a pretty obvious U/R build. I did end up losing two games with the
deck. Once was from not playing around Assassinate. The one free damage (from the
Chandra’s Spitfire that I needed to block with the next turn) was certainly not worth the
chance he had the card, and he did. The second game I lost was from being blown out by
a Volcanic Strength. Here are a few things I learned:

1 . ) I made the mistake of playing Sorcerer’s Stongbox over an Ice Cage. Strongbox
isn’t that good, especially in a deck with a high-end curve.
2 . ) Unsummon is very strong in every archetype.
3 . ) Blue has lots of good fatties in M11.

After winning the grinder, I needed a standard deck for the next day. I asked Andrey
Yanyuk, a friend I met playing Legacy here in Minnesota, for his decklist. He told me
when he got there that he had a good brew that he and a buddy both won grinders with.
After some very slight tweaks to what he recommended, I registered this the following
morning:



















If you can’t tell, the deck is actually rancid. I’ll try to keep the round summaries as short
as possible. I’ll discuss sideboarding and the deck at the end.

Round 1 against Naya:
G1 he has an early Sparkmage.
G2 I have an early Sparkmage.
G3 he has an early Sparkmage.

0-1

Round 2 against Naya:
G1 he cannot punch through my dudes to stop the Garruk overrun.
G2 he gets his Fauna Shaman online and has the Vengevine to discard, and I quickly fall
behind. I will soon find out that having trouble dealing with the Shaman is a Recurring
Nightmare for the weekend.
G3 Sarkhan Vol makes his only appearance on the weekend. My opponent has to go
really out of his way to stop Sarkhan’s flying lizard squad from showing up. This lets
Sarkhan become a Twiddle on his Knight of the Reliquary, allowing me attack for
enough to send him to the land of awkward blocking for short remainder of the game.

1-1

Round 3 against G/R Titan Ramp:
G1 I am on the play and he just can’t keep up.
G2 comes down to one major decision. I play a Hierarch and Frosty the Titan (tapping
second green source) instead of Bloodbraid and Vengevine, despite how tempting the
latter is. Because he was searching out mostly mountains for Valakut, he was unable
to play any of the creatures in his hand without a second green mana. This slowed him
down just enough to let me win.

2-1

Round 4 against Naya:
I don’t remember much about this round. It went to 3 games, and the one I lost
was to Fauna Shaman going crazy on me. In the other two I just smashed face.

3-1

Draft #1!
The draft starts out well with the first 3 picks being Day of Judgement, Lightning Bolt,
then Crystal Ball. I was hoping for a solid control deck, but the good cards ran up fast.
I ended up in a really mediocre R/W beatdown deck. I made a major mistake taking the
second pick Bolt over Cudgel Troll (the Troll even combos with Day!). I found out the
hard way that if you actually want to play red, you’d better have all the rares and mean
it. Had I gone into green, I would have had a much better deck. Moral of the story: red
sucks. Who knew?

Round 5 against G/B/r:
He had a Jund deck with plenty of fatties, but shockingly little removal. I eeked out two
wins over 3 games on the back of Crystal Ball and kill spells against his much better
creatures.

4-1

Round 6 against U/W:
G1 he gets tons of fliers out, and after Balling away 8 cards, I don’t see the Day and
scoop. He jokes about how bad my deck is, and that there apparently aren’t ANY cards in
it that I want to draw. He’s not too far off.
G2 + G3 I curve out with such all-stars as Goblin Balloon Brigade and Goblin Piker.
Sometimes it pays to be on a team. He sees a lot of lands (and has no good way to filter
through them) and dies rather uneventfully.

5-1

Round 7 against U/G:
Both games he has Garruk and Mind Control. And I have no way to deal with either.

5-2

Draft #2!

This time I was pretty sure I wanted to draft green. Kurtis mentioned to me that it’s
underdrafted and that certainly was my experience on day one. So with that in mind, I
happily snatched the pack 1 pick 1 Obstinate Baloth and didn’t look back. While I’m not
entirely able to pinpoint how the draft went awry, I’m sure it had to have been around
where I started taking red cards and only 5 drops. Anyway, the final product featured 3
Acidic Slime and 3 Chandra’s Outrage and all the fatties that 40 cards can handle. This is
also where the tournament took a turn for the worse.

Round 8 against R/G:
This time I’m playing against the guy opposite from me on the table. He has a very
similar deck, except with tons of rares.
G1 I punt away. I go for Slime on his second green source, thinking the only thing that
I would want to Slime that badly would be a Shiv’s Embrace I don’t even know he
has that I thought he would have cast the turn before. It turns out he had the Embrace,
and didn’t cast it the turn before. And we’re dead. Need to resist the urge to snap LD.

