Go away.
Go on, shoo! Before I set the ‘gators on you.
I’m sulking.
Yokohama was supposed to be the tournament I came back to do some damage. I don’t mind so much scrubbing out of Limited PTs. I’m getting better, but I still need a bit of luck to make Day 2, or rather avoid the luck that draws a shade too much land or gives my opponent Cancel for my Pyrohemia. So the failures in Kobe and Geneva were disappointing after the progress I’d made in Prague, but not entirely unanticipated.
But Constructed…
Constructed is supposed to be my strength, my forte. To collapse from 3-1 to 3-5 and fail to make the cut to Saturday is the bad days all over again. I thought I was past all that crap.
I’m bummed out and a little melancholic at the moment. I’m possibly also a little burnt out on Magic.
Happens sometimes.
After Nationals I nearly threw my laptop out of a window after getting mana-screwed for the second game in a row in a league match.
This time I tried a Time Spiral draft, ended up with a monstrosity because I had no idea what the people on either side of me were doing (not sure they did either), decided it would be a good idea to unmorph an Aquamorph Entity into a 5/1 with damage on the stack, didn’t block a Castle Raptors for four straight turns with a Dustwasp on the table and Aether Web in hand because I still thought it was a 3/5…
Sigh.
Seen these symptoms before. Time to put down the cards and step back for a while until the Geiger counter ticks down.
But I can’t quite. Still got an article to write. So I may as well tear open the wounds again for all you bastards out there to pore over.
Hmm, excuse me for a moment.
Footsteps. A loud door clangs somewhere in the distance. For a moment there is silence before it is rudely ruptured by a cacophony of loud banging noises, a gas motor, and something that sounds disturbingly like a human scream. Then the noises die down. Everything is quiet again apart from something that might be a dripping tap. Might be…
A door clangs.
Footsteps.
Ah that’s better. No one likes a misery guts. So it’s time to turn The Wildhearts up to the max and give another good old-fashioned tournament report.
You do know I was kidding back there, right? I love you all really.
Actually I don’t. I hate every living being on the planet from the depths of my twisted black heart, and would like nothing better to burn everything to a crisp.
I put a lot of preparation into testing Time Spiral block. Stuart Wright had been contacted by various people from the Misetings forums asking if they would work with him, and so we had a private message board set up by Canadian now-a-player-more-than-a-judge Duncan McGregor. We basically added anyone we knew who’d qualified from the UK and Ireland – including my usual partner in crime Stewart Shinkins – and soon had a lot of healthy discussion being bounced around.
Most of our testing was carried out online on MTGO or Workstation, although we made a conscious aim to keep our decks out of MTGO’s Premier Events as we knew other players would be paying very close attention to them.
The Stormbind deck I posted a few weeks ago was actually a real deck. I really thought there might be something with Magus of the Library, but eventually he turned out to be too fiddly and too flimsy.
I then moved onto Mono-Black Control, thinking that the combination of discard and Damnation would catch a lot of decks between a rock and a hard place. The surprise for me was how ineffective Mindstab was in the Black deck. The Blue control decks would just tutor for Teferi and leave it stranded in limbo before it ever arrived.
It was clear Black needed another color, and the presence of both Terramorphic Expanse and Prismatic Lens meant color-fixing wasn’t as bad as it initially appeared. Some members of the group started looking at Black/Green while I went to Black/Red/Blue after losing to a very impressive looking Shadowmage Infiltrator deck online. About then we also started splashing Blue in everything after realising just how good Aeon Chronicler is.
In the end, both Black decks fell out of favor. The Green version didn’t have enough oomph, and I went off the Red version when I started to lose to Teferi decks with Hellkites.
Someone, either Stuart Wright or Alan Meaney, had come up with a big guy Red/Green deck, which was then tuned (by Stuart Wright I think) to even bigger threats with the addition of Lotus Bloom and Dragonstorm. This was proving popular amongst our group, although I was very nervous about playing it as I’d played decks like it before… they always seemed to either give me mana and nothing to cast or threats and no mana to cast them.
