Premier event #1!

I played in my first ever premier event today.  I won the first 2 rounds before dropping the 3rd and 4th, which I would imagine puts me out of contention.  I then won the 3rd round and lost the last.   3-3 seems like exactly what I should expect, given my 2-2 history in Dailies.

I feel as though I should have done better, because I believe I was favored in every match.  At least all of the decks I played were real tournament decks.  I beat 5c bloodbraid, and Jund x 2.  I lost to 5cc x2, and Kithkin.  I particularly feel bad about the kithkin loss because I had seen them a lot recently before this tournmant, and took Verhey’s advice in adding 2 more hallowed burials to the board.  I believe I cut the wrong cards, however, dropping 1 negate and something else.  I should have dropped celestial purges or essence scatters, and kept the full 4 negate.

In every other way, I played Gavin’s deck and sideboarded as instructed in his recent articles.

I felt outplayed in my losses against 5cc, and was surprised at how they turned around the games against me.   I also felt during the tournament that I was drawing rather poorly, a feeling I tried hard to discount, since I would imagine over a 6 round tournament you’re bound to feel that way sometimes.

I think it’s telling that I looked up the QP status of my opponents, and found that the folks I beat had a combined 12 QPs for the season.  The folks that beat me had a combined 36, and the ones that beat me when it mattered (rounds 3 and 4) were 32 of those 36 points.  Clearly, although it may seem to me at the time that matchups and draws matter, playskill is probably what’s determining these matches.

I mulliganed a lot, and I felt good about that, because I always hear that marginal players like myself don’t mulligan aggressively enough.  However, I also felt like I had really bad keeps and bad tosses while doing so.   While there were certainly plenty of play errors, I feel like I could have won some of these matches solely based on better mulligans as well.

The most educational match was probably being outplayedby 5cc.  Both matches qualify, but I figure it made sense to go with the 3rd round, since I was playing for 3-0 at that point.

I don’t have a lot of time to finish this posting right now, so I’m just putting up the games.  If I get a chance before my next tournament, I’ll post some comments about what I think I did wrong.

Game 1

Game 2

Plan update, MOCS 7

Technically, MOCS season 7 started on thet 16th and is very short.  I felt, however, that I needed to touch base with the overall status of the project.   I’m not really doing weekly status updates anymore, and discussing the goals and plan for the upcoming season seemed like a good basic subject.

Before I talk about season 7, a lot changed about my approach in the past month, and It seems valuable to evaluate how that worked out in the previous season. At the start of season 6, I posted that my old VS playtesting partner had suggested that I do more tracking concerning how many tickets / packs / rating points I’m gaining and losing as I try to improve. So, here we go:

Tickets = -48
Packs = -1
Constructed Rating = +25 (1565)
Limited Rating = +5 (1616)
Sanctioned Constructed record = 15 Win, 19 Loss
Sanctioned Limited record = 2 Win, 1 Loss

It’s kind of tough to look at.  In the 3rd month of this blog, I have posted fairly poor results thus far in terms of winning prize, and win/loss record.   Let’s try to look at why that’s happened, so that I can try to address it.

Being Rogue:  My first takeaway is that I’m not yet ready to tune or make my own decks.  My pet version of 5cc was just not a successful deck.  I 4-0′d a tournament last month with a list that was very close to what better players were playing, and collected 1-3 and 2-2 results with my own deck.  It made my games much harder for me to analyze as well, because sometimes I couldn’t tell if I lost because I made a bad play or because I played a bad card.

I need feedback: I need both feedback from myself in the form of reviewing my losses more thoroughly, and from others in the form of posting my losses and letting other people help me see the mistakes that I can’t.  When I was playing a lot of games, but drawing my own conclusions about them without putting a lot of thought into it, I wasn’t really doing anything to address improving my playskill.

Tight play: The way that I can improve my results the most dramatically is just by focusing on tight technical play.  While everyone makes mistakes all the time playing magic, currently when I play I am giving up the most percentage simply because I have not yet learned how to play the game well.  Turn by turn, I don’t make very good choices with what to do with my cards, and I lost a lot of matches because of this.   I do like the idea of playing towards my strengths by trying to learn to build and tune decks that are not heavily played eventually, but now is not the time.  The amount of advantage that I could gain on my opponents by learning to do that well just doesn’t compare to how I could help myself by closing the gap between my playskills and the average competitive magic player.  While I have previously tried to stress metagaming, card evaluation, deck building, or any number of other things, it’s just not in my best interests right now to focus on any other aspect of how I interact with magic.

