From: rsh9395@is.nyu.edu (Robert S. Hahn) Subject: Re: Tournament Report - NYMagic 2 March 1996 Date: 5 Mar 1996 02:02:19 GMT Also sprach Joshua E Randall (randall@morpheus.cis.yale.edu): Thanks to Josh for the long and detailed report on the NYMagic tournament. I was there, as he described, and I do think there are some things to consider. : Rob, as I mentioned earlier, had a first round bye. He played against : a fairly standard White Weenie deck in the second round, and lost due : to some poor draws plus Armageddon. He later entered another Type II : tournament, in which I believe he did fairly well, eventually losing : to someone playing a Pox deck. I both think that Pox is a strong, : strong card, almost as powerful as Balance. I will watch for it to be : built into similar decks as the old Balance decks. The first game I played was... well, it was just one of those games. I had ten plus ways to deal with creatures, and I drew NONE of them. In the second game, I had fourteen plus ways to deal with creatures, and I drew ONE card. It happens sometimes. Doesn't happen often enough to justify shelving my boring U/W deck, imho, but it does happen. :) With respect to the side-tourney, my draws were more average and I pretty much did my thing. The U/W deck is designed to win 2 out of 3 games, especially with sideboarding. That's pretty much what happened. One Land Tax/Land Edge deck died HARD when I got out the Ivory Tower and countered the Land's Edge. Then I Capped the other Edges. He died hard -- though he wouldn't concede despite my overwhelming superiority in resources and the Sceptre/Book/Mill combo and multiple counterspells in hand, etc. A white weenie died hard when I got the average draw -- one plow, a Wrath before I died, counter the Armageddon, Control a Knight and kill another Knight, put out an Angel, etc. Second game, I got the first turn Tax, second turn Ivory Tower, and protected it from Disenchants -- then I cruised to victory with 40+ life, having Capped him four times. Again, he would not give up -- though I had to apologize for the boring games. A Necropotence deck was my next opponent. I got lucky here -- there's just no doubt about that. He drew ONE land in the first sixteen turns. By that time, I had eight lands, multiple counters, an Aeolipile, a Serrated Arrows, and TWO Serra Angels pounding him. The second game, post-sideboarding, confirmed what I thought. With the switches, the U/W can put up a fight against the nemesis Necropotence decks. Is it easy? No -- hardly. But putting out a Mishra keeps one alive for a while. Arrows just hurt the Order-based strategy badly, and you can save counters for the key cards: Ivory Tower, Zuran Orb, Gloom, Nev's Disk, etc. The game was tighter than the first one, but he eventually died when he couldn't get enough offense out to prevent my life from reaching sky-high limits with Ivory Tower. The Pox deck was strong -- and I think there are improvements that can be made to make it stronger. But again, post-sideboarding my anti-black suite in, I had a VERY good chance to win. It came down to a lucky draw on his part. He had two Pox in hand, but 6 life, while I was at 2 and had a Karma on my side. He had 3 swamps and 2 City of Brass, however and would die soon if something didn't happen. All of his creatures were history, and I had an Icy Manipulator on my side which I was using to tap his City of Brass. He played one Pox to destroy his 2 swamps. That brought me to 1 life and him to 4 -- I had the Icy and the Karma and I played a Mishra's Factory. During his upkeep, I tapped the City of Brass, bringing him to 2 life with the Karma kicking in the one damage. He didn't have the mana to play the Pox and he would lose during my turn. He draws... a Dark Ritual... He plays Pox, and I die, while he lives with 1 life. It was the only remaining Dark Ritual. It was a great game, and a loss I do not begrudge. Neither one of us made any significant mistakes and we played well. Again, though, luck smiled on the other side and he won. : So my second NYMagic experience was as bad as my first one was good. I : don't think my deck did as well as it could have. In any case, it hardly : matters, as the un-restriction of Feldon's Cane and Recall effectively : destroys Millstone as a viable strategy. Additionally, NYMagic : announced that next month's tournament will be a qualifier for the : Long Beach Pro Tourney, and as such will use the baroque deck : construction rules from the first Pro event (five cards from each : expansion, cards to be played by the latest wording, yadda yadda). I must disagree with you here. I think U/W may have benefitted most from the unrestriction of Recall and Feldon's Cane. Consider: I can now have 5 Ivory Towers against weenie decks. Or, I can have multiple Balances, or Zuran Orbs. Mono-black has no such choice. White weenie has no such choice. I can Balance and throw cards in the graveyard -- after all, they're all subject to Recall. I can now feel comfortable going with 3 Plowshares -- with Recalls, I can have seven. It adds an element of flexibility to U/W that didn't exist before -- and with Land Tax hopefully supplying you with land to use as Recall-fodder (and with multiple Feldon's Canes to keep recycling the land), it is not unreasonable to expect that I will be able to Cap an opponent seven, eight times in a game. Is Millstone dead? Maybe. Using the Millstone to win a game may be a little more difficult -- but does that change the calculus of Millstone psychologically? I don't think so. I will probably play with one Millstone anyway and go up on the number of Sceptres -- now I'll have to win with the Sceptre-lock, made much easier by the fact that I can Recall multiple counterspells multiple times. Also, I will be playing with Tormod's Crypt. Most likely, so will my opponent. Except that only blue has the power to say "No" to the Crypt and to Recall the Crypt a multiple times if the opponent is playing with multiple Canes. In conclusion, the death of a Millstone strategy is yet undecided. Only time will tell what the results of the latest un-banning are. I for one look forward to the new era. But given the new unrestriction of Recall, I think U/W may very well become the dominant deck in Type II: Recall, Land Tax, Balance -- arguably, three of the most powerful cards in Type II and two of them are now unrestricted. Peace, and may your vacations be more like holidays! -The Sophist -- Robert S. Hahn rsh9395@is.nyu.edu NYU Law School, '97 http://pages.nyu.edu/~rsh9395/index.html Politics, Pool, Magic, Shadowfist, Film, Literature, Poetry.... Who has time for work?