Sometimes, just sometimes, madness strikes. The last month of playing, for me, has no great reason to inspire confidence… my best result out of three PTQs and Regionals was a 4-2 record. I won Friday Night Magic two weeks in a row at Comic Book Depot in Bellmore out on Long Island, to at least suggest to me that I was starting to know what I was doing with the Kithkin deck I was favoring. None of these are definitive reasons to fly across the country to play Magic at a Grand Prix, especially when there is a Pro Tour Qualifier within driving distance that I could be attending instead. But that was the decision I reached anyway, even after checking out the fact that my Constructed rating had fallen just south of 1900 after Regionals, leaving me with one fewer bye than I might have had if I had decided at anything other than the last minute to actually attend Grand Prix: Seattle.
My life for the past six months has included something of an existential crisis. It had been far too long since I had seen any real success at Magic, for example, with my Day 2 appearance at Grand Prix: Philadelphia last year the one ray of hope lighting the way back far too many years to the last time I even made Top Eight at a PTQ, and my other hobby of note (live-action role-playing with the New York City chapter of White Wolf’s Camarilla Club) had at this point started to reach an impasse of frustration. I have for the past year been a principal officer for running games within my group, and in fact had my hand on the tiller for our flagship game (Vampire: the Requiem) for much of 2008, but a very insistent clique of friends seemed to be taking it upon themselves to attack me as a means of establishing their own power bloc, and the question started to be raised as to why I was considering this group of people my “friends” and devoting time to that hobby that could be better spent doing anything else at all. Work, while inappropriately called such considering how much actual work I have to do to earn my paycheck, cut my pay 40% at the start of the year, when I spent half of 2008 looking for a job… so going into the start of 2009, I faced the question of just what it is I intend to make of myself, both professionally and with my leisure activities. And one thing that I decided I just needed to do was to play Magic more competitively, as one of the biggest faults with my Magic game was that I just did not play enough of them. Far too often the answer was “I was too rusty and made a mistake,” when ‘making a mistake’ is all it takes to deserve defeat instead of earn victory.
One change came very swiftly: I was playing more, and thus I was playing better, but I was also having a better sense of what deck was the right one for me to be playing at events. I earn my keep here at StarCityGames.com on the strengths of my analysis, not my individual deck choices, but those deck choices had previously been all too afraid of playing mirror matches… after all, if your opponent has prepared for that and you haven’t, you’ll find yourself on the short end of the mirror match far too often. When I no longer had to feel as if I should be afraid that my opponents would be better-prepared for me, I started to see better results more consistently, if not yet that breakthrough result that shows maybe just maybe I might not be bad at this game. I made the finals of a PTQ playing a Faeries deck that was 56/60 cards correct (and 4 out of 60 cards ‘my deck is just going to do the same thing every time,’ which I felt helped to smooth me onto the course of victory but which pretty much everyone else ever has laughed at) but unfortunately lost in the finals while on the tape for The Magic Show, and just had to pick it up and try again. And the decision to not go to Grand Prix: Seattle, which I seemed settled on as we entered the month of May, was based on my old mode of thought: if you don’t put yourself at risk for disappointment, you won’t fail spectacularly and be disappointed. Likewise, if you don’t take any risks and put yourself out there to succeed, you’ll never succeed either. And thus it was agonized over and then finally decided that I would throw caution to the wind and buy a plane ticket to Seattle to play in the Grand Prix, one Bye be damned.
Watching the metagame change around Grand Prix: Barcelona, it seemed to me that the biggest shifts were perception rather than reality. We stopped kidding ourselves that Faeries wasn’t good, for example, now that the metagame had grown more mature and we could prove that the things we were being afraid of just weren’t as terrifying as we thought they would be… and we stopped kidding ourselves sometime around Regionals, when we saw that the deck performed adequately even if it was underplayed, but Sam Black making the Top 8 in Barcelona with a list even he felt was under-developed for that event was the watershed moment that said to everyone, “No, it’s okay, you don’t have to be afraid anymore.” It doesn’t hurt that Faeries clobbers the metagame extremes that had begun to develop in the B/W Persist Tokens metagame of Regionals, and is also quite solid against the 40+ land Cascade Swans deck… so the deck of choice for the weekend was for many going to be Faeries once again.