So, moving forward, what am I going to do?

The next MOCS season is only 3 weeks long, and I believe it is the last one for the year.  So, for the time being, I’m more or less suspending even caring about QP points.  I want to focus on getting better, and while MOCS was one way to measure that, I’m accepting that I’ll be a better player next year.   With that said, now that there are online PTQs, I certainly have some big tournaments to try to use as a goal.  While I don’t think it’s likely that I will be prepared as a player to win a tournament like that yet, I will certainly enter them with the intention of winning.

I feel like the most important thing I can do moving forward doesn’t really have anything to do with what format / deck / kind of tournament I’m playing in.  It’s more about continuing to be analytical about reviewing my matches and asking for feedback on my play.  It’s been about 2 weeks since I changed the direction of my posts towards eliciting feedback on my play instead of reporting my results.  I’m very thankful to both AJ and Dee for their comments and the time taken to make them, and I fully buy into that sort of interaction as the best way to get better right now.   I encourage anyone reading to offer their thoughts on my mistakes.  My only worry is that I will fail to internalize the lessons contained in those losses and I will continue to make the same mistakes.  I think I just need to assume that I will get there, and recognize that playing magic well isn’t something that I do intuitively now.  I’m just going to need a lot of practice, but there’s no reason to think that that practice won’t pay off.

With that in mind, after I finish this blog post I’m going to go back through the matches that people have commented on, and try to remind myself of the mistakes I’m making.

We’ve established that I need to focus, essentially, on playing the same decks that everyone else is playing, getting a lot of practice, and being dedicated to understanding my mistakes.   But I would like to try to address the fact that I can’t play in as many tournaments as I like by continuing to be open to expanding the formats I’m playing in.  I’ve decided that going forward there are 5 different ways I’m going to try to play the game.  I’m hoping that I can find successes somewhere in this spread, because winning more often would really help to defray the cost of doing this in the first place.  I hear a lot of stories from pros about how they got shown magic by a friend, a week later made a cheap aggro deck online, and they’ve never spent a penny on magic since.  I’d like to get a little of that action.

So here’s what I’m going to try for the next couple of months:

Standard Dailies: This is what I already do a lot of, I have a deck that works until rotation and it provides me with valuable lessons.

Alara Block Dailies:  Yes, I posted earlier about how I hate the format and playing the aggro deck makes things seem really luck based.  But I’m willing to admit that that’s an excuse and that I need to give this more reps before deciding that it can’t teach me anything.  I own the cards for a tier one deck and I should use them.  While I will continue to prefer standard tournaments, this should mean more opportunities to play in events, given that my schedule is my worst enemy.

Zendikar Sealed Release Events:  I’m going to need to buy Zendikar cards when they come out.  A couple of weeks ago an author on channelfireball (I don’t remember who) wrote an article basically claiming that these are the softest possible tournaments out there.  Sealed is a skill I don’t really have, and would like to learn, and I want to give a shot at trying to get a bunch of cheap packs this way.  If it doesn’t work out, then I’ll stop, since I can’t just throw 6 packs away over and over, but I’d like to see how I do.

Zendikar Block Constructed:  Brad Nelson recently wrote an article about how playing single set block can be a great way to grind your way to constructed riches, as well as explore the fundamentals of a format and get better at playing in a less complex environment.  So, I want to give it a shot as well.  I’ll start playing this instead of Alara block when we rotate, obviously.

Drafting: I just really like drafting.  I’ll make sure I don’t get too distracted with it, but I can’t resist the occasional draft, and it’s not a bad skill to continue to develop in general.  I won’t let it get in the way of anything else, but pretending I won’t draft sometimes will just make me hate magic.

I guess that’s really it.

• Buy completely into the analysis / review of my play and focus on that.  Fewer matches is fine, so long as I get something out of the ones I do play.
• More formats means more ability to play consistently, even if it may subject me to a steeper learning curve in general.
• Play in PTQs with the intention to win them

This post has been a bit of a ramble, and maybe a strange read, but it helped me refocus on what I need to do to make this project more successful, I think.

Daily #14

Played in another daily, recorded another match, the wheel continues to turn.

