After the rain comes the sun…
After disappointing performances at Grand Prix: DC and Pro Tour: San Juan, I came into Grand Prix: Sendai with a serious fire to succeed. It was my third stop in a month-long trip virtually around the world to play Magic, and up to that point all I had to show for it was a few PT points above the bare minimum for showing up. More than that, I’d yet to have a finish all season that I was happy with. Going from the kind of performances I had last year to failing to make Day 2 at a Pro Tour yet this season was a pretty humbling experience.
As I said in my GP: Yokohama article, I felt underprepared for all of the Grand Prix I played in earlier this year, and I resolved to change that moving forward. After failing to make Day 2 at PT: San Juan, I decided to spend my remaining time productively and play in the Standard side events. I had all kinds of ideas for improvements to the deck I played at GP: DC, and the Standard iPad tournaments seemed like a great chance to test them out.
My results in the tournaments were good, but not great — 5-2 on Saturday and 5-1 on Sunday. I learned a lot about how the deck performed in various matchups and got to try out a lot of different cards, both in the main deck and in the sideboard. I started with pretty much the same list I posted in my article last week, and worked from there. In the second tournament, I tried a version without Ranger of Eos, upping the count of Borderland Rangers and Sphinx of Lost Truths to make up for the lost card draw engine.
Sphinx was a superstar. In one of the first games I played it, I discarded all four Vengevines to a pair of unkicked Sphinx across two turns and then brought them all back and attacked for 16. While that’s obviously the dream scenario, it’s not what you’re relying on Sphinx to do. I found that one of the most common ways for the deck to lose was to flood out thanks to its cantrips. You could end up with a lot of draws in which you’d have a ton of mana and low-impact cantrip cards, and if your opponent dealt with your Jace or something, you’d just end up short on gas. Sphinx was the perfect card for these games, letting you either filter early or just refill your grip late, all the while providing a flying body that’s great for threatening opposing planeswalkers.
Another thing that I learned in those events was that while Sphinx was great, so was Ranger. Without Ranger, it felt like the deck lost a lot of its edge against control decks, where Ranger was great at attacking through Wall of Omens thanks to exalted and ensured that you always had more action after a Wrath effect. The two cards also worked very well together. Fetching Hierarchs with Ranger leads to a kicked Sphinx very quickly, or gives you a lot of options to discard if you play it unkicked. Ranger also contributes in a lot of other unexpected ways, like protecting your planeswalkers or helping win races by fetching Birds of Paradise to block.
The final maindeck card that stood out to me was Elspeth, Knight-Errant. I’d mentioned to Patrick in our brief testing before GP: DC that the deck seemed like the perfect home for Elspeth, and the more I played it the more I was convinced that was true. One of the major strengths of this deck is its flexibility and how readily it can change gears. Elspeth is a card that plays to that kind of strength. Against control decks it can allow your Sea Gate Oracles and mana creatures to kill opposing planeswalkers, while against Jund it can provide a stream of blockers that can contain their aggressive draws and force them to kill it or lose to the ultimate ability. I realized that I pretty much always wanted to draw Elspeth every game against almost every deck, so I went up to three copies.
The sideboard got a complete overhaul from the DC version. I experimented with a ton of different cards in different matchups. The ones that impressed me the most were Oust and Martial Coup. Oust gave the deck much more game against Mythic, which seemed like the worst matchup among the popular decks. Disrupting Mythic’s mana acceleration keeps them from getting too far ahead of you, and Oust is the best card you can play on an early Noble Hierarch or Lotus Cobra. The fact that it costs only a single mana means you can play it along with another spell like Jace or Gideon in the middle of the game, or play it and a land that enters the battlefield tapped on the second turn, both of which are a huge deal. Martial Coup is just devastatingly powerful against any creature deck and can turn just about any game around, especially since you can set it up by using Ranger to search for mana creatures.
