When we last left our hero, Grand Prix: Seattle had just ended and the quest for a tuned block decklist was in its final legs. To complicate matters, it was the week before finals, and the GP the week prior had left several University final projects uncompleted, meaning they still had to be done before venturing to Hawaii. I had tested the format quite a bit, and our best deck (unfortunately) was a Jund control deck splashing Uril to break the mirror, with Behemoth Sledge in the board. Then I came home from the GP and heard about the results from the Magic Online Championship Series, and saw that apparently we were not the only ones with that idea. It was time to go back to the drawing board, and my intention was to get some more testing done before the PT. I should be able to get all of the projects I had to do done and still test more, right?
The only sleep I got between Monday night, Tuesday night, and Wednesday night was when I would accidentally fall asleep over my keyboard while doing homework. So much for more playtesting.
After painfully seeing everyone systematically update their Facebook status to a variant of “Landed in Hawaii. It is awesome,” I left Thursday morning. (Honorable mention to Brian Kowal’s Facebook update: “Brian Kowal is in Hawaii! It’s every bit touristy and commercial as I had hoped!”) I had been shipped a list by Max McCall (who had received it from Josh Silvestri) of a protection bears deck, which basically was a five-color deck which utilized Vedalken Outlander, Zombie Outlander, and Wall of Denial for defense, then gave it to Jonathon Loucks (conveniently on my plane) to look over and work on while I wrote a paper for class. Bleh. To make matters worse, my throat was starting to feel a little sore. Just how I wanted to spend my plane ride to Hawaii.
I landed in Hawaii, cabbed to my hotel, and ran into the group of Ben Swartz, Noah Swartz, Owen Turtenwald, Tommy Kolowith, AJ Sacher, Matt Hansen, and a few others immediately upon exiting my cab. They were all heading to the mall to eat and playtest block until the venue opened, and so I dropped my stuff off in the hotel room and chugged after them, Jon Loucks in tow.
I arrived and picked up some Chinese and a large Jamba Juice without any dairy from the food court to try and ease my throat, then headed over to the Magic table and played some games with the decks they had constructed. Owen was having fun with a pretty putrid looking WW deck, and everyone else was working with different configurations of Jund/Naya. Nothing too out of the ordinary was in any of the lists, except for maindeck Celestial Purges everywhere. Duly noted.
We played for about an hour, then walked over to the site when it opened and were the first human beings in the room. Score. Then we realized we were out of proxy material and couldn’t even try to pick some up from the dealers. Boo. My throat was steadily getting worse, and my exhaustedness of, y’know, not sleeping for three days was setting in. I tried drinking some water to try and feel better, when the glowing beach house conglomerate of Max McCall, Ari Lax, Jed Dolbeer, Corbett Grey, Mat Marr, and others showed up. They had the five color Madrush Cyclops/Uril the Miststalker/Sedraxis Specter deck I had wanted to build proxied up, but were otherwise missing proxy material. Frown. Unqualified people were scrounging around for cards for the LCQ, we needed proxy material, and I was gradually feeling worse, so I offered to head back to my hotel room to grab my Ultra Pro bag. The walk didn’t help me feel better, but I came back and lent out some cards, then went out into the hallway so I could lie down on a padded bench like some kind of psychiatrist patient and talk to Max McCall about where we were at deck-wise for the PT. We liked the Madrush deck, and talked ourselves out of the protection bear deck. It was at that point that Cedric Phillips came over and informed us that Uril and Exotic Orchard were up to $25 each. Whoops, should have bought them in Seattle.
We keep theorizing aimlessly, disappointed that our weeks of putting tons of work into block decks has lead to this situation, then eventually head over to the player party. At this point I am feeling absolutely rancid, and talking or swallowing hurts. I accidentally spit up and double over like I’m choking twice on the way to the player party, and Jon Loucks asks me if I’m feeling alright. I’m obviously not, but I have to go to the party and try and see if I can work with others on my deck choice.
Despite feeling like I was actively killing myself every time I put some down my throat, I have never simultaneously loved and hated food as much as I did that night. I sit down at an empty table, and several Magic players quickly settle in near me and we begin to talk about decks. I try and stay conscious for as long as I can and turn down multiple drafts, but even then multiple people ask me if I was feeling okay because I looked terrible. I eventually I realize I’m just not being productive, and let Max know that I’m going to walk back to my hotel room and sleep for three hours (10pm), then head back to the site and meet up with him to get everything set out for the next day.
