Subject: PTQ Rome tourney report (2nd place) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 03:37:25 -0600 From: "Phoenix Comics NW " To: Frank, just got back from one of the last Rome PTQ's and I decided to write up a quick report. I doubt this info will be of much use to anyone since this weekend is probably the last time anyone will ever play rath-cycle constructed, but oh well there's not much on TV anyway ;-) The tournament was held in Edmonton and there were about 56 people in attendance. I headed North to Edmonton with my teammate Cory Bradshaw (the eventual winner) and our friend Rod. We play tested and crashed at a friend's place affectionately known as Hotel de Yen. I've been play testing Rath cycle for about two months now and felt I had a good understanding of the format. This did not however mean I had decided on a deck. I had played all the major arch-types and a couple rogue decks of our own design and had narrowed the choices to counter-phoenix, sligh or WW. Initially I liked trade-awake but found the number of double blue and double green spells in the deck hard to manage. A some-what fragile mana base also discouraged me from the living death deck (not to mention the fact that everyone has portcullis in the board). On Thursday Cory showed me the Donais/Krakhower(sp.?) mono blue deck from GP Austin. It looked interesting and very good meta-game wise. I had my first chance to play it at Yen's on Friday and after drawing virtually no land and losing five games straight with it I quickly gave up on it and decided to play one of the decks I had been testing for months and feel comfortable with. Cory and Rod however were having great success with it and both decided it was the deck to play. I had to choose between CMU's counter-phoenix, a really cool sligh deck of our team's design with 4 main deck spellshocks and 6 creature enchantments (2 giant strengths and 4 maniacles), and a WW deck with a lot of secret tech (Thanks, Dave). Our info on the meta game was predicting a lot of WW and counter-phoenix, some living death and no sligh. After much agonizing I decided to play WW. I really like counter-phoenix but don't like the head to head match-up. I feel that it goes to time limit too often and I didn't want any early draws. I felt there would be too much WW for sligh to win even though I loved our version of it. Sligh's power is very seductive. My teammate Roland played our version and very nearly made the finals. He went 4-2 losing in the 6th round to teammate Cory. I would know how that feels by the end of the tournament as well :-( So, WW it was. I played a version heavily influenced by play testing buddy Dave Sonnenberg. It had some great tech and I felt confident that I could outplay other WW players. I've played various WW decks for years and feel the way to win the matchup is to know when to make the switch from offense to defense and vice versa. Here's the deck: 4 priest 4 monk 4 visionary 4 paladin 4 warrior-en cor 4 soul warden 4 cataclysm 3 disenchant 3 repentance (really awesome against the field, takes out weavers, drifters, other weenies etc.. only tradewinds and the mighty hammerhead shark refused to repent) 2 flickering ward (the first star of the deck, put a blue ward on a pro red creature and counter-phoenix is in big trouble) 1 torture chamber 3 wastelands 20 plains sideboard 1 disenchant 2 torture chambers 2 helm of possession 4 portcullis 2 flickering wards (sided these in _alot_) 2 circle red 2 light of day So we got to the tournament site at Beyond Fantasy in Edmonton, met up with teammate Roland and team associate Dave, along with the other Calgary guys and some friends from Edmonton. By 11:00 we were off. Round 1 John from Edmonton B/U bridge/broach ? John had terrible luck, parising both games and just getting run over by shadow guys while his walls did nothing. Bad for him but I was happy to get a quick win under my belt. matches 1-0 games 2-0 Round 2 Sheldon from Edmonton WW/u As I said earlier I felt confident against other WW players and felt I outplayed Sheldon in a long first game and a quick second. In game one I felt Sheldon had an advantage in the ground combat for several turns but did not attack, playing too conservatively. He then let me attack with a visionary killing one of his propagandas even though he could have blocked. I only attacked because I had two more in my hand and thought I would trade this one off and get the next through. I thought he would realize his mistake next turn and block, but twice more he let it through until he had no propagandas and then on the next turn he decided to block it! I feel he lost the game on these series of turns even though the game went on for another 25 minutes or so. The