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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.

I went undefeated. 8-0-2, all the way to Nationals. If there had been a top 8 faceoff, Elves would probably have taken the championship, considering there were four Blue/Green decks in it. The Elves reign supreme – somehow. All I can say is that many Angels suffered and many Birds got big. In the end, even Silvos had a thing or two to say. Regardless, I have single-handedly increased the value of Seeker of Skybreak in the past week.

I had to play against the only competent person left in contention at the Ohio Regionals. The winner would be first after the Swiss and thus first overall, as the top 8 doesn’t get played out anymore; the loser would get essentially nothing….

One more round and I would have qualified for Nationals for the third consecutive year. One more round and I would have been first place in the last two Regionals I’d played in. One more round and I wouldn’t have to leave the tournament site a loser. One more round and I would still have believed that I was good.

“Hunting Sound” is the pet name for the Hunting Grounds deck I played six months ago, re-applied to the updated U/G/w aggro mold. The deck was extremely aggressive, with almost no board control elements whatsoever. This made the deck somehow comforting to play. You either beat your opponent upside the face , or the deck just didn’t deliver and you’d shrug your shoulders to show your disdain for those overpriced fetchlands that don’t even fix mana 75% of the time.”Flooded Strand,” you’d remark,”Who needs ’em?”