Yet another tournament, yet another terrible performance (i.e. not first place), but yet another good time was had. Going in, I had high enough hopes, but my head wasn’t really in it, which I’ll discuss at a later time. I was consistently winning on Magic Online with all versions of Ascension, and finally managed to convince LSV to play the deck.
The night before Nationals, we went off to a secluded corner to finish our lists and discuss sideboarding plans. Still, that didn’t stop a few “looky loos” from wandering by, trying to scope out what we were playing. Pretty scummy, if you ask me, but hey. They gotta do what they gotta do to win.
A while back, I suggested to some of my friends that we try Polymorph sideboards in various combo decks, and I basically got laughed away. A few people told me they had tried it and it had sucked, and I believed them, so Luis and I saw no reason to go down the German route.
Jund was the bad matchup, with Naya, Mythic, and RDW being somewhat favorable. UW Control and Valakut are great matchups, as are basically any of the other combo decks. It seemed like Jund was going to be under-represented, and therefore Pyromancer’s Ascension could end up being a great choice in the metagame.
Luis and I briefly messed around with a Spreading Seas and Sphinx of Jwar Isle package for Jund and Naya. Those took up so many slots that it ended up not being worth it. Spreading Seas doesn’t have much synergy with the rest of your deck, but as Mike Flores pointed out, it’s very easy to find multiple copies of Seas versus Jund. At that point, you’re playing like the Spread ‘Em deck.
The added gain in the bad matchup wasn’t enough to justify what it did to your good matchups, so we just tried to dodge Jund. The Sphinxes probably would have been solid, but overall, the list we registered wasn’t anything innovative, and I’ll post a better list later in the article anyway, so it’s irrelevant.
Pairings go up for round 1, and I’m fighting American superstar Ari Lax. We’ve played a few times in the past, which usually ends with him making a couple of big mistakes and then winning anyway. I ask Michael Jacob if he knows what Ari is playing, and he matter-of-factly says “Jund.”
Grr. I really would like to beat Ari one of these days, but I could already see the writing on the wall here. I could see my Nationals falling apart.
Then Ari played a turn 1 Terramorphic Expanse, which gave me some hope. Maybe he had those crappy Plated Geopedes in his list. I could beat him then, right?
When Ari played a second turn Valakut, I knew the streak had ended! I was going to win. Valakut is an incredibly easy matchup if you have the right cards in your sideboard. Post board, they have things like Ricochet Trap, Summoning Trap, and Back to Nature, so Dispel becomes really good even though they don’t have many targets game 1. Don’t even get me started on how good it feels to Dispel a Harrow.
Ari didn’t stand a chance.
Second round was against another ringer: Josh Ravitz. We have a similar past, except in this case, I’m the Ari. Turns out this is the weekend where all of that changes, because Josh beat the crap out of me.
Game 1 I mulliganed into a hand of Mana Leaks and Foresees on the draw. He played turn 2 Knight of the Reliquary, turns 3 and 4 Bloodbraid, and I wasn’t even close to putting up a fight.
In the second game I had on lockdown except for his two Vengevines, but he had no board, no hand, and I had a Cunning Sparkmage (mostly for Telemin Performance, but also good versus the Noble Hierarch decks) and some removal in hand.
He drew and instinctively played a Knight, which I killed. Two turns, later I was being attacked for eight haste damage. I drew another blank, and conceded.
Naya isn’t the worst matchup in the universe, but being on the draw hurts a lot. Post-board I should be solid, as is evident by the second game, where I was ahead the entire time but I couldn’t find a Foresee or Jace’s Ingenuity.
My round 3 opponent led with Savage Lands, which I obviously was not happy about. He had a whole bunch of Nest Invaders and Birds of Paradise instead of threats, so I was able to squeak out the first game. For the second and third games, I made a few costly mistakes. In game 3, I had four land, an Ascension with a counter, and my hand was Time Warp, Jace’s Ingenuity, and Preordain with one already in the graveyard. He had some lands.
I cast Preordain, fully charged the Ascension, seeing another Time Warp and a land. If I get another turn, he’s dead for sure. If he has a Maelstrom Pulse, I get a few turns of reprieve and draw some cards. If he had Thought Hemorrhage (of which he sided in plenty), he had to name the right card, and with active Ascension I could still easily burn him out.
The problem was Blightning. What do I keep on top, what do I hold, what do I discard if he has Blightning? The answer to that was probably keep a land on top and discard the two Time Warps. However, that makes it really bad if he has Hemorrhage instead, since then I need to draw a land, but I didn’t think about that.
