Gifts Ungiven

I was surprised at how excited I was about PT Kyoto, given how much my mind hasn't been in a "Standard" space of late (what with the Extended PTQ season going on). It turned out an excellent top eight and some interesting deck choices (although I might have preferred more variety).

For those who didn't keep up, you can watch all the Wizards YouTube clips as a playlist here:

...and you can check out all the decks that did reasonably well in Standard here. I'm looking at them right now, hoping for more interesting choices (but really, what's going to be better than Doran backed by Rafiq?).

Thought for the evening:

Hitting for two with an exalted Selkie seems good.

The upcoming Superstars $5K in a little less than two weeks, combined with PT Kyoto, has put my mind back on the topic of Standard (more or less). As a result, I've decided to push myself to come up with reasonable and interesting designs as we head into that event, with an eye toward expanding the range of deck types I'll consider (since I tend to hover around certain build types).

I know I'll still tend toward certain design decisions - preferring board control to counterspells, and discard to drawing cards - but I still think it'll expand how I think about the game.

In this post, I've included an aggressive WBG deck that hopes to strike with fatties, benefit from exalted, and backstop its aggression with planeswalkers. Click through to the extended for deck list and commentary.

Following the announcement that the Yu-Gi-Oh! national championships were canceled, Wizards of the Coast issued a press release inviting all players who qualified for US or Canadian Yu-Gi-Oh! nationals to attend their respective Magic nationals:

"We respect the accomplishments of all high-level tournament players," said Chris Galvin, VP of Organized Play for Wizards of the Coast. "We'd like to do what we can to honor their achievements and keep them gaming."

Konami, publisher of Yu-Gi-Oh!, insists that it is trying to arrange national championships for the game despite the announced cancellation, but Wizards is sticking to the offer, in hopes of keeping competitive trading card game players in the game, whether that game is Magic or something else.

I'm curious about how much overlap there is between the Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! communities. I know that Superstars schedules major Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! events in parallel, and I haven't really noticed a lot of crossover in our two local player groups (at the same time, it's not as if there's any acrimony or disrespect, either). More generally, if you're an expert Yu-Gi-Oh! player who's never played Magic before, how much effort would it take to get up to speed?

The most recent crop of PTQs saw the range of expected decks, as well as two clear rogues, one even taking down first place. The winning deck was a reasonable, if unexpected build, with the second being, well, surprising.

Click through to the extended entry for deck lists and commentary.

Gabriel Nassif just won Grand Prix Chicago just a week after his victory at Pro Tour Kyoto.

Awesome.

The coverage suggests that this put Nassif one-up on our own Luis Scott-Vargas, who did a similar back-to-back last year with Berlin and Atlanta. Of course, Luis still managed 10th place in Chicago, which makes me wonder how the two scored at this combination of events.

Pro Tour Berlin - Luis in 1st, Gab in 23rd
GP Atlanta - Luis in 1st, Gab in 173rd
Pro Tour Kyoto - Gab in 1st, Luis in 2nd
GP Chicago - Gab in 1st, Luis in 10th

I'll expand on that by adding in the other PTs from 2008:

Worlds - Luis in 11th, Gab in 297th
Hollywood - Luis in 47th, Gab in 51st
Kuala Lumpur - Gab in 44th, Luis in 169th

The general conclusion to draw here is mainly that they're both very good players, but I think it's easy to underrate how consistent Luis has been over the past year or so (he also took 3rd in California States).

I think it's great seeing either (or both!) of them in the top eight of a major event; I look forward to more from both in the future.

In the last year or so in Northern California, Superstars has really boosted support for the local Magic scene, giving us a steady home for all our PTQs, and hosting multiple $1K events each month and now bringing us a Standard $5K event.

Now the kind folks on 3rd street are bringing us ChannelFireball.com, a content-rich site with many of your favorite writers and some very talented newer authors as well. The "beta" launch of the site includes these excellent articles:

Zaiem Beg discusses the post-Conflux Extended scene and the contentious topic of just how good Path to Exile is
Josh Utter-Leyton (nicknamed "Uber-Leyton" by BDM) teaches us all about 5CC in Shards draft
Riki Hayashi tells us how we, too, can be judges
Luis Scott-Vargas reveals what his pre-Kyoto thought process looked like
Eric Levine answers all our tricky rules questions

I'm personally excited to see the rest of the Magic world getting a sampling of our excellent Northern California community, judges and players alike. I'm adding ChannelFireball to my daily Magic roundup, and strongly encourage you to do the same.

Bill Stark has been following the drama of the Magic theft ring over at the Starkington Post (you can read about it here and here. The short version is that a ring has been hitting major North American events, stealing bags, personal effects, and, of course, cards. At GP Chicago, one of the thieves was finally caught, and the word is that he gave up his companions.

