Magic Day

I just got back from Old Town Hobby after a day of Magic: The Gathering. What a great game, what a fun time. It was just Shellah and Lance, Carson and me. Most of the games were really close in our round robin. We drafted the same as last time, except we switched out Darksteel for a pack of 8th Edition Core Set. With the first pack being 8th, a lot of really great cards were showing up early, and of course it's hardest to make those early decisions on what to draft. Nothing amazing caught my eye, but an early Dark Banishing was something I couldn't pass up on after last time. Big creatures didn't seem to be coming to me, but I saw a Pyroclasm early on. I ended up with mostly black and artifact with a splash of red and a smaller splash of blue. There was some decent green that I had to decide against using. We all noticed that lots of blue cards were not getting picked, and were the last to get drafted. My biggest creature was a 3/3 Serpent Warrior and my best artifact was a Crystal Shard. I had a lot of Equipment and creature removal too, but I wasn't feeling very confident at all about the deck, because I couldn't see anything cohesive about it, other than an overall fast profile with cheap creatures to be pumped by equipment and enchantments. No single standout card to get me excited, but hardly anything with a casting cost over 4. I can't think of when I've felt worse about a deck I was about to play in a tournament. Our pairings were up at noon.

First, I played Carson. He had the same kind of hodgepodge feeling about his deck as I had about mine, and there were some real similarities. Carson had a lot more creatures. He was playing 4-color from what I could tell, with a lot of green and black and blue, some white and a fair amount of artifacts. Game one was long, but my poor start (mana and creature short) eventually got the better of me. He had an Icy Manipulator that was really locking me down. I sideboarded more blue and more creatures in for game 2 and everything came up right and I won fairly quickly, then in game 3 the same thing happened for him, so I lost 1 game to 2.

Next up was Shellah, Lance's wife. She is a really good player, and I heard later about her success with a hasted Craw Wurm working really well in her red-green deck. The cards just seemed to come up right for me in game 1, though I think having a Diabolic Tutor and a couple of cards with Scrye helped a bit. That splash of blue for flyers and the Crystal Shard were good too. She had me down to 1 life in game two, but I came back and won thanks to the creature removal. Even though I came up as a 2-0 winner, the actual games were both a lot closer than that.

The final matchup of the round robin for me was our defending champion, Lance. He was ahead of me in the standings, and the only way for me to win the tournament today would be to beat him 2-0, which I doubted could happen. But I paid closer attention than I usually do to game play, especially late in a tournament. I discovered that with Crystal Shard and Ravenous Rats, I could make Lance discard a card every turn for 3 mana. Also, just from having played Lance a bit more in recent tournaments, I have been learning a bit more about how his mind works. He played a red-white deck with artifacts and some wonderful recursive removal in the form of the Minotaur Shaman, a goblin and some other new red guy. If he had had more Equipment, like John did last time, Lance would have made short work of me and my little creatures. But I had luckily drafted an Unholy Strength, and that, along with Cranial Plating and some of my other artifacts, made a difference. Another standout card for me was Somber Hoverguard. Each of the two games went back and forth, with a lot of removal from both sides, excellent defense from Lance's white creatures, bounce with the Crystal Shard, etc. At times there were fast effects and instants on the stack that went a bit deep and somewhat complicated, but when we got through those, stalemates were broken and the cards in play were a bit simplified. Not once today did my Blind Creeper (a 3/3 for 1B who gets -1/-1 until end of turn whenever a player playes a spell) go to the graveyard out of combat. The only artifact control I had was a Detonate, and I used it every time it came around. Anyway, when the dust settled, I had won 2-0. Bonesplitter, Magma Jet and Vicious Hunger were all helpful cards, but the stupid Serpent Warrior helped me the most today, along with the Ravenous Rats and what I consider to be the best card I used today, Crystal Shard, which let me chump block and bounce my creatures back to my hand.

After the tourney, Carson handed me all of his cards (what a guy!), and Richard gave me a couple packs for winning. It feels good to win, but I would have liked it a bit better if more people had made it today. Today was the 3rd of the three tournaments I planned. In the future, we might do a $5 draft tourney with 1 pack of the newest set and prizes (each player brings 30 nonbasic cards, commons recommended, to fill out the rest of the draft, with random start distribution of cards and seating order). Hey, it's a good idea, it could work!

Color Analysis for today: (8th, Mirrodin, Fifth Dawn draft 9/18/04)
Dave: Black/Red/Blue (1st), Lance: White/Red (2nd), Carson: Green/Blue/Black/White (3rd), Shellah: Red/Green (4th).