In which our hero continues his faltering journey around the Pro Circuit. Battles are won and lost, but mainly lost. Watch as the bright light of a Sunday berth is shone on our hero, then cruelly blinked off as he leaps.
So my first forays into the professional Magic scene were not exactly successful, or even professional (the definition of professional is that you need to be at least making some money doing it). However, when the World Championships in 2000 came round, another opportunity presented itself. I wasn’t qualified (I hadn’t even got a high enough ranking for the Euros in Paris that year either), but Pete Norris had bumped into Wizards employee Vicky Korstanje when he was travelling the GP circuit with Tony Dobson and Scott Wills. It turned out they were always in need of extra coverage writers, and so Pete and I hopped across to Brussels and volunteered our services.
It was another bad tournament for the British. Scott Wills started on a tear and finished the first day as the World Standard Champion in first place. Unfortunately, as would become so predictable for English players, he went 0-6 in the draft (an oddity considering Scott has always been known as a Limited specialist) and didn’t win another match until the eighteenth round.
I found the coverage duties to be good fun, even if the style of my articles was a little… different back then. I got to cover the semi-final match between Jon Finkel and Benedikt Klauser (and was even forced into the zebra stripes, just to look official). The one thing I remember was how hot it got under the lights, and wondering how on earth players could keep their cool. I felt like I was melting.
As we all know, Finkel defeated player of the year Bob Maher in the final. But for me the most important thing was getting to watch Zvi Mowshowitz play a Blue deck in the Block Constructed portion of the tournament. The format was Masques block, and on paper the Troubled Waters deck couldn’t possibly work. It had Rising Waters along with Chimeric Idol and Troublesome Spirit. Talk about negative synergies. Except the deck worked. Actually it did more than work – it smashed face. That’s one in the gut for all of you out there who criticise decklists without actually trying the decks out.
Armed with the tech, I went back to England and battered a 100 player PTQ. I was back on the tour again.
Before then there were more GPs to travel to. By now I was doing coverage part-time as soon as I dropped from the tournament. It paid a display box a day, and meant that even if the tournament went horribly wrong I’d still come out with something.
And the GP’s kept going horribly wrong, but this was mainly because I was trying to fight at 500-player Sealed Deck events with one bye at best. Under those situations you need to be phenomenally lucky to make Day 2. The general rule was you’d lose one round to a broken deck and another to double screw / flood, and then miss out on tiebreakers. That always used to wind me up. There was nothing worse than seeing some pro sail past you into Day 2 with a 2-2 record while you’d had to slog it out for 5-2 only to end up sitting on the sidelines after finishing 76th or something. So damn unfair.
I missed out with the dreaded 5-2 at Porto, but then showed a fundamental lack of knowledge about the Invasion Sealed format by bombing out of both Manchester and Helsinki. They were Limited tournaments after all.
Thankfully the format switched back to Extended for GP: Florence. People were trying to beat Trix (Necro-Donate) and not really succeeding. I was happy just to take the best deck and beat all the people who thought they beat it. Day 1 was fantastic for me as I didn’t lose until the very last round when Bram Snepvanger’s total anti-Trix deck drew two ways (it needed to be two, as I had Force of Will) to stop me from going off two turns after I’d Duressed him.
In contrast, Day 2 went badly wrong. I lost to Justin Gary after Consulting away all my Donates (No Mike Long psyche tricks for me, although I did try hard to convince him I had a fourth Donate somewhere) and then to a totally bizarre play when Benedikt Klauser randomly Force of Willed a Mox, which in turn randomly screwed me out of Blue mana. I won the last two rounds, but it wasn’t enough as I finished out of the money in 36th place. Klauser went on to win the GP. The GP also marked only the second instance of Kai losing in a Top 8 after our final in Birmingham. (Bram took him out, and then went onto become the first person to beat Kai on a Sunday after dumping him out in PT: Nice.)
No money, but at least I’d made Day 2. There was some hope amongst all the scrubouts.
Pro Tour: Chicago arrived, and with it a rare foray into Standard. Standard is rarely used in high-level tournaments outside of the World Championships. I made the cardinal sin of changing decks at the last minute. The Palace crowd was by now part of an international super-team and couldn’t divulge any tech (although Ben Ronaldson would sneak me the odd bone from time to time). I ended up working with a local player, Mike Thornton, on his first Pro Tour. He was taking a Green monster deck that may have been close to Fires, I can’t remember exactly. Green monsters were fairly scary, especially as the powerhouse Blastoderm now got to attack for the full four times thanks to Fires of Yavimaya. I was supposed to playing a Skies variant, but during the flight I realised I’d spent so much time working on Mike’s deck I knew more about how that played and boarded than my own deck.
At first, the switch seemed to be perfect. For the first time ever outside of Worlds I managed to win the first round of a Pro Tour (I’m very bad during the early rounds). I even won the second, but then reality intruded and I realised the deck wasn’t that good. I wound up playing a very silly match against Alan Comer where at one point I had three Blastoderms on the table, and not a single one of them managed to deal him damage. We were laughing so much that Tom Guevin shouted at us from a few tables up, “Some of us are trying to play Professional Magic here!”
