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The Invacational *250th*

It’s time for a tournament report unlike any other. Join JDB as he travels what few remaining landscapes there are left for him to travel, and let him tell you about the time he took a crazy combo deck to an Invitational. And got obliterated.

By


Warning: this Invitational/vacation report may contain marauding camera crews, cowboys, $500 dinners, glass hotels, drunk soldiers, mulligan massacres,
sea lions, voodoo, and Magic.

I’ve had a ticket to every StarCityGames.com Invitational since

the second-ever Invi in June 2011

. I scored my first berth

by winning a Draft Open

and accumulated enough Open Points to play in the third-ever Invi that December.

I never made it.

Before I became a copywriter for StarCityGames.com, I was a rare coin expert for an auction house. Business was booming, which meant job security, which
was good. It was also an indicator of working more weekends than I had off, which was bad, especially since I was on salary and didn’t get comp-time.
Prep-work for the biggest auction of the year always happened around the time of the year-end Invitational, and I never could secure the time to go. That
much I accepted.

The timing never worked out for any other Invitationals either. There was always a chance I would be needed, and so I never received the days off I needed
to go. I maintained writer’s exemptions thanks to my columns for SCG, but they, like my points invitation from 2011, went unused.

By the fourth quarter of 2013, after seven years at the auction house, my mind and body were in a race to see which would break down first. I’ve always
been a bit of an odd duck at Magic tournaments, but re-reading my articles from the period, such as ” More Than I Deserved,” is painful to me now.
Re-reading my Tweets is worse.

My body and mind were in a race to see which would collapse first, and I can say with complete sincerity that getting the job I have now with SCG and
getting out of that specific work situation with the auction house saved me an extended hospital stay at a minimum. Of course, there was work to do before
play, and I was unable to participate in the year’s first three Invitationals. I accepted that.

Still, I kept the Invitationals in mind. As the fourth quarter of 2014 rolled around and I realized that I had a) the vacation days, b) the work freedom,
and c) the liquid funds to make a trip out to Tacoma and play in my second Invitational ever, the planning was on.

Did I have a snowball’s chance in Hawaii of winning? Well, no. Did I go anyway? Oh yeah. But first…

Twelve Hours in Vegas

Before this month, I’d been to 47 of the 50 United States of America, checking off Washington and Alaska as I went on the fourth Magic Cruise in 2012. The
holdouts? Nevada, Oregon, and Hawaii. I’d managed to dance all around them but never crossed the border.

I settled on a plan: a twelve-hour (assuming no delays) layover in Las Vegas as I flew into the Seattle/Tacoma area on the Thursday before the
Invitational, sticking to one property (the MGM Grand) and strictly limiting my casino
activities to a pair of daily Texas Hold ‘Em poker tournaments with total buy-ins in the $100 range, capping things off with a nice supper (emphasis on
nice, and the reason I wore a sport jacket during my time on the Strip).

Things that weren’t in the Vegas plan:

Almost getting run over by a camera crew filming three ladies as they walked toward the arena where a boxing match soon would take place.

The sheer proliferation of cowboy hats as the National Finals Rodeo was going down in the same
venue.

Getting my all-in bets called by pocket aces in both poker tournaments, and the aces holding up.

Test-screening a TV pilot (sorry, no details) at CBS Television City as free entertainment to pass the time until supper.

Deciding, after sitting down in the three-Michelin-star gastronomic temple that is called Joël Robuchon, that it would be a waste not to go for the tasting
menu, which put my final bill for one meal somewhere between my hotel stay for the entire trip and my airfare…and no, I don’t drink alcohol. (As a
once-in-a-lifetime meal it was worth it, and as long as I have a normal memory I never will forget that supper, but I won’t forget that price tag either!)

The straight-up harridan of a TSA agent who bawled out an entire line of travelers waiting for security at the airport in Vegas and disappeared before I or
anyone else could write down her name.

The mishmash of slot machine jingle-jangle and country Christmas covers that went on and on during my flight delay like an unfunny episode of Too Many Cooks.

Airport aside, I had a good time in Nevada. The supper was the obvious highlight, but just a taste of the Vegas life was enough for me, for now. Perhaps
I’ll come back someday, maybe when I’m better at poker, but for now I’m happy to have Nevada checked off my list.

Tacoma Touchdown

I learned from the time I was young that no good ever came from being out at two in the morning, and this was reinforced by my trip to the Hotel Murano, aka Art Glass Heaven. (Should I ever return to Tacoma in an unofficial capacity, I’ll make a
point of staying there.)

