TappedOut in Atlanta: Part 1

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crossclimber

27 January 2011

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Table of Contents

Reporting on Grand Prix Atlanta
Before a Grand Prix
Grinding Away
FNM
Other Things Going On

Reporting on Grand Prix Atlanta

This past weekend I was blessed to have the opportunity to represent TappedOut.net at Grand Prix Atlanta. I love going to big Magic tournaments and playing a great game against other innovative players and meeting people from around the world. This trip was a little different from past events I’ve played in because I had an extra agenda and that was to represent this great website and to promote it as best I could among the people I met. I put a lot of time and energy into prepping for this event and had high hopes of deep runs into Day 2 and playing other pros and telling them about our site from across the table. As it turns out I had a blast, met tons of great people, learned a lot, and played some of the worst Magic I’ve ever played and made mistakes I’ve often coached others against. This tournament report is, hopefully, a humble and lighthearted look at how to have the most fun possible on a weekend of playing Magic and several big no-no’s you can hope to avoid. In an effort to be as detailed as possible I’m breaking this down into 3 sections based on my activities over the 3 days at the event. This first section is about my prep and play on the Friday before the actual event.

Before a Grand Prix

One of my favorite parts of getting ready for a big constructed tournament is the testing and brewing that takes place leading up to it. I wrote some about that recently in the article post:Questions from the Brewing Company. Grand Prix Atlanta was an Extended format event which is certainly one of my favorites if not THE favorite format in the game. It has a large enough card pool to make so many decks viable and the line between a Tier 1 deck, or one of the “best decks” in the format, and a Tier 2 deck, one that has an outside shot at winning any event, is much, much more blurry than in Standard and it is much more “fair” than Limited, draft or sealed formats, where so much rides on which cards you open (of course I’ll freely admit that there is a good bit of skill needed to play Limited but you simply can’t deny the advantage a player has when opening a Wurmcoil Engine). In extended we all start out with the same card pool and then come to the table as practiced pilots of our decks knowing the ins and outs, and options, and best plays for different scenarios (at least ideally but more on that in a bit).

Leading up to GP Atlanta I went through several brews and tested the fire out of them. I knew they had to beat Faeries and Jund and finding decks that did that was a difficult proposition. I went through lots of ideas and tested hundreds of cards in different decks and the more I tested against Faeries and Jund the better I got with those decks and I got to the point where I thought I might even just play one of those. But I hate Faeries and it’s not how I like to play the game so that was out. I looked at Jund and liked some of what I saw but I wanted to be original. So I started trying out different things. I found that by adding in fetches and Murmuring Bosk Jund had pretty easy access to white as a color which broadened my card pool a bit so I looked at 4 color Jund for a while but wasn’t super satisfied. Then I remembered that often times the new best decks come from combining 2 other powerful decks into one. I had recently traded for a playset of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and through speculation had bought a few Prismatic Omens (which turned out very well!!) so I decided to see what would happen if I fused Jund with Omen. The initial testing blew my mind at all the options and different win conditions and way to get the combo online and I was hooked!! This is the deck I wanted to play. I knew it would take a long time to get the decklist down but I was excited to figure this one out. I spent all of the week leading up to the tournament testing and retesting different cards in the deck and got it close to where I thought it needed to be by the time I left planning to test some once I got to the event.

Rock Omen

Legacy crossclimber

9 COMMENTS | 1089 VIEWS

Grinding Away

I arrived in Atlanta around 4pm and found my way to the tournament center eager to get some gaming going after a 12 hour drive alone in a car with my thoughts. Fortunately at these events there is a Ton of gaming going on all the time from people play testing against their friends to dueling with someone from Wizards of the Coast to organized events like 8 man drafts, 8 man win-a-box for Standard, Extended, and Legacy (everyone pays 15 dollars and the winner gets a box of Scars of Mirrodin, but usually the top two players intentionally draw and split the box), Commander or EDH events, and on the Friday before an event there are “Grinders”. Grinders are 32 person tournaments in the same format as the GP and the winner of the grinder gets a 3 round bye in the upcoming GP. They are also a great place to test your deck. This is where I went. I immediately sat down to play Grinder #6. I registered my Rock Omen deck and set to do battle. One of the things I was hoping to learn from this experience was whether or not a few of the cards I had in the deck were ideal against the field or whether I should switch to others. Namely I was curious about Vengevine vs. Chameleon Colossus. Vengevine is stupidly powerful and a great four mana creature but in its day Colossus was the top dawg and more relevant for this event was the protection from black. I had Vengevine in my deck but here was a chance to see if at any time I wished it was pro black. I was also curious if Anathemancer was the card I wanted in the last two spots in my deck. I was also looking at Kitchen Finks or Blightning with a thought to a few others but those were the top choices.