Just wanted to say to commentators that I really appreciate the playskill feedback. I’m certainly not insulted, as I am quite aware of the long road I have to travel to be actively good at this game. Hopefully, the lessons will stick and I can make a leap of some kind soon, but even if that doesn’t happen, I’m pretty stoic about the whole thing and will continue to post videos and appreciate feedback.

I went 2-2 again, and it’s kind of remarkable how consistent that result is. A little frustrating as well, since I realize that it means that 14 daily events = 84 tickets. I 4-0′d once, so that means I’ve gotten 11 packs for 84 tickets. I’m paying like…double store price. If these had been 8 mans, chances were I would have won…something, just by winning round 1 occasionally.

Hopefully the learning is priceless, and I do enjoy getting 4 full matches against real decks. Anyway, I beat Time Sieve in the first round, lost to GW overrrun in the 2nd (once to double overrun when I was sure I was winning…had to have been a way to win that game, right?). In round 3 I lost to Jund, which is a great matchup for me, and then round 4 I went full circle and again beat Time Sieve. I wasn’t actually sure whether Sieve was a good matchup or not, but I felt like I outplayed my not so great opponents, and that felt good.

I probably would have posted the G/W match, except it was not available for replay. I know I’ve seen a method for recovering replays before, but I can’t find it anymore and gave up. So I’m posting my 2 losses to Jund, since theoretically I should own that matchup.

This is the match where I have to take ownership of what AJ said about me awhile ago. Basically that I was chalking matches up to ‘variance’ or bad draws or whatever. This is a match that felt like I would have won if I’d drawn anything in either game. It really did feel like despite my misplays, I needed to draw better to be able to win. So let’s see what I missed!

I had already won game 1 and was happy to be coasting to 2-1 in matches if I could keep my head right.

Game 2

I cash in a color screwed hand for something a lot more reasonable. Ironically, I ended up color screwed anyway. I’m willing to accept that I could have done it, so how do I win this game?

Game 2:

This time I mull to oblivion, but I try not to tilt and I take my best shot at victory. Unfortunately, I do tilt somewhat anyway. I play lands in the wrong order, for one thing, and then I badly misplay when I attack a finks into a puppeteer clique. It’s an interaction I should have realized was there, but I had never run into it before and just didn’t think about it. I guess that’s ok in a way, because I’ve already admitted that I’m going to get better through practice, not being smart. I’m glad I was subjected to the situation, because now an interaction that had never really occurred to me before is something I’ll remember.

Anyway, even with these obvious misplays…could I have won this game? I’m just so far behind. Did I keep the right hand? Should I never have mulled the 5 lander in the beginning?

Thanks for the feedback, as always.

I was supposed to play in another daily tonight, but I missed the start time when they suddenly published a new event schedule (that covers 3 weeks instead of 2, w00t!). That moved my event back by 2 hours, and when I logged on just to mess around I discovered my tournament had already started.

I may draft tonight or something. We’ll see. I’m hoping to force through another standard tournament on Thursday.

Daily #13

I haven’t been posting because I haven’t been playing, with work dominating my weekdays and other commitments dominated last weekend. This weekend I should have some time to play and get up more posts.

I played in a Daily last night with lark and did not play well, going 2-2. I lost to the mirror, which was educational, and also to G/B elves.

The elves game was frustrating for me because I feel like there’s no reason I should be losing to this deck. But in games 2 and 3 he played cards I wasn’t expecting to see over and over again. Honestly, neither of the matches I lost were particularly good, and I did not play well in either of them. I did, however, say that I would always record and post losses when I played, so here’s the G/B match. I only included games 2 and 3, since the first one didn’t record and it was a blowout win for me on the back of sower of temptation.

I’m going to put my thoughts down about these games, because last couple of videos required people who commented to make a 2nd pass after I piped up with my assumptions in response to what they had to say. So I’m trying to find my mistakes in the game descriptions below.

Game 2:

I keep what seems like a good hand to me, because while I lack removal, I have card draw, early defense from finks, clique always seems good, and the mana to play my spells. I end up drawing into removal and feel like I have a very good hand against him.

It all goes wrong when I play that removal, giving him enough land to put an early cloudthresher out. In retrospect, I probably should have saved my removal, since finks plays nicely with his vanquisher. As it was, he turned into a chump blocker. I should maybe keep in mind to use my removal only when I need to, not just because it spends mana efficiently. I also probably should have run out my clique before trying to draw cards with drifter, as I could have snagged that cloudthresher. I’m not sure, because I didn’t want to miss land drops either.

