I had high expectations for this weekend, coming off a pair of PTQ Top 4 performances with Polymorph. I’m not saying making Top 4 of a PTQ is particularly impressive, but rather that the deck has been performing reasonably well for me in recent tournaments. I managed to tweak the deck such that I was destroying both Jund and all the Blue-White Control variants. My only losses in the PTQ last weekend were to Vengevine Naya, so I made some changes to the deck to sway that matchup in my favor. I finally gave up on trying to win the Mono Red matchup, and just hoped to dodge it. The Bant matchup is close, but I figured I would maybe play against two of them and probably win at least one of the two matches, so given that Polymorph pretty handily beats every other deck that is strongly represented in the metagame, I liked my chances of doing well at the Grand Prix. Here is the deck I played:
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (14)
Spells (40)
- 2 Forest
- 7 Island
- 4 Polymorph
- 3 Pithing Needle
- 4 Ponder
- 2 Negate
- 3 Into the Roil
- 4 Everflowing Chalice
- 4 Awakening Zone
- 4 Deprive
- 3 See Beyond
Sideboard
Nearly 2,000 players showed up for the tournament, which meant 9 rounds of Swiss Day 1 and 8 more rounds on Day 2 before the cut to Top 8. I managed to make Day 2 with a 7-2 record, but finished the tournament in a disappointing 105th place with an 11-6 overall record. My record against each matchup was as follows:
Jund 4-0
Blue-White 2-0
Bant 2-4
Naya 0-1
Grixis 0-1
Byes 3-0
As you can see, Bant was the deck that gave me by far the most trouble this weekend. Given the overall distribution of decks in the tournament, the fact that I got paired against three times as many Bant decks as I did Blue-White Control decks (including Planeswalker Control, which as far as this deck is concerned is the same archetype) is a bit unlucky. The problem with Bant decks, especially the Conscription version, is that their combo is slightly faster than mine and they have slightly better answers for my combo than I have for theirs. Between Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarch, and Lotus Cobra, they can get to six mana at least as fast as I can get to four mana. Also they have Jace, the Mind Sculptor maindeck and Oblivion Ring and Path to Exile after sideboard to deal with my plan of Polymorphing into Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, whereas I don’t really have any good answers to Sovereigns of Lost Alara outside of Deprive (since bounce and Fog only buy me one turn).
My loss to Naya was a bit disheartening, since I changed the deck specifically to shore up this matchup. By including Pithing Needles maindeck, I could turn off their Cunning Sparkmage and safely resolve Polymorph for the win. Also, by replacing Rampant Growth with Everflowing Chalice, I could cast Chalice on the second turn and tap it immediately to cast the Needle, and then cast the Polymorph on turn 3 (assuming I made a Plant Token on turn 1, otherwise I go off the following turn). Unfortunately I could not find Polymorph to save my life in two of the three games, and slowly died to creatures attacking me faster than I could produce chump blockers with Awakening Zone.
My loss to Grixis, however, was more a result of a poor judgment call rather than to bad luck. It came in round 5 when I was 4-0. We were in the third game, and there were less than three minutes on the clock. My opponent had been holding four cards in his hand for the past few turns and not playing any spells, so I figured he was probably holding removal and counter-magic, though it is possible he was just getting flooded and was holding a few lands and a couple of spells. I decided a draw was essentially the same as a loss, and so I went for the Polymorph with Deprive and Negate backup. He Terminated my token in response; I countered; He Lightning Bolted my token in response; I countered; He Countersqualled my counter, and I was left with no cards in hand. He then untapped and cast back-to-back Cruel Ultimatums the following two turns, followed by an attack with a Creeping Tar Pit to win on Turn 4 of extra turns. In hindsight, I should have just sat there and not gone for the win. That way, either the match ends in a draw or he has to tap out for Cruel Ultimatum, in which case I would counter it and then successfully resolve Polymorph the following turn and win the game. The variable I neglected to account for was the fact that a draw puts me in a bracket full of Blue-White Control decks, so just sitting there waiting for my Grixis opponent to make the first move would either result in a win for me this round (if he goes for it), or a draw but easier wins in future rounds (since I would get paired against easy Blue-White matchups all day). I just had tunnel vision at the time, and did not properly assess the value of a draw at this point in the tournament.
As an aside: it’s always frustrating to look back in hindsight and realize I could have done things differently to improve my chances of doing well in a tournament, but at the same time it increases my faith in the game, knowing that despite the amount of variance, my fate in a Magic tournament is still largely in my own hands. This is, of course, true for everyone competing in a tournament, not just for me. The deck you play (or draft / build), the decisions you make in each game, the reads you make on your opponents, your mulligan decisions, your proper evaluation of wins, losses, and draws altogether usually more than make up for the elements of chance involve in a Magic tournament (e.g. good/bad matchups, good/bad draws, favorable/unfavorable rulings, etc).
