GPT Seattle - Redmond damage report

I ran Kithkin again, change the sideboard to be a little more reasonable, but didn't do much better.

Round 1 I played Martin playing Five-Color. I take Game 1, and Game 2 I make some bad plays when I didn't leave back Spirits instead of Kithkin tokens (because I was using playing card flipped face up/down), and Game 3 I get stuck on three lands with Elspeth and Ajani in hand.

Round 2 was super awkward. My opponent starts with a deck registration error, so gets a game loss. He sits down, shuffles a couple of times in 15 seconds and presents. When I'm done piling my deck, I pile shuffle his deck (as I do for any Competitive level event) and he's a card short since one got stuck in his library. The judge was writing up his first game loss and understands that this is the most awkward thing ever, and my opponent flips his shit, which was uncharacteristic since he seemed relatively even keel, but maybe not so much on a competitive level.

I won't get into the details of things he said, but he was very much on tilt and had to go take a walk before coming back and playing out the rest of the tournament.

Round 3 I played a GW beats deck. Game 1 I'm on the play and keep as my 6 Stalwart, Stalwart, two drops, a Spectral, and a Windbrisk Heights. It was pretty risky, but I figure after playing my tap land, I'd have plays on turn 2 and 3, giving me three draws to get another land (which is favorable) and still be competitive (may or may not be reasonable). Well, I didn't get there :/ Game 2 I end up getting beats on but he plays a bunch of dudes and my second Banefire doesn't come (had to use one to kill a Stillmoon Cavalier.)

Round 4 I rock the bye, which is great because my tiebreakers were pretty good among the 1-2's. Unfortunately, Martin loses his match and I enter the next round having bad tiebreakers.

Round 5 I play Travis playing Shamans. I start the first game:
T1, Goldmeadow Stalwart, revealing Wizened Cenn.
T2, Goldmeadow Stalwart, revealing Goldmeadow Stalwart; Goldmeadow Stalwart revealing Wizened Cenn.
T3 Wizened Cenn.

Elvish Visionary didn't get there :/

Game 2 he gets multiple Wolf-Skull Shamans and gets a bunch of dudes, and I run out a bunch of guys as well and an Elspeth, but get stuck on 4 with Cloudgoat Ranger sitting in my hand. He ends up with tons of tokens and guys and I'm mucking up the board with tokens. He has Leaf-Crowned Elder in play, checks his Wolf-Skull Shaman kinship first, revealing Rage Forger, then gets to play Rage Forger on approximately a thousand Shamans he has, and I can't come back.

Game 3 I blow him out.

The other X-2 match goes to time at the deciding game and the player with the highest tiebreakers is able to get his opponent to scoop (which I have my own opinions on how that went down), so I get sorried at 9th place.

Since I had my work laptop in my backpack from going from work to someone's place to crash, I decide to try my hand at this match coverage thing. It was pretty fun, and it's something I can stand to get better at too. I'll edit those and post them tomorrow. Long story short, two Five-Color Control decks fought in the final and one of them won while the rest of us lost for enduring it.

Format shift

So I proxied a crap load of decks for testing tonight, only to realize at 2 am that after today, I will not need to test this format ever again, as Alara Reborn comes out next weekend. D'oh!

I definitely see a lot of new decks emerging. Red decks get a huge boost, Red-Green beats will probably be a serious deck, BGW Rock decks get some tools like the new Vindicate, and some deck out there will love to see Chris Pikula back in the format.

Magic-League has received a notice from Wizards of the Coast's legal team to cease and desist using copyrighted material on their website and to stop promoting Magic Workstation and Apprentice.

Parts that confuse me:

- the name "Magic-League" infringes upon copyrights? No idea where that's coming from, and I'm sure they could fight that point if they wanted to.

- Stop distributing Magic Workstation? I believe it's marketed as a tool for playing ANY trading card game, doubt they can stop that. Good thing you can add new cards just by copying the spoiler file into Workstation. Take that, Wizards Legal.

