Gifts Ungiven

I'm currently being silly and waiting up to watch the top eight for Pro Tour Berlin 2008. This time around, I'm feeding things through m's tuner, projector, and giant wall screen, which is great -- I'm testing it on the final Tournament Center right now.

As for the top eight, props to local Cali guy LSV for making it in at eighth place, and props to Kenny Oberg for piloting his beautifully weird rogue deck into the top eight as well. I'm not necessarily excited about six elf decks in the top eight, but maybe the mirrors will be interesting. At any rate, this ought not to run too long.

The live coverage has begun. Comments and ongoing notes in the extended.

Well then. I went to sleep, woke up again, and the final match is still going. More in the extended.

Previously, I've just watched the Pro Tour webcast on my computer, but this time around I had access to our nifty setup that has a laptop slaved to a projector and linked through a tuner to feed the audio into some nice speakers. It looks like this, and it's a great way to watch:

Randy mentioned in the webcast coverage that once day two was done, decklists would start appearing in each of the feature matches. So you can now go to the Pro Tour Berlin 2008 coverage and click through to any feature match to see the decklists. I hope they'll do an aggregate decklist collection as well -- all decks would be ideal, but even a day two list would be fun.

Apparently, lots of people were looking for Pat Chapin's Next Level Gifts list, which you can find here. I was happy to see Shouta Yasooka's black-blue tron list here.

Of course, if Elf Ball is still viable when the qualifier season for Pro Tour Honolulu 2009 rolls around, expect people to pack a whole lotta hate against it, and deck lists to look quite different.

If you followed the coverage from Pro Tour Berlin 2008, you know that the most-played deck was Zoo, and the most successful deck was Elves, with six of the top eight slots. Looking past the top eight, we see rather more variety rounding out the top sixteen. We have:

• Ninth place - Tomohiro Aridome, playing Mono-Blue Control (with Azami, Lady of Scrolls)
• Tenth place - Johan Sadeghpour, playing Goblins (with the Elf-killer, Goblin Sharpshooter)
• Eleventh place - Philipp Summereder, playing Dredge
• Twelfth place - Carlos Amaya Troncoso, playing Death Cloud
• Thirteenth place - Tomas Kannegiesser, playing Mono-Blue Control
• Fourteenth place - Rashad Miller, playing All-In Red
• Fifteenth place - Andreas Muller, playing Mono-Blue Control (with extra colors for bigger Engineered Explosives)
• Sixteenth place - Nikolaus Eigner, playing Dredge

Notice the lack of Elves? Also, notice that three MBC decks and two Dredge decks top sixteened here? Even in its ostensibly "gutted" form, Dredge was able to power its way through a sea of Zoo and Elves to get two people into the top sixteen. I think that's quite interesting, and worth further analysis.

But I'm not going to do that here. Instead, I've dredged deeper into the day two deck lists, to take a look at interesting builds that were off the beaten path and still managed to make day two. Click through to the extended entry for a collection of interesting deck lists with a bit of commentary on each. I've posted them in order from least to most successful, to give you an idea how well the deck and its pilot managed to do.

I'll be playing in the newly resurrected States tomorrow. Expect a deck list and tournament report after the fact.

Yesterday, I gave a sneak preview of my States deck. Today, I went...and dropped after round four, having hit an unfavorable matchup twice running (can you guess which one?).

This was an eventful States, featuring hundreds of players, a hunt for tables, and a visit from the San Jose fire department. I have a sneaking suspicion it's still going on even as I post this.

Over on Top 8 Magic, BDM posted about New York States. They had 134 people.

We had 273.

More in the extended.

...looks something like this:

When I first saw Elspeth I was most excited by her first ability, which both upped her Loyalty and made guys. Because, hey, making lots of creatures is good! However, in practice, I've found that the correct use for Elspeth is outlined above.

WizKids, the gaming company founded by Battletech creator and FASA founder Jordan Weisman, announced today that it is going out of business. Here's the official word:

The Topps Company announced today that WizKids will immediately cease operations and discontinue its product lines.

For consumer announcements, please refer to www.wizkidsgames.com over the coming days for further information.

Battletech was the very first game I ever bought with my own money, and I played it all the way through high school. I picked up the giant robot bug again in grad school with Mechwarrior, which had a robust tournament scene in my area. I was actually the top-ranked player in the city for much of my time playing the game, but I dropped it when I moved and Mechwarrior's game design shifted to try and retain market share.

WizKids has always seemed like a company with a bit of a shelf life. Although Jordan Weisman hit on something very smart with his application of the collectible model to miniatures gaming, both in terms of letting players get right into the action and in reducing the per-miniature price point, the games began to collapse under their own weight after a while, and unlike in the arena of collectible cards, players balked at the possibility of set rotations that would push pieces out of the "core" gaming environment. Somehow, it seems more objectionable to no longer be able to bring your miniatures to the tournament than to have to leave your cards in a box at home.

I am sad to see WizKids go even though I'm not currently playing any of their games. This will not, however, be the end of their properties, as Jordan Weisman has shown an impressive ability to resurrect his intellectual property over and over again in new forms, as witnessed by the creation of Mechwarrior and the licensed production of material for classic Battletech, Shadowrun, and Earthdawn. In articles I've read about Weisman, he reveals that his epiphany many years ago was that the future is not in licensing other people's material -- FASA licensed Star Trek, Doctor Who, He-Man, and Top Gun -- but in creating your own intellectual property that would endure past a single incarnation, generating revenue into perpetuity.

And so it has done, and so I imagine it will continue to do.

How do you design a deck? Build a core, then look at matchups and try to shore them up with cards from the sideboard?