I flew from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City early Friday morning on a flight shared by about a dozen other Magic players, mostly New Yorkers but including (to my eye at least) a group of European players catching their connection from an international flight to Seattle. All of the New Yorkers save me would be continuing on from Seattle to Hawaii for an extended weekend of awesomeness, even though only about half of them had qualified for the event… while I would be catching a midnight flight back to New York alone on Sunday night, proceeding directly from the airport back to work in the morning. There’s a reason they say this is a younger man’s game, and the sad truth is I just wasn’t very good back when I was a younger man. My sleep schedule having overall been screwy for weeks if not months now at this point, I was glad when I saw there would be no fellow gamers on the flight nearby me… that meant I could try and catch up on some of the sleep I was sorely lacking, as I wanted to add at least another two hours of shuteye to the four hours I got before getting up in the morning, if I wanted to even consider myself mentally prepared for the grinders later that afternoon. I did in fact successfully get about two hours of sleep before having to admit that consciousness was here to stay, either because of the chatty Canadian I was sitting next to or the impatient five-year-old princess who was kicking the back of my chair… and spent the rest of the flight reading a research material I’d selected for the trip, as part of the required reading I’ve set aside for myself as part of the other way in which I’ve decided to try and put myself out there in life instead of settle for quiet mediocrity and my own excuses: I’ve decided to start writing a science fiction / cyberpunk novel based on some ideas that have been growing in my head lately, and to flesh out and develop the world in which I wish to set this novel I first have to learn a lot more about our world, and thus I was reading Bush At War by Bob Woodward.
Finally landing in Seattle, us New Yorkers stuck together, some benefiting from a free ride thanks to our borrowed West Coaster, Gabe Carleton-Barnes, while myself and others navigated public transport from the airport to Tacoma proper and made it to the event site. I’d come with two decks fully-built in my bag, the Faerie deck I’ve owned for the past year and the Kithkin deck I had been playing since the StarCityGames double PTQ weekend a month ago… and I intended to play both in the grinders (unless, well, I didn’t have to because I won one…) and decide from there how I felt about this weekend’s metagame and my chances of success going forward from however many byes I had at the end of the day.
For the first grinder I played Faeries, and was able to win my first match comfortably before losing in the second round to a U/R Swans control deck templated off of the Japanese Kyoto list. For the second grinder I played Kithkin, and again won my first match comfortably before losing in the second round to a Turbo-Fog deck that had escaped the obvious and likely first round loss by dint of the fact that his opponent didn’t show up for round one, leaving him capable of playing me in the second round and able to squeak out the first game after we started with an absurdly low number of cards between the two of us, then the second by outmaneuvering my sideboarded Everlasting Torments with a one-of Platinum Angel when I’d foolishly cut my Paths to Exile for other equally-dead cards that didn’t matter. The irony of me losing the three Byes to Turbo-Fog after two weeks in a row of publicly bashing the deck is not lost on me, but neither was the certainty that the deck was not a competitor in the actual metagame instead of an aberration.
I could have played in a third trial, but I felt I had done what I needed to: gathered some information, and played a few trial runs to get me back up to fighting trim for the weekend. I had a decision to make based on the one bye I had and I felt I was better served making that decision than chasing the free-win lottery in hopes that it would put me on even footing with the actual professionals, as it was going to be my experience playing in this format week after week that I would be capitalizing on in order to earn the victories I would need, and starting from 3-0 but making the wrong deck choice wouldn’t actually be better than starting 1-0 with the right deck choice.
I decided that at 1-0 I would have a more significant chance of facing Red decks multiple times over the early tournament than I would face Cascade combo decks, and staggered my decision over which deck to play accordingly. It doesn’t hurt that I have only recently finally started to come into my own playing this deck, after watching my more-experienced playtesting partners reach early success at the StarCityGames double PTQ weekend in Richmond as I settled for mediocre finishes derived from inexperience with the deck’s nuances:
Creatures (19)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (25)
Spells (13)
Sit in my seat for a moment. It’s round two and you are paired against Murray Bryan, who has played a turn-one Llanowar Elves and turn-two Elvish Harbinger. You have just flown 2500 miles and spent $250 on plane fare plus a vacation day at work just to be sitting here at this moment in time, and your tournament has either just begun or just ended based on what Murray is tutoring for. If it’s Nettle Sentinel or Heritage Druid, this match may very well be over before it’s begun, combo-killed by the combo deck I didn’t prepare myself against. Think what you will of my later pairings, this was my scariest moment of the weekend: I’ve put so much on the line even just coming here, where before I would have dismissed it without a second thought… just to lose in the first round?
Round 1 – BYE
I unfortunately lose this one 0-2, as my hour’s wandering around the area turns up very little indeed in the way of food options near the tournament site. I’ve gone so far as to find the Starbucks two blocks uptown, but found little else that is acceptable, meaning food would be coming from the traditionally-sketchy event center cafeteria itself or be incredibly hard to actually find something. There is a Quizno’s one block away from the convention center that is not open on weekends. O what a strange place we have come to, that has such wonders in’t.
