What do you look for most when you play in a tournament? Are you there for the thrill of competition? Do you want to prove your skills against the best in the game? Is it the atmosphere? Do you come to events to hang around a bunch of like-minded people and have fun playing games in a great environment? Or is it the prizes? Are you looking for a chance to win big and take home your share of a big purse?
Whatever it is, the StarCityGames.com Invitational has what you’re looking for.
I posted this on my Facebook and Twitter over the weekend:
Now before I go much further, I just want to point out—no one is asking me to write this. No one at SCG sent me a message saying, “Brian, you know what would be great for your article this week? If you could spend some time hyping up the Invitational!” No one did that at all. Not Lauren Lee, not Evan Erwin, not Jared Sylva, not Pete Hoefling. All of this comes entirely unprompted because I think the Invitational is such an awesome tournament.
What’s the prize purse at a Grand Prix? $30,000. The prize pool at a StarCityGames.com Invitational event is $50,000—over 50% higher. And how many people are competing for that prize pool in a Grand Prix? At a tournament in the US or Europe, you’re duking it out with over 1,000 other players for a slice of that pie—and often many more than that! At the Invitational in Baltimore, there were 140 players. That makes the payout for a Grand Prix around $30 per player, while the payout for the Invitational last weekend was nearly $350 per player—over ten times as much!
Not only that, but the Invitational has a set tournament structure featuring eight rounds on each day. What this means for a smaller field is that there is much more margin for error. While at a Grand Prix these days we often see records of even X-2-1 fall short of Top 8, at this past Invitational X-4-1 was a lock. In fact, one fortunate player made it into the Top 8 with five losses. Five losses in a Grand Prix these days doesn’t make a dime. In this case, that one fortunate player with five losses at the Invitational made one hundred thousand dimes. That player was Max Tietze, who won the entire event for $10,000.
But don’t think for one second that being able to make Top 8 with a worse record means this was a soft tournament. The large number of rounds with the small field means that if you were doing reasonably well, you’d be playing against a significant portion of the top of the field. Let’s take a quick look at how that field looked like at the top:
That’s your Top 16. For anyone who follows competitive Magic, quite a few of those names look familiar. Ben Friedman, Caleb Durward, and Max Tietze all have GP Top 8s to their names this season, to say nothing of the former Player of the Year in 9th and myself in 10th. And if we go down just a little further into the Top 32, we’ll find Reid Duke, Gerry Thompson, and David Shiels—all Grand Prix Champions in the past few years.
A forgiving tournament structure doesn’t mean a soft tournament. Sure, you could make Top 8 with four or even five losses, but when you’re playing against names like those every round you’re not getting an easy ride. You’re facing tough competition, and you have to earn your wins—you just have a bit of a buffer in case you get mana screwed a few times.
So yeah: if you have the opportunity to play in an Invitational, you should do it. And if you’re not qualified, you should try to change that whether by playing in an SCG Open Series near you or an Invitational Qualifier. They really are some of the best tournaments of the year. I flew across the country, put myself up in a hotel, and still came out ahead on the weekend despite finishing the tournament with five losses. Now if only I’d had Max Tietze tiebreakers…
Anyway, enough talking about why you should play in the Invitational and more talking about my experience actually doing so…
As I mentioned, I finished the tournament with a record of 11-5, good for 10th place. But since the Invitational is a multi-format event, what is likely more interesting is how my record broke down—I went 7-1 in Standard, while I managed to muster only a 4-4 record in Legacy.
In Standard, I played this:
Creatures (29)
- 1 Llanowar Elves
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Acidic Slime
- 1 Inferno Titan
- 2 Phyrexian Metamorph
- 4 Blade Splicer
- 1 Fiend Hunter
- 3 Avacyn's Pilgrim
- 1 Daybreak Ranger
- 4 Strangleroot Geist
- 2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 4 Huntmaster of the Fells
- 1 Vorapede
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (24)
Spells (5)
My decklist for the tournament was ultimately only a few cards off from the list posted in my article last week. I was incredibly happy with the deck. My only loss came against Wolf Run Ramp, which is a matchup I knew to be bad going in. I beat U/B Control, Esper Control, G/R Aggro, and four Delver decks.
Look at that last bit right there for a second. Yes, four Delver decks. Have you been paying attention to the metagame lately? Have you seen how much Delver has been floating around? Delver decks largely dominated the Standard portion of the Invitational and put three into the Top 8 of Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur the same weekend, including eventual champion Yuuya Watanabe. If there’s any deck in Standard that it’s important to match up well against right now, it’s Delver.
Not only did I beat four Delver decks, but I beat four Delver decks of all different types. There are a lot of decks out there that are good against the Geist/Pike style Delver decks but roll over to Spirits and vice versa. Not this one. Among my Delver opponents, I faced every different build I can imagine—Spirits and Drogskol Captains, Geists and Pikes, even Blade Splicers and Intangible Virtues, like Gerry Thompson has been advocating—and beat all of them convincingly.
Why is the deck so good against Delver? Well, Thalia is pretty much as good as advertised. Prior to the Invitational, most of my excitement regarding Thalia in that matchup was based on theory, but now it’s entirely grounded in reality. Thalia is absolutely devastating against Delver. In fact, Thalia is so good that in the early turns of the game that it’s quite frequently worth failing to maximize your mana and playing Thalia instead of something like a Blade Splicer. The impact that she has on a Delver opponent’s ability to play the game cannot be overstated—the Sphere of Resistance effect is absolutely crippling.
On top of that, the rest of the deck consists of efficient threats that aren’t generally easy for Delver to deal with. Huntmaster is a monster, of course, and Strangleroot Geist and Blade Splicer can get the pressure on early to make them really pay for their use of Phyrexian mana.
