Yesterday, I mentioned how competitive I was. A lot of people would never believe that. They see me playing cheap, rogue decks. They see me laugh while playing, sometimes even when I’m losing. How could this guy be competitive? He’s losing, and he’s having fun.
Trust me. I am. I want to win. I want to play my best. I get very upset over my stupid (i.e. thoughtless) mistakes. I get riled when my deck just punks out.
Don’t confuse “competitive” with “hyper-competitive,” though. I want to win on my terms. I want to win using the cards I have at hand, not buying a pre-proven deck. I won’t cheat, and I can’t stand those who do. I don’t throw my deck when I lose. I want to play well and honorably and win if I deserve to. If I don’t, then I don’t. I try to learn from my mistakes and move on.
For example, my first tourney experiences were in the Summer of 1999. If you didn’t play back then, you can’t know how bad it was. Let’s just put it this way. Imagine that the only two decks anyone played were Ravager-Affinity and Tooth and Nail because those were the only two that could win. In July and August of 1999, there were Yawgmoth’s Bargain and Replenish decks around here, and that was it. Two decks, just like Affinity and T&N, that didn’t care about what the opponent was doing as long as it could do its thing by turn 4 (and sometimes turn 3 or 2).
I hated it. A lot of other folks did, too, but I truly loathed it. This game – this game – that anyone could start to play for a small investment (pre-constructed decks were still only $9.99 then) was essentially not available tournament-wise to people couldn’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on cards. What kind of fun was that? For someone like me, who had yet to finish at or above .500 for a tourney, it was awful.
I wanted to prove that cheap decks could win. If I did well, along the way, I’d really upset people who had spent ten times more on their decks. (Okay, so, I’m a little bit evil.)
First, though, I’d have to beat Bargain and Replenish decks. How could I beat decks that essentially beat you with their graveyard? The answer was simple: destroy their graveyards.
Enter: Planar Void. Planar Void was an uncommon, it was a one-mana, first-turn answer to decks that used and abused their graveyards, and I had four of them. I also had four Thran Foundry. I had my eight cards to hose graveyards on the first turn. If the game went long, I had Carrion Beetles. Yes, really. The original Rag Dealer.
Of course, once I hated out my opponent’s ‘yard, I needed a way to win. In this case, Abyssal Specter did double duty along with some Ravenous Rats and a few other creatures that I can’t remember. There was also the obligatory creature destruction in Dark Banishing and Expunge along with a couple of Eradicates, which were excellent against Masticores. I don’t remember the rest of the deck except for the Spawning Pools.
I went 3-3 that day. A Sligh deck ate my lunch and then regurgitated it for me to see. A Draw-Go deck was sloooooow and painful. I don’t remember the third loss, though it was probably some mono-Green thing with Rancor and Albino Troll. I do remember that my three wins were against two Replenish decks and a Bargain deck. I beat each one 2-0. By the time I played the second Replenish deck in the last round, people were gathered around us to watch. I got out Planar Void on the first turn in each game. The onlookers couldn’t contain their laughter.
I couldn’t make the next couple of tournaments. When I finally came back three weeks later, no one was playing either Bargain or Replenish. Ziggy said that at least one of the guys had told him that I’d scared people off of playing the decks. Why bring them if it meant randomly losing to my crappy deck? “Good,” I thought. “Win with something else. Let people play the game.” (To this day, the only Masticores that I’ve ever owned are the two that Luanne bought me for an anniversary present three weeks ago. What a great woman. I only ever owned one Morphling despite the facts that Urza’s Block is when I started playing and I bought a couple of boxes of Saga. My track record on not getting the chase rares in packs of the first set of a block is legendary by now. People don’t even want to be around me when they open their packs for fear of getting stuck with three of whatever Red coin-flipping rare the set has.)
Flash forward a couple of months. In September, my sister got married. In October, my brother joined the Navy. In November, Mercadian Masques became legal for Constructed tourneys. Everyone but me had Rishadan Ports. I had bought two boxes of tournament packs (I like getting the extra lands), and I’d pulled zero Ports. No Briberies or Nether Spirits, either. I got three Corrupt Officials, though. Woo and hoo.
Again, the big-dollar card (Port) was causing problems. Then, I noticed that I had some Vine Dryads. “Hey,” I thought, “I can play that as an instant. Meaning I can play it at the end of my opponent’s turn.” Coupled with Rancor, that had to be A Good Thing.
It was good, but not great. The people who could afford Rishadan Ports also had Bribery and Treachery and other good expensive cards. I didn’t finish above .500 for a few months.
