Subject: PTQ Chicago T4 Report Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 12:11:41 EDT From: JLee862009@aol.com To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com I think sealed deck qualifiers have too much luck involved, and, as evidenced by this report (which is based on PTQ Akron, OH, on August 29), players can make the finals with good decks, and good players can fail to make it by receiving horrible decks. This should be obvious to many readers. It is balanced somewhat by the fact that you have to construct the deck, and I was told several times that bad players slaughtered the cards they received by turning god packs into horrible decks. One of my favorite quotes someone told me that day was (sorry I forgot who told me): Q: "How many cards are in your deck?" A: "I don't know". Well on to the day's events...I arrive about a half and hour before the tournament starts, and since there was also a qualifier in Columbus that same day, I did not expect that many people, and there weren't. I found out later that there were only 63 people. I felt that if I received a decent deck and avoided mana screw I would have a decent chance. The day started off with me shaking my head as we registered decks because the deck I was registering was insanely good (more on this later). The person sitting across from me, John Kenney, was also registering an insane deck. This sucks because in the last couple of qualifiers, I played with mediocre decks that had a couple of decent cards but could not compete with the power decks no matter how bad the player playing them was. So we all talked about how good or bad the decks we registered were, and then they announced that 7-8 people would be getting their decks back before they handed out the random ones. Well I sat there watching Eric Taylor playtest a Type 1 doomsday deck against John Marks who was mindplaying (making up the moves, not actually playing the deck) type 2 sligh against him (with a suboptimal draw) when they announced the last person to receive their deck back: "John Lee"...WOW, I was getting my deck back! This is my lucky day! As I looked at my cards I lamented the fact that I could not play white as my second primary color because I only had 4 swamps and 4 plains. That sucked. I looked at my cards and lands in disbelief for about 5-7 minutes thinking that perhaps this was not my lucky day after all because the best deck I could construct would not happen. This is because you receive only 5 more basic lands which meant I would have to go 7 swamps and 6 plains which would not be enough. I think the best way to play sealed deck is to go 2 primary colors with a splash of a third (2-3 cards with 4 at the most only if you have, say a dual land or 2, and if you are playing green e.g. rampant growth, harrow, or skyshroud elf...etc.). This way you don't lose a lot of games to color screw. You may have to play weaker cards this way but your deck will be more consistent and therefore not lose the games because you didn't draw the right land. I've won many games in the past because my opponents were color screwed and I've lost many games in the past to color screw when I didn't know that playing 3 evenly distributed colors is not the best way to go. Anyway I decided that I would have to play white as my third color and I looked at red and blue to see which would be my second primary color. My cards were so good that all 5 colors were strong. I could play any combination and come up with a decent deck (more on this later). Well it looked like that red would be the best choice because of the removal and several combos that I had (more on this later as well). So I went with this deck: Black (the strongest color - 9 cards) Dauthi Horror Dauthi Slayer Dauthi Marauder Dauthi Jackal (the dauthi brothers decided to pay me a visit today) Servant of Volrath Serpent Warrior Screeching Harpy (man look at the previous 7 creatures!!!) Evincar's Justice (gamebreaker...good removal at worst...direct damage even) Corpse Dance (barokenn!!!) Red (9) Mogg Fanatic Flowstone Hellion Wall of Diffusion Mage Il-Vec Sabretooth Wyvern Aftershock Tahngarth's Rage Fling Seething Anger If you can't tell already I have Corpse Dance Fanatic combo, as well as Corpse Dance Hellion...if Hellion doesn't go to the graveyard before end of turn I can kill it myself by making it 6/0 :) White (3) Kor Chant Pacifism Master Decoy Artifacts (2) Bottle Gnomes (yes Corpse Dance combo...this deck was silly) Patchwork Gnomes (the gnomes brothers were also with me today) 7 swamps (3 swamps added) 7 mountains (2 mountains added) 3 plains When I thought about it the red was probably better because of the combos and also seething anger is amazing with evasion (which I had a lot of). I'll give you my sideboard later because that is another story :) First round: This guy played well but my deck was too good. First game: I play Marauder...he plays some blue shadow creature but I have Kor Chant in my hand. So I wait until he plays something else...he does...he plays a soltari lancer. I then attack, he blocks with the blue guy, and I redirect the damage to the lancer. Kor Chant is the ray of command of rath cycle. I