From: edt@admin.lsa.umich.edu (Eric Taylor)
Subject: Akron PTQ report
Date: 3 Aug 1997 16:53:33 GMT

Well, I qualified for Chicago at Akron, using a blue/black deck.
Strange to say, the other person who qualified, Ben Murray, was playing
black/red heavy discard -- and Ben had played me in Sandusky (where we
neither qualified, of course, why else continue in this mirvis-lite rat
race?), but he had been playing the "embryonic" blue and I had been
playing the black/red.  So we had both given up on our old decks and
sort of switched to the other's style.

My old style black/red had basically

4 hammer, 4 incinerate, 4 torch, 4 suq-ata, 4 talarum minotaur, 2
wildwire emissary, 4 stupor, 4 nekratal, 2 agonizing memories, 2 black
guildmage, 2 quicksand, 4 black/red suck lands, 8 swamps, 12 mountains
(plenty of mana for hammer-cursion), and the regular stuff in the
sideboard, chokes, biskellions, dark banishing, and some reign of
terror for maro-skin decks.

I didn't get to see what Ben's version looked like (we just split the
prize), because I didn't feel too much like playing any more games.  I
was really tired because my ride to Akron had stood me up at midnight
the night before the tournament.  The only way for me to get to the
tournament was to jury-rig the burnt-out electric system on my own
junker car, which I had to do with a flashlight in the middle of the
night before driving this unsafe carbon-monoxide seeping, gas-leaking
held together with rope and aluminum foil '81 rust-belt piece of crap
to Akron all night.  By the time I got to Akron at 8:30 in the morning,
all I really wanted was a whiskey and a cigarette.

The deck I used was what you might expect in black/blue,

4 waterspout, 4 man-o-war, 4 ophidian, 4 impulse, 4 dissipate, 4
powersink, 2 desertion, 4 stupor, 4 nekratal, 1 crypt rat, 3
quicksand, 4 black/blue suck lands, 8 swamp, 10 islands, and for a
sideboard, 3 disrupt, 2 biskellion, 2 more rats, 2 dark banishing, 2
boomerang, 2 mind harness, 2 phrexian furnace.

You know how you test decks, and you lay them out side by side, and
play your own deck against a variety of other decks open face?

Well, I had been doing this for my black/red, my blue/white, and some
other decks prior to Lansing, but what the hell, I kept losing.  It's
not so bad when you lose against another person, but you know that
things are really starting to suck when you are playing against nobody
but yourself -- and you're still losing.  After going miserable 3-3-1
in Lansing, I decided this time I would do it differently.  Instead of
testing my deck, I made it two days before the tournament, and the
first time I played it was during the ptq itself.  This meant of course
with no games played, that I was playing an undefeated deck!  My
strategy worked -- the deck continued undefeated for the entire PTQ.

Mike Flores was there.  I felt pretty bad for giving him some bad
advice for his deck while we in Columbus, and when I saw him in Akron I
tried to tell him how to fix my mistake.  He said "It's too late and
besides last minute changes never work."  I just thought to myself,
"Scrub alert."  Poor Mike.  Remember, when you get advice no matter who
the advice comes from to take it with a grain of salt.  A pro might
give you some advice which really sucks, and when he sees you lose,
he'll just go, "Ah, interesting." The person you have to trust the most
when building a deck is not the pro telling you what is good and bad
about the deck, but yourself -- because you're the one who is going to
play it -- and win or lose with the deck, not him.

In the final eight I unfortunately had to defeat the mad genius of
magic, Erik Lauer, and I did it the old fashioned way -- by getting
lucky.  In the first game, I had to discard 5 cards before drawing my
2nd land, and then proceeded to beat Erik down.  The mirvis-lite
environment is really wacky -- without necro or thawing glaciers or any
of the other ways to manipulate your own mana supply, you are really at
the mercy of your draw.  In this case, Erik's mana-glut was worse than
my mana-screw, even after giving him a five card lead.  In the second
game, I had "more-sies" -- I drew more counterspells than he had things
I wanted to counter, so I "more-sies"-ed him to death, which is weird
considering his deck had 4 more counters than mine.

One thing about this black/blue vs blue or other colors is that for a
variety of reasons the ophidian has a lot better synergy with black
than other colors in mirvis-lite.  In white of course, you don't have a
really good way to deal with creatures -- pacifism plus man-o-war =
what a combo.  The gossamer chains is a wonderful enchantment in
mirvis-lite -- but it doesn't work well with ophidian.  Or, if you
afterlife a creature, he can still block the 'fid for a turn.  Pure
mono-blue has a problem with any land creature.  The combo floodgate +
man-o-war has been much discredited as a good way to kill creatures.
Any fattie or blue creature can hold off your 'fid indefinitely.
Red/blue would seem to be the ideal partner of ophidian, but for some
reason the red changes the character of the deck too much, so that you
want to attack more for damage than for a card drawing.  The suq-ata
doesn't have the wait-and-block while I draw cards from my 'fid
character that the nekratal does.  I don't know if that's completely
it, but for whatever reason, my ophidians have never been happier in
mirvis-lite than in this black/blue deck.  In my final game of the
final four, by the 10th turn or so, I had an ophidian and a nekratal in
play, 9 cards in my hand, tons of land, and my opponent had 5 land, no
cards in play and no cards in his hand.  His deck got a slow start, so
I punished him.

World-class pros Chris Pikula and Worth Wollport were there strutting
around and playing in a big money draft against Jason Opalka and a
friend of his.  Chris was giving a good impression of an ATM, and
Worth's plays weren't enough to save their team for a humiliating
defeat.

--- Eric