- Here's a great clip: "... your bad faith intent to capitalize on the good will associated with Wizards’ MAGIC: THE GATHERING® trademark, and pass your site off as authorized or associated with Wizards’ MAGIC: THE GATHERING® game"

CLEARLY spoken from a lawyer's rear side. So by letting people play Magic, Magic-League is harming the intentions of Wizards to... play Magic?

It's very obvious that the people at Wizards who make and love Magic would not stand for this, and they probably cannot comment on issues like this (just as I shouldn't comment on a certain Twitter tag that starts with an "#a" and ends in "mazonfail"). Hopefully the Magic-League guys figure out a way to appease these suits.

In other news, I also got a cease-and-desist order to stop writing on Magic cards with a Sharpie. If I want to play a game of Magic with Reflecting Pools and Bitterblossoms, I'd better start cracking my packs. I'm harming the goodwill of the game trying to tap all your guys and draw a card with a Sphinx's Herald.

"Holy Angel tokens, Batman!"

Looking at my Google Analytics dashboard, I found that more than a couple people came onto my site looking for "brian kibler batmobile". Searching this, apparently this blog post of mine is the top search result when you Google that term.

Well, let the search end, I've found the picture:


You saw it here first on Incremental Growth... since the first time you saw that picture.

GPT Seattle, try 1

So I ran Kithkin at the GPT today at First Pick, more or less as a testing session, since A) I had an unoptimal sideboard with only 1 Elspeth, and 2) I hadn't tested and have no idea what to board in and out.

So here's my deck

1 Mutavault
4 Windbrisk Heights
4 Rugged Prairie
4 Battlefield Forge
2 Rustic Clachan
10 Plains

4 Figure of Destiny
4 Goldmeadow Stalwart
4 Wizened Cenn
4 Knight of Meadowgrain
4 Cloudgoat Ranger

4 Path to Exile
4 Spectral Procession
3 Glorious Anthem
4 Ajani Vengeant

Sideboard:
4 Reveillark
4 Burrenton Forge-Tender
2 Ranger of Eos
2 Martial Coup
2 Banefire
1 Elsepth, Knight-Errant

This GPT was like a small PTQ: 46 people, 6 rounder.

Round 1 vs. Swans
Game 1 I blow him out. Game 2 I leave a kill on the board because I was afraid of Terror but of course Swans doesn't play Terror. Game 3 I blow him out.
1-0

Round 2 vs. Alex West playing Red Deck
He mulligans to five both games. Not much.
2-0

Round 3 vs. Bill Stark playing Sanity Grinding
Game 1 he's on the play and has answers for everything and it's essentially a blowout. Game 2 I'm lucky enough for him to not see any board control cards. Game 3 I mull to 5 and keep 2 Rugged Prairies as my lands. Luckily I get a Plains, but he's already Boomeranged my first land drop.

Max McCall pointed out that on a clash I opted to keep Elspeth on my deck when I couldn't cast it and didn't really want Elspeth in the game, and then on another clash the next turn I opted to send Path to Exile to the bottom because, well, I wanted land to cast Elspeth. I proceeded to get blown out by Plumeveil. At least I got the testing I wanted out of this tournament :/
2-1

Round 4 vs. Chris Kelly playing Sligh
I didn't get very good draws either of the games we played and he blows me out of the water. I think Game 1 I made a bad play that made me lose a Knight of Meadowgrain unnecessarily. Game 2 he plays infinite Terrors on my guys and I flood for a while looking for Burrenton Forge-Tender and he has Deathmark too. Gross... I really don't think this is a bad matchup for me either. He wants to play Goblin Outlander but he also needs to play Volcanic Fallout, so Goblin Outlander on the board = time to overextended a little more, and no Goblin Outlander means Knight of Meadowgrain's going to town.
2-2 DROP

I think the deck's fine, but I'll definitely be trying to get some serious testing in, because I really don't understand what cards are bad and even what cards are good in each matchup.

