The Dragonmaster's Lair - GP Sydney, Frame by Frame

I love Australia. My first trip to the country was back in 2002, when Sydney played host to the World Championships. It’s like Australia is the coming together of so many of my favorite elements of all sorts of different countries. The weather is beautiful, the people are friendly, the food is excellent, and everyone speaks English! Throw in some adorable creatures – along with an incredible array of deadly ones – and what’s not to love?

I started considering the trip to the Grand Prix in Sydney after my finish at Pro Tour Amsterdam, since those points gave me a realistic shot at making Level 8 this season if I can put up a few more solid results. I was somewhat discouraged when I couldn’t find any reasonable tickets, with everything I found coming in several hundred dollars more than I really wanted to pay. When Aaron Nicastri contacted me on Facebook and told me he was opening up his apartment to gamers for the event, however, I felt like I couldn’t say no. The opportunity to hang out for the week with both fellow pros and local gamers alike seemed like too much fun to pass up. Sure, my ticket cost $1600, and I’d have to make the finals to actually recoup the cost of my trip, but it’s not every day you have a good excuse to visit kangaroo land. Play the game, see the world, as the saying goes.

I talked about my adventure getting to the event in
my article last week,
so I’ll spare you the airline blooper reel that was my trip. Suffice it to say that I left San Diego on Sunday afternoon and arrived in Sydney on Wednesday morning, and my luggage didn’t join me until Thursday night. Aaron’s apartment was already full of gamers when I arrived, with Martin Juza, Shuhei Nakamura, Kazuya Mitamura, LSV, and David Ochoa already there, with Paulo set to arrive the following day.

It was quite the array of Magic talent in one spot, and it should come as no surprise that we spent that vast majority of our time in the days leading up to the event drafting. We averaged three or four Scars drafts a day, with the occasional cube draft thrown in for good measure.

This was all done with the spectacular view of the Sydney skyline as a backdrop. Aaron’s apartment was pretty amazing, situated as it was right on Darling Harbor. More than once we got to watch fireworks displays over the harbor from his balcony, and we were in walking distance of a mall with an excellent food court, along with a supermarket and any number of bars. He and his roommates are professional poker players, which led to there being two full-sized poker tables in their living room, perfect for drafting and playing. His roommates also happened to be out of town for a major poker tournament in Melbourne that weekend, which meant that the place could comfortably house all seven of his international guests. Seven plus Aaron, of course, being the perfect number for a draft. Coincidence or brilliant plan? I’ll leave you to be the judge of that.

On the Friday before the Grand Prix, Ray Walkinshaw a.k.a. “blisterguy,” coverage writer extraordinaire, wanted the group of us to go to the zoo to get some pictures with local wildlife for the coverage. When it came time to go, Ray was running late, so we all obviously decided to draft while we waited for him. Once the draft finished, we took what we were told was a fifteen minute walk to the area where we had to pick up the ferry, which turned out to be quite a bit longer. By the time we arrived at the ferry, we were told the zoo was closing in the next few hours. We had to settle for taking pictures with the Harbor Bridge and Sydney Opera House as backdrops – rough life, isn’t it? Amusingly, we’d later learn that there was a ferry to the zoo that left from the harbor directly across from Aaron’s apartment. Way to know your way around your own city, guys!

After the opera house, we made our way to the tournament venue to register. One thing that was pretty remarkable about the venue was just how small it was. Having played in so many GPs lately that have had upwards of a thousand players (and nearly two thousand in the case of some), it was refreshing to play in an event that was a much more reasonable size. I love that competitive Magic is experiencing such a boom lately, but I don’t like playing in massive events that drag on for hours. Grand Prix Portland was the worst example of this, with Day 1 not finishing until nearly midnight. Hell, I was done with Day 1 of GP Sydney not long after I’d just starting playing in Portland! I hope something can be done to improve the experience of massive Grand Prix, but until then I’m just going to bask in how sweet it was to play in a 434 player GP. They even had a barbeque during registration on Friday night. A foil Jitte plus a sausage for signing up!

