Subject: German Nationals Report Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 10:20:41 EDT From: Ezkeel2517@aol.com To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com Hey there.. It's been some time since i wrote one of these, but i thought the Nationals might be worth it... The format was TeTeSt Rochester Draft on day one, type 2 on saturday and then top 8 on sunday. The weeks before nationals we (mostly Kai Budde and I) had pretty much settled on our draft strategy, which was to avoid green and basically everything with a casting of more than four..blue appeared to be the way to go, with white or black for shadows.As it turns out, none of that really worked out for me, but i still went 5-1 in draft and i felt i should have gone 6-0.On to the report : Table 1 : They were calling out tables and i heard "less experienced player" after L.E.P. being called out, hoping i could get a few BYE players at my table.Instead i got to sit at number 6, being fed by Janosch Kuehn, Peer Kroeger and Thorsten Fehrentz, another stromg player...none of them took blue, and since i could not get anything at position 6 anyway, i started by establishing my position, hogging everything blue in sight, stuff like manta riders, giant crab, shimmering wings...The two guys at 7 and 8 both don't see a single blue card in the first round, yet both decide to draft "spoilers" like counterspell and capsize as first picks..so much for reading and controlling drafts...My deck ended up strong anyway, with giants galore : 2 spindrifts 1 hammerhead (as i said, 3 guys with blue) 1 fireslinger 1 mistfolk 1 rootwater hunter 1 cloud spirit 1 sac-to-draw sliver 1 patchwork gnomes 1 lightning elemental 1 dream prowler 2 flowstone giant 1 sandstone warrior..IMHO still the weakest giant, never was very good..it is a defensive card, and defense just loses 1 lowland giant 1 mawcor 1 shock..picked over silver wyvern, which raised eyebrows... 1 tahngarths rage 1 flowstone blade 1 seething anger..won 2 of 7 duels 1 mana leak 1 twitch 1 gaseous form cards i boarded : 2nd gaseous form, giant crab, 2nd hammerhead round 1 : guy sitting to my left who took blue...I win round 2 : Peer Kroeger, RedGreen, 2 searing touch, 2 rampant growth ( card i fear, since he will be too slow without it), fan, he did pass up a 6th pick constant mists in the last booster.. don't remember this too well, i won one with spindrifts, and the other were in kind of a stalemate i drew seethe to go with my dream prowler and 12 lands.. round 3 : Gregor Wernet..solid player with a god-deck, I hear blue-white is even better when you open Orim and Tradewind, i still pull it out with my 3 tims, which will hurt any deck, but blue-white shadows and cloud spirits really don't like slingers.. Table 2 : We are Table 1, which i expect to be easier than a lot of the 2-1 tables, a recurring phenomenon..the players i fear are across or behind me, the draft order is , for all germans reading this : thorsten busch frederic prigge ME frank adler gunnar refsdal gottlieb yeh martin luedecke stefan leppert Anyhow, to make this a little shorter, i don't see any blue and draft a sligh deck with 2 conscripts, FOUR flunkies, acidic sliver, 2 dauthi horror, 2 pit imps (REALLY good in this deck), thunder, shock, magmasaur and a solid creature base with 20 creatures... I beat frank adler (teammate, btw) in round 1, he lets me go first, a case could be made for that vs other decks, but when i have 2 flunkies and 2 conscripts on the table when he plays his third land, he realizes that me may have been better off playing first. I lose a close one to stefan leppert, smack him down game 1, lose to turn 2 cop red cause i couldnt draw Pimps or horrors, lose to manascrew game 3 i beat gottlieb yeh, who incidentally played land, cursed scroll 3 out of 3 games, because he makes a crucial error in game 3.. So I am 5-1 after draft and need to go 4-2 in type 2 to make top 8...I really was going to play Sligh, but figure that lots of the good players at the top tables would be playing Kastle-Variants with disco-decks also being dominant...i figured both of these decktypes to be suboptimal matchups for sligh, and decide to play bloom, were i would have byes against Kastle (Guessed right), and should probably win one more game because bloom can just sometimes win one all by itself (guessed wrong)...anyway, i beat all 3 Kastles fairly easily, even when they did have good draws, and lose to bloom, 4color white with no pyros and daniel brickwell's sligh when i draw 44 cards and no bloom and 18 cards and nothing to draw with in games 1 and 2 respectively...i wasn't even very disappointed or mad though, i just can't get mad about type 2 anymore...call me a scrub, but i am really kind of tired of rock-paper- scissors... Anyhow, in the end, everyone from cologne scrubbed out at place 10-18, with Dirk Hein from Berlin winning Nationals (Congrats), and Janosch Kuehn and Daniel Brickwell making repeat Top 4s..I did think it was kind of scary how poor all the drafters were at Nationals...Even some of the top players drafted poorly IMHO... On the other hand there is always type 2 to make up for lack of skill... Dirk Baberowski Replies to EZKEEL2517@aol.com