The sleeping part of that plan goes well. The rest, on the other hand, does not. I wake up feeling at least twice, if not three times, as bad as I did before I went to sleep, and consider my options. Eventually, I realize what I have to do, something which is possibly one of the scariest things you can do on the Pro Tour: putting your fate and card availability in someone else’s hands, and I call Max to let him know my plan.
“Max,” I said in a raspy whisper, “this is the worst I can ever remember feeling. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can do anything more tonight. I’m just going to play whatever you’re playing. I’ll meet you at the site an hour and a half before the event starts and get everything together then. Sorry to do this to you, and good luck.”
Click.
…
The day started on a high note, as I woke up with my bed covered in my own drool since my body was refusing to swallow while I slept. (That’s the one and only gross side effect of my illness that I’ll mention, but trust me, there were many.) I had tossed and turned for a good majority of the night in agony, finally getting to sleep about 2am. I was in no position to play eight rounds of Pro Tour level Magic. I channeled my inner Frank Karsten and ignored my body’s pleas to skip the Pro Tour and go see a doctor, then headed out to the event site.
Max was fortunately there on time, and let me know what was going on. “We’re playing Sam Black four color cascade deck, we just need a few cards.” Max had already assembled most of the deck for me, which slightly unburdened my heart and continued to prove that Max is an A+ #1 awesome person.
We sit down next to Sam and get his new manabase and sideboard.
“How much have you guys tested this deck?” I ask.
“It’s probably better if you don’t know,” replied Max.
“Enough,” said Sam with a wide grin.
“Alright. Sounds good.”
We cobbled everything together, and this was the deck Max, Dan Lanthier, Sam Black, and I ended up with:
Wheel of Variance
4 Savage Lands
4 Exotic Orchard
4 Jungle Shrine
5 Swamp
1 Mountain
2 Forest
2 Plains
3 Naya Panorama
2 Jund Panorama
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Enlisted Wurm
4 Sprouting Thrinax
1 Thornling
2 Uril, the Miststalker
4 Bituminous Blast
4 Blightning
3 Captured Sunlight
2 Celestial Purge
3 Maelstrom Pulse
1 Terminate
Sideboard:
4 Anathemancer
2 Celestial Purge
2 Infest
2 Magma Spray
1 Path to Exile
1 Slave of Bolas
3 Thought Hemorrhage
The only difference between our decks is Max and I have a miser’s Ajani Vengeant over Sam’s and Dan’s fourth Captured Sunlight, and we each have a second Uril over Sam’s second Thornling. Dan’s manabase was also a little different. I finished scrawling my deck down just in time, having to call Max during the player meeting because my foggy mind forgot a sideboard card, and round 1 was soon underway.
Round 1 — Five-Color Control
Game 1 I keep a hand with Thrinax into Bloodbraid into Blast, which would be awesome against most decks. Unfortunately, he’s playing Five-Color Control and draws plenty of removal and three early Wall of Denials. I get endgamed out by Obelisk of Alara and Cruel Ultimatums. This game definitely didn’t feel close.
Game 2 I have a similar draw, only with Blightning instead of Blast and Anathemancer over a land. I Blightning him twice, once off of Bloodbraid, but don’t draw much gas to get past his Wall of Denial. He lands Obelisk of Alara as his last card on turn 4, but I’ve drawn my misers Ajani Vengeant and use it to keep his Obelisk from taking over the game, then whittle him down with my creatures and eventually hit ultimate range.
Game 3 he mulligans to six and keeps a sketchy draw, plus I have Blightning. I believe the only spell he played the whole game was Path to Exile.
1-0
Round 2 — Bant with Protection Bears
Games 1 and 2 are fairly unexciting, as in the first he rolls me by drawing protection bears and Deft Duelists to completely neutralize my creatures, and the second by me getting an aggressive draw while he’s light on action.
