Well, here I am again to offer you another dose of Magic chit-chat. If you are looking for format breaking theory and decklists, look away now <Rumours of a T2 decklist at the bottom of this page are completely unfounded>. There are far more qualified people on our wonderful site if you are after that kind of thing. You should hopefully be getting an idea of what I am all about by now – the inane chatterings of someone who can obviously talk a good game but has very little actual knowledge to impart. I am well aware of my niche-ness ;)
So, like a Suntail Hawk squaring off against Akroma herself, what topics will our intrepid writer be tackling today? Well today I am going to discuss, in no particular order, M-Fest, PT Geneva, Magic on TV, a very brief report on how I did at GPT Amsterdam a couple of weeks back and <if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you> an update on my pet project rogue deck of the moment.
M-Fest
Ok, is it totally sad that I am really looking forward to this already? I got my DCI pocket planner thing through a couple of days back and all I could think was ‘How far away is M-Fest?’ Many reasons for this I reckon…
As pathetic as this sound, I am really feeling quite settled in Twincast. It’s a good community to be involved in and you all seem like tip-top chappies. And I’m really looking forward to meeting you all. As the only Scotsman on the forum (I think anyway…) I also feel that it’s my responsibility to organise the Twincast night out when we are down there. This will probably involve a Wetherspoons, a cheesy student nightclub called ‘Charlie’s’ and staggering back to the venue at 3 o’clock to have a CoK block draft. All because Mark piped up with ‘I’m sure it can’t be as bad as we all remember!’ some point during the 14th of WKDs or whatever grouping of chemicals and alcohol are being imbibed at that time. On that note, what are the possibilities of holding a semi-official / semi-fun ‘Twincast’ tourney at Birmingham? It looks like it may be the first time the majority of the site will be together in one place. Would be good to have some kind of event where we all just get together for a laugh and flop some cards.
The other reason is that I’m a bit down on Magic at the moment. Well, not so much the game itself but playing it in my area. As previously noted, we have just changed TO recently and we are now playing in a shop in the town centre. Now I will say this about the TO – he’s not a bad guy necessarily. He just has the people skills of a carrot. And the shop owner in question couldn’t care less about Magic. He hosts us because it’s extra revenue for him. We play what he has. We had to draft RGD a couple of weeks back because ‘the supplier hadn’t got him TS in enough time’. That was an outright lie. He just hadn’t ordered it. And as also previously stated, I don’t see a lot of the people in my Magic group up here as ‘friends’. It’s getting to the point where sitting round a table with them for 4 hours on a Sunday just doesn’t appeal. It’s probably me. But then I log on here and I just get the feeling that I would actually enjoy drafting with the people who post on this forum. Either way, I am going to plug away here in Aberdeen and carry on envisaging M-Fest as some kind of Pearly Gates or Nirvana. Chris for St. Peter anyone?
PT Geneva
Rumours of an American demise in Magic seem greatly exaggerated methinks. Sure, Japan is the nation producing the vast majority of the talent but the Americans have been getting a hard time in a lot of quarters over recent months. Mr Hron confirms that this is a bit unnecessary. Of course he did have to rely on a colossal mistake by Takuya Osawa at the end of game 5 <dude, Spectral Force untaps when you have a black thing on the table – I mean seriously!> of a match which Ted Knutson described as ‘the best match I’ve ever seen’. From reading the match report it seems like it was a good, hard-fought battle but hardly the stuff we’ll be talking about in years to come.
And why is it that we always talk about the massive mistakes these guys make in major events? Recently we’ve had Edel at Kobe, Nassif at Worlds and now Osawa is under the spotlight. Seriously, if I ever even got a sniff of a PT Top 8 at any point in my life I would consider my Magic existence and everything I had every spent on it – both in time and money – to have been completely justified.
In other news, there were some very interesting drafting choices from the pros throughout the event. Kenji Tsumura, imho the best player in the world right now, took Harmonize over Stingscourer very early on in the PC pack of the top 8 draft. He was fully RG. In one of the earlier drafts, Willy Edel, who made top 8, first pack, first picked Amrou Seekers over Teferi! There was also an interesting group of German pros who played very few creatures (sometimes as low as 7) with as much removal as they could get there hands on. Methinks that would be very nervewracking indeed… I personally think it’s great that the pros haven’t ‘cracked’ TS, TS, PC yet. There are still a lot of differing opinions and draft strategies out there and that can only be good for the game overall.
Hellfire, that almost sounds like some info the Spikes out there may actually be interested in! Dangerous territory indeed for our intrepid reporter…
Magic on TV
I was reading an article by someone over the past week. Think it was on Londes but not 100% certain right now. Here’s an excerpt from it…
‘Randy Buehler noted the complex coverage that they already do online. “We are on the cutting edge of internet broadcasting,” he said. “Among other things, we’ve got four camera crews and a director on site. How many else can claim that? The internet, not television, is the future of broadcasting, and we’re leading our industry. That’s something to be proud of.”
