The following tournament report may or may not be from the beginning of the most recent Yokohama PTQ season. It may or may not be real. It may or may not have been sent to me because someone apparently doesn’t know who the editor of StarCityGames.com actually is. It may or may not have been edited for grammar and brevity. The names of people and places may or may not have been changed to fictional ones in order to protect the innocent.
We Did It! Top 8 at PTQ: Yokohama
Hey, all! Fred Flintstone here. This is my first tournament report, because I just made my first Top 8 at a PTQ. This makes me now an official contributing member to Team Stone Age. Big ups, Team Stone Age.
Team Stone Age, if you don’t know, is me, Barney Rubble, Mr. Slate, and some other guys from the Bedrock City area. Bedrock City isn’t close to many PTQ hot spots, so every one we can get to is a pretty big deal. I tested a lot for this tournament with Barney, with him playing Boros and me playing Rock. I’m a Rock player all the way (no Gifts though. Who needs it when Living Wish is just better?), while Barney thought Boros was the strongest choice.
My first Rock list had an old favorite in it: Spike Feeder, fresh off the reprint list. However, I don’t like him any more because all the Boros players are playing Sudden Shock these days, and Boros is everywhere right now. I quickly took out the Feeder for Ravenous Baloths to back up my Hierarchs. Yes, they are slower, but they also jam up the board because they are so much better at blocking, and also they are better in the mirror where smaller creatures tend to get ignored. This change should put my Boros matchup back where I like it, nice and high.
We also tested against TEPS and NO Stick, with Barney’s Tin Street Hooligan tech shining against the Isochron deck. Rock was about 50-50 as usual (good ol’ Rock! Nothing beats Rock), though I am sideboarding the maximum 4 Krosan Grips just to make sure I don’t lose that one.
Round 1: Goblins
He plays Warchief and two Piledrivers and I only have one Baloth to block. I draw Deed, but I only have 5 mana, so he keeps the Warchief and I lose my chump-blockers. He uses Goblin Matron to get Siege-Gang Commander, and I draw Vindicate, but it’s not enough.
Game 2 I Therapy for Piledriver and hit three! After that I play Baloth, flashback Therapy to kill Ringleader, Living Wish for Genesis, and play Hierarch on the next turn. He scoops quickly.
Game 3 I have a perfect curve in my opening hand: Therapy, Living Wish, Witness, Hierarch. Keep! I again have Therapy for Piledriver, but this time he has none. I don’t have a way to flashback Therapy because my turn 2 play is Living Wish (for Genesis again, setting up the late game with the Hierarch in my hand). He plays turn 2 Warchief off his turn 1 Prospector, and then next turn plays Matron for Piledriver, Piledriver, but doesn’t attack because my turn 3 Witness (getting back Therapy) is holding it off. I don’t have the 4th land for Hierarch yet, so I Therapy for the Ringleader I saw the first time, and see… guess what? Gempalm Incinerator. He drew it in one of his last couple turns. So now I have a terrible choice to make: flashback Therapy with Witness to kill Incinerator (thus losing my only blocker for Piledriver), or let him cycle it and 2 for 1 me. I want to keep him off the 2-for-1 and so I flash back the Therapy to kill the Incinerator. Needless to say, he gets lucky again and topdecks Mogg War Marshal and attacks me for 14. I still can’t draw a land to save my life, so I don’t get the Hierarch next turn and lose.
I ask him after the match how many Gempalm Incinerators he was playing, and he was only playing one. Can you say, "lucky?"
What can I say? Sometimes they just get lucky. That’s okay though, at least there wasn’t really anything I could have done about this loss. He just ripped twice for the win, and whenever that happens, you just have to make sure you keep your head up and don’t go on tilt.
It sucks that I have to start out the tournament in the losers’ bracket, but hey! That’s where the easy decks are.
