I’m in an apartment Bangkok at the moment, but I feel like I could just as easily be in Prague already. I’m sitting in a room surrounded by people speaking Czech. I’d been staying with Gaudenis and Mat Mar for this GP, but Gau flew to Japan on Sunday night and Mat Mar decided to spend the week on a tropical island somewhere. This left me alone in Bangkok until my flight tomorrow night. Fortunately for me, Martin Juza, who somehow found himself a sweet apartment right next to the tournament site, had a spare couch in his room.
I don’t like Bangkok. It’s one of those cities that excite people. It’s exotic and known for low prices and girls. Somehow I got distracted by those things and forgot to anticipate exactly how unpleasantly hot it would be. Fortunately a girl on the plane who was coming here for missionary work warned me just as I was about to enter the country, so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise. I guess you’re probably not too surprised that a tropical country is hot, but seriously, if you’re ever thinking about coming to Bangkok, be warned: it’s always very hot and humid. Don’t bring foils.
People here seem to speak less English than people in a lot of the world. They also eat a lot more fish and meat in general. This makes getting food quite awkward for me. At the GP I had someone write a note for me in Thai that says “I’m a vegetarian, I don’t eat meat, fish, or seafood, and I’d like curry,” or something like that. I don’t know exactly what it says; I can’t read it. I do know that several restaurants have turned me away when I show it to them because they only serve meat. Singapore was similarly hot, but I was able to eat excellent vegetarian Indian food all the time. Here, I have had no such luck (although it probably exists, and I should try to find an Indian place here tomorrow).
Bangkok offers tourists a number of other things that have made some visitors very happy. You can get a massage for under $5 an hour almost anywhere here. The problem, as I see it, is that you have to sweat enough to get anywhere that I really couldn’t stand the idea of being touched. There are probably some sweet temples, but again, they require more time in the heat than I’m really comfortable with. The last major offering of Bangkok, as far as the rumors I’ve heard go, is the naked girls, who can be watched for very little money… but honestly, that’s not really my thing.
Whining aside, I suppose this is supposed to be a Magic article, not a travel article. I should probably get to the actual tournament.
I was very happy when I got my sealed card pool. It contained Earthquake, Fireball, Shivan Dragon, Garruk Wildspeaker, Cudgel Troll, Overrun, Acidic Slime, Mind Control, Merfolk Looter, and a pair of Borderland Rangers and a Rootbound Crag to tie it all together. I did not build the deck correctly. The relevant cards were:
2 Llanowar Elves
1 Naturalize
2 Borderland Rangers
1 Elvish Archdruid
1 Awakener Druid
1 Cudgel Troll
1 Giant Spider
2 Entangling Vines
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
1 Stampeding Rhino
1 Acidic Slime
1 Overrun
1 Craw Wurm
2 Sparkmage Apprentice
1 Act of Treason
1 Canyon Minotaur
1 Berserkers of Blood Ridge
1 Inferno Elemental
1 Shivan Dragon
1 Fireball
1 Earthquake
1 Merfolk Looter
1 Essence Scatter
1 Wind Drake
2 Horned Turtle
1 Divination
2 Snapping Drake
1 Mind Control
1 Rootbound Crag
I decided that the pool had enough power, and I should go for consistency by playing R/G with all of those Red and Green cards except Naturalize and Act of Treason. It’s possible that I should have played Naturalize over Craw Wurm. In reality, the pool had enough consistency and you can never have enough power, and I always sided in the Blue cards that were not named Horned Tuttle, and reduced the Red to a splash for Fireball and Earthquake.
It was the kind of deck that doesn’t really require tight play to win. I didn’t need to get maximum value out of any of my cards because I always had more bombs to throw at them. This lead to some fairly sloppy plays, which would occasionally cost games, but not enough to really punish me because the deck was always good enough to win the other two games. I was playing pretty badly this weekend.
My one loss in the swiss was to Ruud, who went undefeated until he got to the point where he could start scooping people into the Top 8. I lost games 1 and 3 to a Xathrid Demon that I couldn’t quite deal with. In both games 2 and 3 I kept five lands, Llanowar Elves, Earthquake. I think it was actually wrong to keep it in both games, but for some reason I had trouble bringing myself to send it back after winning with the same hand in game 2.
My first draft started off with a pick between Snapping Drake, Centaur Courser, and Kalonian Behemoth. I think the Behemoth is good, but I knew that if I first picked him I would try to draft a Green deck that planned to hit seven mana and win with him, and I didn’t think that was a good deck to be looking for. Also, if I took a Green card, Gaudenis on my left might have also taken a Green card, and I really wanted to try to cooperate with him. Taking the Snapping Drake was much more likely to put us in different colors and put me into an archetype with which I felt happier. From there I got passed a Gravedigger. There might have been other options in the pack; I don’t remember, but I took Gravedigger. I’d recently gotten crushed in an online draft by a Blue/Black deck with fliers and removal, including Unsummon, that had really impressed me, and I was looking to try something similar. As a result I took some early Child of Nights because they seem awesome in that archetype. Late in the pack I saw a Sparkmage Apprentice without anything good in my colors, and took it to keep my options open in case it was a sign that Red was open. The next two picks were also Sparkmage Apprentices, and I took that to mean I should probably consider switching to Red.