I was also a little concerned that we might have neglected both the White Weenie and Blue/Black Teferi decks. It’s one of the weird quirks of British Magic that everyone is reluctant to work on the obvious decks because they’re… well, obvious. The usual argument is either everyone will have better versions or be geared up to hate the best decks.
My counter argument is “Sometimes the obvious deck wins.”
I’d also noticed the White decks were taking up a hefty chunk of the Top 8 slots in the online premier events. A mono-colored beatdown deck held a lot of attraction, to me as it seemed like the Red deck of the format: consistently doing its thing and preying on the fiddly complex decks when their draw didn’t come together.
A few days before I was due to fly out, I went off to Rich Hagon place, up in Scunthorpe, for a few days of intensive testing. We’d done the colony thing just before Paris and it had been very good in killing off my pet Gargadon deck and getting me to play the Dragonstorm deck to an eventual 4-2 record. We’d also done the same before Geneva, and learnt that in a room full of English people and one (former) Italian, the non-English player will obviously 9-0.
Stefano couldn’t make it this time, as he was already out in Japan sightseeing with some of the other Brits. Instead we were joined by fellow qualifier Guy Southcott, the ever-present Ben Coleman, our tireless editor Craig Stevenson, and Paul Graham. Keith Spragg was unfortunate enough to only make it up on the Sunday, when we were pretty much Magic’ed out and played Arkham Horror instead (an excellent game, even though we had an odd game where the Great Old Ones didn’t seem to want to come out and play).
Unfortunately we didn’t have an up-to-date listing for Teferi. I had a Red/Blue version that aimed to abuse Shapeshifters and Hellkites, but that pretty much got torn to shreds by White Weenie. We had to ring Stuart Wright for a listing that seemed moderately sensible. Overall, the testing was fairly inconclusive. There were a lot of 6-4s and 5-5s, with the occasional one-sided matchup usually for or against White Weenie, but no deck that really stood out. The Green/Red deck we had seemed very explosive – Rich even straight-up managed a turn 4 Dragonstorm kill – but I didn’t like the White Weenie matchup and I expected to see a lot of it.
I was leaning towards White Weenie… until a couple of dreadful Premier Events when I realised the deck wasn’t actually as consistent as it first appeared, and that I didn’t have a clue what was going on in the mirror.
Stuart Wright had come up with a more aggressive Blue/Red/Black build featuring Infiltrators, Cloudskates, Sulfur Elementals, and Shapeshifters alongside more traditional Teferi elements. Initially I wasn’t too keen on the deck, as the mana looked iffy and it seemed to have too many rogue one-ofs, but it did butcher White Weenie… and I mean really butcher White Weenie. Once the bombshell of the 4x Premier Event landed, that fact suddenly seemed very important.
The decklists I posted last week were pretty much what our team had at the time. Obviously I didn’t build all of them, but I didn’t want to mention the full details of who was involved in case someone read the article and then got paired against a team member. It was fairly encouraging to read Tiago’s article earlier this week and see we were mostly on the right track. The one glaring hole was the absence of a strong Teferi deck… no one had thought to add White, for instance. We could really have done with someone running with that ball. But overall, not a bad spread.
I wasn’t lying about how hectic my Sunday was. Somehow I managed to crawl through a lab I barely understood and then finish some editing work that was desperately required by Helene Bergeot on the Monday before I even got to the airport.
Normally I don’t mind flying, but this time the flight wasn’t the best. Air France have been annoying me for a while with their insistence on self check-in. To me this is an obvious cost-cutting measure, and I don’t like it when companies try to save money by shifting workload onto their consumers. Self-service check-in just means all the people on their own take seats in empty rows, so by the time you get to check in you can’t even find two seats together. No testing on this flight, and I mainly slept for most of it.
We got to Yokohama in decent shape, but then my fabled sense of direction malfunctioned and it took a while for Stuart Wright and I to find the same hostel we’d used at Worlds. I felt slightly more justified when we eventually got there, as it had been done up since the last time I’d been there and I didn’t recognise the building at first. The rooms literally are the size of cupboards, but it is fantastically cheap at just £60 for the entire stay.