0-1
Round 2: Boros
This guy’s deck was so awful I don’t even want to talk about it. All I have to say is, "Skyknight Legionnaire." He got one of my Baloths by attacking with Silver Knight and then Sudden Shocking it after first strike damage resolved, which made him feel pretty good about himself. Then I play another Baloth and two Hierarchs, and then he doesn’t feel so good about himself anymore. Silly Boros player, combat tricks are for Limited!
Easy bracket for the winz0r.
1-1
Round 3: Mirror
This man tainted his Rock deck with Gifts, but I’ll let it slide. This time. He plays turn 1 Therapy for Fact or Fiction (?!) and misses by a mile. Since he did it off an Overgrown Tomb, I figure he is Rock as well, so I Therapy him for Eternal Witness. Direct hit!
I drew my one Genesis, so Living Wish gets Eternal Witness. This gives me a never-ending army of Ravenous Baloths (so glad it wasn’t Spike Feeder) and they trade with his first two Hierarchs, soak up a Vindicate, and then beat him down when he runs out of juice.
Game 2 he kept a one-lander with Birds and never drew a third land.
2-1
Round 4: U/W Tron
Game 1 is very, very close, I win the roll and play Birds, Duress, Therapy, flashback Therapy, and his hand is all lands and a Talisman (needs one more Tron piece). I play a Baloth and start swinging, so he Wraths when he gets down to eight. I drew a lot of lands, so I can play Witness for Baloth and Baloth just fine. He plays Eternal Dragon, I Putrefy it, and attack him down to two. He returns Eternal Dragon and Wraths again, taking one from the Talisman and going down to one life. I play Sakura-Tribe Elder (of death!) and he can’t attack with his dragon without dying because he is at one. I topdeck Vindicate like a pro. He Remands it, but I can cast it again, and do, and the tiny little Elder attack wins it.
On the other hand, Game 2 is a total blowout. I cast Duress and see Azorius Signet as his only Blue source, along with two UrzaTron pieces. I take the Signet, and he just shakes his head and plays the Power Plant on turn 2. I play Living Wish for Witness, then Vindicate his Power Plant. He’s down to one land now. I Witness back the Vindicate, he has no land drop, and I get to Vindicate the other land. No permanents!
Then I play Baloth. He eventually draws a couple lands, but cannot beat back the Baloth in time and I win. So, so, so, so glad I played Baloth instead of Feeder!
3-1
Round 5: NO Stick
Game 1: He has early Scepter with Chant, and I don’t draw Putrefy before he draws Teferi. Yeah, nice draw.
Game 2: I duress a Scepter, lose a Deed to Counterspell, Witness it back while he Fact or Fictions into another Counterspell, then lose the second Deed as well. Meanwhile, I beat down with Witness and Genesis, and when he Wraths them, I just get back Witness, Duress away his Orim’s Chant, and so when he finally does draw a Scepter, it’s just on Fire / Ice and I can Vindicate it away easily. Loxodon joins the fray, and he and Witness beat down for the win.
Game 3: He has a second-turn Scepter with Fire / Ice, but I have the Krosan Grip for it right away. My second Hierarch resolves, and I just beat him about the head and shoulders with it until he dies.
4-1
Round 6: Boros
This guy was pretty easy. He didn’t have any Molten Rains, so except for the one time he Sudden Shocked my Tribe Elder, he didn’t do much to stop my Baloths and Loxodons from coming into play. Then they came into play, and I’d just Living Wish for either more of them or Genesis, and win.
Hell yes, Ravenous Baloth and Loxodon Hierarch!
5-1
Round 7: ID
I talked with my buddy Dino and he told me my tiebreakers were good enough to draw here, so I did.
5-1-1
Top 8! Now I can call myself a Team Stone Age member with pride. Before this, I was just a nobody. Now my name will be on magicthegathering.com (unless the TO for Jurassic Games is lazy and doesn’t turn in the decklists again like he did last year, in which case he will rue the day) and yeah it might not seem like much yet, but I’m on my way, baby!
Quarterfinals: TEPS
When we tested this matchup, I was playing Rock and Barney was playing TEPS, but Barney’s never been much for combo decks, so I’m a little worried I may be outmatched.
