Search Content

Regionals was an uncomfortable car ride followed by a big disappointment diced up to lay amidst small flares of occasional fun, the meetings with friends and MODO clan members that were like little pepper granules of merriment amidst the undercooked, salmonella-inducing hamburger patty of defeat. This whole putrid meal was served up with a side order of uncomfortable accommodations and a large Pepsi. No, I didn’t have fun at Regionals, where I saw two weeks of intense study and preparation go down the tubes – but mark my words, I’ll have fun writing about it, or die trying.

“So you finally lost.”
“Yeah, it was a good run. First match loss in the eighth round is not a bad day. I mean, five, oh, and two is great after seven rounds. That’s top eight in a seven-round PTQ, right?”
“That’s true, man. But you suck. No lies; you really suck at this game, and yet you managed to be in contention for seven rounds. That’s pretty cool.”

At this point, I am sitting at 3-1-1 and feeling pretty good about myself… But of course, we all know that I did not X-0 the rest of the tournament. Locusts would have swarmed the earth, fire would have rained out of the sky, and other bad times would be going on.

It has to be read to be believed. But there is a major revelation for Chris Romeo fans.

Don’t ever let it be said that you can’t go rogue and place highly in a major tournament. If you work hard, test diligently, and learn your deck’s strengths and weaknesses inside and out, you can succeed. It’s definitely easier to play a potent netdeck whose power is already well-documented, but I must say that nothing, I repeat, nothing matches the satisfaction from winning with something original that you’ve incubated for months.

It takes a”special” player to be at 4-0 with a solidly-tested and built rogue deck, and then throw away the next two matches while being up a game in each. Working your ass off for two months, only to be done in by your own poor decision-making skills, is not a pleasant thing to have happen – but it happened to me. This is my story…

My goal that day was a winning record. I knew that I hadn’t playtested enough and would get caught by tricks and sideboards I had not anticipated. I also figured to lose one or two matches to manascrew, since I was running a two-color deck with non-aligned colors and no Birds of Paradise. That about summed up the day: Winning record, lost two matches to my errors, one to mana screw. But along the way, I learned some lessons about Rob Dougherty’s Elvish Succession, some changes in the metagame that have weakened it, and some tricks on playing it properly.

I have slowly come to the realization that I will, in all likeliness, never become the next big thing on the Pro Tour. Yes, there are a few”old timers” on the Pro Tour, such as the inimitable Mike Pustilnik, but I have never been able to reach that”critical mass” point where I had the momentum to carry my skills, such as they are, into lucrative employment as a professional Magic player. For me and all the other Bennie Smiths out there, the two tournaments we really look forward to are States and Regionals. A win at States or a Top 8 at Regionals would be the pinnacle of my competitive Magic career, Pro Tour or no Pro Tour.

For this series, I’m going to try something a little different: I’m going to leave the deck strategy in the next article and instead get right to the report. Once I’ve gone through all the rounds, then I’ll post a strategy article specifically for Mirari’s Wake – a suddenly very important deck. My feeling is that for a deck that’s as complicated as this one, if we get the experience under your belt now (at least vicariously), the strategy article for the deck will make that much more sense and we’ll be able to get down to the nitty gritty a lot faster.