Round 2 – Murray Bryan, B/G Elves
As foreshadowed, I’m on the play and lead off with a one-drop and a two-drop while Murray leads with Llanowar Elf into Elvish Harbinger and scares the bejeezus out of me. Will the card he’s tutoring for signal my death by being a combo piece? Instead, it’s Nameless Inversion, and a huge sigh of relief can be seen to utter from my lips as I realize my opponent is playing fair rather than about to murder me with his combo engine. I win the game handily against miscellaneous Black and Green creatures by doing what Kithkin does, getting some attackers down there and then finding a way to push them across the table at the opponent, and the game is locked up by a flying Cloudgoat Ranger that brings him down into range for an alpha strike powered up by Zealous Persecution.
Sideboarding: -3 Ajani Goldmane, +2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant, +1 Path to Exile
For the second game, I play some creatures and we actually are racing, thanks to the fact that he has a double Chameleon Colossus draw while I have some beaters going. He’s much more ‘in’ this game than the first game, thanks to a good aggressive draw on his part while on the play, but then I play Elspeth and turn the tables on him, throwing a creature in the air to attack him and managing his Colossi with a Path to Exile and a token or two to chump-block as Elspeth flies my 2/2 over.
1-0 Matches, 2-0 record. 2-0 in games.
Round 3 – Ben Sowards, B/G Elves
Ben wins the die roll and mulligans, leading off with Wren’s Run Vanquisher revealing Nameless Inversion while I start off with an excellent start of Stalwart into Wizened Cenn. Ben gets in some early attacks as I throw creatures his way, while I start to stabilize with Spectral Procession as my beatdown and Knight of Meadowgrain to pad my life totals a little, grinding through the mid-game creature battle to finish him off thanks to a removal spell or two on his best creatures.
Sideboarding: -3 Ajani Goldmane, +2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant, +1 Path to Exile
For the second game, Ben is again on the play, and just gets the aggressive push going while using his Pulses and Nameless Inversions to manage my creature hordes into something his army can block while he is at it. I have his life totals as going down by one point a turn for several turns but don’t recall him having a Bitterblossom, so I’d have to assume I either kept one Spectral Procession token somehow to attack him with as he beat me with his creatures, or he had a painland-heavy draw, and I am favoring the painland theory as that sticks at least somewhat in my memory. I seem to be recalling death by Profane Command as well, but he may not even have needed it, so that could just be a flight of fancy.
For the third game, I am on the play, and get what looks like Figure of Destiny into Wizened Cenn, hitting him for two and then for three on the first turns, plinking in for some more damage without actually exposing the Figure to his Nameless Inversion, and keeping my board generally thin so as to play around an Infest that I read him as potentially representing, since he has missed early creature plays and is just attacking in five point chunks at the time. The game goes long-ish but I am never really threatened into taking the defensive, and since I spent a decent amount of time playing around Infest we are able to trade cards in the mid-game when he finally started to play out his own stuff, signaling the end of any fear of Infest crippling my board while leaving him with the ability to come back from it with his own cards in hand. I’m able to grind the game out in the mid-game, after a few turns of stalemate, with what looks like Elspeth turning up to make things complicated for him.
2-0 Matches, 3-0 record. 4-1 in games.
I’ve now “won my Grand Prix trial,” or at least done so as effectively as matters at this point since it’s been announced that X-2 will make the cut to Day 2, cutting some of the tiebreaker worries that otherwise traditionally see those with three Byes making the cut to the disadvantage of those who had to play opponents who didn’t win 100% of their matches (including the one you played and beat them in). One could now reasonably expect the field to get significantly harder, as those with three Byes start to come into the field. For extra bonus irony, my two wins will now have surely earned me my second Bye, but they won’t add that in retroactively… surprise, surprise.
Round 4 – AJ Sacher, Faeries
I’m told after the fact that Brian David-Marshall wanted to pick this match for a Feature Match because of some rivalry I have with AJ supposedly, which tells me if nothing else I should be going through AJ’s archives to see in what context my name has come up. I may have made things accidentally awkward if we did have a rivalry I didn’t know about, as I did make a point of dropping in one of AJ’s favorite phrases (“Oxygen Thieves”) to hint that I have read at least some of his articles. In this context it was to jokingly call the judges “oxygen thieves,” based on the fact that the judges were able to go through all 1127 decklists for the event in enough time to award AJ a game loss for his first round of play for a misregistered deck, gifting me with the first game and denying us the use of our sideboards for the second game, which is a gift indeed based on how these matchups usually play out. In this case, I played a Goldmeadow Stalwart and Knight of Meadowgrain while he played a turn-two Bitterblossom, at which point I began the slowed-down but still significant tap-dance on his face routine as my creatures turned sideways and attacked. There was a lot of interplay in the game, but I came out fast and aggressive as I’d hope to for game one, and without access to Infests for ‘game two’ he ended up not having the ability to defend himself in a ‘best of three’ match.