I had high hopes going into the event. I’d been having a great deal of success in our practice drafts and felt like I understood the format extremely well. A new format that I felt confident in combined with a small field that was unlikely to have much experience with the set seemed like the perfect storm for success. I’ve typically done well in new Limited formats – three of my Limited GP Top 8s were among the first events featuring a new set. But, as always, I had to survive the Sealed Deck portion before I’d get a chance to draft.

Scars Sealed is the hardest Sealed Deck format that I can remember. In most Sealed formats, deckbuilding is usually pretty straightforward. You can eliminate entire colors on the basis of having too few creatures or just too few cards, or not filling in your curve correctly, or whatever. Most Scars Sealed decks, on the other hand, have upwards of a dozen artifacts, so deckbuilding is a matter of identifying which colored cards work best with those artifacts and fill the roles you need to win. Because you can end up with so few colored spells, it’s often far easier to splash as well, despite the lack of traditional color fixing. It’s incredibly easy to misbuild your deck simply because there are so many possible options.

That being said, there are shortcuts to building decks for Scars Sealed. The first thing I do when I lay out my Sealed pool is look at what infect cards I have. If I don’t have the makings of a focused poison deck, I set those aside and pretty much eliminate them from consideration. Some infect cards will make the cut in non-poison decks, like Necropede or Skittles, three-strikes-and-you’re-dead Dragon, but generally speaking a Plague Stinger or Contagious Nim isn’t going to get there on its own. Of the dozen or so Sealed pools I’ve looked at so far, none of them have had what I’d consider playable infect builds, so be careful about being lured in by the allure of killing your opponent with poison.

Building my Sealed deck in Sydney followed this script to the letter – lay out infect cards, dismiss them, and then stare at the rest of my cards and try to figure how in the hell to make a deck out of this. My pool was solid but unspectacular, with enough artifacts to support a metalcraft strategy but nothing truly exciting to do with it. I was a bit light on removal, with only an Oxidda Scrapmelter, Galvanic Blast, and Turn to Slag in red along with an Arrest and Dispense Justice in white and an Acid Web Spider in green. I took the entire allotted time for deckbuilding before finally settling on an R/G deck that hoped to win the game with green fatties like a pair of Carapace Forgers, Molder Beast, and Engulfing Slagwurm, along with a Steel Hellkite as my biggest bomb. My theory was that in Sealed Deck, people will basically play all the artifact removal they have, but there isn’t much that deals with big non-artifact creatures, so my green fat should be able to eventually take over games.

I realized the folly of this plan after playing a half dozen or so games with my deck during my byes. My green fatty plan basically meant that I had to play like a control deck, and I just didn’t have enough removal to play that way. With only Oxidda Scrapmelter to kill artifacts, I kept losing game after game to opposing bombs like Mimic Vat. I wasn’t fast enough to win games before my opponents drew their bombs nor did I have the tools to control the game once they did. I decided to sideboard into a more aggressive R/W deck during the tournament, removing my green fatties for a pair of Auriok Sunchasers and my Arrest and Dispense Justice.

My first round was against a friendly fellow named Paul, who’s one of the owners of the Good Games gaming store chain around Australia. We played a fairly long and drawn out first game which I eventually won on the back of my fatties, but despite that, I still decided to stick with my sideboarding plan. Game 2, I got mana flooded, and he stuck an Argentum Armor which dispatched me handily.

In the third game, I had a strong start beating him down when he once again played Argentum Armor. This time I had Turn to Slag to answer it, but not until after he was able to attack and kill one of my creatures. I had more gas to follow up in the form of Steel Hellkite, but he had Kuldotha Phoenix along with Razor Hippogriff to return his Argentum Armor and gain six life. He had to double-block my Hellkite when it attacked, leaving him with only a Myr for creatures, and when he equipped it and attacked, I had Dispense Justice to leave him with only the equipment in play and six land on the board. I slammed down a Chimeric Mass for nine, threatening to kill him if he didn’t have an answer, but his next turn was perfect – Tumble Magnet plus Snapsail Glider. The combination held off my Mass and let him suit up with the Armor on the following turn, and the rest was academic.

I was disappointed to start the tournament with a loss, but I felt like my deck was solid and had somewhat underperformed in the match. I was confident things would turn around soon.