Pack 2 I opened Cudgel Troll, Acidic Slime, another good Green card, and a Snapping Drake, which I took. I got passed an Air Elemental. I knew I wanted to be Blue, and I was evenly committed to Red and Black. As the pack went on, I was occasionally faced with picks that wanted me to choose between Red and Black without giving me a clear sign as to which was correct. I took Stone Giant over Weakness and Assassinate, and that was the pick I would end up regretting most in the draft.
Pack 3 I opened a weak pack and took Gravedigger. I then got passed a Tendrils of Corruption, followed by a Royal Assassin that finally let me choose a second color. I ended up taking Black cards through most of the rest of pack 3, and switched from what I thought would be a very Blue heavy deck with three Serpent of the Endless Seas (who I’ve been fairly impressed by) to a Black-based deck with Sign in Blood, Black Knight, Tendrils of Corruption, and Royal Assassin, all from pack 3. To maximize those I cut down to 7 Islands. This was excessive and I should have played 9-8. I was also short a card because I had taken so many Red cards and ended up needing to play one Zephyr Sprite (over Serpent of the Endless Seas and Unholy Strength).
My deck was something like:
1 Zephyr Sprite
1 Unsummon
1 Deathmark
2 Child of Night
1 Black Knight
1 Sign in Blood
2 Ice Cage
1 Essence Scatter
1 Wind Drake
1 Kelinore Bats
1 Dread Warlock
1 Royal Assassin
1 Divination
1 Assassinate
2 Snapping Drake
1 Howling Banshee
2 Gravedigger
1 Tendrils of Corruption
1 Air Elemental
I was pretty happy with the deck, all things considered. It could have used a little more removal, something along the lines of -1 Zephyr Sprite +1 Weakness, but it looked like a deck that should be able to do what I was trying to do, and I liked a lot of my creatures a lot. In hindsight, only playing 7 Islands was appallingly greedy.
My first opening hand with the deck was five lands, a Zephyr Sprite, and a Child of Night. I figured that hand was basically dead to any spell, so I sent it back for 5 lands and a Gravedigger. That hand’s in more or less the same boat, so I sent it back and drew 4 lands and a Gravedigger, which would have to do. I can’t tell you the details of the game, but I got within one point of killing my opponent. If he’d had nothing near the end of the game rather than a Divine Verdict, I would have won. Game 2 I kept three Swamps, a Gravedigger, and three Blue cards. I didn’t like it, and I possibly should have sent it back, but I think I wasn’t emotionally prepared to repeat the previous game. I never drew an Island, and I got crushed. Sadly, it wasn’t until after this game that I realized only 7 Islands was just terrible, so I probably deserved that.
Game 2 in the second round, when I was up a game, featured my W/B/U opponent – who had no board and one or two cards left – playing Mind Rot when I had 5 cards: my 6th land/3rd Island, Air Elemental, Unsummon, Child of Night, and Essence Scatter. My plan had been to play the land and play Air Elemental with Unsummon backup. Given that I wouldn’t be able to do that, I discarded Island and Unsummon and played Air Elemental on my next turn. He Mind Controlled it, and I lost. I kept the Child of Night so I could still pull ahead in case he had a removal spell for the Air Elemental, but maybe I should have kept the Unsummon instead. I would have won that match if I had.
The rest of the draft was more of the same. I lost every die roll, mulliganed at least twice a match, tilted because of it, probably made some slightly suboptimal plays, and went 0-3.
The last draft was pretty straightforward. I opened Air Elemental, which I took over Assassinate and Divine Verdict. I then got passed Doom Blade, which I took over Acidic Slime. It felt a little awkward to move into the same deck I’d just 0-3’d with, but I knew the deck was fine and I’d just had a miserable series of draws. I also never felt like the draft gave me a reason to consider switching colors.
I ended up with two Tendrils of Corruption and a Consume Spirit (I could have had a second, but I took Mind Shatter over it), and I had only ten creatures. I had a Terramorphic Expanse and a Drowned Catacombs, and I played only five Islands to maximize those Black cards. This meant not playing Cancel and stretching my mana in a way that was similar to the last draft, but also more appropriate.
Fear of not having enough creatures led to playing Disentomb (I had Air Elemental, Clone, and Nightmare, and they were basically my only reliable ways to kill someone) over the third Mind Rot (I was worried that, since it was hard for me to end a game, I would make my opponent discard their hand and then just draw discard spells while they killed me by playing off the top). I also maindecked one of my two Flashfreezes, which turned out terribly.
I managed to finish 2-0-1 with this deck to salvage a 42nd place finish. It was frustrating because it could have been so much better, and I felt like I just got robbed in my first draft, but I didn’t play flawlessly, so I don’t entirely feel like I deserved better than top 64.
After the GP, I worked on Shuhei’s Dominion game and then went out to eat with the Japanese. Thanks to GP: Champion Shingou Kurihara for picking up the bill for everyone, and Kazuya Mitamura, anti-champion of a nine-man single elimination two-round Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament, for buying sundaes for everyone. Also, thanks to Gavin Goh for coming to find me on Patpong, the street where the giant outdoor night market is surrounded by strip clubs and brothels, after I called him (as per our arrangement, I might add).
Thanks for reading…