My opponent starts things off with a Lotus Bloom, Gemstone Mine, and Darkwater Egg, which I have to read because in our version those were replaced with the Terrarions, which Slate says are superior. I have Birds and then turn 2 Duress his Mind’s Desire and Sakura-Tribe Elder. He casts Burning Wish for Sins of the Past and misses his third land drop, so now he has just one of those sac-for-two-mana lands and Gemstone Mine with one counter left. I have either Vindicate or Baloth to play, and I don’t think he can go off next turn so I play the Baloth.
I should have known better. Naturally, Murphy’s Law kicks in and he uses the Lotus Bloom, sacrifices his sac land, his Gemstone Mine, and his Egg to go down to zero permanents (!) but still manages to chain some Chromatic Stars and Rituals together to cast Sins of the Past targeting the Mind’s Desire I Duressed, and gets a storm of seven. Desire reveals another Mind’s Desire, which gets him so much ridiculous gas I don’t stand a chance.
Game 2 I kept a one-land hand with Birds and 2 Krosan Grip for his Lotus Blooms, but I don’t ever draw a third land. Great way to end my first Top 8, right? Hey, at least I got there in the first place. Can’t ask for more than that.
…
Richard again. Nice report, huh?
Basically, “Fred Flintstone” here made mistake after mistake, and ended up in the Top 8 anyway.
Because I’m 100% certain the author of this report will either (A) never read this or (B) won’t care, I’m going to go through and highlight some of the many mistakes Fred made at this tournament.
I have two goals in doing this. First, I think it’s useful to showcase just how poorly a PTQ player can play and still reach the elimination rounds. When you see the decklist on magicthegathering.com, if you don’t recognize the name of the pilot, you really have no idea how the deck made it there. Was the finish posted on the strength of the deck? On the back of the pilot’s playskill? Thanks only to fortunate pairings? You never get the whole story, and while everyone knows they should take PTQ decklists with a grain of salt, this tournament report really underscores just how big that grain should be.
My second purpose in this breakdown is to show what not to do when preparing for, and attending, a PTQ. I’ve certainly made some of these mistakes myself in my time as a PTQ player – without realizing them until much later – and I suspect I’m not the only one who has done so.
The report didn’t include a decklist, but we can infer from the text that he played at least the following cards.
Birds of Paradise
Sakura-Tribe Elder
2-3 Ravenous Baloth, with one in the board
2-3 Loxodon Hierarch, with one in the board
1 Genesis in the main, and one in the board
2-3 Eternal Witness, with one in the board
Pernicious Deed
Putrefy
Vindicate
Living Wish
4 Krosan Grip in the board
From all this, we can extrapolate that his list looked something like this:
23 Land
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
3 Living Wish
3 Loxodon Hierarch
3 Ravenous Baloth
3 Eternal Witness
1 Genesis
4 Duress
4 Cabal Therapy
3 Pernicious Deed
3 Vindicate
2 Putrefy
Sideboard:
4 Krosan Grip
1 Eternal Witness
1 Ravenous Baloth
1 Loxodon Hierarch
1 Genesis
7 unknown cards
I’ll highlight the mistakes as I go along.
“I’m a Rock player all the way”
This is not the kind of attitude you can bring to a PTQ season, even if it might work out for a tournament or two. You can’t be a “Rock player all the way” and hope to post consistent finishes, because Rock won’t always be good. Jeroen Remie played Rock until he couldn’t get it to win anymore, and then he stopped. You’re absolutely free to have a favorite deck, but pigeonholing yourself into playing it because it’s your favorite and not because you’ve determined it’s the best choice is just foolish.
“No Gifts though. Who needs it when Living Wish is just better?”
This sounds reasonable at face value… but it’s really just nonsense. Who says we have to play Living Wish instead of Gifts? For that matter, why is Living Wish better? It seems to me that Fred made up his mind to play Wish over Gifts because it “felt” better, and is once again limiting his ability to improve – both his deck and as a player – by being too lazy to think through his decisions. This is hardly a trivial change, yet Fred just glosses over it as though it were as simple a choice as Snow-Covered versus basic Forests in a deck with no Snow synergies.