start seething my Marauder and he can't do anything about it...game. Second game: I don't remember the details but I cast Kor Chant again so I win. 1-0 Second round: Game 1: I play first turn land. My opponent plays first turn carnophage. I play second turn land. He plays second turn spinal graft attack for 5!!!! I play third turn patchwork gnomes. He attack again next turn and I have to think. Well I take it and I go down to 10 already on third turn!!!. Well I play servant of volrath and double block next turn but he continues to vomit creatures and I lose. Game 2: I don't sideboard. I only sideboarded about once this whole day. He plays first turn carnophage again!!!! He gets me to about 6 or so but my deck is much better in the late game than his due to buyback spells so I recover and win. Game 3: First turn carnophage!!!! &%$#@!*&. But I am prepared for spinal graft because I have mountain and tahngarth's rage in hand. But he doesn't play spinal graft. Again he serves early beatings and I recover. I don't remember too many of the details. 2-0 Third round: Game 1: This game is interesting. My opponent has lab rats goblin bombardment combo going. It's really annoying and I manage to make the game go long because lab rats buyback is slow. Anyway he gets me down to six and he will kill me next turn. He has 2 lab rats and 2 other creatures. Next turn he can lab rat buyback, lab rat w/0 buyback and bombard me for six. So I have to win this turn but he is at 8. How is this possible? I can't get through because I have no evasion and he has 4 blockers. I win this game. I play corpse dance without buyback with Flowstone Hellion as my top creature in the graveyard. I then seething anger my Hellion without buyback. My opponent is puzzled and does nothing. I then make my Hellion 8/1 (using the Hellion's flowstone ability). Now my opponent is alarmed and bombards the Hellion with a lab rat in response. I fling the Hellion at him in response!!!! Now you can't respond to the fling because it is a sacrifice, so responding to the fling will do nothing (unless it's a counterspell of course). Wow, I pull the game out of my ass because my deck is just silly. Game 2: He gets lab rats goblin bombardment AGAIN!!! This time I can't recover as he is blocking my creatures or killing the ones with evasion every turn. He plays puppet strings this game as well. If he didn't have puppet strings I might have won. Game 3: I now sideboard disenchant and it proves to be the gamebreaker. He gets that damn goblin bombardment out again !! but he doesn't play lab rats this game thank god. Anyway I have done early damage because my creatures are better than his but then we hit a snag as he casts puppet strings again and plated rootwalla. Since I am the aggressor he has to leave the plated rootwalla on D. But after I declare an attack and he taps my hellion, I disenchant his puppet strings. He kills my hellion with a fling. But I will have a chance because I have the almighty kor chant. I proceed to kor chant the rootwalla to itself (after he makes it 6/6) when I attack with the servant of volrath and now I have a chance. I then kill him with the servant and patchwork gnomes. The endgame was interesting because there was only a few minutes left and he started to stall. The couple of turns before the last turn he didn't stall so I give him credit for that but the last turn he does stall until time runs out. I am going to kill him the next turn and the judge Dave Troost who was watching decides that he had nothing to think about (my opponent had no non-land permanents in play and he only had lands in his hand) so I get my next turn and win. The maddening thing was I could have killed him before he had a chance to stall but I was rushing my moves because time was running out. I seething angered my servant and attacked with servant and gnomes for 8 to put him at 2 but I could have killed him instead by playing seething anger wihout buyback and then casting evincar's justice. But I pulled it out anyway....whew. 3-0. The third match was probably the best deck although that's probably only because he got goblin bombardment lab rat combo 2 out of 3 games. Fourth round: Game 1: My opponent tells me he is not good at magic and is just lucky and has a good deck. And a good deck he indeed does have. I actually mess this game up because I was nervous on one play which made me really angry!! I was nervous because I was at the number 1 table and several people were watching including the almighty Jason Opalka (although not so almighty in T2 anymore because he doesn't play at Reality Recess anymore...Jason is watching because he's already qualified for Chicago due to his limited ranking...If he's the K at anything it's draft not type 2). What happened was I played master decoy and like a total idiot I forgot to leave a white untapped on one turn which allowed his wayward soul to attack. The sum total mistake was 2 points of additional damage (take 3+1 instead of 1+1) which would be my undoing and he kills me with sonic burst when I am at 3 or 4. If I didn't forget to leave the white untapped I would have won with a shadow creature. Game 2: I don't remember but