The next night I actually slept on Nick Sephton’s floor in the swanky Pan Pacific Hotel. This was because he had a free net connection and I needed to email Craig my article for the week. And also because my fabled sense of direction was completely on the fritz, and we’d ended up following the wrong train line south rather than west back towards his hotel and decided on a taxi rather than embarrass me further.
We met up with the Irish and pretty much everyone else on the team at the Starbucks in China Town. This was Stewart Shinkin’s idea, and I was initially concerned it was bonkers. There was no way it would ever work out, and we’d never see anyone until registration. Somehow it worked though, even if I spent most of Thursday sleeping on a chair in there rather than testing.
By this point I’d already decided to go with Stuart Wright Infiltrator deck. The majority of the rest of the team went with the Green/Red deck. Daniel Godfrey had suggested splashing Black for Void (moving Aeon Chroniclers to the board), and that seemed to improve the White Weenie matchup.
Unfortunately, because most people had decided on the Green/Red deck before coming, we were put in the odd situation of mainly playing Infiltrator versus Green/Red far more than the matchup was ever likely to occur.
This is a trap that’s easy to fall into. By this time everyone has the deck they want to play, and they all want to play as many games with that deck. If most of your team has the same deck then you end up playing lots of matchups that aren’t really relevant. At this point you really need volunteers to run the gauntlet decks, making sure you alternate to keep things fair. Again I think the lack of a good solid gauntlet Blue/Black Teferi deck really hindered us.
This was the deck I decided on:
Creatures (20)
- 4 Shadowmage Infiltrator
- 1 Bogardan Hellkite
- 1 Brine Elemental
- 1 Draining Whelk
- 4 Riftwing Cloudskate
- 1 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
- 4 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
- 4 Sulfur Elemental
Lands (25)
Spells (15)
Sideboard
Stuart Wright had a slightly different main deck, with a Snapback over the Whelk and possibly a second Totem over the Brine Elemental.
And the Red/Green deck:
Creatures (15)
Lands (23)
Spells (22)
- 2 Dragonstorm
- 3 Void
- 4 Lotus Bloom
- 4 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
- 4 Search for Tomorrow
- 1 Weatherseed Totem
- 4 Harmonize
Sideboard
Going into the night before the tournament I felt really confident. Stuart had done a lot of testing with the deck online, it butchered what we expected to be the most popular deck, and I was happy with the sideboarding options. I wished I’d played a few more games against control, but I’d managed to get a few in, enough so I didn’t think I’d be totally clueless.
Unfortunately the day did not go to plan, and you can read about it in all the gruesome detail right here.
This seems like an appropriate time to cover some forum posts I got for my last article.
All these pros writing about White Weenie make me think that they have some anti-weenie powerful tech and they’re telling everyone how good WW is so they can wtfpwn at PT by going against hordes of weenies decks…
It’s a nice conspiracy theory, but I’m not sure how true it is. That 4x Premier Event sent out some shockwaves. Stewart Shinkins was walking around on Thursday, and he said more than a few teams were suddenly panicking because they’d underestimated how strong WW was and were realising they didn’t beat that matchup after all.
I fully expected White Weenie to be the most popular deck, and that it would put multiple players into the Top 8. It was only around Thursday that I started to notice the danger signs. There was a lot of talk about the deck, but I knew of very few people who actually wanted to play it.
To be honest, I should have used my head a bit more. Everyone had access to that same information, and everyone would rightly conclude that it would probably be too risky to play as there’d be a lot of hate for it.
It wasn’t so much “pushing a dodgy deck on the unsuspecting,” but more of the field reacting in an obvious fashion to an important piece of information.
With so few of my best matchup in the field, I was actually pretty lucky to face three White decks… and then I managed to lose to two of them.
Between the pain, this forum post did bring a smile to my face:
Craig on SCG.com wrote:
1. “My deck beats White Weenie.”
What you actually mean is that your deck beats White Weenie if it gets its good draw.