What I probably should have done was put the Time Warp on the bottom and draw the land. That way, if he Blightnings me, I can get way ahead if I draw a land or any cantrip, and if he doesn’t have it, he probably loses.
In reality, I kept the land on top and he Thought Hemorrhaged me for my remaining Ascensions. I drew a Foresee and drew a bunch of cards, but he Pulsed my Ascension. At this point I’m basically dead, but I got him down to three before he killed me with Raging Ravine. If I were a little luckier I would have still won that game, but that doesn’t excuse what ended up being poor play.
In the fourth round against Mythic, I got a nice three-for-one on turn two with my maindeck Pyroclasm. I played one maindeck in the last few iterations of the deck because I like having my draw steps be live. If they explode in the first few turns, you need to draw a million Burst Lightnings in a row to kill all of their guys, but in my case, I just need to find my one Clasm to get the job done.
Mythic is a pretty easy matchup, so I finished the first Standard portion 2-2.
My draft pod contained Dave Williams, Sam Black, and some people I didn’t recognize, with D-Wil on my right. I first picked an Aether Adept but quickly abandoned it for Green. While I don’t like Green in this format, I knew that almost no one else did too. With Dave feeding me, most likely while in Blue himself, it was fairly easy to abandon my first pick. With the first pack winding down, I noticed that White was the other underdrafted color. I knew exactly where I wanted to be.
I wanted to be a highly aggressive Inspired Charge WG deck, but that just didn’t work out the way I wanted. Angelic Arbiter was my first pick pack 2, and then I got another fourth pick, followed by a very strange sixth pick Lightning Bolt. Within a few picks, I had to morph into a mediocre three-color control deck.
I had to play some mediocre cards like Silvercoat Lion and Palace Guard, but overall, my card quality was good. What I really worry about in this format is how good my midgame draw steps are going to be. The game often stalls out, or you just run out of gas and you need to turn to the top of your deck for help. When all that’s forthcoming are Grizzly Bears, you probably aren’t going to win. Adam Chambers used to play Sea Snidds over Grey Ogres or Grizzly Bears because it made his late game a lot better, and that theory applies best to Core Sets than to anything else.
Sure, there are ways to draft the all Infantry Veteran/Grizzly Bear/Inspired Charge deck and crush with it, but that takes a lot of work. In the average deck, those cards aren’t going to accomplish much, and you’ll feel like you just skipped a draw step when you peel them on turn 12.
Anyway, my deck ended up pretty nice, but I lost to two really good Blue decks. There was basically nothing I could do. At 3-4, I decided to drop from Nationals and grind win-a-boxes the next day. I could PTQ, but didn’t feel like it, since who knows if I’ll even go to the Pro Tour next year.
That night, I checked the Nationals coverage and saw Sebastian Thaler’s Polymorph sideboard in his Ascension deck. A while back, I asked a few friends if they thought some Polymorph sideboard plans in various decks would be good, and some said they tried it and thought it sucked. After splitting two eight-mans, I have to say they were wrong.
Polymorph gives you an actual shot against Jund and makes everyone’s sideboarding a nightmare. Going forward, I think this will become the industry standard, so congrats to the Germans.
This is what I would play:
Lands (23)
Spells (37)
- 4 Lightning Bolt
- 3 Time Warp
- 2 Pyroclasm
- 4 Mana Leak
- 3 Foresee
- 4 Ponder
- 2 Into the Roil
- 4 Pyromancer Ascension
- 4 See Beyond
- 1 Spawning Breath
- 4 Preordain
- 2 Call to Mind
Sideboard
Burst Lightning isn’t much better than Pyroclasm or Spawning Breath, so you can definitely cut those in favor of more high impact cards. I added a land to compensate for the awkwardness of the Khalni Gardens.
I also changed the sideboard a little. Progenitus is useful against decks with Oblivion Ring and Jace, the Mind Sculptor, but the Ascension plan (or both) is typically better against those decks anyway. The counterspells are incredible in their respective matchups, so the more of those you can fit in your sideboard, the better.
My eight-mans with Ascension went well. I split the first rather than play the mirror, even though I happen to like the mirror a lot. Then I split the second against Naya, which is a close matchup. In the third eight-man, I was playing the same Naya player I split with, and made a huge mistake in game 1. I was at eight life and had six land, an Ascension with one counter, with a Lightning Bolt, and card drawing spell in my hand.
He attacked with his Bloodbraid Elf, and I instinctively Bolted it. I knew that I was unlikely to kill him on my next turn and wanted to preserve my life total in case he played some dudes and then a Vengevine on his next turn.