Grinder #6 Round 1 – I played Dylan who had brought a Jund deck to the table. Dylan was a friendly guy who joked with me a bit wishing me “many mulligans and the worst luck possible until the next round.” It’s not my style to return such but I did laugh and it helped me relax a bit. My deck didn’t really do so well against Jund in testing but I had hoped there wouldn’t be much of it at this GP due to its recent less than stellar results. Game one was tight. He dropped a Fauna Shaman on Turn 2 and on my 3rd turn straight out of the car, having thought about Magic for hours and hours and all the right plays to make with my deck, I made my first mistake in not playing Maelstrom Pulse on the Shaman. I opted for a Knight of the Reliquary instead. On his next turn he dropped a Putrid Leach and passed the turn. I again neglected to play the Pulse and dropped a Vengevine but with no good attack just sat back and waited.
This is a time when Colossus would have been stellar! On the end of my turn he dropped a Demigod of Revenge into the graveyard and searched up another. I knew I was doomed. Pulse is a sorcery so I could not cast it on his turn when he dropped a Demigod and brought back all of them from the yard, so on my next turn I Pulsed the Shaman to keep him off of more of them and tried to give myself time to draw another Pulse. I started attacking and dropped him down to 8 before he got his land right and could play the Demigod in his hand smacking me for 10. I had to topdeck a Pulse to stay in the game and I didn’t do it. Game 2 I sided in all the removal I had, never drew it, and lost a very one sided game.

Grinders are single loss events so I was done for that event. But lessons learned. Colossus is probably going to be preferred over Vengevine and some life gain in that match-up wouldn’t hurt either. So I’ll try the Finks over the Anathemancer. I then spent some time walking around and watching other matches and noticed there was a LOT of people playing Jund and those that weren’t were playing Naya (another lower percentage match-up for my deck although better than Jund). It seemed mid-range creature decks were about 50% of the field or more. Not at all what I was expecting!

I still wanted to play some more so I made the two switches to my deck and entered Grinder #7. In Round 1 I faced Alex who was playing Faeries. Alex was very professional in his table manor and didn’t say much but focused on playing his deck well. Faeries was a deck that is about a coin flip against my deck and the one match up I had tested the most so I was pretty comfortable when I realized what he was playing. He had plenty of counter magic in game one and Thoughtseized away my Prismatic Omen to keep me on the beatdown plan while he played chump blocker after chump blocker and eventually did me in with his flying swarm. One credit I have to give him was that his build had Esper Charm and he used it to clear my hand as soon as I was down to 2 cards in hand. Not something I was used to playing against but very effective. Game two was very much one-sided in my favor as I played Zealous Persecution and smashed for 16 damage on turn 5 which did him in after his 2 Thoughtseize. Game three I had trouble getting anything to stick on the table as he played Counterspellafter Counterspell, Esper Charm for discard, and then dropped Wurmcoil Engine. I guess I could have sided in my Obstinate Baloth for his discard but that didn’t seem right at the time.

So it was another one and done. I could have wished for more matches to test my deck but I was confident in the testing I had done at home and the deck was working as it had in testing in those two match ups which admittedly were losses but I wasn’t discouraged because I knew Jund was a bad match up and Faeries was close and I felt like I could still beat it down half the time. So, tired of the one and done events, I went to try out my revamped GW landfall Standard deck at the Super FNM.

       

Super FNM

So here is the decklist I had brought for this very event. I was excited to try this out since I had recently made a few changes and added in Oracle of Mul Daya, Lotus Cobra, and Sunblast Angel.