But I like the opera…

I drifted off on the taxi ride to Tacoma, only to wake near my destination when I heard the sound of a minor car crash. The cab driver didn’t want to stick
around the idiot trying to park up a tree, and I was in no position to argue. After a bit of time spent lost, we found the hotel and I walked in, only to
be greeted with…

Well, there’s an old sea shanty called the “Drunken Sailor,” and a common enough second verse
asks “What do we do with a drunken soldier?” The answer was not, in fact, “multiply them by a few dozen and put them in the lobby of the hotel where I am
trying to check in,” but there was a party in full swing and several ladies’ once-bare shoulders had dress jackets over them. I was dreading the potential
for noisy sleep disruptions the night before the Invitational, but fortunately I had a room on the seventeenth floor and I passed eight relaxing hours in
Dreamland before my Invitational alarm went off.

The Invitational Disaster

Before the tournament, I assessed myself to several co-workers as being “one of the ten worst players” in the field. I’m not a tech expert; I’m a flavor
geek. I may have more than a decade of playing under my belt, but my lifetime accomplishments are meager in the extreme, and I had to use a writer’s
invitation rather than earning a spot through tournament play.

“Ten worst players” might have been an exaggeration. “Bottom ten percent” proved not to be.

I won my first match in Standard, piloting Abzan Reanimator, by a game count of 2-1. My draws in the three games were mediocre, mediocre, mediocre; his
were incredible, terrible, terrible. That’s all there was to it.

I proceeded to drop my next six Standard games in a row, getting flattened by Esper Control, comboed out by Pro Tour-era Jeskai Ascendancy Combo (including
a third-turn mauling that left me in vaguely disgusted awe), and burned out by a Jeskai Tokens player who knew when to switch gameplans and got a little
fortunate that I never found a Whip of Erebos in the match.

Nine games. Two wins. Seven losses. At least the two wins were in the same match!

So I was walking into Legacy 1-3, needing to win out to make the second day of competition. My weapon of choice? All Spells, the first-turn combo deck that
is the only thing on Planet Earth more fragile than my ego. (When you don’t have dual lands, there are only so many decks to play…)

I met my fifth-round foe, shook hands, and won the die roll. I checked my opening seven. No Balustrade Spy or Undercity Informer. Back it went. My opponent
kept his seven.

Mulligan to six. No combo piece. Back it went.

Mulligan to five: combo piece and the mana to cast it! The tradeoff was that it had no Pact of Negation or Cabal Therapy for protection, or even a Gitaxian
Probe to see what I was up against. Going in blind against an unknown opponent is nerve-wracking, and I showed it as I went to combo off, practically
begging him not to slow-roll me if he had Force of Will. Instead he sat there, looking interested as I explained the workings of the combo, and before my
Cabal Therapy could resolve he scooped, leaving himself down a game but with all the information in the match.

As is standard, I sideboarded out the graveyard combo for the second game and sided in a Recross the Paths/Doomsday package that would be slower but would
dodge the nigh-obligatory graveyard hate an unknown foe probably would bring in.

I drew my seven. No combo piece. Mulligan.

I drew my six. No combo piece. Mulligan.

I drew my five. Combo piece (Doomsday), but only two mana and a Manamorphose available. Nonetheless, that’s a keep.

My opponent led with a Taiga and passed. Lands, I thought at once. Crop Rotation for Bojuka Bog. Got it right. But when I drew Gitaxian
Probe and deployed it, I got a nasty surprise:

Oh heck no.

I’d made myself far worse against his deck! When I drew a Cabal Therapy off my Gitaxian Probe, my one true out showed itself to me: use my fast mana, cast
Manamorphose to get two black mana, and hope like heck for a Dark Ritual to come off the top, which would allow me to cast both Cabal Therapy and Doomsday.
Instead I drew a Pact of Negation and had to settle for casting Cabal Therapy and stripping the Thorn of Amethyst from his hand.

From there it was a race of draws: me to assemble the fast mana, him to find Dark Depths and Thespian’s Stage or else another mana-stopper. I managed to
Doomsday, but there’s a delay between the casting and the victory, and in that window he assembled his Marit Lage combo and mauled me.

For the third game I went back to the graveyard configuration. All I had to do was find a go-off hand; without a land on the battlefield he could not Crop
Rotation, and unless he was on something bizarre like Leyline of the Void or Faerie Macabre, I would have a clear path.

I drew my seven. No combo piece. Mulligan.

I drew my six. No combo piece. Mulligan.

I drew my five. Combo piece, but it’s a mana short. Still that’s a keep, and with a Pact of Negation among the five, I’d be fine waiting a turn even in the
face of Crop Rotation, because I could counter the Bojuka Bog.

What was not fine was a first-turn land, Mox Diamond, and Sphere of Resistance.

My deck: neutered like a Pound Puppy.