So he’s beating on me with thresher and when I clique him I figure my strategy has to be to get through his two removal spells, resolve sower on cloudthresher, and use it to defend myself from stag, hopefully protecting it long enough to get out some larks or just beat him to death with it. So I took infest. He, of course, draws infest. Then he wipes me with it. Which is kind of fine, because it fuels lark and then I can clique again. So I take the damage from his guy and clique, going after the inversion. He uses it on clique so I can’t chump, and I end up taking thoughtseize.

I sower thresher. If i can untap, it seems like I have a great shot at the game. He draws doomblade and kills my sower. I cryptic fog, and he responds with primal command to bounce me. I’m pretty much dead at that point and I’m not sure why I played a sower on the last turn for no reason. I probably should have put out mage and finks to chump thresher and kill stag and had a shot at victory.

Game 3:

I keep due to having early removal and card draw that can find white lands. Not to mention my one copy of hallowed burial.

His draw doesn’t have leech or any other early beater, and I’m happy about that, but he does have the stag on 3. So I path it. At that point he goes garruk and leech, and suddenly I’m feeling like things are very bad for me. I dig with drifter, and he goes puppeteer clique on it. I seemed to play into everything he wanted to do and when he did those things they were excellent against me. I hallowed burial 3 guys away. He dumps 2 more stags into play. At this point I hardcast a drifter because I wanted to keep garruk off his ultimate, even though I had the removal for the stags. Not only is that probably wrong from the perspective of strategy…but oh look, garruk was already on his ultimate. So, that was obviously pretty dumb. I could have killed his creatures and then played some of my own, like, y’know, lark. Then maybe I could have won.

So, not exactly an inspiring performance, but I can’t sit here and be afraid to admit I’m bad.

Daily 12 + videos

Played in another daily tonight. Decided I wanted to at least split my time between the 5cc deck that I’m tuning (possibly badly) and proven decks. So today I played Gaven Verhey’s Lark deck.

I don’t have much experience with it, but I played lark before when I started the blog. I got two matches in on tournament practice to try to get my legs under me, and here we go.

I went 2-2, which is my thing, losing to U/W baneslayer and Faeries.  I beat some sort of white weenie with ajani and a random mono black rogues.  I admit to feeling like I should 3-1 when I get to play against mono black rogues. Of course, that was once I was out of contention. I’d love to play it round 1 someday.

Faeries is supposed to be a bad matchup, but baneslayer isn’t.  When I reviewed the  baneslayer match, I just made a huge number of big mistakes that I could easily see.  Honestly, I saw them after I did them while I was playing.  It was my first match, and I must have just done dumb things from inexperience.  Hopefully I’ve already learned some lessons from that match.

So here’s the match against Fae.  I lost it in 2 games, but felt like I was in it for one, and maybe improved play would have stolen the game.

Game 1:
The big mistake I see is walking lark into spellstutter sprite. I am not used to seeing that card counter spells that cost 5, and it didn’t occur to me to count faeries before casting it. With that said, it’s a long game, and I’m sure there are other mistakes that need to be pointed out to me. Felt like I could have won this one.

Game 2:
Mull to oblivion. I’m including it for completeness and so that people will hopefully validate what I perceive as correct mulligan decisions. Also, I wonder if I should have let myself be cliqued in the hopes that he would incorrectly give me a shot at a land.

Daily 11 + videos

AJ Sacher was kind enough to check back in with the blog, and had some criticism that you can find in the comments of the last post.

Because he knows more about winning at magic than I do, I’ll take his word for it.  Essentially what he had to say was that I was playing a lot, but had really dropped off my attempts to analyze my play afterwards.  That is true.  I have been focusing my time on making sure I post regularly and playing a lot.  I have really cut back on the level of analysis and explanation I attempt on each game.

I felt like I needed to play more, because I was starting to find myself in positions again where I just didn’t know how the opposing deck worked.  It’s one thing to read in an article how great Sygg is in merfolk, but playing against it brings it home and gets your brain moving on how to beat it.  Time has been my enemy lately, and between playing, blogging about playing, and analyzing my play, something had to give.

I’ve decided, therefore, that I’m going to stop trying to do complete tournament reports for every tourney I’m in.  That will allow me to focus my posts on analyzing individual matches and improving my play.  Besides, trying to bang out a description of every match was making those descriptions so short and full of assumptions that they weren’t useful.