other interesting thing about this game was that by turn 3 we both had 3 soul wardens in play!! I think he peaked at about 40 life and I was as high as 35! matches 2-0 games 4-0 Round 3 Tim from Edmonton U/B brooch/bridge/ertai Tim's a friend from Edmonton and we had just played a match between rounds without sideboards and he had beaten me 2-1, so I wasn't real happy about this one. I did have one more disenchant in the side so I hoped it would make the difference. Game one shadow guys are too much for Tim. Game two looks like it's going the some way but while at 2 life with no cards and three shadows staring him down, Tim calls on the top deck gods for a Bridge and he draws it!! I am not too worried however as I think I should be able to draw one of my sideboard cards or one of the 4 disenchants before it gets out of hand. Next turn Tim calls out "ERTAI" and draws....ERTAI !! WTF!! Now I'm in trouble. I have a couple chances later in the game to break the lock, but Tim has me in thrull surgeon recursion with megrim in play and puts me on the clock. I force him to tap ertai on his turn with disenchants, but can't top deck another one or a cataclysm or a helm when I need one so eventually I loose. Game three, Tim risks tapping out on turn four to get Tradewind lock and I cataclysm. Three turns later I play a helm, next turn I have Tradewind lock :-) I just go beatdown though, and it's over shortly. matches 3-0 games 6-1 Round 4 Ronan from Edmonton playing suicide black Game one I get a one wasteland draw and Paris. I then get a two wasteland draw and Paris again. One land and a bunch of two casting creatures. I'm dead before I get a second plains. I side in the lights of day and hope for the best. Game two, no land. I Paris to a good hand, or so I thought. I play plains and say go. He plays swamp, carnophage. I play plains, monk. He attacks with his phage and plays swamp, ritual, horror, slayer. I draw light of day and have the other two plains in my hand. I play plains, monk and attack for two. I think I'm in good shape, with light of day next turn and a blocker for the slayer this turn. He pays for his phages and plays swamp, dread of night. I lose my guys but have disenchant in hand. He attacks, casts culling the week on the phage and hatreds me out. I am really mad to lose to this stupid combo, especially when he made at least two play mistakes in the two games and they only lasted a combined 8 turns (forgot to pay for a phage in game 1). I try not to show how upset I am and he apologizes for winning in such a way. He seemed like a nice kid and fortunately I have plenty of time to cool down and prepare for the next round. matches 3-1 games 6-3 Round 5 mono blue trade/manakin I missed this guys name, but he was a nice guy and we had three good, close games. I lost the first and won the next two with shadow and well timed cataclysms. He seemed to think white weenie was his bane, but he had hammerheads and thalacos drifters, so I felt it was a hard match for me. Flickering ward was definitely the deciding factor in this match. matches 4-1 games 8-4 Round 6 Jim from Edmonton playing a cool WW variant with mindless automaton and city of traitors I want to draw as I have great tie-breakers, Jim wants to think about it, as his aren't as good. He decides that since I drew with him at regionals when our positions were reversed he would do the same for me. What a great guy! So now my lifetime record against Jim is 0-0-2 and we're batting a 1000 at drawing in. I hope to draw into top 8 with Jim many times in the future :-) Matches 4-1-1 games 8-4 Top eight are: Ronan hatred Mike Hanfield living death Cory (my teammate) K/D mono blue Shaye counter phoenix Michael Bower (ME!!) WW Sean counter phoenix Jim Roy WW JP Sohi counter phoenix In 9th was Rod, who drove up with us and played the same deck as Cory. He went 0-1-1 in his first two and then won 4 in a row but he had horrible tie breakers and just missed. I would call this a strong top 8 with Cory and I representing Calgary and the others all from Edmonton. In my opinion Mike, Jim, Shaye and JP are probably the four best players in Edmonton. Quarters Shaye playing Counter-phoenix Shaye is playing a very good c-p variant with main deck legacies allure to stop WW, so this match looks tough and it is. Shaye wins game one, but I make it close. Late in the game I have a very, very slim chance of pulling it out but it would involve showing Shaye my flickering ward. He would also have to make the mistake of not capsizing in response to me casting it (I know he has the capsize). I decide that Shaye is too good a player to make that mistake and don't play it and die a turn or so later. Game two the Flickering wards show up and I