GW Angel Rampp

Modern crossclimber

1175 VIEWS

Round 1 - was against Breanna who was playing a Vampires deck with Grave Titan and Abyssal Persecutor. This could have been one of my favorite matches of the weekend simply because of who I was playing against. Breanna was a very fun and relaxed player who was quite relieved to see find that she was not the only female in the room as she had feared, and as we shuffled up for the match she thanked me for not being a jerk. We both presented and took 7 cards to resolved mulligans before the round began and when we both decided not to keep I asked if she was okay if we both took 7 again and she excitedly took the offer. Now let me pause here to say I would only even think of suggesting this during causal play but then again that is how I see FNM’s. Friday Night Magic is my favorite place to play because everyone is there just to have a good time and no one is ever really taking it too serious. It’s a great place to try out new deck ideas because you get to play them at least 4 times and if you lose who really cares, you were there just to play and have fun anyway. It also helped in this case that my opponent felt similarly about the game. So we took our 2nd 7 and got started. Game one took a while to complete but I kept her threats off the board with my Admonition Angel and eventually took it down. Game two she curved out so perfectly it blew my mind. Turn two Doom Blade my Cobra, turn three Gatekeeper of Malakir on my 2nd Cobra, turn four Abyssal Persecutor, turn five Mind Sludge clearing my hand, turn six Grave Titan. I held out meager hope in that she didn’t seem to have a way to get Percy off the board but eventually the game ended with life totals of her at 24 and me around -18 or something. We had been having so much fun we hadn’t realized that time was really zipping by and as we started game 3 we only had 5 min. left on the clock. I raced out to a great start ramping up and playing 2 Journey to Nowhere on Persecutor and Titan and as time ended I was the one with 3 turns left but I could only manage to get her down to 2 life so we ended in a draw, which was a very acceptable result for such a fun match.

Round 2 - I played Dave and the matched ended 2-1 in his favor. Sadly I cannot recall a single other thing about this match sorry.

Round 3 - I played Adam who was playing the UG Genesis Wave deck that made a splash at World’s. Adam was a super nice guy and we played another classic match. Game one was tight as we both ramped up and at the same time played a control game where I Journey to Nowhereed his things and he countered some of mine and used Spreading Seas on my lands. He eventually stuck a Frost Titan and started to keep me tapped. Playing tired I tried to target his Titan with a Journey to Nowhere but forget to pay the extra two mana it takes to target Frosty so my Journey just ended up sitting on the board targeting nothing. This cost me a close game one. Game two was again tight with us both playing conservatively and interacting well with the opponent. I managed to keep him off blue mana long enough to set up my Admonition Angel, Oracle of Mul Daya lock and took game two. After Game 2 Adam’s fiancé came to watch us play, this gave us something to talk about as we shuffled up. I wished them the best in their new lives together and encouraged them as best I could. Marriage has been one of the greatest blessings I’ve ever experienced. We then talked about how much Magic is too much and takes away from the relationship, but I mentioned that he was blessed to have a wife who played. Game three started with again only a few ticks left on the clock and judging by how we had both been playing controlish games I saw this headed for another draw. However, this time I didn’t draw my interactive cards and he got in a Genesis Wave for 7 and smashed me with one turn left remaining.

Round 4 - a player didn’t show up and that was the end of my gaming for the night. Not counting this round since I didn’t play, I ended the night 0-4-1. Not my best night of gaming, record wise but I still had fun and had great conversations with my several of my opponents. Many of the asked about Tapped Out and gave me a chance to share my opinion of this awesome site and mentioned they might even be able to read about themselves in the upcoming week. I even met a couple of guys who had already visited the site and were frequent users!

   

Other Things Going On

In between my matches on Friday I spent a lot of time walking around talking to people and to vendors. I made some good trades with people to keep things in my binder moving along. The highlight of my trading was when I managed to trade into a full playset of Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I traded my extra 2 Force of Will and 3 Vengevine for 2 Jace, which I felt was pretty even and turned cards I didn’t need and weren’t using into cards that I was excited to finally have and filled out several decklists I’ve had but been unable to complete. I also walked around to the 7 different card dealer booths and found the best prices for my duals. It was interesting to talk to the dealers about what people were buying and what people were trying to sell. The hot cards to buy were Zealous Persecution, Linvala, Keeper of Silence, Shadowmoor block filter lands, and Demigod of Revenge players were selling Prismatic Omens, Vengevines, and Titans from M11. I also met the artist Eric Deschamps and had him sign a few of my cards, Celestial Collonade, Stirring Wildwood, and Captivating Vampire. As he was doing card alterations and other things he talked about the design process and how much Wizards gives him to work with and how much freedom he has which was very interesting and things I hadn’t thought about. Magic is a community for sure and at times it can seem both overwhelmingly large and surprisingly small. I had the great fortune to reconnect with guys I had met and played against in GP Nashville a few months ago and to talk strategy for this upcoming event. It was a wonderful time and interesting to see how friendships can develop over time and in such weird ways.

Check back again soon for my Report on the actual Grand Prix event with a round by round recap of my matches as well as deck and metagame analysis.