Greetings kids, it's your old pal Keith here for another installment of everyone's favorite blog (okay maybe not, but it certainly made me feel good). I unfortunately had a pretty poor showing, which was unfortunate because I was very confident that Boros was the way to go for this particular tournament.
The morning was very uneventful, we arrived early and basically just sat around and zoned in and relax. I encourage anyone going to a big tournament to do this. I had 2 hours before the event started to chill and relax. This put me in a very good space and is one of the major reasons I don't think I went on tilt even though I didn't do well. As an aside, I've seen some very good articles on tilt recently and it's very important to keep yourself out of this mode. You will certainly lose and make others hate your guts.
I was also able to unload a lot of useless rares and mythics and got a pretty good penny out of them too. Team Big Sexy as a whole did this and was able to bring down a playset of Tezzeret and 3 Jace the Mind Sculptor as well. Not a bad pull for the day.
Round 1 I got paired up against Andrew Berke who was playing a version of U/W/R control. Emerge Unscathed ended up beign the real winner for me here as his lightning bolts proved to be worthless. I had two very fast starts and he just ended up not being able to DoJ in time to clear my board.
Round 2, it was Caw-Blade with Kurt Spiess. I hate this deck, but Kurt played it very well, as he should. I had to mulligan down to 6 on game 1 but was able to keep up with him until the inevitable board sweeper. I had nothing after that. Game 2 was a different story. I was able to keep him off creatures and just had a really good fast start. Game 3 ended up going to time, however he beat me right after with Gideon Jura. There's nothing quite like Gideon. He really does win games. Kurt went on to have a pretty good day and I send my congratulations out to him.
Round 3, it was Valakut Ramp with Sarah Simpson. She just had ridiculous ramp both games. Game one she was able to cast Primeval on Turn 3. I think that wins games. I just never had a shot either game. I couldn't get land to power my landfall guys and was just drawing junk. She meanwhile had cobras in play and was ramping up both games. I never had a shot.
Round 4, I was paired against Jessica Miller who was running Kuldotha Red. Game 1 she got a ridiculous start and i just could not keep up. Game 2, I was able to keep her off creatures long enough to start building up myself. She then cast Devastating Summons with a Bushwhacker kicked. The summoned dudes were 4/4. I was able to block 1 with my Hero of Oxid Ridge but it was lights out after that.
I dropped after this and decided to just mill about and root on the rest of my team. It wasn't a very good showing for me, but at least I can say that it wasn't because I made play mistakes. I never got angry and I played the best i could. Magic is sometimes a game of luck after all, despite what anyone will tell you to the contrary.
Special congratulations go out to my buddy Nick Harry who was able to get into that Top 32 at the end of it all and win some cash.
It's definitely something I would do again and am looking forward to the two Baltimore opens later in the year. I am definitely passionate about playing in bigger tournaments now.
If you look at the results, you'll see that pretty much everyone was running Caw-Blade. It's unfortunate but even though I saw a pretty diverse amount of decks in my rounds, overall i feel like it was dominated by Caw-Blade. It's definitely a good deck. Do i think it's the best in the format? No. I feel like Boros is still a dominating deck and I think Valakut is still a pretty viable build. Valakut I think more so because I saw it beat Caw-Blade several times. I don't know that Caw-Blade is bad for the format right now, but it's certainly disconcerting to see that many top 8 finishes go to this deck. Time to go back to the drawing board. I think decks that main deck artifact hate is the way to go here now.
I myself am working on a Tezzeret control build, probably Grixis colors, ala Patrick Chapin, but we'll see where it goes.
Till next time...
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