PTQ Austin schedule posted for the Northwest

Cascade Games has posted their dates for Pro Tour Austin qualifiers. The format's Standard, so it will be lots and lots of Standard this summer. The earliest PTQ is May 9th (before or after Alara Reborn?), and the Northwest gets theirs pretty late. And there is Regionals and Grand Prix Seattle smack in the middle. Here are the relevant ones for the Northwest, hopefully we get a couple more?

August 1 - Portland, OR
August 15 - Seattle, WA

A MODO update/self-assessment

So last week I won 12 packs for T4'ing a Daily Sealed, plus I opened an Elspeth and some other things, so I had plenty of tickets to boot. I started drafting them last Saturday when I got home from Vancouver, in the 1710's. My results, all in 8-4 drafts, were 1-1, 0-1, 1-1, 2-1, 2-1, and I'm up to about 1730 I believe off the top of my head.

I feel like in this stretch I was getting kind of lucky and my opponents were getting rather unlucky, and that some of my decks aren't really stellar... but things like this haven't happened for me as far as I can remember: I always manage to find ways to give games away or make terrible mistakes, a few years ago when I was begging to hold ground above 1600. Maybe (gasp) I am actually getting better at Magic. Conflux events are starting this week, and I won't have an Extended tournament for three weeks after Standard for a Mox, so I'd like to dive into Limited and start picking my game apart again.

This week, however, I'm focusing on Standard and doing lots of side-by-side testing with myself (working blows) to get a grasp of the decks I want to play. I'm leaning toward RW Cruise, but that deck seems really popular, so then it might be Blightning Beatdown (which from testing for States, I don't think can beat Kithkin), Kithkin (which from testing for States, I don't think can beat Five-Color), or Five-Color (which I don't know much more about). If I do play Cruise, I want to make sure I can play the mirror match properly and have the cards necessary to be successful in the matchup, while not giving up a whole lot against Faeries... I think the Faeries matchup is very very close.

Short PTQ damage report

I managed to get the cards for Affinity and got to play that in Vancouver. It was 100 people and over half of the field was American.

I copied the list that won Pittsburgh... except for the lands. I changed the maindeck cards in the stock Affinity deck that I had proxied for testing, changed the sideboard, but didn't pay attention to the fact that I didn't have Ancient Dens already in. Then for whatever reason I thought that's how the list was supposed to be, rationalizing "Oh, must be to flash back Ancient Grudge... I guess you can always Springleaf Drum for White."

.... HUH?!?!? <-- that part didn't happen until after Round 1, declining to board in Path to Exile in the mirror.

Anyway, with my horrid scrub deck and all, here's how it went:

Round 1 L vs. Affinity. Bad attacks/playing from not playing the deck for an extremely long time cost me the game.
Round 2 W vs. Mono Red Burn. Played a newer player
Round 3 W vs. Affinity. Ancient Grudge might get there.
Round 4 W vs. TEPS. Mull to 4 on the play Game 1 might get there.
Round 5 L vs. Naya Zoo. Kept a bad 6 Game 2 on the draw with a Blinkmoth Nexus and needing to draw into another land, and didn't get there. Game 3 he mulls to 5. Kataki might get there. Dwayne swears to god he wasn't mulling to it ;)
Drop.

I was more comfortable playing Affinity than I have in the past, and I don't see it getting absolutely hated out, so hopefully it will still be a good choice for Seattle, because I like it a lot.

I'm gonna be testing Standard when I can this week. Leaning toward RW Cruise or Blightning Beatdown. (Does this deck need to play Bitterblossom? Wouldn't I rather play a bear or pump my Figure on Turn 2?)

Limited > Extended apparently

So there haven't been updates this week because, well, I haven't been playing much Magic this week. This weekend I did play a lot of MODO... I think I did about 5 drafts, won one of them, I think made the second round of 2 of them, and scrubbed out of the others... so 5 drafts became 8 packs :/

I just finished a ALA Sealed Nix Tix qualifier, and I T4'd. My pool had Elspeth and double Sigil of Distinction. I lost a match in three to a clutch Battlegrace Angel, and then lost my last match of Swiss to mana screw in the last game, but it didn't matter since my tiebreakers were very good.

In the draft, I was heavy Black and ended up Grixis. I played the person I lost to in the last round and won in 3, then lost in 3 to a Jund deck due to my deck not serving up Red mana. I'm up 50 rating points, and I'm qualified for a free ALA Sealed tournament Saturday... which means I'm even more unmotivated to make the trip to Vancouver this weekend.

Maybe if I had a larger collection on MODO, I'd be more into this current Constructed season, but I don't, which means I have to find real people to practice Constructed with, and I don't have the means or drive to do it during the week, whereas with MODO you can almost instantaneously draft. MWS is an option for Constructed, but it's actually pretty hard to find game on Magic League late at night on the West Coast.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I'm losing my drive to do well in this Extended format. I think I'd rather play Limited and keep getting better at Magic, because I still make tons of mistakes that just go unpunished in Constructed testing but would cost you prizes in a draft.

I'll probably write a report of this tournament this week, as I'll be looking through the replays for mistakes anyway.