I outrace him with shadow creatures. His deck is amazing. It is primarily blue black with cheap flyers and shadow up the wazoo. There will be ample evidence in the third game. Game 3: He plays foul imp. Then he attacks and plays some 2/2 ground creature. I don't do anything until 4th turn when I play screeching harpy. For some reason he doesn't attack with foul imp. Fortunately I am playing someone who isn't that good at magic. I have an evincar's justice in hand and mage il-vec and I am considering whether to play mage or wait until he hopefully plays more 2/2's. My patience pays off when he plays 1 more creature when I have 6 land...but doesn't attack because of my regenerating harpy...and then when I have 7 land he plays 2 more (one with shadow, one with flying)!!!! He has 5 creatures all 2/2 or less. (all of them had power 2..like I said his deck was a wrecking ball) I was hoping for an extra swamp so I could justice and regenerate my harpy. But evincar's justice with buyback killing 1 one of my creatures and 5 of his is a pretty decent trade. Needless to say I win. 4-0. At this point I find out that there are 4 undefeateds so we all double-draw into the final 8! Wow...only 4 rounds and I'm in at 4-0-2. Comments on my sideboard: My cards were so good I made the following deck out of my remaining cards and I still had decent cards that I couldn't fit into 2 DECKS!!!! Elvish Berserker Skyshroud Ranger Crazed Armodon Trumpeting Armodon Bayou Dragonfly Avenging Druid Spike Worker Spike Rogue Spike Colony Spike Drone (I had 3 families today) Needle Storm Broken Fall Whiptongue Frog Scrivener Rootwater Hunter Wind Drake School of Piranha Spindrift Drake Thalakos Mistfolk Sift Angelic Blessing Temper Smite (<-note white cards that didn't make the cut into my deck). I could have played this deck and would have been fairly pleased although it is a bit lacking in removal. I could also have done insane spike corpse dance things if I played green/black today!!!! The rest of my sideboard: Spirit Mirror!!!!!! (Couldn't make the cut because of double white) Honor Guard Elite Javelineer Disenchant (only card sideboarded all day) COP Green Warmth COP Shadow (I never sideboarded the COP's or Warmth because I didn't know what to take out...the disenchant vs. puppet strings/goblin bombardment HAD to go in, however) Samite Blessing Stone Rain Monstrous Hound Shatter Shattering Pulse Spinal Graft Morgue Thrull Megrim Mortuary Scare Tactics Fade Away Steal Enchantment Respite The Final 8: The finals were me, Jean-Luc Park (I hope I spelled it right), John Hunka, Jason Marks, Nathan something, and 3 random guys who got in probably because they were lucky or had amazing decks. The top seed was a random guy who decided to choose first at the rochester draft. Since he didn't know...John Hunka then told him he should have decided to choose somewhere between 3rd to 5th, which I agree with. I think I like 5th because your picks are going up every round....first 5th, then 4th, then 3rd...etc. Anyway the seating went like this: 1: Random Guy 2: Nathan 3: Jean-Luc Park 4: Me 5: Random Guy #2 (I will call him Mr. Soul Warden - you will see why later) 6: John Hunka 7: Battletech player 8: Jason Marks Basically what happened was the first pack had a lot of blue cards, so 2 out of the first 3 picks were blue. Noticing this I decided that I probably shouldn't go blue since the other guys were going blue. There were only 2 good white cards and since I was getting a late pick this round as well I took soltari lancer. This gambit paid off. The white sucked ass for the first few packs which meant hardly anyone was going white. The only people going white were John Hunka and me. Because the random guys seemed to have no pattern in what they were picking I ended tempest pretty badly. I had 6 white cards and a fireslinger and the rest of my cards were jank. I knew I was white after tempest but I didn't know my second color. John Hunka was also getting the shaft because of the randomness picks of the random guys so he was white also but didn't know his second color as well (or so I thought...it turned out he would go red/white because of a late lowland giant pick.) Jason looked pretty red/black and Jean-Luc was blue/black. Nathan looked pretty green/red and who knows what the random guys were doing? I couldn't figure it out. Top seed picked a first turn fighting drake but then proceeded to go 4 colors it seemed. Anyway John Hunka started to give me the shaft because he got some amazing removal in stronghold (including 2 shocks). I started to take a mix of red and white creatures (the fireslinger I had made me lean toward red). I got lucky as there were plenty of good red cards even though 4 of us were fighting over the red (Hunka, me, Jason Marks and Nathan). It turned out that I thought I had the most consistently fast, cheap aggressive deck but I wish I had a couple more removal. John Hunka ended up with 10 removal!!!! but his creatures sucked bones. He thought his deck was bad but I feared it...