“Soon,” it seemed, was not the next round. My opponent was a local player who’d done some drafts at Aaron’s over the past week, so I wasn’t expecting him to be a pushover. I also wasn’t expecting him to play a turn 3 Koth in game 1 when I got stuck on two lands, but he did exactly that, and I died in short order.

I won game 2 rather handily despite his Koth and Hoard-Smelter Dragon, so we went to game 3. He chose to draw (as I had chosen in both previous games), and I kept a hand with Iron Myr, Oxidda Scrapmelter, and five lands. I proceeded to draw a total of two more spells for the rest of the game, while the only artifacts he played were two Pyrite Spellbombs, so I couldn’t even play my Scrapmelter without killing my own Iron Myr if he sacrificed them in response. By the time he played a third artifact, he had Indomitable Archangel in play. It would’ve been comical if it weren’t so frustrating.

So there I was at 0-2. I’d spent thousands of dollars and flown clear around the world only to find myself on the brink of elimination just like that. I took a deep breath, put on my headphones, went out to the parking lot, and looked at the sky. It was a beautiful sunny day, with huge billowing clouds spilling out across blue sky. I smiled. I was happy. Life was good.

I walked back inside and found my travel companions. Everyone else was X-1 or X-0. When I told them I was X-2, they looked on sympathetically.

“At least it’s only eight rounds today, so you only have to win three more,” consoled Blisterguy.

“No, I have to win twelve more,” was my reply, “I still plan on winning this tournament.”

I smiled. I meant it, too.

The next few rounds that day blur together. I remember losing game 1 of my next match when I had nine poison counters, and a trio of Precursor Golems attacked me for thirty thanks to Untamed Might. I hung on by the skin of my teeth in the third game of that match when that same Precursor Golem attacked with his pals, and I blocked to force the Untamed Might that put me to four, then ripped the land for Turn to Slag the next turn to clear the board and finally claw back to win. I remember losing game 1 of my final round match to Volition Reins on my Steel Hellkite that came out of nowhere from an opponent who’d already played black, white, and green spells, and only had a single Island in play for most of the game, but I battled back to take the next two just before time expired. I remember constantly having my back to the wall the entire time, fighting just to stay alive.

But every round I’d stop by the coverage station to see Ray.

“Eleven more.”

“Ten more.”

“Nine more.”

Many years ago, at a tournament just after the PT Chicago where I finished third, I had a long conversation with Mike Long, of all people, who I’m reminded of as I write this. Mike told me that he had a theory about the types of players who experience success in Magic. He felt like there were two major types – what he called “Concentration-based players” and “Confidence-based players.” He argued that some players, like Ben Rubin or Kamiel Cornelissen or Dave Humphreys, are successful because they analyze every possibility in a game and work out what to do from there. Those are “Concentration-based players.”

“Confidence-based players,” on the other hand, were guys like him and me. While the other kind of players breaks down every situation, we play by feel. And because our decisions come from our gut, we have to feel like we can win every game we play. Our hearts have to be in it. We have to want to win – we have to be confident that we can win – or we won’t be able to find the winning play inside us.

Now I’m not telling you to go out there and subscribe to Mike’s newsletter (I assure you, he has at least one), but I’m just saying that there’s a lot to be said for staying in the right frame of mind. I know my best performances come when I feel the best – when I am at my most confident, and my worst performances come when my heart isn’t in the game. Find what puts you in a winning mindset, and do what you can to stay there.

The next morning was what I was waiting for – time to draft! My table had a few familiar faces, including Gene Brumby and Scott Richards from New Zealand, but thankfully had none of my traveling and testing partners. My general Draft strategy in the format, as I explained in my last article, is to try to stay as open as possible, often taking cards that don’t commit me to a color over potentially stronger cards in other colors to retain flexibility. I’ll often avoid picking up even a second color well into pack 2 if I’m drafting metalcraft, which lets me pick up whatever bombs I might open or get passed in later packs.

I stuck to my strategy in the first draft, first-picking a Myr out of a relatively deep pack. I realized my fellow drafters didn’t have quite the same appreciation for the little mana makers that I did when I got passed more Myr second, third, and fourth, but I scooped them up anyway. A pair of Sky-Eel Schools came around late and went into my stack, along with a Tumble Magnet and a Neurok Replica. When my pack came back around, it still had the Cystbearer I’d opened, and I contemplated just abandoning everything I’d drafted so far and making the switch to poison since no one else at the table seemed to want it. I decided against it, and a pack or so later was seriously wishing I had, since every poison card seemed to be completely ignored by the entire table.