Craig on MTG.com wrote:
Overall the deck didn’t deliver. I think it’s just a little too tricksy for its own good. While it has game against most decks, it can just as easily malfunction. I lost most of my games to just not drawing the right spells for the right matchup or through mana issues. The shock was to go 1-2 against White Weenie, the supposedly unloseable matchup.
🙁
Still a great article, even if you didn’t listen to your own advice.
Damn, hoisted by my own petard.
In my defence I’d like to point out that the deck was straight up murdering White Weenie in testing. You can usually spot the “my deck beats X when it doesn’t” syndrome when you start making excuses to justify a 4-6 or 5-5 scoreline that you feel isn’t representative because the mana came out wrong in a couple of games, or deck X got lucky in another. We were regularly managing 8-2s and 9-1s. But on the day when it really mattered…
So I suppose I probably should have listened to my own advice.
The deck didn’t quite work out, but I also forgot to mention Stephen Murray wasn’t the only player to Day 2 with it. Ervin Tormos also made it in and even finished in the money, but that also has a lot to do with him being an extremely good player. Meanwhile, Stephen Murray found the other part of the deck and saw a 6-2 Day 1 record reversed to 2-6.
Friday night was a monster. While Joules Jardine might not have been present, his spirit certainly was. Actually for this trip, I have to be honest, I was the Joules, at least when the sun was down.
After leaving the Day 2’ers behind to get some much-earned rest, we followed expat Paul Benjamin into the neon lights of central Yokohama. Unfortunately, Bunny is more familiar with the Tokyo nightlife, and the area around Yokohama Central Station turned out to be a bust.
In that case it fell back to me, and I took us back to the slightly dim and more local Noge-cho area in search of the kind of bars Joules had managed to drain dry during our last visit. I got lucky and managed to whack a six straight over the pavilion (I’m British – I’m refuse to say I struck a home run!). We found a tiny Karaoke / Darts Bar run by some hot women and had an excellent time drinking beer and mutilating various songs.
They shut at half-two, and we were directed to a bar we remembered from last time. They even managed to remember AJ, but I suppose six foot plus Irishmen with ginger Mohicans are probably not very commonplace in Japan. More drinking followed, various people fell asleep, I have the incriminating photos. This time we failed to break AJ, and so instead the KFC award for extreme drunken behaviour has to go to Mr Michael P Groves. We don’t actually know where he ended up that night. After running around with a bar stool, Grovesy walked outside and vanished. He said he woke up in the street and discovered someone had written a very rude thing on the back of his neck in permanent marker.
We left at the more sedate time of around six in the morning. I was the spirit of Joules so obviously I’d stayed awake the whole evening. I’d like to say I was perfectly sober, but I also remember arguing drunkenly about politics with an American expat (he was the one who’d been very handy with the marker pen) and his mate from Newcastle (“So where’s the toon accent then?”). Not exactly sober, but I’ve been on worse benders, and as this one didn’t feature vomiting, memory loss, or even a hangover, I suppose it should be classed as one of the milder evenings.
“Craig, we really like your blog. Why don’t you make Day 2 so we can read more of it?”
It was actually quite nice the number of people who came up and complemented either the blog or my StarCityGames.com column. It means a lot to know people are reading and like it, even if I’m so socially awkward I don’t quite know what to say.
The original plan, and it was a good plan, was for me to play in the Prereleases and blog that. It was something I was looking forward to. Unfortunately that didn’t quite happen. I didn’t wake up until half past four, and after finding the shower was occupied I realised that I still wasn’t alive and needed another three hours.
I finally got to the venue at around half eight in the evening, and felt very sheepish. Hopefully, I’ll still be called upon to write the blog at San Diego, but I probably didn’t do myself any favors here.
While the night was fairly extreme and good fun, anyone who remembers me from the European Grand Prix coverage will not really see this as anything untoward. Not making the venue the next day at all, however, is extremely rare for me. I’m very much a work hard, party hard and then get up to work hard the next day kind of animal. I joke that Sideboard Writers are “indestructible.” You have to be, otherwise the events would be nothing more than working and then going to bed, and that’s no fun.
