Prerelease Weekend been and gone, and I’d managed to rack up a 5-1 record at the Saturday event, picking up a Damnation and 6 rating points in the process, and managing to lose a sealed pool complete with extirpate. 2 Weeks later and it was back to the Bishop for a Planar-Chaos-packed weekend, with a triple set draft on the Friday, Sealed on Saturday with drafts to follow, and a 2HG on the Sunday (with more drafts to follow). Sadly, however, the Saturday release clashed with the Oxford legacy event, and so some of the top Bishopers were lost to Crispin and co. Fortunately for me this meant that the title of prerelease was mine for the taking (ps it was predicted on the forum that I would come 1st and Tom Van dorsse-something-or-other would come 2nd, so if you get freaked out easily, DON’T READ THE ENDING), and so off to the Bishop I was bright n early(ish) on Saturday morning. Most of the regulars apart from the regulars that weren’t there were there, including the group of pesky kids (Callum, Ollie etc) that often do well at these events (I blame it on their super lucky pools), but there were also a lot of new faces, which is nice to see. It’s not that nice when they don’t turn up to any other events, but hey, it’s a start. I sat myself down at a table with mostly people I knew, cracked open my packs and delved into the pool to see what wonderful combos I could come up with from the pile of new shiny cards sitting in front of me. As I opened the packs, Callum and Ollie stuck to true form and starting flashing every single bomb they opened, of which there were many – Owen stood out as having a full suite of bomby red rares from Planar Chaos with Magus of the Arena, Torchling and Pyrohemia to name but a few. However, unlike usual, I too appeared to be sat behind a rather, as a Magic geek would say, ‘redonculous pool’.
For your delectation:
White 1 Momentary Blink |
Blue 1 Wistful Thinking |
Black 1 Null Profusion |
Red 1 Firemaw Kavu |
Green 1 Might of Old Krosa |
Other 1 Dormant Sliver (thought I’d fill the space) |
I know some people like to see how they’d build a deck from a pool they see before knowing how the owner did, so I’ll give you a picture of a blast furnace I made for my Chemistry homework to distract you from the decklist I’m going to post after it. The Scragnoth was kind of.. a joke – while building my deck I had an abundance of 3-drops and was complaining that I didn’t want to play 2 of a certain card (no giveaways yet... except Scragnoth, but he didn’t really fit in the deck anyway), so somebody said ‘you have no 5 drops, run Scragnoth’, so I said ‘you know what? I will!’ and the rest was history.
Anyway, back to the blast furnace (don’t ask what tuyères are, I was copying from a book).
And now that you’ve had sufficient time to admire that, here’s the offending deck:
“Wait... How many bombs?”By Matteo Orsini Jones |
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1 Whitemane Lions |
1 Chromatic Star 8 Plains |
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Decks built, cards sleeved and insults and mockeries exchanged, and we were all ready to go into round one of five, to battle it out for the ultimate goal of becoming Bishop Games Release event champion! (it sounded better when I said it to myself). My first round opponent was Tomasz Pakula – he isn’t one of the FNM or TNM regulars at Bishop Games, but he often / always turns up for the bigger set release events.
I lost the roll and so Tomasz elected to play first, and after my first hand was thrown back for six hopefully better cards, I kept a debatable hand of 2 Mountain, 1 Plains, Weathered Bodyguards and 2 Calciderm. Well I guess it wasn’t that debatable as I could drop and unmorph my morph if I drew any form of land over the next 3 turns, but it was heavily dependent on drawing the second plains.
Tomasz’s first play was a second turn Revered Dead, which didn’t exactly pile on the pressure, and gave me ample time to draw something more useful than the mountain and Saltblast I drew in the first 2 turns. However, when Tomasz then stuck a Dust Corona on top of his ^almost^ unkillable 1/1 regenner and hit me for 3, my unmorphed bodyguards wasn’t looking too helpful. However after taking 6 off the little man my bodyguards managed to unmorph and start taking the hits, and the fact that Tomasz wasn’t playing much else was helping my defensive plan. Next turn came a Pallid Mycoderm to help gum up the ground even more with his freshly made attacker, but with a plains off the top next turn and 2 Calciderms and a Saltblast later, not much gumming up was needed, so Tomasz decided the best plan was to scoop up the cards and move onto the next game.
However the next game didn’t go too well for him. This time it was his turn to send back his hand and hope for a better one, and he decided to stick at 6 cards with a 2 land opener on the play. Unfortunately for him he didn’t see the third land, and even more unfortunately for him I couldn’t have had a better start, with a 2nd turn Knight of the Holy Nimbus, 3rd turn Sulfur Elemental (for a 3/1 flanking hard to kill Knight), 4th turn Coal Stoker into Jaya. A scoop from Tomasz quickly ensued and I was off to check on the other regulars’ progress.