Kithkin versus Faeries is a lot of work for the Kithkin player, but I’ve found my year-plus of experience in playing Faeries has if anything taught me what they don’t want to see the Kithkin player do, which informs my mulligan decisions and my game-play decisions, so I don’t walk cards into his tricks in a way that is favorable to me or focus on things that don’t matter, such as attacking Jace Beleren when there is a Bitterblossom on the table… that two life will frequently mean more than two cards on layaway appearing in slow motion will, because they’ll have card advantage no matter what you do, but basically none of their cards will make their life total go up instead of down. The Kithkin deck has to play perfectly to be in it, and by ‘play perfectly’ I mean ‘play perfectly against the Faerie deck’s capabilities’ instead of just not screw up simple stuff like which order to deploy threats to get the most damage out of your cards. If you play perfectly, it comes down to just how well your opponent has drawn; if they haven’t drawn exceptionally well, you’ll play a tight game of Magic that you will in the end win, and if their draw is below average they’ll just roll over and die. Game two and its subsequent Infests change this around a lot and makes more games favorable to them, as well as changing what you need to do to ‘play perfectly,’ thus making it a lot easier to provoke a mistake from you that will cost you the game. In general, playing the Kithkin versus Faeries matchup I’d rather be on the Faeries’ side of things, but having now played it from the other side I’m more confident in the matchup being winnable for Kithkin if they know what they’re doing and actually do it. In other words, I’ve found new respect for the deck and its capabilities, where before I’d had only mockery for the Kithkin when playing the Fae.
3-0 Matches, 4-0 record. 5-1 in games.
Round 5 – Paul Poncy, Faeries
Speaking of the Kithkin versus Faeries matchup, I get to do it again for the next round, save this time I actually have to win more than the much-more-favorable first game in order to do it. Paul wins the die roll and gets to play first, and his first two plays are Bitterblossom and Jace Beleren to my Stalwart, Stalwart + Heights draw if I recall correctly, ramping his Jace up to five cards to weather the incoming four power of attackers… which I point at his face anyway, ignoring Jace and his possible card advantage in order to focus on what actually matters, his life totals while under his own Bitterblossom. I’m almost certain that I followed his Jace up with a Spectral Procession but it is possible I just have everything out of order for this game, as I can’t quite seem to figure out what I was actually attacking him with, just remembering the crunchy bit of turn-two Blossom, turn-three Jace, get ground down by my attacking creatures until he is at one life with a Bitterblossom in play.
Sideboarding: -3 Ajani Goldmane, -3 Cloudgoat Ranger, -1 Oblivion Ring; +1 Path to Exile, +2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant, +4 Reveillark
The strategy for the second and third games is to push early damage across, then use my Planeswalker and Reveillarks to keep damage flowing even in the face of his removal spells, as Elspeth can make an army in a can without being easily removed from play (especially when the Faeries are on the defensive instead of trying to race or use tempo advantage) and Reveillark is all sorts of unpleasant when their answer isn’t Sower of Temptation. For the second game, he plays without Bitterblossom and thus isn’t under dire threat of losing if he hasn’t won by a specific time, but neither is he going to be able to keep the attackers at bay with a wave of tokens. Paul takes the first few hits to go to twelve but then recovers the game, ending up starting to stabilize when I take advantage of my Figures of Destiny to start becoming very dangerous things indeed. These Figures start to become problematic for him, as I’ve been leaning on them to survive Infests that should be coming out of his sideboard and have some Reveillark action for later if he does manage to deal with them, and these things combine to put the game into an exhausting state where he is treading water to keep up and I am threatening to push ahead all while still getting some damage across almost every turn, and he starts using Cryptic Commands to tap my creatures just to stay alive. The second time this happens he takes two from my Mutavault, going to two, and it is clear on my next attack that he doesn’t have another Cryptic Command, so he gets attacked by the white creatures that were there while a Mutavault that is just a land cheered on from the benches.
4-0 Matches, 5-0 record. 7-1 in games.
Halfway through the tournament so far, I’m comfortable and relaxed as well as feeling pretty confident in my play so far, as I’m seeing all the nuances and little things I had previously been screwing up when trying to fight in these difficult matchups, and correctly doing things like saying ‘take two’ with a 2/2 Figure and three mana untapped against Faeries, even though my play for that turn is to pump my Figure to a 4/4. After all, you want to push damage across the table and not walk into Agony Warp, so it’s much better to hit them for a definite two and then play the “do you have Agony Warp?” game at the end of their turn, when you will have at least tapped their mana to keep them off Cryptic Command and Mistbind Clique if your Figure does get Warped. You can play Kithkin well or you can play it poorly, and while I may feel that Faeries is overall a better deck in general, my decision to play Kithkin on the day was based on its positioning in the earlier rounds of the tournament as well as the later rounds, and the fact that I was reaching that higher level of competence as was needed to win these difficult Faerie matches, like the steely resolve to let Jace draw them extra cards while you attacked them.