Game 3 he tanks and mulligans, then tanks again and decides to keep, and I mull to six and keep a hand with Blightning, Bituminous Blast, Magma Spray, and three lands. I spray his Hierarch, but he follows up with a Vedalken Outlander and starts to beat me down. I Blightning him and he quickly discards an Elspeth and a Rafiq, and as a result I’m sure he has at least one of the two, if not both, still in his hand. He misses his fourth land drop and bashes in again, and I keep drawing lands. He finds a land and casts Elspeth, and sends the Outlander in to put me on a quick clock. I play a land and pass, and next turn he tanks. He plays Rafiq and activates Elspeth, and I Blast the Rafiq looking for an answer. I cascade into… Path to Exile! I Path his Outlander, draw and play Bloodbraid Elf, hit Maelstrom Pulse for his Elspeth, and suddenly his board is reduced to shambles. I win a few turns later when he has no more action to back up his board.
2-0
Round 3 — Jund Midrange
He doesn’t have the White splash, and is opting for Algae Gharial, Broodmate Dragon, and Terminates in place of my White cards. The Jund mirrors are all pretty silly and quickly summed up, in that it’s simply the last creature left standing wins or who hits the most early Blightnings. Game 1 I get Blightninged twice, and killed by Broodmates. Game 2 we trade Blightnings and removal and I land an Uril.
Game 3, I know it’s a bad sign when my opponent eagerly tells me he will keep when he hasn’t even seen his seventh card. We trade Blightnings and Thrinaxes, but he has an Algae Gharial I am unable to deal with.
2-1
Round 4 — Five-Color Aggro
This is the deck with Ancient Ziggurat and Sedraxis Specter that powers out some of the best creatures you can play in the block. Game 1 he has a fast start, but I remove his creatures and gain life off Captured Sunlight and win from a safe total. Game 2 he gets a blazing fast Noble Hierarch powered start and I’m way too behind.
Game 3 I have an excellent Terminate, double Purge, Thrinax hand, which plans to get its White mana off Exotic Orchard. He has a turn 3 Blightning and I discard Naya Panorama, my foggy mind thinking he has a foreign Ancient Ziggurat in play — only to realize it’s actually a foreign Exotic Orchard. He plays a couple Black and/or Red creatures, and I end up dying while not being able to cast any of the four (!) Celestial Purges I’ve drawn. (And then discarded to his Sedraxis Specter.)
2-2
Round 5 — Jund Super Aggro
I’m playing against Billy Moreno super fast Hackblade-Rip Clan Crasher deck in an uncovered feature match this round. Game 1 I remove his first creature, play a Thrinax, and follow it up with Ajani Vengeant. Game 2 I mull down to six and he plays Hackblade into Hackblade, but then Thought Hemorrhages Ajani, doing basically nothing. I am stuck on four lands though, and he has a second Hemorrhage to hit Triple Bituminous Blast — nugging me for nine, and being more than enough for his creatures to mop up over the next couple turns.
Game 3 I keep an opening hand of Savage Lands, Swamp, Blightning, Blightning, Terminate, Celestial Purge, Celestial Purge. This opener seems fine, and if I draw a land it’s gas. Even if I miss a drop for one turn, I will probably be okay. What actually happened is I didn’t find a land drop for four turns, but then my hand was still gassy enough to play for seemingly twenty more turns and stripping almost every spell out of my deck between cascade and his Thought Hemorrhages. I eventually end up being out of gas and losing to Resounding Thunder.
2-3
It was time to move into the draft rounds, and I sadly don’t still have my draft deck together as it got mixed in with other cards on the way back. Don’t despair too much though, for you aren’t missing much. I first picked Rhox War Monk over a few good Black cards because I felt like to 3-0 my pod I needed to have an insane deck, then got a bunch of confusing signals coming through on my right from Mark Herberholtz, like 5th pick triland, 8th pick Vithian Stinger, and 9th pick Bone Splinters. In pack 2 I got passed almost exclusively good Green and Blue cards though, and in pack 3 I had a first pick Nemesis of Reason, but then it was pretty weak otherwise. And you know a draft has gone poorly when Alara Reborn has been a weak pack for you. Let me just put it this way: my deck, with access to all five colors, had to play Cylian Elf.
I lost round 1 to a far superior deck, although ironically I would have been able to win game 2 if I had drawn any land but my second triland on turn 9. (I needed to be able to play Elder Mastery and Resounding Roar in the same turn.)
