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.