Then, came Spring of 2000 and with it Nemesis. I won my first ever prizes at a tournament. I came in second and won four packs. It was glorious. The deck I came up with was, someone later told me, a proto-Blue Skies deck. (No, I’m not going to try to take any credit for creating Blue Skies. For one thing, no one knew who I was back then, so no one was copying my “tech.” Second, once a pro turns his or her eye to it, Blue Skies kinda builds itself. I was, however, playing it before it ever hit the ‘net.) Nemesis gave us Daze, Cloudskate, and Seal of Removal to go along with Cloud Sprite, Rishadan Airship, and Counterspell. I added some other fliers and two copies of Quash with two more in the sideboard.
Quash was the day’s MVP. By this time, people had started playing Replenish and Bargain decks again. (Silly people.) Against those decks, I knew that I could simply sit on Quash and take their win conditions: Soul Feast for the Bargain decks; and Replenish for (duh) the Replenish decks. On the way to my second-place finish, I beat one of each. (Quash is also Some Good against Bribery, too. Not that they’d get anything huge from my deck.) Surprisingly, I was also able to beat a Rebel deck. Turns out Blue Skies can go very fast some times. Rebels might be able to call up a flier, but I’d just bounce it.
At about that time, I met four Magic-playing folks that I actually liked. (If you knew the tournament scene in Knoxville at the time, you’d know why that newsworthy.) Of the four, two have stopped playing Magic, and I don’t see much of them anymore. The other two are Karl and Stacey Allen, about whom you’ve read many times in From Right Field. (“Could there be more prepositions in that sentence?” asked Chandler.) Later that year, Karl would become Tennessee State Champ. Soon after, Stacey would win a Pro Tour Qualifier in North Carolina and go on to play at Pro Tour Chicago, the one with Kibler’s G/R/W Rith deck. (You can still read Michelle Bush’s interview with Stacey here. The part that tickles us even today is where Bush describes how Stacey says something “in her heavy Southern accent[.]” Stacey’s from Michigan. While she may have picked up a bit of a drawl from being down here for a few years, she doesn’t have a “heavy Southern accent[.]” Of course, Dr. Bush is from Boston. Truth is in the ear of the beholder, I guess.)
Karl and Stacey are wonderful people, and I truly feel blessed to call them friends. They’re fun and generous. They’re smart and enjoyable to be around. From a strictly Magic-al standpoint, they’ve been great teachers. Karl was the first person to ever tell me why a card was bad. Everyone else would just say “that card’s bad. Use
They’re also creative and don’t mind trying new things. (Stacey finished high enough at 2003 Regionals to win prizes on the back of her own Squirrel-Beast token Opposition deck.) This, of course, is great for me. The creative part of Magic is what truly intrigues me and keeps me coming back. I bounce ideas off of Karl; he sends better ideas back to me. I write about them and get famous. He gets to see his name in print. Case in point: Ants in the Pants.
I was finally ready to play in a big tournament. Karl and Stacey wanted to practice for 2001 Regionals. I offered to be a guinea pig. I also had an idea for a deck. How about Wave of Reckoning along with Spidersilk Armor? I had no Wrath of Gods. To me, Wave of Reckoning was a cheaper version. With the Armor out, none of my creatures would die to Wave of Reckoning. If I didn’t have the Armor out, well, it wouldn’t be any worse than Wrath of God, right? At the time, almost every creature that people were playing with – Flametongue Kavu, Rith, Dromar – had a power at least as great as its toughness. If I could pull it off, Wave would be a one-sided Wrath of God.
Karl came back with this idea: why not just forget the Spidersilk Armor, and use nothing but creatures with toughness greater than their power, ones that would survive Wave of Reckoning on their own? Then, we’d have four extra cards to play with. Karl came up with a deck that featured Birds of Paradise, Vine Trellis, Benalish Trapper, Saber Ants (our ultra-mega-secret tech against Flametongue Kavu), Ancient Spider, and, to top them all off, Blinding Angel. To add spice to the mix, we had Armadillo Cloak. If I was playing Green and White, I was using the Cloak. (An interesting note on the Cloak, Wave of Reckoning, and the Saber Ants: if the Ants are wearing the Cloak when the Wave hits, you gain four life and get four tokens. Plus, your Ants are probably free to swing, too.) Along the way, we realized that Ants in the Pants beat Fires deck handily, and no sideboarding was needed. Since Fires was The Deck to Beat at the time, this was surely A Very Good Thing.
I didn’t do well at 2001 Regionals. My sideboarding skills were (and still are) horrendous. The bright spot was that I didn’t lose to a Fires deck all day long (eleven rounds). At the time, Karl was doing some writing for a web site called 7Towers.net. I wanted to make sure that, if a deck like Ants in the Pants ever made it onto the tourney scene – and why wouldn’t it when it ripped Fires a new one – Karl got the credit. (I was so naïve.) So, I submitted an article to the defunct 7Towers.net.
They published it. People liked it. They asked me to do more.
It’s all 7Towers’ fault.
Tune in tomorrow – same web site, same column – when I get way, way too deep.
Chris Romeo
CBRomeo-at-Travelers-dot-com