With that in mind, I played another standard daily on Sunday.  I went 2-2.  I lost to Jund and Lark, and beat Jund and my nemesis, ‘Bye’.  I’m playing 5cc, essentially ripped off from what Duotianshi is winning with in the premier events lately.  I’m running a runed halo and 2 shriekmaws instead of lightning bolt.  I’m also running 2 cloudthreshers and 1 baneslayer instead of 3 of the angels.

After splitting the Jund matches, I was at 1-1 and got paired against lark.  Here are videos of the games.  I put some of my thoughts about my mistakes in the description of the videos.  I’m going to avoid trying to point out everything I might or might not have done wrong, because I don’t really know how valuable that is.  Feel free to give feedback regarding how much I should speculate when I post these.

As usual, the quality isn’t awesome, but I find watching them on the youtube site in HD gives enough fidelity to figure out what’s going on.  Any comments, either here or there will be appreciated.

Game 1

Game 2

Game 3

I’m going to make it a practice to review each match after any tournament, and then post at least 1 of the matches to this site for feedback.

Daily 9 and 10, plus block disdain

I decide to play in the block premier event, since I have the day off.  I put together Brian Kowal’s aggro cascade deck from the finals of Gencon, which only requires me to purchase a few maelstrom pulses that I should buy anyway.  I join the tourney.  It sits at 22 people joined, and never fires.  This is something new to me, and I hadn’t really realized it happens.

After that, I realize there’s a standard daily in a few hours, and get ready for that instead.  I’m sitting at 1-1 and in my third match when my internet service betrays me.  I was unable to get back on, and I guess it autodropped me, which I suppose is better than just losing 2 matches.

In that tournament I lost to UW lark / baneslayer again.  I beat a random aggro creature deck.  Obviously, I find getting disconnected annoying, it costs me rating when I randomly lose to someone and all that, but it’s part and parcel of playing online.  It’s worth noting that it’s the first time it’s happened to me since I started the blog.

The next day I have every intention of playing in the standard daily that starts at 1 pm…except it turns out to start at 12:00 pm instead.  So, yeah, I can’t play.  I decide to make the best of it and play in the alara block constructed daily at 4:00.

I do that, and honestly, it’s one for the ages.  If you were trying to come up with a curriculum for a class that trained people not to play stupid, draw dependent aggro decks…you would essentially make them play though my tournament.

Round 1 I play against what seems to be the 75 card mirror.  Game 1 he is mana screwed so I win.  Game 2 I am manascrewed so he wins.  Game 3 I mulligan to 4 just trying to find some lands and he wins.  He apologizes for the crappy match, which I guess is nice.  I chalk the whole thing up to variance and go on to round 2.

Round 2 I face what seems to be the 75 card mirror.  I play some cards.  He plays some cards.  I don’t draw enough land in the final game and I lose.

Well, that was quick.  Time to play for rating and practice.  Round 3  seems to be the 75 card mirror again.  I draw better and I win.  This sets up a climactic finish where I play the mirror again.  Which I win, seemingly because I draw better.

I thought about going back and rewatching these to be able to tell more of the tale of what each match was like.  But really, there didn’t seem to really be any decision points.  It’s just kind of a blur of ‘i got leech and he didn’t’ or vice verse followed by who got luckier with their cascades.

So, honesty, wow.  Four mirror matches with aggro cascade Jund.  I had read some of the coverage of Pro Tour Honolulu, and absorbed the general idea that it was not a fun format.  I hadn’t realized how much I would dislike it myself.  There are 3 decisions, as far as I can tell, when playing this deck.  The most important is whether or not to mulligan.  Then there’s what to discard to blightning.  Finally there is whether or not to pump putrid leech.  As far as I can tell, that’s it.

You play the cards you draw and see what you cascade into and hope you draw more cascade cards than your opponent.  Is this representative of aggro in general?  I’m not sure, but it sort of seems like it.   You just play your cards and see if you get there or if your opponent has what they need to stop you or kill you faster.

I can see wanting to play a deck like this, but only if you had some kind of deckbuilding advantage.  If you came up with a great aggro build of some kind that used unusual cards or just an updated aggro deck no one was expecting, you’ve kind of already made your important decisions before you start playing.  I can see where that would give you real percentages against the field and be fun.

