Subject: GP Birmingham *44th* Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 09:53:29 EDT From: davebax@epo.e-mail.com To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com Dave Bax (Netherlands) *44th* GP Birmingham Arrived Friday afternoon with other Dutch guys, discovered Hôtel rooms abnormally high priced, luckily had a room book for me by a random English man, Steve 'Viagra' Easton, at a reasonable rate. We tested for a few hours, to decide between The Belgian Blue and WWu. The Belgian deck was clearly better, our deck lists varied by a couple of cards only (Noah choosing to go with 61 cards, Sven starting only one helm, me starting only two Forbids). We gave the deck the name 'Belgian Chocolate'. After that, a restless night, with Noah talking in his sleep about sideboard cards. Everyone else has complained about the delays etc, so I will not repeat them here. I had a bye first round, then into the tournament proper with very high hopes that the 8 Dutch/Belgian/Danish players playing 'chocolate' would make the top 16. Round 2 Philip Pettifer Trade/Awake A reasonable match up, however I just got blown away, can not explain why, I was always out countered on crucial plays and his awakening won the games. Nearly get a cheapo, we are deck checked and one of Philips rares are marked, he doesn't want to pay for a replacement so is given 10 mins to buy sleeves and resleeve ... I inwardly laugh in my evil way because I happened to know that none of the distributors/vendors had any sleeves on site! ..... 8 mins later Philip returns mumbling that he decided to buy a replacement rare, so no need to resleeve .... good decision PP !!! Match: 1-1 Round 3 B* (I only recorded his Initial, sorry) WW Fairly easy, block with sharks, counter cataclysms, bounce shadow, beat with flyer. Matches: 2-1 Round 4 Liz Keogh 'Death' An amusing match, with a mixture of light heartedness and strictness. I got smacked the first game by standard Scrags. The other games she had poor mana starts (and in one case did not improve) which seems the main weakness of the Death decks (see Darwin Castles semi-final match). Liz gave the impression of being rather masochistic (generally a nice trait in females): when she untaped a land that should have stayed taped, I just pointed to it and she immediately threw her hand up shouting for a judge to penalise her. Matches: 3-1 Round 5 Joao Malverio from Turkey WW The plan to counter cataclysms did not work well, he cast 9 in 3 games and 4 of them got through! Luckily for me, I always kept a little land in hand and always recovered faster than him. After his last cataclysm, he failed to draw land for the rest of the match, giving me an easy finish. Matches: 4-1 Round 5 Frenchman with initial 'L' probably Laclaverie Laurent MonoU The standings at this time (0900 Sunday morning) 27 players on 13+ and 59 players on 11+ with only 64 progressing it looked like a win was required for those on 4-1. However, the Dutch correctly deduced that drawing was on if only a handful decided to take this option. So, we sat at our tables and watched, I saw only one table agree a draw (Sven from Holland) so I offered my opponent the draw, he refused. Well, my Chess background reminded me that the only answer to a draw refusal was to go on and win, so I did 2-1. Matches: 5-1 Round 6 Craig Jones Mono Red Sat down opposite a frail, wimpy, nervous wreck ... great. He tells me he is embarrasses to have made the 2nd day, doesn't know how he made it etc etc great. Starts a mountain and pup ... on balance, great, we never bothered to test v mon red since we thought it would have little chance with all the WW about. Looking back on my notes I see I did him 1 damage in 2 games, he killed me in 7 turns game1 and 5 turns game2. What else can I say? Matches: 5-2 (ok, out of the final 8 unless the maths run perfect) Round 8 Manuel Bevand 'LD' with single spike creature. Game 1 he starts with two wasteland ... great. I start beatdown with a 2/1 flyer or two then the trouble hits the fan, LD=Land Destruction in this case! He got the jump on me with buyback LD and wasteland then the Erotic Portals did their job to the flyers .... game over. Between games I realise that he is playing a deck that Noah gave my girlfriend Marion to play in a PTQ a week before, I did not rate it much then, I rate it against mono Blue now though! Game 2 similar, he had some early Blossom+Erotic Portal action to draw cards and I think I remember seeing a Phoenix before I resigned. Oh yes, the single spike creature? A hedgehog (presumably a present from that Manuel lovingly squeezed before each game (mana screw aid??). Matches: 5-3 (a trickle down PT Rome place won't have energy to reach me) Round 9 Dirk Barberowski U(g?) I remembered his face as the guy we walked in with, him on crutches due to a torn ligament. Did not realise he was a winner or anything (I am too eager to judge peoples playing ability on first impressions) however, after I beat him down first game with a single flyer, he bounced back in the next game to crush me ... not sure, may have seen a Scrag in the 2nd game, third game I got a flyer out for 2 damage a turn, unfortunately he got first one then two grindstones churning against me. On his last turn, Dirk was at 2 and I had 6 cards in library which included 1 land and 2 artifacts, the bar-steward got the 2 blue of course and that was that, out of the money now! Matches: 5-4 (not a very impressive 2nd day) Round 10 Bye-bye 5 colour Colourless He did not show up, win by default. Matches 6-4 Round 11 John Larkin, Ireland, Blue. This was by far the most interesting and exciting match for me. Game 1 I got an early flyer that did the trip (as they say in Ireland) but a lot of interesting licid/allure/counter war action surrounding this. Game 2 I again had an early flyer but John got down an early dominator. I made a serious misjudgement here, John had a Medallion out and I was calculating this in possible uses of his licid, I was reminded after the match by John that, of course, medallion could not be used for this, silly me. Game 3 saw a lot of allures, a dominator, helm of possession play. The interesting play for me was the sideboard! In games 1 and 