I ended up with a solid U/B pseudo-metalcraft deck, featuring two Grasps of Darkness, Mimic Vat, Contagion Clasp, and a pair of the remarkably underrated Bleak Coven Vampires. I had a decided hole in my curve at four and could have used a few Chrome Steeds or Rusted Relics. That said, it was a good deck, and I remained confident.

I won my first round handily, which gave me time to scout the rest of my table. Scott Richards had gotten a bye, and I watched Gene Brumby lose to a Furnace Celebration deck with seemingly endless Spellbombs recurred by Salvage Scouts. Sure enough, I played against the Furnace Celebration deck the following round, and lost the first game to a second turn Kuldotha Rebirth sacrificing a Spellbomb and drawing a card and followed up by an endless stream of Shatter effects and recurring Panic Spellbombs to make blocking difficult.

I actually sideboarded in a Blistergrub despite my opponent not playing black simply because I wanted non-artifact creatures to block against his Rebirths, and I managed to win the next game decisively.

The third game came down to an interesting situation in which I had a Contagion Clasp, Tumble Magnet, Necrogen Scudder, and Bleak Coven Vampires against his Kuldotha Phoenix and Ratchet Bomb. When he put the third counter on his Ratchet Bomb, I used my Contagion Clasp to proliferate it up to four, saving my Magnet and Scudder and essentially making the Bomb useless to him.

The last round of the draft is against Scott Richards, and we were featured. The first game was incredibly long and complex, as I had to outmaneuver his Carnifex Demon plus Trigon of Corruption with Tumble Magnet and Contagion Clasp. Eventually I bounced his demon with Neurok Replica and put him on the back foot, and when I played a lethal Bleak Coven Vampires, he used Disperse on my Magnet instead of on my Myr or Contagion Clasp, which let me replay the Magnet with the land in my hand to keep his Demon tapped long enough for me to kill him. The second game was somewhat awkward, as I got ahead of myself in my head and threw away a Grasp of Darkness trying to kill his Carnifex Demon when he could just respond by removing a counter to make it bigger, but my hand was the nuts, and I killed the demon on my next attack with a second Grasp and him the turn after.

I was happy to have 3-0ed the draft, especially since I’d probably be kicking myself for not moving in on poison if I’d done poorly. Both LSV and I were still in position to make Top 8, while everyone else in our squad had taken a loss in the first draft.

“Six more.”

Alas, it wasn’t to be. My draft went well (it was
covered here
), but fortune just wasn’t on my
side in my first match of the pod (which is also
covered here
). In the first game, I was so many cards ahead and had a Sylvok Replica (not Vulshok, as the coverage says) in play and Riddlesmith digging to answers that I felt like it was almost impossible for me to lose, but then Isaac ripped Molder Beast and Untamed Might in consecutive turns to kill me. In the second game, I kept a hand with three spells and four lands, and pretty much just drew land for the rest of the game, while he killed my only relevant creature with Skinrender. Alas.

I won my next round, and then Aaron Nicastri conceded to me in the final round, since he couldn’t make Top 8 and didn’t need the PT points, leaving me in 11th place when the dust settled. Not a bad result when you start the event 0-2! Amusingly, I’ve now finished 11th in all of the tournaments I’ve ever played in Sydney – that’s where I ended up at Worlds in 2002, too. I sure would like to take a digit off of each of those results. Next time.

The end of the tournament was hardly the end of my Australian adventure, though. We made up for our tardiness on Friday by heading to the zoo on Monday, and it was more than worth the trip. And the journey to Australia in general, despite the fact that I didn’t win, was also more than worth it. I much prefer traveling for Magic now than when I used to play on the Pro Tour. Back when I was playing in college, traveling for Magic was essentially just a commute, but now – thanks to generous hosts like Aaron – I get a chance to really explore my destinations. I thought as a change of pace I’d share some of that exploration with you in picture form

Here’s a glimpse into the world down under: