I might be in the wrong buisness here…

Yup… as predictable as a specialist role player’s choice of character, this trimester’s Magic the Gathering Pre-release tournament was upon us this weekend.

I originally started writing this at 7h00 am this morning before going to the tournament, but my wife ran out of coffee. I therefore put on my husband Superhero suit and went to get her some of Tim Horton’s as all our grocery stores are still closed before 8h00 AM on a Sunday morning (I’m a tea person myself, but I live but to serve, plus she was giving me a whole gaming day to myself!. Thanks luv!).

So by the time I got back, the kids were up and wanted to get some daddy time before I left. I never got to write that post about how Magic the Gathering had slipped in my hobbies’ priority list, (behind D&D, the blog, the forum and Wow) and how I was, once again, totally unprepared for the tournament.

Good thing I didn’t write that piece because I managed to win the tournament again…

I’m starting to wonder why I write about RPGs…. Maybe, I should try out to be a featured writer at StarCity Games or something.

This post is my stab at doing a tournament report. Sorry to all RPG fans, I swear I won’t do more than four times a year…

I went to pick Yan, my Magic the Gathering partner-in-crime, at 8h30 AM on this blistery cold January morning.

We drove on to Carta Magica, Montreal’s main DCI sanctioned store. As Sundays are the second Pre-release tournament days, the attendance was light (24 participants).

We registered and got our foily Promo card. Stef joined us and the Old Geeks Squad was complete!

The tournament was to be a 4 rounds, sealed deck (i.e. you build your 40 cards deck with the 90 cards given to you) event. The prize structure was very simple: Win all 4 rounds, get 10 booster packs (150 cards), anyone else got 2 booster packs (worth about 4,50$ each).

We got our cards and were allowed 30 minutes to build our decks (I since then merged my deck in my card pool so I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of my deck construction).

For those who actually care about these things, here is my deck building strategy:

• I open all cards and sort them by color without reading them.
• I look at each color pile and sort the cards in ‘Playables’ and ‘Not-playables’ sub piles.
• I look more closely at each ‘playable pile’ and look for BREAD cards (Bombs, Removal, Evasion, Assistants, Dregs).
• I chose the 2 best colors and think about ‘splashing’ bombs/removal of a third color (I usually do this if the card pool can’t support only 2 colors).
• I remove all colors I don’t use and all unplayables
• I re-sort all cards by mana cost to create a Mana Curve (A graph-like representation of the number of cards at each casting cost… hint, you want a thick middle and thin ends)
• I select the best 23-24 cards, making sure I have 16 or more creatures (as Magic Sealed decks are usually won with creatures)
• I re-sort the deck by color and I count the Mana symbol of each color.
• I chose the breakdown of the17 lands I add to the deck based on the color break down I get.
• This gives me a 40 or 41 card deck.

Today, I noticed I had a few very good white (Including quite a few bombs, flyers and removal) and Black (a lot of removal) cards. So I made a Kithkin, Shapeshifter, Elf, Goblin deck (This collection is very creature focused).

I won’t give you a play by play account of the tournament but I will relate a few ‘high’ points:

My first opponent was worried and fidgeting. I told him chill out as he had no idea if I was any good as we had never played against each other. He responded ” Well you might not remember but I played against you before… and you beat me to a pulp”…

Oh…

I must confess that I felt bad about that… (but also strangely flattered that I register on other players radars).

For what it’s worth, as I was playing against him (and beating him to a pulp again) I recognized his mannerisms and remembered him… kinda… 🙂

While playing my 1st opponent, I realized that my deck was an engine of destruction filled with far more synergies than I had seen during deck building. I felt that I might be able to take it to the top.

My second opponent was my good friend Stef. I really hate playing against buddies as we know that one of us will walk away without the prize. I’m more experienced, and more rules-obsessed, than Stef and I usually win in sealed deck games against him.

He won the 1st game (I kept a bad starting hand and he outplayed me) but I took the next two rather easily.

My third opponent was a very good player, and he exploited a mistake I did (I attacked with my star (but very fragile) creature into a blocker I forgot was there) and took the 1st game fair and square. I dispatched him rapidly in the second game.

The third game was excruciating for all as we were both down to our last lives (the goal of the game is to deal about 20 points of damage to your opponent).

It came down to a few key decision and it became clear that there was no room for mistakes. He made a slight one by sacrificing the wrong creature at the wrong time and I took the match by a slight margin. Relief!!!!!!

When the last round was called, only 3 players had perfect records, Yan, myself and another player. This meant that one of us had to be paired to a played that had lost one game already (and therefore had no chance of taking the big prizes).

Yan and I were both looking forward to dish it out against one another. We had faced each other off in prior tournaments but only in the early rounds. We had already agreed to split the prize 8:2 just to let the loser walk off with 4 boosters.

We weren’t paired together, I got paired down with the player who lost 1 round. My opponent was a much younger and less serious player than the one I had faced previously.

However, at that point in the tournaments, after three 50 min rounds, my mental faculties were frayed by the stress of losing, hunger from a missed lunch hour, and the mental efforts of staying focused for so long. I lost the 1st game, severely weakening my hopes of walking with the prize for a second time in a row (something that had never happened in 20+ tournaments).

I took a quick breather, re-focussed myself and proceeded to trash my opponent in the following two games.

I was very happy to win all these cards. I won’t buy any of the new collection as 12-13 boosters is what I usually buy from each.

It might all be a freakish coincidence that I open crazy good cards two events in a row. I might also have attained a level of play where my deck building skills have matured and I am finally able to avoid some key mistakes.

There is also the fact that Morning tide (the current collection) and it’s predecessor Lorewyn are Creature heavy sets, a theme I like a lot and am comfortable with.

Finally, there is the fact that I don’t care about my performance as much as before and maybe that’s the key.

Honestly I think it’s a little of all that.

So I’m magicked out for a while, and will lay down the competitive cards until next Spring.

I think I might look into joining a Gen Con event after all.

Thanks for sticking around, back to some RPG goodness tomorrow night.