One card that’s surprisingly good against Delver is Gavony Township. One way Delver is able to beat midrange style decks is by playing a waiting game with Mana Leak. They can just sit back with a Geist you can’t afford to attack into and make Moorland Haunt tokens or plink away with an Invisible Stalker while holding up counter magic for your threats, and then just Snapcaster the Leak and do it again. Gavony Township gives this deck a way to break open waiting games. If you’re in any kind of stalemate position, Township can very quickly turn a board of mana creatures and Golem-less Blade Splicers into an army. This puts the burden of action on the Delver player, which can often allow you to resolve cards like Huntmaster when they’re forced to tap out.
The last big card is Daybreak Ranger. Yes, I know that everyone thinks that I have some sort of strange fetish for Daybreak Ranger, but the reality is that Standard finally looks very much like I thought it would when I predicted that the card would be one of the defining cards in the format. There are a number of sorcery speed midrange creature decks that are extremely vulnerable to a flipped Daybreak, like Pod decks and Humans, and various decks against which even the front side is awesome, like Tokens and Spirits.
It’s important to note that you’re not going to win games in which you recklessly rely on Daybreak Ranger. You can’t just pass the turn and try to flip your Werewolves (Ranger or Huntmaster) when doing so will get you blown out by instant speed removal. It’s also important to note that I am in no way claiming that a single Daybreak Ranger is just going to come down and dominate the game against Delver. Cards like Vapor Snag and Dismember exist, and Ranger can’t effectively stop Invisible Stalker or Geist, especially when there’s any kind of equipment involved. But what Ranger can do is ensure that you don’t lose to flipped Delvers, and it often puts your opponent in a position that they can’t flip their Delvers when they want to and have to sequence their plays awkwardly to get your Ranger off the board and stop it from coming back down again.
Basically, a huge element of the strength of Delver decks is their ability to force opponents into awkward situations by forcing them to play around Mana Leak, Vapor Snag, and future copies of each thanks to Snapcaster Mage. This deck can frequently turn that dynamic on its head, disrupting the Delver deck’s play pattern and putting it on its heels thanks to an array of aggressive, disruptive creatures.
So yeah—want to beat Delver? This list is a good place to start.
As for my Legacy list—here’s what I registered:
Creatures (25)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 2 Aven Mindcensor
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 4 Qasali Pridemage
- 3 Scavenging Ooze
- 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (23)
Spells (11)
Now note that I said “what I registered.” That’s not the deck I actually played.
I’m sure you’re wondering, “Wait, what?”
You see, when I wrote down my decklist I forgot to write Gaddock Teeg on it, but it still counted out to 60 cards when I put everything together for the Legacy rounds after Standard. I hadn’t de-sleeved my Legacy deck from Indy, and I just moved over the cards from my Standard deck that I’d need since I was playing Thalia in both formats.
The problem was that I was also playing Green Sun’s Zenith in both formats and completely forgot that I had a Green Sun’s Zenith in my Standard deck. So when I registered my deck, I left off a Gaddock Teeg I’d intended to play, but when I constructed my deck, I left a Green Sun’s Zenith in my Standard deck so I didn’t realize that playing the Gaddock Teeg would leave me with 61. In my head, I was cutting the three Stoneforge Mystics and the three equipment from my Indy list and adding a Pridemage, an Ooze, a Gaea’s Cradle, two Mindcensors, and a Jitte. In reality, I was only actually cutting two of the three equipment, since I was leaving a Jitte in the deck, so my mental running total of my decklist swaps was off. I never noticed because I still had a 60-card deck even with the unregistered Gaddock Teeg, because my Green Sun’s Zenith never left my Standard deck.
I didn’t notice the error until I was putting my Standard deck back together for the second set of rounds and counted it out to be too few cards. I realized that my Thalias were in my Legacy deck, and then when I was shuffling them in I thumbed past the lone Green Sun’s Zenith in my Standard deck. I realized that I only owned four Green Sun’s and I had no recollection of ever putting it back in, so I went and deconstructed my Legacy deck after the round was over to try to figure out what was wrong. Ultimately, I realized that I must have just missed registering one of the one-ofs in the deck, and sure enough when I went up to the judge’s station to ask for my list it was sans one Gaddock Teeg.
I explained the situation to Riki Hayashi, the head judge, and he tried to figure out what the appropriate solution would be if I ended up making Top 8 since I’d have to play with my Legacy deck—which I’d played in one way all tournament but had registered differently. Ultimately, the ruling Riki decided on (which sadly didn’t come up, since my tiebreakers failed me in the end) was that I’d play with the deck I registered rather than the physical copy I’d been playing, since it was a symptom of a multi-Constructed format tournament that caused the confusion in my list thanks to the need to swap cards back and forth between decks.
It’s kind of funny, too, since if I were able to go back and play the tournament over, I would’ve just cut Gaddock Teeg from the deck anyway. He was ultimately very unimpressive, and I never won a game in which I cast him. I certainly would have liked to have had that fourth Green Sun’s Zenith instead—since, you know, it’s one of the best cards in the deck. I imagine the next time I play Legacy in a major event will be the next Invitational that I go to, and hopefully by that point I’ll have sorted out this whole “correctly registering my deck” thing since it seems to have eluded me in both Indy and Baltimore.
Thankfully, Salt Lake City this weekend is Standard, and I have a much better track record with deck registration in that format as well as a deck that I’m much happier with. It would take a serious revelation for me not to play Naya Pod in that event—but hey, the General Assembly of the Church of Latter Day Saints is that weekend. Who knows—maybe I’ll stumble across some golden plates with a decklist for me.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for this week. Good luck in whatever you might play in this weekend, and if you’re going to the Grand Prix be sure to say hello.
Until next time,
bmk