This act of playing an aggro deck that was already acknowledged as one of the best decks seems awful.  If other people play the same deck, it’s a series of coinflips.  If other people play the control deck that foils it, you lose if they have what they need, and you win if you get the busted draw.  Only if they play what amounts to a just plain less powerful deck do you get a benefit out of the fact that you’re tier 1.  It’s a really wierd change from playing 5cc mirrors, where I almost always lose because I made more mistakes, not because I drew worse cards.

Maybe that’s unfair and it’s just this deck and format, but this tournament certainly left a bad taste in my mouth.  So I guess that puts me back to standard, or maybe Kibler’s 5cc block deck.  I thought I would enjoy sitting back and relaxing and making fewer decisions while I played.  That did not end up being true at all.  Maybe if I’d won 3 matches, I’d feel differently.

My newfound disdain for block got me back into trying to figure out what to play in standard.  What I generally the most of at this point hasn’t changed much in the last 2 weeks, except to move even further away from 5cc.  I’ve been mostly playing against:

• Lark, either with or without a heavy emphasis on baneslayer.
• Merfolk
• Jundish things with blightning and bloodbraid elf

The fact that 2 of these decks are bad matchups probably means I’m playing the wrong deck.  However, I went back and looked at that standard tournament I missed and the top decks were all super aggro creature decks.  I can only assume they were there to predate on lark and merfolk, and because everyone has stopped playing 5cc.

I’ll keep messing with 5cc until rotation, most likely.  Merfolk and good jund decks require manabases that I’m not going to buy when they are just about to rotate out.  I could put together an updated lark for about 20 bucks, mostly in new cards, so I should probably do that as well and play them both.

It’s very, very hard to suppress the urge to waste my time messing around with rogue decks.  I feel bad enough playing with my own version of 5cc instead of a straight netdeck, but at least all the cards I’m playing are acknowledged as good.

MOCS 6, Week 3

It’s the unfortunate nature of the fact that my schedule can sometimes be out of my hands that my season is already kind of a wash.  As usual, that’s ok, because qualifying currently means less than just improving my game and continuing to play.  Of course, continuing to play is also the reason things are a wash.  I’m obviously not getting a huge amount of value out of the project lately.

I ended up later getting from out of state this weekend, and couldn’t play in my Sunday tournaments.  I was asked to work late again on Monday, and missed that tournament.  I’ve gotten to play a good bit in the last few days in tournament practice, but that is what it is.  With that said, I feel better about my deck than I did last week, simply because I’ve gotten to play it some, and I was competitive in a DE again.

My record for the week is a simple 2-2.  I put in 6 tickets and got no product out.  My rating is now 1560.

I’ve learned very little in the last 2 weeks, unfortunately.  It happens and it will happen again.

Areas of focus for the week:

Metagaming / Card choices: I continue to feel out of my depth in regard to tuning a good deck to still be a good deck when the metagame shifts.  I have found it rewarding and educational to try, though.  Rotation is still almost 2 months away for MTGO, so the format is still relevant.  While I may eventually break down and buy the baneslayer angels everyone loves, but I’m not going to buy old cards I don’t have to make something like merfolk.  Chances are I will continue to play 5cc in some capacity this week, if not neccessarily in every game, and I’ll continue to need to become comfortable trying to tune and adapt a deck.

Practice, Practice, Practice: My biggest problem for a few weeks now has just been lack of data.  I know I said this last week, but I should be able to play more in the upcoming week.  Whether I get a lot of tournament reps or not, I need to make myself sit down and bang out a few matches with more than one deck if possible.

Experimenting with Broader play: When I started the blog, I said that I was going to focus on standard.  Repeatedly, I’ve found myself controlling the urge to do other things because I felt like it, and staying focused in the ‘right’ place.  That worked really well to an extent, but in the last two weeks has done two things that I really don’t like.  Because the new dominant decks in standard focused on merfolk and baneslayers, I found myself unable to play a consensus tier 1 deck for the environment.  I was shoved into a spot where I had to try to change my deck up to take advantage of the new meta.  I do think this is valuable experience, but I also think my playskills are weak enough that they need to be tuned while playing a very competitive deck.  It also pushes me back towards one of my old weaknesses, and that’s not playing the best decks, but instead playing with pet cards / decks.