“I quickly took out the Feeder for Ravenous Baloths to back up my Hierarchs”
The mistake here is that Fred has vastly oversimplified the trade-off he is making by replacing Feeders with Baloths. He removed Spike Feeder on the grounds that it was vulnerable to Sudden Shock, completely ignoring the facts that Baloth is (1) more expensive, and (2) vulnerable in its own right to Sudden Shock. In Round 2, Fred blocks a Silver Knight with a Baloth and sees it die to a Sudden Shock after first strike damage resolves – even though he played that card explicitly so that he wouldn’t miss out on Spike Feeder’s lifegain due to having it Sudden Shocked. More importantly, what does cutting a suite of three-drops for four-drops do to his mana curve? Fred seems to think this is too insignificant to mention, when nothing could be further from the truth. Your mana curve should pretty much be the first thing you consider when altering your deck in any way.
“This change should put my Boros matchup back where I like it, nice and high.”
It should put the Boros matchup back where he likes it? Changing Spike Feeder to Ravenous Baloth – which is not as clearly an upgrade in that matchup as Fred seems to believe – is hardly a dramatic enough change to declare victory without playtesting. I understand that you always have time constraints, but this is a very risky way of thinking.
“Rock was about 50-50 as usual (good ol’ Rock! Nothing beats Rock), though I am sideboarding the maximum 4 Krosan Grips just to make sure I don’t lose that one.”
This is a dangerous attitude to take towards any matchup. Having a dicey game 1 and then expecting it to turn around thanks to four sideboard cards (especially when you don’t have a lot of card draw with which to find them) is unrealistic. You’ll get game one some of the time, and the sideboard cards will steal wins some of the time, but the matchup is far from as written-off as Fred believes it to be.
“Game 2 I Therapy for Piledriver and hit three!”
Considering how many blockers he has for Piledriver, I am almost certain he should have been casting Therapy for Warchief instead. (To be fair, he may not have had any in his hand at the time.) However, Fred does not seem to reconsider what to name with Therapy at all for game 3 after the miraculous three-for-one he gets in the second game. This is a mistake because in game 3 he is on the play, with Eternal Witness in his opener. That means the Witness will block the Piledriver unless Gempalm Incinerator removes it, in which case the Hierarch that will follow will be able to block the (most likely) 3/2 Piledriver. That means Warchief was definitely the biggest threat, yet he still named Piledriver.
“Game 3 I have a perfect curve in my opening hand: Therapy, Living Wish, Witness, Hierarch. Keep!”
Against Goblins, this is actually a terrible curve. Fred’s first board-affecting play is turn 3, and it’s a Witness for a Cabal Therapy that he might not even want to return, as a turn 3 flashback (without paying mana) might be his only chance to hit a critical card like Ringleader.
“My turn 2 play is Living Wish (for Genesis again, setting up the late game with the Hierarch in my hand).”
No, no, no! Here, Fred is way behind on the board and yet casts Living Wishes to set up his long game, despite lacking the mana for the Hierarch in his hand – to say nothing of the five mana required for Genesis. He had an opportunity to Wish for something to help get him out of the hole he is in, and instead he fetched a card that will only be relevant if he topdecks his way out of his problematic board position. He essentially put himself into topdeck mode with this play.
“I ask him after the match how many Gempalm Incinerators he was playing, and he was only playing one. Can you say, ‘lucky?’”
I can hardly deny that I’ve been guilty of this myself, but I’ll point it out anyway: asking “How many of those were you playing?” is basically the same thing as asking “Can you put me on tilt please?”
“It sucks that I have to start out the tournament in the losers’ bracket, but hey! That’s where the easy decks are.”
This is in no way a guarantee, and letting your guard down is an easy way to pick up that second loss once you’ve dipped into the X-1 bracket.
