Saturday 18 April 2009

A brief report on regionals

By Jim Marlow

Hey everyone,

Im writing this fresh of the back of going 2-2-1 in a pretty hurrendous day that involved going 1-2-1 in regionals, then 1-2'ing a draft that was a total cockup.

I did some last minute testing before regionals, and some less than perfect results made me feel a bit uneasy about my deck. I have heard a lot of people say that reveillark is just not good enough. I still think its one of the best decks in standard, but my realization is that it kind of needs to all come together, and in a tournament where a loss and a draw probably meant no spot at Nats, this was a worry.

Hilarious, my first 2 rounds i ended up 0-1-1 - losing to one of the guys playing a G/W token deck that i like quite a lot, and also drawing against matt kitchen's kind of odd deck. I was forced to mulligan in 4 out my first 6 games, which annoyed me, and the odd matchups which i felt could have gone my way just didnt this time around. I was pretty bummed about these 2 matches, but i thought i would play to 2 losses anyway to maybe stem a ratings bleed.

Round 3 i played against red deck wins, forgive me for forgetting the name of the opponant, but i had played him this year at Sheffield champs, and remembered him as both playing red deck wins, and making lots of mistakes. Luckily, well not so much on the RDW front, neither had changed, and when he decided not to attack with a demigod of revenge because i had a stillmoon cavalier, my sower of temptation made light work of him.

My fourth round was against a hilarious noggle (yes noggle!!, amused - jim) deck, which he told me only contained commons and uncommons because his deck got stolen from Fanboy 3 in Manchester (which comes as a total suprise, the shop is probably the nicest in the north, and Dave is a hero). Game 1 i stabilised on 1, and managed to turn it around. Game 2 he managed turns 2 and 3 hellspark elemental, turn 4 unearth them. I was on 8 for a long while. After this i managed to get him to 0 cards, had some guys, i think some reveillark, sneaky ninja says: i have a small penis, shanagens went on. I let an end of turn shock resolve to put me to 6, he draws and banefires me for 6.....urgh.

He then asked me how the rating system worked, so i guess i well and truly got my ring busted opened then, so much for a ratings salvage.

I got a bit annoyed at the results, but im not too much of a hard loser, because i know winning unwinnable matches is the stone cold nuts. I signed right up as the 8th man in a draft, and so i thought i might be ok to do well at something today.

The draft was stupid!

Well im pretty sure everyone i spoke to was well aware, but my first 4 picks of pack 1 put me into esper, with good red cards going left...so imagine my suprise when i found myself shipping red cards back right pack 2. Luckily for me the guy to my left had tried to force epser after opening a scourglass. We both did badly as a consequence, and i guess its testimony to the importance of well given and recieved signals, in both directions. Never mind, i made play errors as well and went 1-2, what you gonna do, eh?


Well my reveillarks are almost certainly put away for the rest of the regionals series, and i will most likely be playing something with spectral procession and cloudgoat ranger. Having said that, i think i accidently put my playsets of both in the bin today when i was binning some commons from the draft, so thats a shame (if anyone has either for trade, im looking for them!)

This is my latest concoction, based upon the g/w deck that got a nationasl invitation today


4 x figure of destiny
4 x noble heirarch
4 x knight of meadowgrain
4 x kitchen finks
4 x wilt leaf liege
4 x cloudgoat ranger

4 x path to exile
4 x spectral procession
2 x garruk
2 x ajani goldmane
1 x loxodon warhammer

4 x windbrisk heights
4 x treetop village
4 x mutavault
4 x brushland
2 x woodedbastion
5 x plains

Sideboard
Burrenton forge tender x 3
Martial coup x 3
Stillmoon cavalier x 4
Celestial purge x 3
Cloudthresher x 2

This is pretty janky, and im still wondering if there is any reason at all to be playing this over b/w or just ordinary kithkin. That said, i think the manlands provide a huge problem in a format defined as those decks with wrath, or those that hope their opponant doesnt draw it. What do people think?

Until next time

Jim

As always, feel free to comment on anything about this article, or anything unrelated to magic whatsoever. If you would like to contribute to the TLM blog, please email any ideas, articles, pictures or anything else to ss07jm@leeds.ac.uk

1 comment:

  1. The reason to play the GW tokens deck is access to Overruns, which are pretty good if your opp isn't playing Volcanic Fallout or Cryptic Command

    ReplyDelete