Bryan, a good Magic playing friend from summer '07, came back to Magic yesterday, and T2'd today. Good for him, except the deck he was playing in the finalwas, well, something you wouldn't expect and something I wouldn't recommend without some tuning.

At least I'll gain a few points from this...

Actual paper Magic

I haven't played paper Magic since the last PTQ, and rather than sit at home and blow away dollars on 8-4's, I decided to actually get out, enjoy the unusually beautiful Seattle weather, and do a paper draft in Redmond.

I ended up 4-0'ing with a very odd Esper deck splashing Red for Blood Cultist and activating Vein Drinker. Here's what made the cut.

1x Grixis Illusionist
1x Zombie Outlander
1x Tidehollow Sculler
1x Esper Battlemage
1x Blood Cultist
1x Aven Windwatcher
1x Brackwater Elemental
1x Viscera Dragger
2x Fatestitcher
1x Tower Gargoyle
2x Dreg Reaver
1x Vein Drinker

1x Bone Splinters
1x Path to Exile
1x Courier's Capsule
1x Yoke of the Damned
1x Gleam of Resistance
2x Oblivion Ring
1x Resounding Wave
1x Kiss of the Amesha

1x Jund Panorama
1x Esper Panorama
1x Unstable Frontier
1x Mountain
4x Swamp
4x Plains
5x Island

(not sure about the mix of Swamps, Plains, and Island, but it was definitely 5-4-4)

So initially I thought the deck was pretty slow and would get blown out by a Bant deck pretty easily. Luckily, I did not play against a Bant deck, and against everything else the deck was pretty solid. I elected to draw every time I had the choice, since I was definitely a control deck and I thought my mana was atrocious, and the amount of removal I had, plus double Fatesticher + Esper Battlemage and Blood Cultist, made winning relatively easy in the late game, be it with Vein Drinker or Dreg Reaver.

A couple of notes about my actual play:

I started out writing down every card my opponent plays again, but then I noticed that as I was taking a note, my opponent would make a play and I'd instinctively say "Sure" without even considering the board and my hand. After that, I'd only write down cards when I truly had idle time, and then even only noted important cards like tricks and guys that actually change the board.

I'm still not finding the most correctly play fast enough. In my last game, I made a couple of not-so tight plays, but luckily my opponent didn't make me pay for them. Maybe I need to slow it down a little bit, but I think it was more a lack of concentration. I need to eliminate the number of times I say "Wait, that play was awful" immediately after I make plays. I do that a lot.

Anyway, for my efforts I got credit for at least three more drafts at Redmond, a sweet playmat, and foil Path to Exile #2. Magic is fun when you win. :)

How on earth is competitive Magic thriving?

Got this link from Slashdot to a New York Times article about professional gamers losing their sponsorships and entering the real world, with pro gaming circuits like Championship Gaming Series and Cyberathlete Professional League folding due to the economy sucking. Apparently Major League Gaming is turning a profit, though.

But I've always wondered about these leagues' business models. How can you spend $1-2 million total on your elite players, dish out prize cash, and put on extravagant tournaments that probably cost more than Pro Tours (I've never been to a PT, but these MLG tournaments have a lot more lights, seating, equipment, and booth babes) all off of sponsorship money? At least with Magic it makes sense: when people take the game more seriously, they buy more Magic cards and play in more FNMs, PTQs, and MODO drafts.

It's a little confusing, with such bad times financially, that we are breaking attendance records in North America for Grand Prixs and PTQs, and that tournament organizers can turn profits on $5k tournaments and cruises. Guess it just goes to show what a great product Magic is. I know I certainly don't get positive EV from playing Magic, and I don't know too many people in Seattle that do, but we're still flying to Grand Prixs and even PTQs. I guess you can't do that with Halo unless you pay some people to show up and beat up amateurs, since you get nearly the exact same experience sitting your living room on X-Box Live.

Maybe it's also a little justice in the world. Competitive gamers don't exactly contribute much to society, so they shouldn't make more money in the long run than, say, teachers or policemen.