Post combat, he played his sixth land and slammed down a Realm Razer. I’m not sure if I should have played around his one-of Armageddon or him just having more dudes, but I lost that game, won game 2, and then lost game 3. I kept Preordain, See Beyond, and lands, and by turn 7 I had lands and an Emrakul in my hand.
Pretty awkward.
The only other deck I considered playing for Nationals was my former roommate, John Penick, Wooly Thoctar Naya deck. Thoctar is nearly unkillable in this format, and makes your deck more consistent. When you’re trying to ramp from one to three with Birds and Hierarchs, you want to make sure you have enough turn 3 plays to make ramping worth it in the first place.
To help out the mana, he added Ancient Ziggurats. While this takes away your ability to use things like Eldrazi Monument or Ajani Vengeant, he didn’t even really consider playing those in the first place. Monument is fine in creature matchups, and Ajani has its uses, but he wanted to be a slick beatdown machine with Fauna Shamans for both utility and to create unbeatable board states with hordes of Vengevines.
The other innovation was the Lodestone Golems in the sideboard for UW, Valakut, and Ascension.
Penick and I were planning on retiring early on Saturday night. He had to drive home the next day, and I had a Team Sealed event to play. I was very excited, and I haven’t played three-man Team Sealed in quite some time, and it is probably the best format ever. Team Rochester is certainly the most fun.
The prizes were poor, but it didn’t matter. It was a throwback to when Magic was great instead of simply bearable. To reflect this, I chose Brandon Scheel and John Pelcak as teammates. It’s like it was 2005 all over again!
At 1:30, John and I were both pretty sleepy, but I got a text from my roommate saying “donks incoming.” Craaaap. I knew how this would turn out. I saw Kibler tweeting about drunken karaoke shenanigans, and dealing with that aftermath wasn’t exactly something I was interested in.
Sure enough, half an hour later, a pack of drunken gamers including Brian Kibler, Sam Black, and Patrick Chapin stumbled into my apartment. While the times were good, Penick was miserable. He attempted to sleep on the couch and was even mildly successful, but we still didn’t end up getting any real sleep until 5am.
We started 4-0, but lost to Adam Boyd team. In the next round, we were paired against Chris Lachmann, ringer Donnie Peck, and Calosso Fuentes. We were basically all friends and wanted to help each other out, so we tried to figure out if drawing was an option. The first place team drew with the fourth place team, while Lachmann’s team was in second, and we were in third.
If we IDed, the top 4 would consist of the first place team, the winner of the teams in fifth and sixth, and then two of the teams that IDed, while one of the teams would end up in fifth. We started playing, and I was down a game, Scheel won his match, and Pelcak was in game 3, but probably winning.
The last time Scheel unintentionally drew, he ended up in ninth, so he wanted to defer to me on this one, and I told him that while we weren’t a lock, it looked okay for us. We all wanted to help each other, so we drew, and then our team ended up in fifth.
Heartbreaker. All we wanted to do was Rochester draft!
I lined up a 4v4 draft, but Scheel had to sell some cards before the dealers closed up shop, so we waited for a while. BDM walked into the hall and asked if anyone wanted to Roch, so I abandoned my other draft, and we picked up Scott Bielick as our third.
We got crushed, but it was still awesome. BDM, Conley, and AJ went on to do another draft or two in the hotel lobby, and now are trying to organize something a little more concrete for Pro Tour: Amsterdam.
After some drama in the lobby, almost everyone cleared out, and I retired home for the evening. The Hollands’ flight didn’t leave until 7pm the next day, so I acted as “tour guide” for the Mall of America for them and Tim Landale.
Since I live in Minneapolis, people thought that they could go to me for information, but I was completely useless the entire weekend. This came as a shock to most people, but not to me. I knew exactly that the extent of my knowledge is how to get from point A to point B, and two places to order pizza. The stuff in between is a complete unknown to me.
When I picked up the Hollands from the airport, I had no idea where the nearest restaurant was. Even though I’ve been to the Mall of America about a hundred times (and even used to play FNM there), I could barely navigate us to the food court.
The thing is, I rarely leave the comfort of my apartment. I may be worldly in the sense that I’ve traveled all over the globe, but you ask me anything about the cultures or the monuments, and I’ll probably just give you a blank stare. It’s a wonder I can even dress myself in the morning; how am I supposed to know how long the light rail has been in my city?
Next week: The StarCityGames.com Minneapolis Open! Back to back events in my city? Don’t mind if I do.
GerryT