Here’s the list I ended up with:
Creatures (24)
- 2 Birds of Paradise
- 2 Ranger of Eos
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 1 Borderland Ranger
- 1 Scute Mob
- 2 Sphinx of Lost Truths
- 4 Sea Gate Oracle
- 4 Vengevine
- 4 Wall of Omens
Planeswalkers (7)
Lands (24)
Spells (5)
Sideboard
I arrived in Tokyo on Thursday afternoon and took the train to Saito’s apartment. Saito’s place is almost comical these days. He lives in a one bedroom apartment that isn’t particularly big to begin with, and also runs his online shop out of his home. The entire place is packed with boxes of Magic cards, and there are stacks of loose cards on top of nearly every surface. When I got there, there were a total of nine people crammed inside, sorting cards and processing orders on the computers or on the phone. It really was a sight to see.
We drove up to Sendai on Friday morning, leaving at an ungodly hour in the morning to beat the traffic. Tokyo is a city of some untold millions of people, and getting around by car is about as miserable as you’d expect. The drive has some pretty cool views that I probably would have appreciated more if I weren’t pretty much running on empty as far as sleep was concerned. Traveling from San Juan to San Diego to Japan in the span of three days is a recipe for some serious jet lag.
We got to the tournament site sometime around midday. I decided to jump into one of the last chance Grand Prix Trials to get a bit more practice in and try out some more cards, and promptly lost the first round to Jund hitting Bituminous Blast into Bloodbraid Elf into whatever the perfect card was for the situation in two straight games. Sweet practice. I talked a bit with Yuuya about the deck, since he’d decided to run it as well after some games we played in San Juan. He liked Journey over Oust and didn’t like Bant Charm, but otherwise had come to most of the same conclusions that I had. I ended up changing one Oust to a Journey for some more flexibility in sideboarding, but ended up sticking to my guns overall.
Once the rest of the invading foreigners arrived, we made our way to our hotel. I’d put Martin Juza in charge of figuring out our living arrangements and he’d booked one three-person room for four of us, so I ended up staying with a couple of Brits instead, Matteo Orsini-Jones and Chris Batemen, the latter of whom I would soon learn makes sounds akin to a dying man while he is sleeping. With the help of my headphones I managed to actually get some rest and sleep until the sun came up. Unfortunately, it seems that Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun not only because it is so far east. I rolled out of bed when I woke up because it was already light out, only to find that somehow it’s bright as day at 4am. Who needs sleep anyway?
We needed the extra time to make it to the tourney site anyway, since the venue was apparently nowhere near any hotels. We had to take a twenty minute train ride from our hotel and then take a cab from the train station to the site. We arrived shortly before the player meeting was scheduled to start, but so many more players had shown up than they had expected that there was a delay for an hour and a half as they set up the hall to accommodate the additional gamers. By the time the tournament actually started, I was starving, but it was pouring out and the closest food was at a mall several blocks away. Eventually the rain died down and I led a contingent over to find a place to eat and somehow despite being in Japan we ended up at an Italian restaurant. Gamers sure do love pizza.
Speaking of rain, my song for this tournament was “7 Colours” by Lost Witness, which includes the lyrics “…after the rain comes the sun!” It seemed like an appropriate track after my disappointing finishes in the past few events. Apparently my song choices have a tremendous cosmic impact, because not only did I turn my thus-far failed Magic trip with a win, but it was pouring rain on Saturday and completely clear and sunny on Sunday. Don’t worry — I won’t use my powers for evil. Only for awesome.
Finally, it was time to battle. Generally, this is where I’d do a round by round report, but I lost my notebook from the tournament, so all I have to go on is my sleep deprived memories and what I posted to my Twitter feed during the event itself. Let’s see what I can do with that….
Round 1-3 — Byes. And Japanese pizza.
Round 4 — U/W Control
U/W Control is one of this deck’s better matchups, but there are some cards that can certainly swing the way the games play out. One of those cards is Sphinx of Jwar Isle, since it is big enough to block Vengevine and can pressure your planeswalkers in a way that Baneslayer Angel cannot, as it can dodge removal. My opponent played two Sphinxes in the first game of this match, which combined with a somewhat slow start on my part to pretty much seal the game. I pulled out the next two pretty handily, however, with Negate and Deprive playing a major role.
Matches: 4-0
Round 5 — Planeswalkers
If you’re not prepared to play long games, you should not play this deck. While the deck is favored against the control decks in the format, the way it wins a lot of games is by slowly grinding the opponent out with Vengevines and card advantage from Sphinx and Ranger. This match featured one of those games, which took nearly the entire round to finish. After a 40 minute game 1, time was called in game 1 and I won the match 1-0.
