Monday, February 23, 2009

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?)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I feel like without Bitterblossom, the deck should just not play black and be mono red again.

Daniel said...

The list I've been testing with has Terrors main, which are a good solution to Burrenton Forge-Tender from Cruise. Plus the BR pro white guy is good at blocking Figure of Destinies, and the 1BR 4/3 can't block guy seems good too.

That being said, I think people are playing Mono Red.