Match result: 2-0
Matches so far: 1-0
For some reason or other I can’t remember a whole lot from this match, and I can only remember one of the colours Callum was in – green. The reason I remember this particular side of his deck is that he managed to get out a Mire Boa EVERY FRICKIN’ TIME I smacked down a turn 4 Calciderm (yes I’m complaining about turn 4 Calciderms on my side of the board, get over it – he did have 2 Boas in the deck...), allowing him to block away unimpeded and wait for my 5/5 unkillable beast to slowly fade away.
Mine and Callum’s decks were both equally bomby, and I also remember playing 3 very close games, in which the losing player was only a turn or so away from winning themselves. The third game I do remember slightly better, because of the slightly dramatic (and lucky ending). Both me and Callum were hitting low life (me on 3 him on 6), I had out a tapped Calciderm with 2 vanishing counters on, Callum had out a Mire Boa and it was his turn. Callum figured that Calciderm wouldn’t be able to become any bigger than a 5/5 due to his untargetability, and so attacked with his Mire Boa. This put me at one life, and I knew that with a Calciderm that was only going to hang around for one more turn, I needed to draw something very useful very soon, or at least more useful than the 2 lands I was holding (Jaya or Stormbind meat). Keeping my calm I drew the top card, and couldn’t help but smile when I saw the Fortify in my hand. Barring a Healing Leaves from Callum (I trusted him to be a better player than that), the game was mine, so I swung, he changed his life to 1, and I flashed him a Fortify. Callum wasn’t best pleased as you may imagine after I told him the Fortify came straight off the top, but then again any form of creature bigger than a X/2 would have helped, as would a Stormbind. Callum also wasn’t happy as he showed me the 2 Seal of Primordium in his hand – in the second game he boarded them in against Stormbind and they didn’t see the light of day while I burned him out, then the third game he drew both and I failed to see any form of artefact or enchantment. Such is life.
Match result: 2-1
Matches so far: 2-0
Round 3: Tom Van Doorsselaere: WR
Tom is relatively new to Bishop Games, having been here only since the start of the year, but has become a regular since, and his game has improved a lot through weekly drafts. After the first round Bogi and myself had gone through Tom’s pool to see what we could come up with it, and decided his pool was strong and deep enough to go for only 2 colours, splashing for a third – before he was heavily in 3 colours to include all his bombs, but cards like Blood Knight were making his manabase somewhat shaky. Though we told him that, being a release event, he could change his deck between rounds as ‘nobody would be watching’, Tom decided to be morally right and stick to his original deck for the first game of each round.
This meant that in the first game against me he did in fact regret having a shaky manabase, and an early Stormbind on my side of the board didn’t give him much time to try and sort out his lands. After the first game, Tom grinned and said ‘sorry, I might need to board a bit’ (knowing that I knew exactly what deck he was subbing into). Boarding done and my wrists getting sore from the shuffling, and we moved swiftly onto game 2. I don’t remember much from this game, except that it went long and the game went to Tom in the end as I failed to deal with a Castle Raptors in the air – this led to a comment from me along the lines of ‘I guess this version of the deck works better then’.
The third game also went long. We both started off by making plenty little men, attacking a bit, blocking a bit, and killing each other’s creatures a bit. A Blood Knight staved off a Calciderm for a while, and we both ended up stalling out. Until, that is, Tom got bored of the creature stall, and decided to drop Pyrohemia and nuke the whole board, then drop the dreaded Castle raptors two turns later. Being on less life than Tom at this point the Sulfur Elemental I’d flashed out at the end of Tom’s last turn seemed to be doing more harm than good, and before I knew it I was at 1 life, with Paradise Plume on white in play, and Momentary Blink in hand. As in the second round against Callum, I ripped off the top card of my library and grinned as I saw Aven Riftwatcher.
I swung in with Sulfur Elemental and Dropped the Riftwatcher, gaining 3 with Plume: life total 4. In Tom’s Turn he decided to Saltblast my Elemental, turning my Aven into a chumper rather than a trader – life total 5. Tom then attacked into my Aven, and with Damage on the Stack I Blinked, gaining a total of 5 life – life total 10. Frustrated at my sudden swing in life, Tom passed the turn – now at 6 life it seemed like the game had swung suddenly in my favour. Smiling, I said ‘and who said life gain was bad’. We both went into defensive mode after that point, but once again my top decking proved to be better than his as Jaya came straight off the top. As if I didn’t need her, the next card was Stormbind (to be fair there were only around 10 cards left in the deck), but I didn’t need to play it before Tom scooped.