2 John hardly played a creature (maybe 2 licids and a tradewind) he had been out countering me (partly by number of counters and partly by better timing =skill?). I decided, since nothing at stake but pride and rating points, I would sideboard out my 9 counter spells and bring in 3*drifters 2*sharks 1*helm 3*interdict (some of this already in after game 1 of course). So game 3 saw me playing creature after creature and John a little puzzled about my not countering anything. I made a pretence of thinking about something in reaction to him using an allure, to which he asked "You want to use the Interdict tech?" but my only reply was the truth "Tech not available at this time, go". The match then hung in the balance (due to my throwing a Manakin away needlessly) with me in the lead damage wise but only doing 4-5 a turn while he was doing me 6. John went into slow mode, I called a judge to watch, John went even slower for the last two turns .... however he happily agreed he was slow/thinking and told the the judge he agree to extra turns after time if needed ...... the game ended naturally just about as time was called, so everything in order. Matches: 7-4 Not great but picked up a load of ranking points I suspect (John asked the next day about my rating, did not have the heart to tell him it had dropped to 1600 so I tried saying you don't want to know but he persisted, so I lied and said 1680 which already pissed him off ... I think John is/was about 1950). With regard to the rest of our group, Pepijn made 31st with a similar deck, beating Hovi and drawing with Buehler, Jakob got up to 16th with the same deck, Sven dropped a few rounds before the end, ended 57th. Jos Schreurs with trade/Awake ended 48th. Noah did not make the 2nd day (but he was already qualified for Rome following his PTQ win the day after his suspension ended). We were pleased to hear that Jean-Louis made top 8, the inventor of 90%+ of our chocolate deck. So we hung around for the quarter finals to watch him. The organisation failed a little because of the time problems, so the quarter finals took place in a small room above the main event, the semi's and final were to be moved to a hôtel. I only watched Jean-Louis v Darwin Castle. Unfortunately Jean-Louis was mana plagued throughout the match, Darwin demonstrated command of his deck and showed a LOT of patience which I could not hope to emulate (resisting on more than one occasion to cast living death v a taped out Blue opponent with 3-1 advantage in the graveyard ... preferring to keep his 2-1 advantage already in play. No incidents between players, however Darwin showed annoyance with the phrase to the judge "I would prefer you did not give my opponent visual clues" when the judge picked a very inopportune moment to turn Darwins graveyard sideways to read the text of Carrionette (soon after used to target a Standing Stones that would have blocked a Scrag). After this match, we went back to our own hôtel to draft (minus me, who hates foreign card drafts). To our amusement we discovered that our hôtel was the very one that the last 4 was moving to! I got myself a nice chair between the two semifinal games but just before the start got bullied out of it by Carl Crook muttering something about being a judge (Darwin got p'd off a couple more times with the table judge, the same one from the quarter finals ... once about keeping track of land and another time the two players, the table judge and Kim Eikefet (robbed of 64th spot first day fame) taking notes for Duellist all had different life totals for the players (well spotted and intervened from sidelines Carl). Darwin walked the first game, the second he put in less effort ... since his opponent Kai Budde from Germany managed to expose a couple of cards during shuffle of DC's deck and instead of drawing cards drew a game loss. Game3, Darwin Mulligan'd and his crony quipped that Mulliganing down to 0 cards would give Darwin greater chance of another free game if Kai had to shuffle after each Mulligan! Unfortunately for him, Darwin must have prayed so much to the mana Gods before arrival that they now showered him with mana, more mana, mox diamonds, mana a scroll rack or two and mana .... both of the last games I think Darwin took sub optimal hands after Mulligan, used the scroll rack for 4-5 cards and found-----> you guessed it, 4-5 more mana! No contest really. Darwin blew up at Kai over use of Scroll Rack. I will not bore you with the detail but while I understand Darwins reaction, I have only seen Kai play as a gentleman (of course he is German, so anything is possible ;-) so I felt a little sorry for Kai when Darwin accused him of trying to pull a cheapo. Kai was in the wrong but I am sure completely unintentionally so. Did not hang about for all of final (0300+), had a couple of drinks with with random Belgians (and Mr. 'GP' Bruno is getting more and more random in his choice of company these days;-) Somewhat amused that the Red deck made it ... well stayed Craig, beneath that mild mannered exterior lives a true SuperGirl! (well, get the hair cut and I will call you SuperMan). Flew home the next day, sitting next to Noah (who is semi scared of flying) ..... the best part of the trip was coming into land and you know that moment when the wheels drop and the flaps/slats extend? There is a sort of 'Ber..bump' noise, well Noah froze and came out with an expression that only a magic Nerd could: "oh oh, double warning, game loss!" Cheers, Dave Bax props: Jean Louis D'Hondt for inspiring us with a deck with potential : everyone, no big fights, de/re sleeving, cheapo attempts on me : the suggestion by someone else that second day qualification (GP and PT) should be based on points only, eg 12/18 for 6 rounds or 13/21 for 7 rounds. : Carl for doing his best within constraints put upon him. slops: having to register for 6th round day1 at 0800 day2! : Birmingham hôtel prices! : Carl for causing me to lose a £5 that if an opponent took a creature of mine that I controlled from the start of turn and I immediately took control back that it had no sickness. : Carl for not letting me register as "European" : Carl for taking my prime position chair away from me in semi's.