Moving forward, in order for me to continue playing this deck, or to recommend that others play it, something must be done to improve the Bant matchup. Mono Red comprises so little of the field that just hoping to dodge it is an acceptable enough plan, given the fact that the two most popular archetypes in the field are near auto-wins (Jund and Blue-White). Bant, however, is the third most popular deck, and so Polymorph needs a better plan against them if it hopes to win. I have two suggestions that I believe are worth testing. The first is the more radical of the two: Sideboard into 4 Mind Control and 2 Eldrazi Conscription so that you can steal their Sovereigns of Lost Alara and use it to find your own Conscriptions. Combined with a bounce spell or a Fog, this seems like a solid way to gain an edge and win the match. The second suggestion is one that a friend of Kenji Tsumura told me about at the Grand Prix: run All is Dust. He said that this is what Kenji told him he should do for the Mythic matchup. Given that the deck now runs Everflowing Chalice over Rampant Growth, casting All is Dust is a relatively easy proposition, and certainly one that sounds promising. The question is whether it’s enough, or whether Mythic can reliably rebuild a winning board position following an All is Dust before we can kill them. These are some of the options that I would like to explore, but I won’t be touching Standard again until after Pro Tour: San Juan, so hopefully someone else can try these strategies out against Mythic and let me know in the forums or on Facebook how they go, or if you have a more proven strategy for beating Mythic.
Post-Tournament Shenanigans
Of course, no Magic tournament is simply about playing cards; half of it is about having fun with friends that share a common interest. Grand Prix: D.C. was no exception.
After the Swiss rounds were over, I jumped into a team draft with Zach Efland and Chris Fennell against Luis Scott-Vargas, Paulo Vitor Dama da Rosa, and Josh Utter-Leyton (I’m 100% sure I misspelled at least one of these names, sorry). One game against Luis I managed to Hellion Eruption for 12 after a rebounded Nomad’s Assembly. I was up 2-0 in matches and in the middle of my match against Josh when my teammates informed me we were drawing dead since they were 0-3 and 1-2. So instead of finishing the match, we re-drafted with same teams… and this time I was 1-0 and in the middle of my match against Paulo when my teammates informed me that our opponents were drawing dead, since we had already won five matches. In the previous draft, the one we lost, the most expensive card was probably a $3 Student of Warfare. Fortunately for us, this second draft was the one with Gideon Jura, Vengevine, All is Dust, Foil Emrakul, and enough other cards for the dealer to buy it all from us for $108, which is probably slightly above average for a 6-man draft.
Later on we drove to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner. During the car ride, Tim Landale got to sit on Harrison Greenberg lap, as four of us crammed into the backseat of the car while somehow Ben Wienburg got to ride shotgun… what a miser. After dinner, we played the credit card game and World of Warcraft World Champ Billy Postlethwait paid for everyone’s meal. Since we were all going to different locations after dinner, we broke apart, and half of us took a taxi back to the Wingate hotel, where, after playing round 2 of the credit card game, Ben Wienburg paid for the cab. This was probably inevitable though, considering the amount of karmic justice he had working against him from getting to ride shotgun on the way to the restaurant while everyone else crammed into the back seat.
When we arrived at the Wingate, there were already a couple dozen Magic players that had taken over the common area of the hotel and were mostly drafting. Martin Juza was team drafting while simultaneously playing in two MTGO queues. No wonder he is Level 8. Shortly after we arrived, Brian Kibler and the Champ — Brad Nelson — arrived and were looking for a draft. We arranged a 3v3 until realizing there was neither table space nor basic lands. There were two guys I did not know sitting alone at a table and offered to let us use their table if they could join the draft. They then sweetened the deal by informing us they had a box of basic lands we could use. So instead of a 3v3, we just did an 8-man single-elimination draft for the cards. After all, most of us were just trying to prepare for San Juan, so doing an 8-man was perfectly reasonable anyway. I lost to Kibler in round 2, and he split the final.
After the draft, we still had a couple hours before having to take a shuttle to the airport, so Gab Walls and Luis-Scott Vargas decided to play a timed variant of Mental Magic out of the stack of commons and uncommon left on the tables from all the previous drafts. This was quite possibly the most entertaining hour of the entire trip (anything involving Gab Walls is usually quite entertaining, but this was especially so). Basically here’s the way the game is played: each player starts with no cards in hand and infinite mana. Then the player that goes first draws his card and has five seconds to play the card as a different Magic card with the same converted mana cost as the card drawn. If he can’t think of a card in time, or if the named card has already been played, it gets mucked with no effect. So for instance, Heat Ray is an automatic win as long as you can think of a Fireball variant in time that has not already been played. And despite Essence Feed being drawn and mucked at least a half dozen times, for some reason Corrupt was never named. At one point there were about ten people rail-birding Gab and Luis, and we were all making so much noise laughing and calling out card names that the hotel management had to tell us to quiet down. Before long, it was time to head off to the airport and to make our way to San Juan.
Hopefully next weekend will bring more fruitful tournament results and equally enjoyable non-tournament experiences for me to write about, especially since most people will not care much about Block Constructed results.