Subject: 2. Searching for Jon Finkel Renewed Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1998 10:11:40 -0400 From: "eeyoo" Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy (written in geekese) First of all, I'd like to say that Jon Finkel.... I'd like to respond to that by offering this piece of advice; 'Never believe a word John Shuler says. Not one.' This is not to say that he's not trustworthy, or that he's not a highly personable, interesting and forthright person. It's just that everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. Ok, let that statement resolve. Now, Jon Finkel. When you're Alan Webster, or anyone except Jon Finkel, the way it works is this way. You're playing some crappy living death deck against sligh. On turn 2, you play Chill. On your opponents turn he plays land, scalding tongs. Your turn you play land, something. Your opponent goes land, fanatic. You sigh. There's no way THIS GUY can keep playing land and cards. You untap, play a Tradewind. He untaps, plays LAND, FIRESLINGER. You untap, forget to play land, forget to play cards, etc. Your Chill has stalled him for exactly 0 turns. You lose. When you're Jon Finkel, you play Chill, your opponent ends up discarding 3 turns in a row due to manascrew, you Lobotomize him and even tho he has a PORTCULLIS in his hand and you're playing Living Death, you remove his SHOCKS from the game simply because if he gets 1 more land he could play them, and by removing his Shocks you show him just how crappy his hand is compared to yours. Then you play more land and simply tap 8 mana and PLAY a Verdant FATTY FORCE, and your opponent wants to quit the game of Magic and take up something simple like Chess, or Rugby. Jamie Wakefield said to me tonight that some people are just so consistently phenomenally lucky that it's like part of their play skill, and I'm beginning to feel that's true. Sometimes it reminds me of that X-Files with the child chess prodigy, who won because he read his opponent's minds, not cause he was actually a chess master. The kid refused to play against a chess computer because he knew he couldn't beat it since he couldn't read it's thoughts. Not that I believe that, but it sure seems that way sometimes. So we build some Rath decks to take down to Grand Prix. Fritz has a cool G/W deck that walks all over sligh and hatred, but loses horribly to Awakening. Kevin has a modified version of my Writer's Block (U/B featuring the awesome Scrivener!), I am planning on playing the Discard Nazi, and Don of course has no deck. We arrive, meet some guys, and Nick from Hammers shows up and immediately starts ragging on me cause he and some of the Hitmen made and tested my Discard Nazi and said it lost to Hatred all day. I'm stunned. Then I hear about a few of the changes they made to it and explain how the deck loses to THE card Hatred, but unless it appears in the first 4-5 turns it won't lose to the THE deck Hatred. A little simple math shows that Hatred doesn't show up in the first 5 turns with mana to play it 2 out of 3 games, and after my sideboarded edicts show up, culling the weak is a lot weaker card. So Nick decides to play Writer's Block. Then Don decides to. Fuck. I don't want to play it, but there have been too many times that someone else played what I thought was my second best deck and finished significantly higher than me for it to be coincidence. So I reluctantly construct a sideboard. We head out to the gaming hall to get into a few drafts, and I draft a Asian Rathi, followed by Rolling Thunder, Magmasaur, Flame wave and other misc. Fat. I unfortunately draw all my fat against a guy with 2nd turn Legacy's allure. I hear that card's good. Grand Prix We've all been to tournaments. You hang around, play, talk about manascrew (your opponent's or yours, depending on who won), play, talk about god draws (ditto), play, talk about lucky pairings (ibid), and so on. A few highlights. I'm playing Dennis Coats (W, Pork barrel style; i.e. Fatties), he has a helm of possession (controlling my Coffin Queen), and 2 STAUNCH fatties. I'm at 1, with NO creatures and 5 mana. This is how I won. I capsize his Helm b4 his attack. He shrugs, attacks with his fatties. I tap 2 black mana, play a card and for some reason he sacrifices one of his guys. I block the other with the queen. Then I untap, play SCRIVENER, get edict back, edict again next turn and then counter e v e r y creature he tries to play. We end up drawing the match unfortunately. Why Lobotomy blows. At least 1/2 the time you play lobotomy, it sucks ass. 40% of the time it's good, and 10% of the time it's great. Me, 4th turn. Playing against living death, I cast Lobotomy. His hand is Verdant force, 4 land. BFD. He untaps, draws, plays Lobotomy taking my COUNTERSPELLS! He lobotomizes again in a different game when I have Otto in play. I discard all my good cards to Otto, he takes the 1 Capsize in my deck and leaves me my Battle Gnome. I smash him with a Huge Automoton. So anyway, my deck sucked ass. Overall, it was about a 50% deck (exactly I think), and Don managed to lose to 2 Awakening decks which I feel Writers Block should beat every time. Some more about John Shuler. He is a nice guy. He GAVE me a Scroll Rack and traded me another for a Caldera Lake even after I castigated him publicly. He was also the anchor in the team sealed deck, where he, Kevin Tamlyn and I ( aka Team JACKELOPE HERD), crushed all opponents and emerged victorious and significantly richer. John Shuler, he sure knows Beatdown. ;o) A special thanks to Nat Fairbanks for being the coolest judge in the world, in addition to the only one considerate enough to take time out of his life to post regional tournament listings. I feel sorry for guys who aren't in New England. The title of this report is sort of a reference to the best movie about tournament level Magic ever; Searching for Bobby Fisher. While on the surface it may seem to be about Chess, in reality it has some extraordinarily valuable lessons about all competitive endeavors. Lawrence Fishburne, for example, screaming 'Don't play the board, play the man! I'm your opponent! Beat ME!' Or Ben Kingsley simplifying the essence of chess by asking his prodigy to solve a problem and then sweeping the pieces to the floor, the empty board glaringly emphasizing that fundamentally the game is about player vs. player. Incidentally, John Shuler didn't win A game in the team sealed. He lost one game to his opponents turn 2 Wall of Razors because he couldn't draw one of the 7 ways in his deck to kill it. When you are a good player, you draw what you need. When you are a bad player, you don't. I would definately drawn Evincars Justice if I'd had his deck. That card loves me. But I wouldn't have drawn the Armodons. Not that I'm a good player; I'm a bad player too. How else could I lose to Sligh playing turn 2 Chill? John wants to come to VT to take EVERY SINGLE ONE of my DCI points, but we need financial help in setting him up with a place to live for the 6 months it'll take to play the 25,000 games we estimate it'll take. Anyone interested in tickets to watch this royal beating should send money to Team Jackelope Herd R.F.D. #2, Box 671 Northeast Kingdom, VT 09891 All donations will be accepted and awarded tickets, but tickets for the final day (when my DCI points actually reach 0) will be on a cash only first come first serve basis on that day. We'll keep you posted. Alan Webster Has nearly 1800 DCI points to dump Will be playing Jackelope Herd in LOTS of those games