“He has early Scepter with Chant, and I don’t draw Putrefy before he draws Teferi. Yeah, nice draw.”
This is an interesting example of “entitlement,” a phenomenon I may tackle in greater depth in a future article. Fred knew he had a 50-50 game 1 with Scepter-Chant, had accepted that, also knew that the opponent had a Nuts Draw that he was unlikely to defeat in game 1… and yet he grumbled about his opponent’s good fortune when he lost. A lot of people seem to feel somehow entitled to a win as long as the matchup is not actively unfavorable (that is, less than 50-50), which is an entirely silly way to put yourself in danger of going on tilt.
“When we tested this matchup, I was playing Rock and Barney was playing TEPS, but Barney’s never been much for combo decks”
This was at the beginning of the season, when the hype surrounding TEPS was huge. Testing against a complicated combo deck whose pilot is an inexperienced (or possibly just inept) combo player is just asking to get destroyed by it at the tournament. If there’s no one in your area who can play the combo deck correctly, then at least goldfish it yourself so that you can find out where its weak points are.
“My opponent starts things off with a Lotus Bloom, Gemstone Mine, and Darkwater Egg, which I have to read because in our version those were replaced with the Terrarions, which Slate says are superior.”
If you’re going to test against non-gauntlet versions of a decklist – almost always a mistake to begin with – you should at least make sure you know what the normal cards do. It didn’t get him into a lot of trouble here, but it could have been a very big deal had the card replaced been an Instant of some sort; because he had tested exclusively against a non-gauntlet version of the deck, Fred would have had no idea what he should have been playing around.
“He casts Burning Wish for Sins of the Past and misses his third land drop, so now he has just one of those sac-for-2-mana lands and Gemstone Mine with 1 counter left. I have either Vindicate or Baloth to play, and I don’t think he can go off next turn so I play the Baloth.”
To reiterate, he knows the opponent has six mana available next turn, a card yet to draw from his draw step (and another from the Egg), and Sins of the Past in hand with Mind’s Desire in the graveyard. He’s got a Mind’s Desire for three brewing with just the Bloom and the Sins, and although Fred didn’t tell us which other cards he saw with Duress, we can guess there were at least a couple there to generate Storm. Against a combo deck that wins in one turn, your decision to disrupt or to apply pressure cannot be glossed over. You have to spend a lot of time analyzing the early turns figuring out if they can go off or not, because one miscalculation can end the game immediately.
“Game 2 I kept a one land hand with Birds and 2 Krosan Grip for his Lotus Blooms, but I don’t ever draw a third land.”
Fred just won game 3 of the mirror match a few rounds ago because his opponent kept this hand, and yet he made the same blunder in the deciding game of the tournament! Again, I think entitlement may be the culprit. You feel like you’re so close to having a great hand, that it would be such an injustice to let this hand go to waste, that you’re somehow entitled to topdeck the land you need – despite being on the play and needing to topdeck it pretty much immediately in order to stand a chance – and so you keep it. And so you lose.
“Great way to end my first Top 8, right? Hey, at least I got there in the first place. Can’t ask for more than that.”
Yes, you can! Never settle for Top 8 when you could do better.
So remember, whenever you read a PTQ Top 8 decklist, take it with a grain of salt. When you see something odd like a three-Baloth, three-Hierarch configuration, don’t assume it was a brilliant innovation. It might very well have been a decision made with faulty logic, and only through playskill – or good fortune, perhaps, despite play errors – did the pilot bring that deck to the limelight.
Also remember to double-check yourself after a tournament. Did you lose for the reasons you think you did? Did you let your opponent’s one lucky topdeck put you on Full-Blown Tilt because you asked him if it was a one-of? (What did you think he was going to answer?) Did you really get all that unlucky, or did you just remember the time you didn’t hit that third land drop you “deserved” a lot more vividly than you did the time you hit three Piledrivers with one Therapy?
Think about it.
I’ll see you next week.
Richard Feldman
Team :S
[email protected]