This only caused us to laugh even louder.
But that’s enough talk about the disasters. When I finally made Day 2 of a PT, I managed to do it in style. This was PT: Tokyo in 2001, and I still think that maybe I should have won it.
Tokyo was Invasion Block Constructed, and we’d managed to assemble a team of British players that were outside of the international Palace contingent. Tony Dobson was no longer affiliated – the same for Ellis Romero and Scott Wills. Pete Norris’s practise on the GP circuit had paid off, while I qualified through a loophole known as frozen rating. The Extended and Standard ratings were combined into one Constructed rating, but in the interests of fairness they’d frozen the Extended ratings for a certain period of time. Mine just happened to be high enough to sneak me in.
We put a lot of work into the format. The obvious expected deck was a control deck based around Yawgmoth’s Agenda. I took the already strong Black/Red discard deck available at the time and pushed the power level even further with Blue for Probes and Recoil. Pretty much every card in the deck was based around card advantage, but it was also very aggressive at the same time. It butchered control decks based around Yawgmoth’s Agenda in practice (and I’m sure at some point I heard Scott Wills throw his computer across the room while we were testing on Apprentice one evening. Sure, he was on the other side of the country, but you get a nose for these things and a stream of random letters followed by “Swills has disconnected” is usually a dead giveaway).
In one day I managed to banish all my previous Pro Tour nightmares by running the tables to a perfect 7-0 record. I had done it. Not only had I made my first Pro Tour Day 2, but I’d done it in style.
Unfortunately, the nightmares didn’t stay away for very long.
I lost the first round of Day 2 in a close fought match against Ryan Fuller, but then bounced back with wins over Antonino De Rosa and eventual winner Zvi Mowshowitz. At this point I was 9-1. I was already guaranteed money, but better than that I only needed one more win from the next three rounds and I’d be able to draw into Top 8.
One win from three. How hard could that be?
It seems deceptively simple, but don’t ever make the mistake of thinking it is.
In round 11 I went 1-0 up against Andre Delere. He was playing a similar Red/Green aggro deck to Fuller, and game 2 had not gone well for him as color issues had given him a slow start. I had a Flametongue Kavu, Terminate, and Probe in hand, and was facing down a Raging Kavu. Delere had two cards in hand. My game plan was simple. The Green/Red deck was dangerous and had a lot of finishers like Ghitu Fire. I needed to not only be able to kill all his creatures but also have a fast clock to finish him off once I put him into topdeck mode. For that I needed to let the Flametongue kill something and also have it live long enough to beat my opponent to death. So for me the optimal play was to strip the two remaining cards out of his hand with Probe and then be able to cast both the Flametongue and Terminate on the following turn.
Delere had no cards in hand, but it was okay as the top card of his library was a Skizzik and he sent it in for an extra five points of damage.
Taking eight was pretty bad, but not irretrievable. He still had no cards in hand. I could shoot the Skizzik with the Flametongue, Terminate the Raging Kavu and still have the Flametongue for my fast clock.
Delere had no cards in hand, but it was okay as the top card of his library was a Skizzik. WTF? Another one. Now this was bad as it meant I had to commit the Flametongue to blocking. I hadn’t drawn anything exciting off the Probe, so now we were in a top deck war and I was on considerably less life.
A couple of turns later I found Crosis, the Purger. Now that was just what the doctor ordered. Crosis had been damn good for me on the first day, and now he was going to put me into the top…
Wait, what was he tapping mana for? He’s got one card in hand, but that’s probably a land or a burn…
Mages Contest.
Mages Contest!!!
How damn good had Delere’s draws been? Two Skizziks, and now a Mages Contest to stop my dragon coming into play! I couldn’t believe it, and was still stunned when he drew something else to finish me off a few turns later.
I was a win away from Top 8, and then my opponent top decks like a god. [Mr Jones? Mr Ruel would like a word… – Craig.]
In game 3 I fall victim to a horrible mana screw and lose.
I was a win away…
No matter, still got two lives left.
And then I get mana-screwed again. And then again. And this from a 26-land deck.
I’m shell-shocked at this point. I don’t remember much about the next match, as my deck goes into complete meltdown and David Williams practically gets a bye into Top 8. There isn’t anything left after that, and I lose to former World Champion Brian Seldon, falling out of the top 16 in the process.
Yes, on the one hand it was fantastic to make my first ever PT Top 32 and around $1000. If you’d offered me that before the tournament I’d have taken it, but on the other hand to be so close and then see it all ripped away. That hurts.
I still think of that game and that amazing sequence of topdecks from Andre Delere. It needed to be two Skizziks and it needed to be the Contest. In nineteen other alternate realities I’m in the Top 8, and maybe even winning the whole thing. In this reality I’m standing at a railway station with the rain pouring down wondering how it all went so horribly wrong.
Join me tomorrow, when things get even worse.
But don’t worry, I’ll try to make sure I come back with a smile on my face. Tennis-serving bunnies over a motorway always makes me laugh (although it is a pain having to pick the fur out of the racket strings afterwards).
Prof.