Immediately I went into what-if sequences, drawing cards and saying go, working out if there was any way I still could win. (It involved a lot of Elvish
Spirit Guides and Simian Spirit Guides.) After a few turns of cheerfully sculpting his draws, he found Dark Depths and Thespian’s Stage and that was that.

Live by the volatile combo deck, die by the volatile combo deck. I laughed it off philosophically as I signed the match slipped and dropped from the
tournament.

Away from the table though, the salt kicked in.

No. That’s not going to be the last memory I have of this tournament. Forget that.

And I went back and un-dropped, ready to get my teeth kicked in if it meant I at least could play a match without my deck critically failing me. By the
time Round 6 pairings went up, I’d managed to reduce my sodium level from “Lot’s wife” to ” Morton Salt girl.”

And I did get my teeth kicked in, by an Infect deck that had the Force of Will every game. The first time, I drew a Pact of Negation before he could draw
out of his mana woes; the second and third times, I could not find the Pact in time. The deck’s combo-piece draws did not fail me though, and I managed to
part from the Invitational in a decent mood.

At the hotel the soldiers were drinking again, though it was too early for (most of) them to be drunk. After a stop in the hotel restaurant, I went back to
my room, watched a little television — a rarity for me — and booked my next day’s travel.

Achievement Unlocked: Lower 48

The Tacoma Amtrak station is within two miles of the hotel where I stayed, and so rather than go through
the hassle of getting to the airport (a proper wallet-soaking, that trip!) and getting touchy-feely with the TSA, I resolved to get to Oregon by train.
With several trips a day, the Amtrak Cascades line offered me a reasonably priced trip to
Portland and back, provided I had the time (which I did). The train ride also gave me a chance to see some of Washington; despite spending several days in
the state, all I’d seen of it were the airport, a couple of hotels, and the convention center in Tacoma.

The ride to Portland was gorgeous. On the stretch between Tacoma and Washington’s forgotten capital city of Olympia, the train went right along the shore
in places, close enough for me to observe sea lions in the water and sunning themselves while I had a nice breakfast in the dining car.

Once the train crossed the Columbia River, it was done: I was in Oregon, and I’d officially been
in 49 of the 50 United States of America. When the train pulled into Portland, my clock was running and I had just a few short hours in the city, but I
knew the two places I really wanted to visit.

First stop: Powell’s City of Books. I’m a literature nerd. I can’t and won’t help that. My
purchases ranged from Japanese literature to ancient Greek and Roman works and into later 20th century untranslated fiction with a UK printing of aBrother Cadfael mystery and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven. From there I walked a bit to the most “Whole Foods”-y Whole
Foods store in the entire chain to buy stamps for my postcards, and then on to one of the most infamous places in Portland: Voodoo Doughnut.

I shall not provide a link to Voodoo Doughnut because even its Wikipedia page is not safe for work, but suffice it to say they have…unusual doughnuts. It
was with Voodoo Doughnut in mind that I brought my emptied carry-on suitcase, which I presented to the cashier with the question, “How many doughnuts can
we fit in this thing?”

The answer turned out to be 26: one of their signature Voodoo Doll doughnuts, a Bacon Maple Bar (maple bar doughnut + two strips of bacon = decidedly
non-vegetarian yumminess), and two dozen specialty doughnuts in a pink box for my work colleagues at the Invitational. I’d previously joked about making a
“doughnut run” for them one day; I’d just never said how far I’d go to get them!

After my doughnut delivery (and the discovery of a cigar-themed doughnut among the two dozen, despite my request for “work-safe” doughnuts), I went out for
a bit of Seattle socialization with folks I’d interacted with online but never had met in person, both Saturday night and through the day Sunday.

I haven’t asked permission to name names, and so I shall not, but they included several community notables from the Pacific Northwest and a handful of
Wizards of the Coast employees, and I got to see the Space Needle and the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibition nearby. My last meal in Seattle on Sunday evening
was at a Hawaiian-themed fast food place, L & L Hawaiian Barbecue…appropriate enough, since Hawaii will be
my 50th state once I get there.

From the start I’d planned my trip to be an “Invacational,” and in the end it succeeded. I checked off my last two states in the Lower 48, got to taste the
previously forbidden fruit of Invitational play, and profited by experiences if not by pocketbook. If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that “Play the
Game, See the World” is an ethos worth living by, and if you’re going to travel for Magic, why not see what there is to see while you’re there? We all
could use that reminder once in a while.

This is my last Magic dispatch of the year. I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing in 2014 and will do the same in 2015. Merry Christmas if you celebrate it,
warm holiday wishes in the tradition of your choice if not, and a Happy New Year to all who observe the Western calendar!