Round 6 – Wilson Mok, Faeries
Game 1 starts off with me mulliganing a weak hand on the play and Wilson mulliganing as well but into a Bitterblossom hand, and I have Figure of Destiny plus Windbrisk Heights for my first two turns against his turn-two Bitterblossom draw. My recollection of the exact details of this game are spotty, save for the fact that on turn three I faced three options: pump Figure to a 4/4, play Spectral Procession, or play Oblivion Ring to take his Bitterblossom out of the picture. I let Figure hit him for two a second time and cast Spectral Procession to go with my Windbrisk Heights, and the game starts to crawl from there as I try to keep an aggressive board presence going while his Bitterblossom is trading with my Spectral Procession tokens and his countermagic keeps my following threats in check. After he taps down on turn five or six to just below the four-mana mark I play a second Spectral Procession, which gets to attack him down to seven on the following turn and threaten Windbrisk Heights’ activation, which I am slowrolling to get better use out of as he’s clearly got countermagic to spare but not so many things to do to affect the board right now, and I can actually resolve that spell with some patience. That patience ends up grinding him down to one in the face of his own Bitterblossom, which is then bounced via Cryptic Command on the turn he taps all of my creatures to stave off an attack, but no follow-up answer actually saves him from the impending attack phase to follow.
Sideboarding: -3 Ajani Goldmane, -3 Cloudgoat Ranger, -1 Oblivion Ring; +1 Path to Exile, +2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant, +4 Reveillark
The second game he is on the play, and has a turn-two Bitterblossom that is far more effective, and includes other things like a Mistbind Clique that steals a turn and actually goes on the offensive. My draw didn’t include a one-drop and his draw is heavy on removal, so Bitterblossom + Mistbind Clique is able to seal the game away and even the score going into the third. For the third game, I have Stalwart into Wizened Cenn, getting in early damage while he gets in some creature removal to start keeping up, including an Agony Warp to stabilize against that Stalwart-Cenn draw and Deathmark to really save on tempo in those early turns. I’m able to push in a pair of Knights of Meadowgrain to hit him to thirteen before they die, and then these too die as many things are doomed to do. We unfortunately see him stabilize in the middle of the game with a Bitterblossom on his side of things, though not to the point where he could actually go on the offensive, and I’m keeping the trades favorable on my side with Rustic Clachan to keep a threat in play. The game starts to fall apart for him when I take the opportunity of Evoking a Reveillark, that decision made mostly because I couldn’t afford to let him Sower it if indeed it did resolve, putting enough additional boots on the ground on my side that the next attack brings him to three, which his Bitterblossom reduces to two, and from there it again is simply academic as he hasn’t dealt me any damage yet all game and I have the Path to Exile for his Mistbind Clique to remove Bitterblossom from the game, and correctly wait for it to be Championed so that it comes back after. You’d be surprised how often that doesn’t happen that way.
Unfortunately, after three rounds of that matchup in a row, I’m not exactly certain which games played out which way against whom, though I recall all of those relevant little turning points happened somewhere over the course of those three matchups. I’ve attempted to figure out which game was which based on the life totals and my other brief notes, but this reconstruction may not be greatly accurate.
5-0 Matches, 6-0 record. 9-2 in games.
Round 7 – Joel Calafell, Seismic Swans
This round was a Featured Match which you can read in detail here, and the game recollections Rich Hagon can provide for us will do far more than any reconstruction I could attempt at that interplay from just my notes. Rich Hagon was sitting on Joel’s side as one could only consider to be fair; Joel was the most recent Grand Prix winner, and by all expectations (especially when one knows what I am playing!) one would figure I’m just the schlub in the way, even if I happen to technically be a co-worker of his here at StarCityGames. I cracked a joke to that regards and pointed out that I was just happy I hadn’t accidentally said anything mean about Joel’s win even as I said that it could just as easily have been Sam Black win with Faeries we saw coming out of that event, and then Brian David-Marshall snapped a picture of us both as we were shuffling up for the first game.
Game 1, I get to play first and we both mulligan, but he is able to combo-kill me as I was threatening lethal damage the next turn. No big surprises here, as I have no disruption and didn’t draw especially well, with a playable but far from perfect hand.
Sideboarding: -2 Zealous Persecution, -3 Ajani Goldmane, -3 Cloudgoat Ranger; +3 Pithing Needle, +2 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender, +2 Aura of Silence, +1 Path to Exile
Some people might be confused by the fact that I only brought in two, not three, Forge-Tenders, but the question is why was I bringing them in, not why did I not bring them all in. I was sideboarding out threats and dropping my curve, and needed to have more things that could potentially attack, and that was Forge-Tender’s role: 1/1 for 1, with a beneficial creature type. That’s it… he’s not a combo-breaker, nor could I realistically expect to see Volcanic Fallout in Joel’s sideboard; his removal spells should be Wraths and Pulses and that is it.
For game 2 I get about as perfect a draw as one could ask, with a one-drop, a two-drop, then disruption spell followed by disruption spell-plus-creatures, all poised to attack Joel to exactly lethal in the minimum number of turns without letting Seismic Assault do anything. Bloodbraid Elf found him his Assault on his fifth turn but ate a Path to Exile rather than be allowed to block, and like that we were off to the third game. Apparently the ‘dude, dude, Aura of Silence, Pithing Needle plus duded’ draw is a good draw.
For the third, he mulliganed on the play and I looked at a good but not disruptive hand, three lands plus four one-mana plays, three dudes and a Path to Exile, with one of those lands being Mutavault. I didn’t draw a disruption spell besides Path to Exile, whose dubiousness is unquestioned when they start pointing lands at Swans of Bryn Argoll, since they don’t frequently fizzle when the only constraint you’ve put on them is “you’ll need a second land in hand when you try this” thanks to the fact that they are packing upward of 40 lands. By this point we’d drawn a crowd, which included Brian Kibler watching over my shoulder, who got to see the misplay from turn one as it began in progress: I made my keep based off of a seven card hand and played it out in my head logistically as it needed to play out, then drew a Rustic Clachan on turn 1 that I should have snuck into the progression turn 1 to make it that much easier to deploy Mutavault on time as an attacker while playing all of my spells at peak speed. Instead, I played Caves of Koilos plus a creature, taking an unnecessary damage every turn from here on out that I used it, and this kept pushing the Clachan and then following that the Mutavault further back in time until it might actually bite me awkwardly in the ass.
With no disruption, Joel is able to leverage his Seismic Assault to killing my creatures, while my job is to keep up the aggressive push. Key mistake number two was in not playing a second Spectral Procession for a turn, even though I would have been able to a) attack with Mutavault, b) play Spectral Procession, and c) keep up one mana for my Path to Exile in case of Maelstrom Pulse and/or the combo appearing on the board, all because I somehow tricked myself into worrying about Volcanic Fallout and/or Wrath of God and having no follow-up pressure afterwards, and not realizing it was far more likely that Primal Command or Captured Sunlight would change the race away from ‘he is dead next turn’, and I give him at least one extra turn because of that. I finally shake off whatever fear of overextending I had and realized I needed to do that if I wanted to take advantage of the fact that his first three Cascades were all for Seismic Assaults and not for Pulses that could have bought him enough time to use his combo, his fourth Cascade is for a Pulse that he points at a token, and as we’ve known from the first moment, I have the Path to Exile to make sure I still have lethal damage next turn.
Worth noting: his life total was at one point 2, when my misplay of my first land pushed playing Mutavault back one turn further in time, and his life total was at a later point 3, when my inexplicable caution pushed playing a second Spectral Procession entirely too far back in time. Two critical and inexcusable mistakes not caught by the online coverage, and which I am even luckier than I had to be because I escaped this match with a win anyway. While I realized the mistakes I made as I was making them, I didn’t realize the mistake was being made as I made my plans, or in the first case failed to revise my plan thanks to the addition of new information. Two mistakes versus a presumed zero mistakes from my opponent makes me lucky indeed to have won this match, as the matchup is especially reliant on my drawing sideboard cards or him stumbling with too many lands coming into play tapped, but I’ll take my lumps for them and hopefully learn from the endeavor.
(This is where GerryT would probably hold me obligated to make a Todd Anderson joke. Thankfully I try to keep out of other peoples’ feuds, and apparently even out of my own as the apparent case of my feud with AJ Sacher is concerned.)
6-0 Matches, 7-0 record. 11-3 in games.
Round 8 – Constantine Vigderman, R/B
I win the die roll and start deploying Figure of Destiny followed by Knight of Meadowgrain which is followed by a second Knight of Meadowgrain, while he leads with a Goblin Outlander that is destined to make my next few turns a holy hell. I’m trying to figure out what I’ll need to do to work around an Outlander when I draw a second Zealous Persecution, proving me wrong in my belief that I cannot actually kill a Goblin Outlander and leading to a massive shift in position as I free the board of pro-White blockers and start to swing. The fight becomes prolonged but clearly in my favor after that, with my two Knights bloating me up to 33 against the Red deck while his board position whittles away and his life totals fall to four, and then to zero and beyond.
Sideboarding: -3 Cloudgoat Ranger, -3 Ajani Goldmane, -2 Oblivion Ring, +1 Path to Exile, +4 Reveillark, +3 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender
While there is nothing wrong with Cloudgoat Ranger in this matchup, neither is there anything especially right, as the tokens are still vulnerable to either Fallout or Infest depending on which he was relying on, and while we’re at it he also opens me up to a potential killing blow at the hand of Chaotic Backlash, so I sided it out for the more reactive but still-resilient Reveillark. For the second game, Constantine mulligans on the play and starts with a decent offensive, attacking with Boggart Ram-Gang according to my notes. He is able to stem the bleeding initially, and I aim to not over-extend into a mass removal spell if I don’t have to overcommit to the board, but if I want to win the race it is clear I’ll have to be more aggressive and just commit more things to the table when him playing out more of his hand suggests he doesn’t have a sweeper coming anyway. Red decks are reasonably favorable matchups, which is one of the key tiebreakers I went with in choosing Kithkin over Faeries in the first place.
7-0 Matches, 8-0 record. 13-3 in games.
Round 9 – Michael Jacob, Five-Color Blood
I have every reason to suspect Jacobs is going to be playing the Chapin deck, and his start of an aggressive mulligan and a few Vivid lands backs that up very quickly. I start with Goldmeadow Stalwart into Knight of Meadowgrain followed by Spectral Procession, which is more-or-less the nut draw for this deck (though Wizened Cenn instead of Knight of Meadowgrain lets us open up the possibility of a turn 4 kill with either Persecution or Ajani, making that the actual nut draw). Michael plays one spell all game, a Boggart Ram-Gang, and then concedes in the face of the attackers when I have a Path to Exile that gets it out of the way.
Sideboarding: -2 Oblivion Ring, -3 Ajani Goldmane, -1 Zealous Persecution, +1 Path to Exile, +3 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender, +2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
Oblivion Ring is unfortunately a permanent that is easily bounced with Cryptic Command or killed with Maelstrom Pulse, either of which can be really bad for me at awkward times, while Ajani Goldmane is best suited attacking other White decks rather than non-White decks, against whom I favor Elspeth for her ability to create a threat on her own but more importantly to fling a man to the air for a turn or two to get the kill. Forge-Tenders come in against the obvious and inevitable series of Fallouts and Jund Charms, which are also highly relevant and much of the reason that Zealous Persecution is well worth keeping in: it can help you weather a sweeper, and can turn a creature combat in your favor, but while I still want to draw one I don’t want to have to leverage playing two effectively at full value.
For both the second and the third game, Michael draws the things he needs to in order to make his deck work against mine: Putrid Leeches, and in significant quantities. He plays a Leech on turn two in each game, and I believe he had two each game, which halted my early attackers and left us playing a game that goes long enough for him to punish me brutally with Cryptic Commands. Worse yet, for the third game he draws Kitchen Finks as well, allowing him to be more aggressive with his life being spent into the Leeches and sees him win the game at five life still when just a little bit less life would have let me pressure him in such a way that he couldn’t survive my attack and still be able to kill me on the back-swing, and he is at least one life too high for me to dictate his blocks by making the right attack.
7-1 Matches, 8-1 record. 14-5 in games.
8-1 at a Grand Prix is far and away the best result I’ve had at one of these, and one I am quite proud of: I played exceptionally well (except, well, for the few occasions when I didn’t) and saw an exceptional result to follow it. I’ve been trying to train myself to be process-oriented instead of results-oriented, that playing well is the goal to reach for instead of a specific record that will show me I have accomplished my goal of ‘playing well,’ and working for the past month to learn how to squeeze more out of this beatdown deck than most people seem to manage, largely because my testing partner Josh McGhee is as unto a god with Kithkin in his hands, and my goal was to learn to see the things he was seeing and emulate playing as he does on that higher level with the deck. An 8-1 start is an excellent springboard for either a Top 8 or a Top 16 finish, either of which would be an amazing boon to me as a player trying to jump from PTQ player to occasional PT attendee… and a good showing on the second day, either 3-3 or 4-2, would still bring with it money to pad my wallet and a ratings invite to Nationals, so there was plenty that could be seen to be within my reach for the second day.
Those who have gone to the coverage already know the score; I went 1-5 despite having what I would think of as far easier matchups the second day than I faced the first, where the only matchup I would consider truly favorable was against the Red deck… I played against a Cascade LD deck (and lost), a B/W Tokens deck (and lost), Boat Brew (… and lost…), B/W Tokens again (and lost), B/G Elves (ha ha, fooled you, THIS ONE I won!), and for round fifteen Faeries again. What was different?
I was different. Superman and Clark Kent may be the same person, but everyone knows that Superman is immune to bullets and Clark Kent is not, and for Day 2 I certainly had my glasses on. Remember those parts of the story where I told how little sleep I got? This was unfortunately endemic, and the biggest lesson you could say I learned on the weekend as a whole is that if I want to be serious about doing this, I need to understand the impact of jetlag upon my ability to play well, and not just simply assume that by flying out early on Friday and staying up till midnight in the time zone I was in that I would suddenly be acclimated to the change in time-zones. Sleeping has been tetchy for me for a while now, and I assumed that this would be fine because my body was already accustomed to staying up until 11pm or later on the Left Coast, and I was indeed quite able to fall asleep around midnight each night… or 1am, depending on how late things took of an evening, let’s be honest. The problem though came from the fact that my brain knew it had a tournament to go to, and that I had to be up and at the site for Day 2 by 8:30… but not what time zone it was in. Day 2 was effectively shot for me after the third day in a row of five or fewer hours of sleep on top of all the stresses and rigors of the trip and the events I was pushing myself through, and by Sunday my body wasn’t able to work nearly the same way it had been the previous days, and unfortunately my brain is a part of my body that is not itself immune to such rules as ‘needing sleep’ or ‘getting tired.’
And that, unfortunately, is how my story ends. I stayed in through all six rounds of Day 2 in the vague hope that a 9-5 record might still pass Go and collect $200, though I found out after I failed to even win a second match on the day that it mostly didn’t for anyone so I could have safely dropped a few rounds earlier and maybe kept some of the ratings-points goodies I had accrued for myself on the first day. I spent the remainder of the day watching various people draft and play in the PTQ, too dejected to really feel like trying to pick myself up and join them in the gaming festivities, but also too aware of the fact of why I failed to do well on Sunday to really take my failures there too seriously against myself. As far as I am concerned, I played excellently and showed that maybe just maybe this is something I can do if I try… and I learned a lesson I knew intellectually but hadn’t actually felt viscerally enough to let it sink in, which is that planning for these events and having enough time to get over jetlag and get in synch with the local time zone is a necessary part of the planning. I didn’t do enough planning for this event and I didn’t take more than one day off from work, when the extra night spent in the Seattle/Tacoma area might have been all the difference between succeeding on Day 2 and crashing like I did.
One thing worth noting is that I still think the Kithkin deck is as awesome as I did before, in the hands of someone who has truly put in the work of learning how to play it well and get the most out of it as you can. I charge the losses on Day 2 not against my deck but against my person, and not even in the “ha ha, Sean McKeown is terrible at Magic!” sort of way but in the “yeah, you can see that happen if you make a mess of planning for the event” sort of way. I didn’t lucksack my way into ninth place out of 1127 going into Day 2, even if (let’s be fair) at least some elements of luck were on my side: I played first in five of the eight matches I played on Day 1, and only mulliganed three times in nineteen games, plus I won my third game in Round 7 against Cascade Swans in the hands of an excellent player despite two critical misplays that each would have ended the game far more quickly if I hadn’t made those mistakes. I won’t say luck wasn’t involved overall, though whether I won the die roll or played first in a game only seemed to truly matter in one of my matches on Day 1, where I got my Faeries opponent two times out of three largely on the basis of having gotten to play first and the tempo swing that provided to my aggressive push.
Mistakes were made, but they didn’t have much to do with the cards I chose to play or the games I was playing them in, but instead were in the grander scheme of things in making my plans for the event: I made a plan that was going to be excessively taxing physically, and then failed to perform adequately when my body finally couldn’t stand up to the level of stress I was putting it under on the third day of my adventures at Grand Prix: Seattle. I’m still glad I went… and I look to the future now with that lesson learned and greater confidence in the fact that if I put in the work to get me there, I can do respectably well for myself at these events in the future. I’ll still laugh any time someone puts the words “Pro Player” and “Sean McKeown” in the same sentence (… I don’t know how they do, but every once in a while I hear it at a tournament…) but the reality is I’m stepping up my game and got a serious lesson about how to do well at these events out of the deal. Instead of focusing on the result of ‘having a good finish,’ I look at the process: I did well, but I didn’t do perfectly, and the things I didn’t do perfectly I learned a lot about, enough to make the difference in the future. And who knows, maybe someday soon I won’t have to say it with words, I’ll say it with cards…