Matches: 5-0
Round 6, 7, 8, 9 — Jund, Jund, Jund, Jund
Nearly a quarter of the field at the GP was Jund, and it certainly showed in my pairings. These matches mostly run together in my head, but include a whole lot of blocking with Elspeth tokens, returning Vengevines, kicking Sphinx of Lost Truths, and the occasional Martial Couping away a board of two Siege-Gang Commanders and six goblin tokens and returning two Vengevines on the following turn.
Matches: 9-0
I was pretty happy to end the day undefeated.
Round 10-11 — Mirror match (Mori and Watanabe)
Both of these matches were featured, so you can go read about the details here and here. I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to sideboard and play the mirror match, since I certainly hadn’t tested it. It seemed pretty clear that Elspeth was the most important card, since it trumps pretty much everything the other player can do (except Sphinx of Jwar Isle, as Yuuya showed me in our match), so I wanted as many answers to her as I could get. Unfortunately, Yuuya and Mori both had Qasali Pridemages that I didn’t have, so they could win Oblivion Ring fights better than I could, though my Mold Shambler could directly kill a planeswalker or a Colonnade, both of which can have a big impact. I felt like I wanted Deprive if I was on the play but not on the draw, since you can solidify an advantage with it much better than you use it reactively. The games played out largely as I expected, and certainly went long, with the match against Mori ending with a 1-0 win for me after a 45 minute game 1 and the match against Yuuya ending in a draw in a game 3 that it looked like I was likely to lose.
Matches: 10-0-1
Round 12 — Jund
See above.
Matches: 11-0-1
Round 13 — Mythic
Mythic is certainly the toughest matchup for NLB among the popular decks. I think you’re a pretty significant underdog in the first game and then probably about even after sideboarding, which puts you under 50% to win the match, but it’s definitely the kind of matchup that can swing hugely on individual decisions. It’s very important to contain the Mythic player’s early mana production if you can, since it’s falling behind their ability to produce threats that is what decides the games that you lose. I don’t remember the details of this match but do know that I lost. Looks like I fell behind!
Matches: 11-1-1
Round 14 — Mihara with Planeswalkers
Planeswalkers is perhaps the best matchup for NLB and I was certainly happy to play against it when I only needed one more win to lock up Top 8. The games went pretty much according to plan — flooding the board with a bunch of creatures that draw me cards, get Wrathed while holding six or seven cards, rinse and repeat. The only card that feels truly threatening out of Planeswalkers or U/W is Martial Coup, since it can clear the board and put a stop to Vengevines immediately. Mihara only played one Coup and didn’t draw it in any of the games we played.
Matches: 12-1-1
Round 15 — Mythic
I could have drawn this round and so could my opponent, but I knew that he was playing Mythic and didn’t want him in the Top 8 where he could beat me, so I decided to try to eliminate him when I still had a loss to spare. If he had been playing Jund, U/W, or planeswalkers, I would have happily drawn or even conceded him in, but playing to keep him out of the Top 8 is what I felt gave me the best chance to win the tournament, so I did. And I did. He got way ahead on mana in game one and pretty handily crushed me, and I mulliganed a weak hand into a mana-heavy hand in the second game, but my double Hierarch plus Colonnade put a ton of pressure on very quickly and I was able to force a game three. In the third game I resolved Martial Coup, if my memory serves me correctly, after which point it is pretty tough for Mythic to come back. My opponent seemed disappointed but not upset after the match and asked me for advice on sideboarding the matchup before wishing me good luck in the Top 8.
All of my Top 8 matches are covered on the sideboard, so I won’t bother retelling them here, since the games went pretty typically and weren’t terribly interesting. But yeah, I won all of those, and it was pretty sweet. I sure do like winning tournaments! It was especially awesome because of the tradition Saito seems to have started at Japanese events, which is a huge drinking party on Sunday night for all of the players who want to come. Over sixty gamers came out for it in Sendai and I had the best beer mug of all — my trophy!
I’m certainly playing the deck again in Manila, and I’m working on tweaking it to improve the Mythic matchup and find some sort of action for the mirror match. I’ll be back next week to talk about the changes I’d make and go into detail on card choices, matchups, sideboarding, and — hopefully- further tales of victory in the far east!
Until next time…
bmk