I’d like to have the option of branching into multiple formats for this reason.  Also…it would be great to not have to rely on being able to make the standard tournaments, and be able to fall back to block.  Eventually maybe I can put together a go-to extended deck that allow me to jump into those events as well.  Basically, I need to play more, and have more options for decks to play when something I’m using gets worse as the result of a meta shift.  I need more formats to be able to do that.

Honestly, I’ve felt less and less connected to these areas of focus, particularly in the game game playskill ones, as time has gone by.  It’s probably getting near time to republish the fearless inventory and try to update it’s relevance.

Tournaments for the week:

My schedule is super unpredictable over the holiday weekend, except that I should have plenty of free time to play, but I’m just not sure when.

I’ve decided that I’m going to allow myself to become involved in block, if I can get together a decent deck, in order to play in more tournaments, experiment with different deck types, and get ready for Lorwyn block rotation.

I’m may also play in limited tournaments, but in general I’m only playing limited if I absolutely cannot make anything else or I have the packs lying around, because it’s too costly.

I will still, for the most part, play standard.

My goal is to play at least three tournaments this week, since I haven’t managed more than one for two weeks in a row.

The Deck

I’m still lost.  5cc got me a 2-2, which is ok for my rating, but tied for last as far as prizes go.  I played it and the 5c bloodbraid deck that I linked last week in the tourney practice room a lot.  I got to the point where I’m never losing in that room with 5cc, but bloodbraid is wierd.  I don’t really like the deck and I think the one I copied is misbuilt, 4-0 or not.  I tend to agree with the article authors who have said that cramming bloodbraid into 5cc or cramming cryptic and cruel into a 5 color aggro deck is just not a good idea.  The mana stinks, and having a cryptic and a bloodbraid in your hand and having to decide what to do based on what you can actually cast on turn 4 is annoying.

I will say that by yesterday evening, I was pretty much never losing in this room with 5cc.  I felt very in control, and shriekmaw has been fantastic as removal and a fallback finisher when cloudthresher can’t get there or my one angel gets destroyed.  I’ve been very underwhelmed by halo maindeck.  I’ll probably shake it up a little bit and take it into another daily, next chance I get.  I want to see if becoming more comfortable with what this altered version can do does anything to my ability to win.

I think if I want to play bloodbraid, I need to sit down and get a better version of the deck, probably with an expensive mana base that’s about to rotate out.  If I’m going to buy expensive cards, I should just buy Baneslayers.  A voice in the back of my head keeps saying ‘You should start playing Lark again.’  I liked Gavin Verhey’s deck that he just lost in the finals of a ptq with.  At the same time, merfolk and faeries are his bad matchups, so, yeah, that doesn’t sound so great online right now.

Duotianshi continues to make the top 8 of PE after PE with his 5cc list, so I feel that even though it shows up less and less, it’s still a good deck and it can still compete in this meta.  I guess I’m sticking with it while trying out other decks when I can.

For block decks, I will probably gravitate towards something more aggro, as I need something that I can occasionally crank out wins with without beating myself constantly.  Also, I haven’t really ever played a competitive aggro deck, and I wonder how helpless I’ll feel when I’m not as in control of the match.  It’s a perspective I need to experience in any case.

Hopefully we’ll have a lot more updates this upcoming week, and I’ll have some fresher thoughts next time, due to more games played.

Daily #8

While the week didn’t live up to my tournament participation expectations (again), I did play in a daily event on Thursday.  My hopes were not high, given that I’ve struggled lately and was still trying to get my legs under me in tuning 5cc to be better in this meta.

Round 1 – Blightning

Seems like he’s playing the Flores list, and my deck does what it’s supposed to do as wall of reverence eventually goes home with cloudthresher until I have a lot of life.

Game 2 the protection from white stuff comes in, and he beats me up with stillmoon cavalier and shriekmaw (for my angel)

Game 3 he is color screwed for awhile which gets me far ahead and he can’t come back.

Matches 1-0, Games 2-1

Round 2 - U/W Lark

Game 1 I keep a 2 lander on the draw and never draw another land before dying with esper charm in hand.  I noted that I died to reveillark minions, and got ready to play against U/W Baneslayer.  That ended up being a huge mistake.

Game 2 is a drawn out affair.  The mistake I make is letting him resolve a late meddling mage which I didn’t really see as a must counter threat, and he sets it to cryptic, which surprises me.   He taps down to only 4 many up, and I try to draw out his counters  by casting thought hemmorage on him with tons of mana still up.  He resists the urge to counter, and I name baneslayer….which he doesn’t have.  He seems to be running straight up old school lark.  No archmage either.  Turns out he has the triple negate draw. *sigh*.