think I get a cataclysm through and I win fairly quickly. Game three is kind of funny. Shaye plays a portcullis and I have a soul warden and a priest in play, next turn he plays a legacies allure with mana to cast just one counter. I cast something which he counters (I forget what it was but it was a must counter spell, I think disenchant) and I cast flickering ward on my priest and serve for the next few turns. With me at 22 and Shaye at 6 he casts capsize on my ward, I of course return it to my hand to fizzle his capsize, but he takes my priest. The race is on! Soul warden Vs priest. I will win the race, but he has 5 turns to draw a solution, of which he has many. Sally serves for the next few turns and with Shaye at one he draws and seems surprised. Oh, Oh, I think he's found a solution. He casts intuition. I think this could be trouble and he looks through his deck, but all he can come up with is 2 capsizes and a legacies allure. I give him the allure and he concedes. Semis Sean playing Counter-Phoenix We get deck checked (my first time today) and I hold my breath. We went for breakfast this morning and got to Beyond with only a about 15 minutes to register and I hope I didn't make any mistakes. We registered with sealed deck check lists and I was scared that in a hurry I might have marked Soltari Foot Soldiers instead of Soltari Priests or something. This round and the final are best of 5 so we get ready for a long match. By this time the headache I've had all day is getting really bad and I'm worried that I'll make mistakes. The decks come back and they're OK. Cool, we can begin. He plays mountain, Mogg fanatic and says go. I always check to make sure my opponent has the right number of cards before I draw and this time when I check he has 6 in hand plus 2 in play. At first I think my headache and head cold must be just confusing me, but I ask him and he says Oops, he must have accidentally drawn an extra card. He says he'll just put the one he drew back. Since I've never played him before and don't know what kind of player he is, I want to call a judge, and he doesn't object. We both think he'll get a game loss since this is level 4 rules enforcement, but the Judge says it is a warning and he randomly selects a card and shuffles it back into the deck. I think this is fair and would have felt bad if he had gotten a game loss. Especially since at the end of our 3+ hour match (yes 3+ hours) I had come to like and respect Sean. He played very carefully for the entire match and I am sure that the extra card in game one was a simple mistake. Anyway, we started game one and I got of to a quick start, as I would in all our games. I got him down to two before he stabilized with capsize buyback. It started to look bad for me, but I played very carefully and took my time and thought out every move. He did as well and the game stretched on over an hour. Finally I drew the one last must counter spell I needed and with exactly enough mana in play(he had started to capsize my land) I managed to cast enough spells that he couldn't counter them all and he had to burn his capsize on my flickering ward (once again this card was huge) and when he couldn't top deck another capsize my pro-red, pro-black, pro-blue paladin went in for the last two :-). Part way through this game there was a huge argument going on between some players and the Judges. Apparently JP was deck checked and was playing a 59 card deck and had misrecorded his deck list, listing only 59 cards. Both penalties carry a double warning under Level4 and so he was kicked out! I felt bad for him as he is a very good player and deserves to be back on the tour, but this was the second time in just a couple of months that JP had made a similar mistake. At regionals in a match verses me he was awarded a game loss for failing to desideboard before game one. JP is a very meticulous player and should not be making these kind of sloppy mistakes on something as important as a deck list. I don't think for a second that he was trying to gain some advantage through this, though. The judges at Beyond do a lot of deck checks and no-one can make it to the finals without one, so there would be no point in trying to get away with a 59 card deck. Anyway, Sean and I continued with Game 2 which developed similarly to Game one only this time Thalacos drifters slowed me down and I stalled with Sean at 6. I'm really starting to hate the drifters. I think they've showed up in every sideboarded game I've played against blue today and continue to do so the rest of the way. It really makes me wish I had the 4th repentance in the deck or sideboard. Anyway when Sean stabilizes he is really low on cards, so rather than be patient like the first game