(shackles, pacifism, master decoy, 2 shocks, sonic burst, etc.) Here are some more notes on bad drafting...the guy on my left seemed to be going blue but I had no idea what his second color was (he probably didn't know either). Anyway there was a wayward soul in the pack which I thought he was going to take but he took soul warden!!!! Now Soul Warden is awesome but you don't take it first pick when you aren't playing white and it's exodus already! He had only taken 1 white card previously which was a pursuit of knowledge!!! Also another memorable bad pick was time warp first pick!!! Mr. Battletech took it because it was rare. Wow, we had 3 players I didn't have to worry about because their decks were horrible but they also screwed up the draft process by making Hunka do the switch from black/blue/white to red/white. And I didn't know my second color until stronghold. Here's my deck in no particular order: Honor Guard Repentance Wall of Nets Elite Javlineer Soltari Lancer Shield Mate Advance Scout Pacifism Charging Paladin Treasure Hunter Standing Troops Bandage Spirit-en-Kor Soltari Trooper Mogg Flunkies Flowstone Shambler Flowstone Blade Fireslinger Reckless Ogre x 2 Flowstone Hellion Shock Dizzying Gaze 9 plains 8 mountains Like I said I was pleased with the fast creature attack but I wish I had more removal (Jean-Luc counterdrafted a Kor Chant I could have had) and Hunka was fortunate that he was 4th seat during the stronghold and got all the red/white removal in those packs before they hit me. This turned out to be the difference as will be evidenced in the matches. The rest of my cards were: Invulnerability Clergy-en-Vec Welkin Hawk Reaping the Rewards Dizzying Gaze Mogg Maniac Mogg Bombers Furnace Spirit Cinder Crawler Mnemonic Sliver Dream Cache Shadow Rift Mana Leak Contempt Rootwater Mystic Spinal Graft Scare Tactics Avenging Druid Frog Tongue Overgrowth Verdigris Skyshroud Troopers First round: I go against Jason Marks. I don't remember too many of the details but one game I was spitting out my ground creatures like no-one's business and I almost hit a snag when he had Darkling Stalker and Clot Sliver to stop the beatdown. But the tides turned when I had 1 shadow creature and 4 others including the amazing Advance Scout. I then played Hellion and I was able to give first strike to whoever I needed which eventually wittled his defenses down. He even had 3 regenerators (the third was screeching harpy but the fact that he couldn't keep up paying mana (playing creatures and regenerating them) meant that I got through. I win 2-0. Second round: John Hunka. Damn...the person I feared the most because he was the best player left and he had the most removal. Game 1: This game I will never forget because I lost to a crucial error of strategy. I started spitting out creatures as usual and he played armored pegasus with maniacal rage and started hitting me for 3 every turn so I was on a clock but so was he. Eventually the crucial move was when I had a shackled 2/2 (I don't remember which), a mogg flunkies, a shield mate, and a flowstone shambler. I had just cast the flunkies and attacked for 4 with the shambler and shield mate. On his turn he was stuck at 2 plains and 1 mountain and started to think. I had even more creatures in my hand including a hellion so I was confident in my chances. After at least a couple of minutes he decided to shock my shambler. Since I was kind of dozing at this point I didn't really think about it and let it die. I figured I might have to save my shield mate for when he eventually plays another creature. He doesn't do anything else but attack so it's my turn. I attack for 4 again and play some random 2/2. Then on his turn he plays an armored sliver and attacks again (maniacal rage means he can't block). I am at 8 at this point. On my next turn I get my 5th land so I play Flowstone Hellion. As he has only the armored sliver and only 3 land in play I attack with shield mate, flunkies, a 2/2, and flowstone hellion. He has to block the Hellion or die. The attack puts him at 2 and he will be dead next turn. I'm at 8...that's pretty safe, right? WRONG Next turn he plays mountain, attacks for 3 and then shocks me, and then sonic bursts me. DAMN. If I had saved the shambler with my shield mate the turn he shocked it the game would have been totally different. I think I would have won because it would be at least 2 more points of additional damage. Game 2: I mulligan. My 6-card draw is 4 mountains and white cards. I eventually draw plains but he has armored pegasus maniacal rage again! He also has master decoy which stops my Spirit-en-Kor. The only other creatures I play are Advance Scout and Wall of Nets which do not provide beatings. I put pacifism on his pegasus but he plays flickering ward with pro-white so I lose. If he didn't have master decoy I would have had a chance. Eventually John Hunka wins against Jean-Luc. Hunka did 5 points of damage with watchdog!!! Like I said, John's creatures sucked huge ass but when you have 10 removal I guess it doesn't really matter. The only beefy creature he had I think was Lowland Giant. John Hunka is an excellent player and I don't recall ever seeing him make a mistake and he deserved to win. He is also a level 2 judge so he's fluent in the rules. Good job John. John Lee went 2-3 drop in PT Chicago '97.