Seemingly, way back in the dawns of time Magic was featured on ESPN. Now it isn’t. The article goes on to cite the rise of poker on TV over the last 5 years as a success story Wizards could ape. Now let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Even if it’s on TV, PT / GP coverage isn’t going to cause playing numbers to shoot through the roof. I don’t think it would have a detrimental effect on the game in any way, shape or form but to think the game we would love would explode worldwide to poker proportions would be naïve at best. That said, as I have discussed in a previous article, the people who play the game are a dedicated bunch. And we read a lot of Magic articles. I think that Magic coverage would be watched by a lot of Magic players. I know I certainly would.
And from watching the video coverage on mtg.com, it is very polished and well done. They obviously invest a lot of resources on the coverage in terms of time, manpower and sheer money. And the coverage seems to be getting better and better with every PT. Without knowing a lot about the technicalities, surely it wouldn’t be difficult to put this coverage onto an hour long programme each evening? I can’t imagine it would cost much more than they are already spending but I’m not sure. Obviously the US sports channels aren’t against the idea in theory if they have broadcasted Magic before.
Of course, it would be typical that they start broadcasting something and then don’t make it available to the European market via Eurosport or whatever. Ah, well we always have the joys of Torrent or eMule should that occur.
GPT Amsterdam
Myself and my good friend Brett travelled down to Dundee for this with silly notions that we might do well. How foolish were we. Before I go any further, do any of you guys practice 2HG Limited at all? This was only my second ever 2HG Limited and I think it showed. The last time I took part in one, it was kind of a giggle, not to be taken seriously so we weren’t too fussed about theory or who won or whatever. This time it was for a serious prize. We applied all the best Magic theory we could muster but in the end it all counted for naught.
I could go into all the gory details but I won’t. Our record after four rounds was 1-2-1. 4 points from 4 rounds. Ace. Honestly, our pool wasn’t great but it was at the very least a 2-2 if not better. We made some fundamental errors in judgement; Ignite Memories was resigned to the board as we didn’t have a lot of suspend cards. It wasn’t until we were driving back north that we even thought about that. I think what made it worse was the fact that we couldn’t blame luck or a dodgy pool or whatever. It was all our own fault. I think the pool would have struggled to make top 4 tbh but with a pair of more competent players and a bit of luck it might have.
2HG is meant to be a fairly ‘fun’ format imo, despite Wizards trying to push it to the top levels of tournament play. I left Dundee feeling fairly cheesed off at events. What made it worse was that Denise was off that day (I should clarify here that Denise gets two days off a week but she works in retail so those days can be any in the week – she probably gets a either a Friday, Saturday or Sunday off each week) so I made the active choice to leave her at home and go play Magic. As we headed back, I didn’t feel like I had had such a ‘fun’ day and felt more than a little guilty for having wasted the opportunity to spend a day with the missus.
Of course, had we won I would have been feeling considerably less guilty. We are a fickle bunch, eh?
Rogue Pet Project Decklist Thingy
As discussed on the forum a week or so back here’s a decklist I’ve been playing with…
4 Groundbreaker
4 Timbermare
3 Uktabi Drake (Watchwolf?)
4 Scryb Ranger
4 Whitemane Lion
4 BoP
3 Mangara of Condor
2 Llanowar Elf
4 WoG
3 Harmonise
3 Stonewood Invocation
+ 22 appropriate land
Having now played a few games with this, I really like it. On a God draw when you are on the play, you should be sat after turn three with 3 lands, a BoP, a Scryb Ranger and a Whitemane Lion in play with Mangara in hand and you opponent should have zero land.
How does it play in practice? Well the deck is stupidly synergistic. Every card fits well together with the possible exception of WoG. Still trying to figure out if the WoG is cuttable or not. It has good game against most blue / white control concoctions I’ve thrown it against. This deck likes to go long. What doesn’t it like? Fast aggro. Mono green doesn’t seem too tricky as it isn’t the most rapid of decks and Condemn in from the sideboard (still tweaking the board at the moment) really helps. Boros can be a problem though, which makes WoG a key card. I’m thinking it should maybe be in the board but from testing, game 1 against Boros is almost an auto-loss. Post board, it’s much better but then you have to win two games against a deck which just wins. The deck also doesn’t like a lot of discard. You need to be keeping as full a grip as possible. Mana Tithe from the board can be key here. A few key plays have been from a BoP enabled Tithe from the board. They just aren’t expecting it.
The curve still isn’t quite right and I’m not quite sure if the land / mana bug balance is quite there yet but I think this deck has real potential. All advice and opinions gratefully received. As soon as I get some more definitive results and tourney play with her I’ll let you know some hard stats.
And here we must sign off. Hopefully this hasn’t been too painful an experience for you and, as always, let me know what you think in the forums.
Dave <dreaming about M-Fest>
-Flame on-
PS - Momentary Blink now kills tokens? Seriously, wtf?
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