I sadly dropped and watched Max end up 0-3ing to not make day 2 with a solid draft deck while figuring out what I was going to PTQ with the next day. I wanted to play Conley Woods Necroskitter–Dusk Urchins deck, but ultimately didn’t find the Elves matchup good enough, which was a problem after it had done so well in the LCQs and a lot of people I knew were scrambling for elf cards. I went out to dinner with Bill Stark, along with some Seattleites and some Midwesterners, to an upscale burger place with nice music, where once again I had good food which was very painful to eat. I was still feeling horrible, and the service took forever which didn’t help matters.
Afterwards, I went back to my hotel room and asked Chris Jobin via phone what I should play. He told me U/W Lark which actually sounded pretty good, so I went to sleep.
I woke up feeling a little better, but not by much. And, to top it all off, my voice was totally shot to the point where you had to lean in to hear anything I said.
I headed out to the PTQ, and ran into Tommy Kolowith, who had his Top 16 U/W Reveillark deck from the GP the week before on him. Sure, sounded good. Ben Weinburg ended up losing in the finals with the same maindeck, but I only managed a paltry 2-2, losing to Faeries and a Japanese take on Chapin’s Five Color Aggro deck, one without Cryptic Command but with Doran. Sigh.
After I dropped from that PTQ, I saw my chance to finally do something way more fun than all of the other tournaments. There was an Extended tournament for Power, and I quickly sought out Max McCall to see if he had Astral Slide on him. He had most of it, so we borrowed a few cards and built a replica of his PTQ winning decklist. I decided, similar to TEPS, I would just lose to Hypergenesis if I played against it.
I was excited to play Extended, and I think the idea of doing so actually made me feel a little physically better. Ah, Extended, the ultimate panacea. What an awesome format. I quickly burned through an Affinity, Zoo, and Bant deck, but then made a misplay to lose against Elves game 1 and didn’t see a single cycling land in over half my deck game 3, beat Affinity, then lost to Standard Faeries (well, 74 card Standard Faeries — he had the GP: Chrome Mox from the week before.) and Extended Faeries. Sigh. Well, at least I got to play Extended. And, um, win two Conflux boosters.
I went out to dinner with Alex West, Sam Black, Zaiem Beg, Hollie Beg, Brian Kowal, Jon Loucks, and Eric Reasoner, to an Asian restaurant, which was pretty good, except for the fact that my voice was even worse in the morning so everybody had a difficult time hearing me.
Sunday I woke up early with every intention of playing in the draft challenge, but the 128 person cap was cut off right in front of me. Sigh.
Instead, I hung out with Brian Kowal, Max McCall, Jed Dolbeer, and Alex West and was taught how to play the board game Agricola, which it knew had to be good based on the virtue of the fact that Sam Black had been carrying it around everywhere he went — restaurants and all — just like it was his precious, in both Seattle and all over Hawaii. It was pretty complex, but pretty fun once you understood how to play it. I counted up my points at the end and thought I had won my first game — an impressive feat — but on a recount I ended up tying with Brian. Bleh. Between the long play time of a five-player game and us learning how to play, the game took over three hours, so Brian, Noah Swartz, Ben Wienburg, and I all went out to this Italian place Brian had heard was good.
We arrived, and immediately found ourselves daggered by the completely strange notion that the restaurant didn’t serve pasta before 3pm. It was a few minutes after 2pm, so we just shrugged, ordered bread and salads, and waited until three while Brian taught us how to play the noncollectable card game Race for the Galaxy. It’s a game with some really good mechanics, although I’m not a fan of the less-than-Dominion level of interaction and the way the game ends. Plus, it’s a game set in space, and after playing a thousand medieval farming games, a game with a space setting was ascetically awesome. Despite all the losing I had done, the time moving toward the pasta time of 3pm passed faster and faster.
And there we were, for a moment stuck in time, four otherwise strangers from completely different parts of the country, sitting in a hole in the wall Italian restaurant in Hawaii playing cards, cracking jokes, and exchanging stories. And isn’t that what the experience is all about?
Man, the Pro Tour is awesome.
Gavin Verhey
Team Unknown Stars
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else