I see the 3 negates in his hand and realize I have no hope to resolve the identity crisis I was trying to sandbag.  I have cryptics and a broken in my hand.  He casts evoked lark and I can’t stop it, getting him back double mulldrifter and they and the mage beat me to death.

I felt outplayed and out meta’d, and my rating only dropped by 4, so I guess that guy was good.

Matches 1-1, Games 2-3

Round 3 -  Naya Aggro (Featuring bloodbraids, ram gangs, ranger of eos, nacatl, etc)

Game 1 he mulls to five and I get to baneslayer quickly and kill him.

Game 2  I keep a sort of speculative hand with too much land and a plumeviel.  It works out and I get to eventually put down the dual wall for 4 life a turn.  Then cloudthresher comes down and it becomes 7 life a turn.

He does stuff, I counter it…and regret it.  I run out of counters  and ajani comes down.  That will teach me to counter things I don’t absolutely have to against aggro decks .  With the board the way it was, I shouldn’t have been countering things like ram gang.  He taps down my thresher who was beating down,  and eventually blows up all my lands when I don’t draw any way to effect ajani.

I sandbag lands, knowing he might get there, and my board is too developed for him to overcome even with me starting over.  He manages to get some damage in and kill walls for awhile, but I draw more cards and get everything going again, getting back up to 8 mana.  I never drew cruel the whole game, and that was wierd with him at 5.  I eventually get a shriekmaw, which is unblockable against him, and it kills a nacatl and goes the rest of the way.

This game takes forever, but I’m very happy to be 2-1 and have a legit shot at prizes.

Matches 2-1, Games 4-3

Round 4 - UBr Faeries

When I realize what he’s playing I’m really happy, because my deck has 3 stags, 4 fallouts, and 3 cloudthreshers after board.  I can’t imagine he can beat that.

Game 1 I have a great hand with 3 lands, a castable esper charm, cryptic, fallout, and thresher.  Then…I proceeded to lose with this hand.  Looking back on the match, I played way too tentatively and I realize now that I honestly haven’t played against faeries in months.  I underestimated it, played way too cautiously, and lost.

I had what I needed to win and got outplayed.  Mistbind beat me to death while cloudthresher sat in my hand when I couldn’t find a way to get it out there without it being countered.  I had to blow my fallout on a turn 3 Jace.  I made note that I need to get my head on straight and be aggressive picking fights against faeries.

Game 2 I kept a sort of slow hand, drew both my thought hemmorages which I think was the worst card I had post board against this deck, and he got really aggressive, killing me before I could stabalize.

Faeries, in the hands of a good player, against someone who isn’t in the right mental space, can, in fact, beat 5cc with 10 dedicated hate cards.

So, that was very frustrating, but I have some mistake fodder to review and correct my play with.  Additionally, I at least get some rating points out of the whole thing, and feel like my deck is at least viable.

On the other hand, I lost to both ‘bad matchups’ that my deck was supposedly metagamed to do a better job of beating.  I would have won the matches I won with a stock list, and lost the matches I lost with a stock list.  That begs the question…’why aren’t I playing a stock list?’.  I never saw a baneslayer angel on the other side of the board, the creature I was primarily concerned about.

Matches 2-2, Games 4-5

For the record, here’s what I played:

Creatures
1 Baneslayer Angel
2 Cloudthresher
3 Plumeveil
2 Shriekmaw
3 Wall of Reverence

Instants
3 Broken Ambitions
4 Cryptic Command
4 Esper Charm
1 Makeshift Mannequin
4 Volcanic Fallout

Enchantments

1 Runed Halo

Planeswalkers
1 Jace Beleren

Sorceries
2 Cruel Ultimatum
2 Thought Hemorrhage

Land
2 Vivid Crag
4 Vivid Creek
3 Vivid Marsh
3 Vivid Grove
2 Island
1 Mystic Gate
1 Exotic Orchard
1 Cascade Bluffs
4 Sunken Ruins
2 Flooded Grove
4 Reflecting Pool

Sideboard
2 Ajani Vengeant
2 Identity Crisis
1 Jace Beleren
1 Cloudthresher
1 Pithing Needle
2 Essence Scatter
1 Runed Halo
3 Great Sable Stag
2 Hallowed Burial