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