Not this time however. There was nothing for me in the tank for the next day.
I’d been suffering from a virus for a few weeks beforehand, and the days before the tournament had been fairly gruelling. I wonder even, as useful as the testing session at Rich’s had been, I might have been better leaving a day early and getting a full night’s sleep in my own bed. As it was I tried to pull an all-nighter on Sunday to build the block decks I needed, pack, learn the lab I was demonstrating the next morning, edit a press kit for Wizards, and write my weekly article for StarCityGames.com. I got some sleep on the flight, but I’ve found that often doesn’t help, and I’m not sure sleeping on a mat at the hostel helped me catch up either. There was also another three-hour night as I finally got round to finishing my weekly article.
Definitely a case of spreading myself too thin. I think this might have also been the reason for the calamitous Day 1 collapse.
While I don’t think my draws in the latter half of the day were good, I think there was something else going on. Somehow I lost the plot half way through the day. I didn’t even realise the most sensible thing I should have done is drawn the last round with Geoffrey Siron so that both of us would have finished with an extra Pro Point.
It’s something I will certainly need to be more aware of. While I’m out at the event I can take a fair bit of punishment, but only if I go in with a full charged battery.
I spent most of Sunday falling asleep in a chair while watching the semis and final. Craig Gibson managed to get a beaut of a picture I believe is hidden in the coverage somewhere. Fortunately I was professional enough to report the quarter-finals without any problems.
Both Stewart Shinkins and Adam Bennett finished in the money. Adam’s performance was particularly impressive as this was his first Pro Tour, and he was on the verge of elimination for most of Day 1 after starting out 1-3. He finished a very credible 25th in the end, and the Red/Green listing above is the deck he played. Rather generously, Adam picked up the tab for the second night we spent at the Karaoke Bar to celebrate. Normally that’s reserved for people who Top 8, but I think Adam was just overjoyed to have Top 32’ed his first Pro Tour and qualify for Valencia.
I’m rubbish at Karaoke. Teddy Card Game elegantly summed it up when I joined the staff party on Sunday and picked Green Day’s “Basket-Case.”
“Are you sure? You realise this has a Melody?”
Melody, pitch, tune, pshaw! Who needs to worry about those things.
I know my role, you see. Most of the time people are a little unsure of getting up to sing because they’re frightened of making a fool of themselves. But after I’ve utterly butchered a song (I even tried Radiohead’s “High and Dry” – no, you don’t want to imagine it, trust me), all of a sudden people lose their reticence.
“Wow, this guy’s really bad, surely I can’t be worse.”
We even got Stuart Wright to do a few songs, while Daniel Godfrey was obviously sandbagging us with the “Oh no, I don’t sing” then belting out perfect renditions of various metal tracks. Overall it was really cool to go to the Pro Tour and get to know some of the UK players I’d never seen before, even if I lost half of them on Saturday night in the maze of Noge-cho looking for the karaoke bar and ditched all of them in favor of the free grub of the staff meal on Sunday night. Free food, guys – c’mon!
Sure I can whinge about how the tournament went, and the fact I seemed to spend most of the daylight hours nodding off in one chair or another, but the nights made up for it.
Overall it seems like Block is healthier than I first thought. I did ask Devin Low and Randy Buehler if they’d been concerned after that 4x Premier Event, as I guess a monoculture Top 8 is the last thing R&D want. I still don’t like how Teferi completely wrecks whole swathes of cards, but it seems like there’s enough variety overall to be healthy. There are plenty of different ways to build both the Red/Green decks and Blue/Black decks, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see White Weenie to creep back in once the format settles into something less hostile.
I think what this Pro Tour highlighted is that while MTGO can be a fantastic tool for testing, it can also be a gaping pit-trap if you aren’t careful. The Pro Tour metagame is different to the online metagame, and there is a very real danger of over-fitting decks to the wrong metagame.
That about wraps it up from me… sadly, this Pro Tour wasn’t the glorious return to Magical form I was looking for. Sometimes that Lightning Helix is nearer the bottom that the top.
Ah well, better luck next time.
Prof.