G2 I don’t Outrage his Fauana Shaman, thinking that I could just get the creatures he
searches out instead, and then the 2/2 will become irrelevant. While Chandra’s Outrages
were fine against his Baloth, Spined Wurm, Yavamaya Wurm and Hoarding Dragon, he
just blew me out with an Inferno Titan. Lesson learned.

5-3

Round 9 against U/W:
G1 I’m about to pull ahead and then get hit for 10 with a Fireball.
G2 is going well, I Slime both of his Mind Controls, but in the end I don’t end up
drawing enough creatures. I don’t exactly recall all the mistakes I made (although they
were certainly there), mostly because they involved not understanding how the games
would development from complex board states, instead of being tactical miscues.

5-4

Round 10 against Bye:
Finally, a matchup where my awkward deck and poor evaluation of the long game
doesn’t cost me too badly. Time to go watch Kurtis and Kyle and Matt PTQ for a bit.

6-4

So if I wanted to prize, I would need to 4-0 the standard daily. My normal plan
of only playing late night dailies so opponents fall asleep and time out, while
particularly effective against ringers like Kmaster,(Matt and Dan should've woken me up - K) wasn’t going to cut it here.

Round 11 against Mythic Conscription:
G1 He stomps me with Sovereigns. This is essentially how I envision the matchup.
G2 I Sparkmage his accelerator, and then Jace-bounce out his now clumsy draw.
G3 he mulls to four, but I keep a bad 6 knowing that his hand is probably bad as well.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t do much and I win.

7-4

Round 12 against Naya:
G1 he mulls to 4 and dies.
G2 he has Fauna Shaman going, then taps down my team with Naya Charm (that card
exists?) and gets me the next turn.
G3 I Sparkmage him out.

8-4

Round 13 against B/U/G Good Stuff:
He has cards like Noble Hierarch, Mana Leak, Putrid Leech, Maelstrom Pulse, Vengvine,
Jace, and Sea Gat Oracle. Basically his deck is somehow even more unfocused than
mine.
G1 looks like it’s going be a grind, until I Oracle into a Jace, which he has no way of
dealing with. That takes it home pretty quickly.

G2 actually is the grind that I predicted in this matchup. The games ends when I finally
draw a second creature to get back my two Vengevines with. This was the only time on
the weekend that card wasn’t actually just Lightning Elemental.

9-4

Round 14 against Naya:
G1 he has Sparkmage/Collar the turn before I play Eldrazi Monument. This means he
can zap my Lotus Cobra (one mana short for getting the Titan that was locking down
his Knight of the Reliquary), but then has to try to ride out his aggressive start. After a
shameless attempt wrought with poor acting to try to get me to punt, I manage outrace his
lifegain and one damage per turn from Sparkmage. Close one!
G2 I mull to five, and a turn 2 Sparkmage from him seals the deal.
G3 I start out very quickly. I lock down his white mana with Frosty, keeping his O-
Ring at bay. Just when I think he has no outs and I have it won the next turn, he plays an
Obstinate Baloth. It didn’t occur to me to even consider bringing in my own copies, much
less that it would be good in the matchup. But there it was, threatening to let him play out
his hand while I was without cards and unable to profitably attack. That is until I topdeck
Monument next turn. Got there!

10-4, and in the money at 18th.place

Thoughts on the deck (and Standard):
1 . ) Noble Hierarch and Lotus Cobra is very potent combination. Frost Titan is also
incredible. (Maybe Kurtis was on to something?) The rest of the deck was pretty
meh. But when it needed to bring the heat, it brought the heat.
2 . ) Sea Gate Oracle came out every round without exception. Against G/R ramp, it
became Manabarbs, and everywhere else it became Sparkmage. I should have had
Sparkmage main deck. Also, all the games where brought in Sparkmage, I also
added 3 Flame Slash for assorted slow cards.
3 . ) Pyroclasm seems well positioned, not for this deck mind you, but just in general.
4 . ) Playing without removal has it ups and downs. Baneslayer isn’t popular, so it
could be worse, but Vengevine doesn’t come back that much if you don’t discard
it to Shaman. It is probably possible to build Vengevine decks that can have cards
to deal with THEIR Shamans (and other guys) and not lose too much power.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. Hopefully I’ll find inspiration for follow-up articles here on
Rusty about playing red cards. Best of luck in your upcoming events,

Michael Servis
Posted by Kmaster at 12:44 AM

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