Match result: 2-1
Matches so far: 3-0
W00t! This put me at 1st place, being the only one to have gone 3-0 (there were quite a few draws), and put me in a great position to go on to win the whole event. 1 more win and I may have even had a guaranteed 1st place, but with my history with tiebreakers they didn’t seem the best thing to be relying on.
Round 4: Pete: UR
Pete is a fairly regular regular to the bishop, but living in Kenilworth and prioritising rock concerts and the like over Magic (I know, crazy), means he only turns up to the odd weekend event. Pete also always makes it seem like he’s in a bad position by looking at his hand and moaning, then winning the turn after – against Marco at the Guildpact Prerelease he debated keeping a hand for quite a while, then went turn 1 Scorched Rusalka, turn 2 Mauler, turn 3 Mauler. And, as usual, he started doing it against me – time to start worrying for me. I started off well, with a 1st turn star, 2nd turn Holy Nimbus and 3rd turn dreaded Stormbind. Once again, Pete started moaning and said ‘I really don’t see how I’m going to win this one’, as he merely suspended an Aeon Chronicler with 2 counters and passed the turn, leaving himself open to yet more beats.
Next turn Pete then managed to kill both my men and cast Bust, Armaggedoning the board, leaving me with a lonely 
Stormbind and him with a Suspended Chronicler coming in to beat me the turn after for quite a sum.
I, however, managed to draw another land (with one in hand) and Stormbind him for the final 4 a turn before the Aeon man came in for lethal.
Game 2 I don’t remember a whole lot about, other than that it took a while and Pete eventually won.
Game 3 started with not much time left on the round, so I was relying on my deck to give me the aggro start I needed to finish Pete off before time was called. This plan Seemed promising as I suspended a Peregrine second turn and made a 3rd turn Jaya against Pete’s heavy blue deck. Jaya was swiftly put to rest, but a 4th turn Calciderm meant Pete was being hit for 3 in the air and an untargettable 5 on the ground on turn 5. He failed to make a creature off his 6 mana (with Prismatic Lens), and simply passed the turn, allowing him to take yet another 8 damage, putting him on 4. In my post Combat main phase I debated for a fair while whether I should hardcast my Bodyguards or morph it, and deciding that the mana might be more useful next turn I hardcast it and passed the turn. Pete, however, wasn’t simply mana flooded and dropped a Draining Whelk into my 6-casting cost man. Ouch. Pete then made a hardcast Chronicler, making him safe from 1 piece of removal, and passed the turn back. For the first time in the whole Tournament I drew my Scragnoth – and for the first time in the tournament I was playing against a heavy blue deck. An attack later and Pete was at 1 life, and all he could do was, with great pain, drop a 3/3 chumping Hammerheim Deadeye, with the only target being his 7/7 Draining Whelk. ‘Strong’, I commented, as I attacked into his Giant and watched my Scragnoth chew it up. Back to Pete’s turn and he drew his top card, hoping for something better than the 2 for 0 he’s just given me, but saw nothing. Pete extended the hand, and with only a few minutes left on the round the match was mine.
Match result: 2-1
Matches so far: 4-0
W00t! At 4-0 I couldn’t come lower than second – There was a person at 3-0-1, and beating me would put him straight to first. Still, he’s 14, he wasn’t going to beat me... surely…
Round 5: Owen Barry (not Barry Owen): R/x
Owen is also fairly new but has been playing fairly regularly, and was telling me before the match that I should scoop, as he’s never won an event. I replied with ‘well I’ve never lost one, so maybe you should scoop’. Before the round he also had a call from a rather angry parent asking him when he was going to finish, and made me chuckle when, in trying to make them keep shopping for another hour or so, said ‘Look, if I win this...’ paused, looked at me, and started again, ‘When I win this match, I’m going to win the event’. I replied with ‘don’t worry, that won’t happen – I’ll just rip you apart with Jaya and/or Stormbind.’
And that’s exactly what I did – an early Stormbind game 1 and an early-ish Jaya game 2 finished him off in quick succession, and the pyrohemia he showed me both games did not a lot against my Stormbind in the first game or my Calciderm and Jaya in the second game (well it killed Jaya, but all it did was speed up his death).
Match result: 2-0
Matches overall: 5-0
And back to that little prediction made at the start of the article – I did indeed come first (but we all knew that anyway), and even more wierdly, Tom did indeed come second at 4-1. Spookier still, halfway through the tournament a sudden gush of wind shot through the room with no open windows or doors, and a faint wailing was heard, which some said sounded like someone screaming ‘help’. Okay that last bit was all a lie, I was just making sure you weren’t asleep after reading 3,225 words of hardcore Magic.
Fun was had by all (except Richard who didn’t turn up in the end), and the event was well run as usual.
Signing off,
Matteo ‘Stormbind AND Jaya’ Orsini Jones.
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