Last year, Zaiem Beg addressed the topic of sideboarding, discussing the approach of designing a deck for each matchup, then bringing these decks together in a combined core and sideboard. In effect, the goal here is to pick out your likely matchups, then design a number of ideal versions of your deck, each suited to a given matchup. In the current environment, one might want to design to beat Faeries, Five-color Control, Kithkin, Red Deck Wins, and Reveillark.

That's what I did here:

Click here to see the full spreadsheet in a separate window

Go to the extended entry to see where I went from there.

I use Gatherer, Wizards' official Magic card database, quite a bit. As such, I've been wanting for a long time to have it work more like a full database, allowing complex queries, iterative queries, and so forth. I want to be able to search positively for one thing, while requiring the absence of something else. Then I want to be able to sort the results according to my needs.

Apparently, that's been a common enough request to prompt a revamp. This week, the beta version of a revised Gatherer went live.

Click here for Gatherer beta

The simple search is probably the way many people used the old Gatherer -- type in a card name, get the card back. The advanced search, however, is nifty. You're given a large number of options for things to include in the search, using a boolean AND/OR/NOT to qualify the term. The interface has the search options on the left, then it shows you the search you're building on the right. Here's a search I set up earlier this week while I was trying to find creatures in Extended that could potentially serve as Elf ruiners:

This is a search I couldn't have done in the old Gatherer, where I would not have been able to rule out both Persist and Wither (which tend to clutter up the results, as you can see if you drop those qualifiers back out of the search). Here's another search (again, in Extended) for cards that have alternate payment options but which are not Suspend cards:

Once you have your results, you can choose display options including text, text plus card (the default), and a pure visual spoiler display. You can also sort as you like -- although I haven't yet figured out how sorts are ordered if you stack them. My default preference -- true for old Gatherer as well -- is to sort by CMC, in ascending order.

I'm happy to see this new, significantly more powerful tool being made available to players. It's handy, it's reasonably intuitive, and it's really fun to play with. Good job.

Today I went to the Superstars November Standard Championship, vying along with 42 or so other players for the $1K prize pool. I brought my white-black disruptive control deck that I've named "Ahura", for which you can find a deck list here. I had a good time and did reasonably well, ending up at 4-2 but missing the top eight on tie breaks and coming in at 11th.

Overall, I think the Ahura build is quite solid, and it fairly cleanly beat the matchups I'd given some thought to ahead of time -- Faeries and Lark, while suffering against Merfolk and Tokens.

The take-home message today is that an active Battlegrace Angel is ridiculous.

The full tournament report is in the extended entry.

In this earlier post, I highlighted the "lose to my own Glimpse of Nature" play that caught out both Grgur Petric and Zac Hill in their matches against Pascal Vieren. The way it's told in the coverage, it sounds like most of the story is just a funny bit about losing to part of your own combo. Over on the SCG forums, Zac Hill makes the point that it's actually about Pascal making an amazing mental play:

No, I was drawing a card every time I played a man. But he'd playtested the exact same decklist and knew what the plan was, and so when I got the correct four guys on the table and activated Entity at 1, Pascal said "Yeah yeah I know the combo. How many times are you going to do it?" I said "100". He said "you're dead." The reason both Grgur and I got "gotten" was the like resigned tone of voice Pascal managed as if he was already in the process of scooping his cards. I told Bill about the massive punt for the WoTC coverage because it was, you know, newsworthy that the G and I had played so terribly, but it really needs to be looked at as a masterful Jedi Mind Trick by Pascal.

I'd already had the impression that this was a "forced" error based on Pascal's question, but the elaboration on exactly how he forced it makes the story even better.

I'd like to say I wouldn't let that happen to me, but then, I let someone Prowl out a Notorious Throng off of a Mistbind Clique hit last week, so I'm in no position to talk.

The 2009 Grand Prix schedule has been posted. Click here to read it.

The Extended GP in Los Angeles in January is about the only one I might realistically make it to, unless work travel somehow puts me near one of the others.

Wizards has also updated the rules for making it to day two in a GP. Previously, GPs cut to the top 64 players, or, for GPs of 800 players or more, the top 128. The new rule will be either a cut to 64/128, or a cut to all players at X-2-0 or better, thus avoiding the heartbreaking "Yeah, you managed an X-2 record, but you're being cut on some marginal tiebreak" situation that popped up a lot this year in the massive European GPs. That seems like a good change.

One of the things I did on coming back into Magic after my long hiatus (my collection has a mild hiccup between Ice Age and Time Spiral) was go back through the coverage archives, first video and then text, and read about the recent history of the game. I've talked before about my favorite events in the archives, and among them is the top eight of Worlds 2005. I enjoy it because it includes a number of highly interactive matches, and that's the kind of Magic I like to play -- thus my proclivity for playing mid-range, grind-out-a-win-style decks.

Seedborn Muse appeared as a one-of in the sideboard of Mori's Ghazi-Glare deck in that top eight, and that really caught my attention. Offering the possibility of tapping out on your turn and then Glaring the opposition down on their turn -- or of untapping under a Hokori -- the Seedborn is an enticingly powerful engine card. Also, it turns out you can accidentally win a free game off of Frank Karsten if everyone misses the interaction between Yosei and Muse. Oops.

The upshot of all this is that I've been wanting to use the Muse in a deck where it's actually a good idea, yet have been disappointed at how often it just isn't a good choice. However, I think the build I'm going to highlight below represents an instance of proper Muse use in a deck that has a chance to compete with the little blue people and all those technicolor mana bases.

Click through to the extended for a deck list and explanation.