I go aggressive and cast everything I draw hoping to slip something through his counters and hoping he draws too many of those 27-30 land I assume he is playing. It almost works as I get him to 2 before he gains control and finishes me off with phoenix and drifter beats. It may have been a mistake to play so aggressively, but it seemed like the way to go at the time. This game also takes over an hour and now as we shuffle everyone keeps coming over to see who won the match, we tell them to settle in and wait cause we've got 3 more to go! My head is pounding now between games, while we are playing I kind of just drop into the 'zone' and don't really notice but between games it's killing me. Game 3 is really quick. I have a nearly perfect draw: priest, paladin, paladin, flickering ward, plains, plains, plains. Sean has only mountains and reflecting pools for the first four turns and doesn't recover. Game 4 is a replay of game one only much shorter. Only about 50 mins :-) I get Sean to 4 and then he stabilizes and I play conservatively, grouping threats and keeping Sean on the defensive. I hold a cataclysm forever trying to find the perfect time to cast it. Finally I get my opportunity to cast it after I believe I have run him out of counters. I have a paladin in play with a flickering ward with summoning sickness and he has a drifter (have I mentioned I hate the drifter?) a phoenix and nine untapped mana and a capsize and one more card in hand. I have a wasteland in my hand and not much else I cast cataclysm with my last 4 mana after I thought for probably 3 minutes about weather to play the wasteland or not. He adds nine mana to his pool and my heart sinks. I realize that he can capsize my ward with buyback and capsize my paladin. Why didn't I play my wasteland so I could save a white mana in my pool? Then I could fizzle the first capsize and he would burn!! But he plays intuition to get 3 counterspells and then capsizes my ward. His reasoning was that he had lost 16 land in the cataclysm and needed to thin the deck to draw land and with the counter he could take care of the flickering ward if he drew an island that turn. If he had capsized the paladin I may have been able to play it and ward it before he drew enough land/counters to stop me. I was at about 30 thanks to capsize and soul wardens so the drifter wasn't going to finish me in time. Anyway, he drew and it was a source of blue but it was a reflecting pool!! My wasteland took care of that and I cast the ward and two turns later it was over. Even if he had played it the other way it likely wouldn't have mattered as I drew the other plains I needed to recast my paladin and he would have needed the perfect draw of island then counterspell to have stopped me from warding it again. I thought this was an excellent match and was very happy with how I played it, except for the one mistake, which was very minor and may have even been the correct play. This match really illustrated what I liked about Rath constructed, even though there was some element of rock-paper-scissors to the format overall with proper sideboarding and metagame decisions this could be over come and the games really came down to play skill. The only deck in the format that is pure luck in my opinion is suicide black, with even sligh requiring good play to win with consistently against a field stacked against it (WW, counter phoenix, living death and mono blue all being tough match-ups). The Finals I'll keep this one short. Cory is one of my best friends and if I couldn't qualify, I'm really glad he did. I won game one thanks to my one main deck torture chamber and my wastelands and he took games 2 and 3. It was a tough match-up for me and games 2 and 3 weren't that close. In my opinion Cory is a better player than I am (even if he didn't play-test this format nearly enough ;-) ), has come really close to qualifying before and really deserves this. Now we've both qualified for pro-tours overseas with very little time to prepare ;-) I missed out on Paris and regretted it so I really hope Cory can make it to Rome, maybe I'll even tag along for support :-) quick props scoop: hey, he won Jeff Fung $10,000 in Chicago so I figured he was worth the $7 investment. pheldigriff: Cory's girlfriends purple hippo beanie baby for giving our car of people good luck. Beyond Fantasy: Great tournament, run well, especially Catherine and Phil, bringing Sean and I fruitopia and chocolate bars during our marathon was really cool. All my opponents: for being cool Dave: For flickering ward and repentance tech Yen: for the use of his house slops: no slops :-) Michael Bower Phoenix Comics NW (hey, I plugged Beyond at least 3 times I should plug my own store at least once)