While criminal charges are in the works, the DCI has already acted, handing out lifetime bans to four individuals. Bill talks about it here, and you can check the DCI Suspension list here.

According to judge Adam Shaw in the Starkington Post forums, these individuals are also banned from the premises at any WotC event, with a probable follow-on effort among TOs to keep them off all tournament grounds.

Seems good.

Admittedly, this isn't much of a find - it was today's Daily Deck List on the mother ship. However, when I read through the list, I immediately thought "How did I miss this?" It's such a cool deck.

I mean, it has Seedborn Muse!

Click through to the extended for deck list and minimal additional commentary.

Reviewing the most recent crop of PTQ-topping deck lists at DeckCheck, I found a list that top eighted at this PTQ in Munchen that had a singularly fascinating sideboard card:

We don't normally expect to see Furious Akroma running around in Extended (although her Wrathful version makes an appearance as a finisher in Dredge decks from time to time). What's really amazing is that Akroma is a sideboard card in a TEPS deck.

Kudos to Sebastian Mattes for a quirky and completely unexpected sideboard choice.

I imagine the concept here is that in game two, you side in Akroma with the idea that your opponent will be piling on the countermagic, disruption, and storm hate. Then, if they manage to damage your combo and keep you from going off, you can use your acceleration to just flat-out play an uncounterable firebreathing trampler that can't be Pathed, Sowered, Cryptic Commanded, or otherwise dealt with in any reasonable fashion before it just kills your opponent.

In a lot of environments, opponents will be wary of a transformational sideboard move out of a combo deck (e.g. a Heartbeat deck siding into big creatures), but I think that's so far off the normal TEPS plan that people just aren't going to look for it. Certainly, my anti-Storm sideboard plan doesn't have anything for a 6/6.

I did a little testing of my Gifts build with friends yesterday and one thing became quite clear:

In other words, the value of a topdecked Thoughtseize drops precipitously as the game goes past the first couple turns. Facing down a kill-it-or-die creature? Thoughtseize is terrible. Just gained control, and looking to ice the game? Terrible. In one game, I died when almost any other non-land card in the deck would have been good. In another, I ended up with two Thoughtseizes in hand, just waiting slooowly for a real card to come up.

This is not to say that Thoughtseize isn't valuable, but I found it was such a depressingly poor topdeck that I'd prefer to just cede some turn-one value against certain decks (say, Storm) to increase the value of my deck in the late game, which is where i wanted to win anyway.

After Gab Nassif's topdeck to win game five of the quarterfinals at Kyoto, Randy Buehler commented that his breed of five-color control was built to have good topdecks. As I look at my upcoming PTQ opportunity next week, this is something I want to make sure I engineer into my main deck. That is, the ideal card, even one that's meant for the early game, should also be a solid late-game topdeck.

I never regretted seeing a Path, whether it was the first or the tenth turn, and that's the kind of thing I want in a card.

So, Thoughtseize, it's off to the sideboard for you.

As I prepare for my next PTQ this coming weekend, I've been checking in with deck lists from all my usual sources. I'm generally looking for two things:

1) The metagame as sort-of represented in the top eight
2) Interesting innovations

Innovations can be anything from subtle changes to a known archetype (say, adding Future Sight into Faeries) to substantially novel decks. This week, we see a mix of all that, although in fairness, many of the outliers are not so much "novel" as they are re-imaginings of decks from older formats that you might not have expected to see in a top eight. Nonetheless, I like seeing quirky ideas make their way into top eights, as deck building and card choice really are two fundamental parts of the fun of Magic.

Click through to the extended entry for cool ideas and commentary.

One of the sweeping generalizations that rolls around in Magic is that "the Japanese" are prone to running weird, off-the-wall deck lists. It might be more accurate to say that "some very successful Japanese players are willing to run nonstandard decks" than to suggest a genetic basis for this statement, but nonetheless, it can be a lot of fun looking at tournament results from Japan in hopes of seeing wackiness.

The most recent results from a PTQ in Sendai don't disappoint. Click through to the extended entry for a look at the latest in slightly to significantly nonstandard decks.

Edit: Read this before randomly netdecking anything in this post.

Courtesy of a heads up from Bill Stark, we can all go check out the locations for North American regionals tournaments. Regionals this year come up on May 16th (which is two days after I come back from travel, so that's handy).

Regional tournaments feed into your country's nationals, yielding from 2-8 invitations (most of them clock in at 4). I encourage you all to attend the nearest regionals if you can. It's a fun tournament that brings together a wider swathe of your local Magic community than a PTQ would, while still remaining a competitive environment.

I just returned from the first of two Sacramento PTQs in the current season. This was my first time at the venue, Great Escape Games. The space is cavernous, spreading well out behind the store proper. The tournament was run smoothly and crisply by our excellent judging staff, lead by Riki Hayashi and ably assisted by other great judges from our local community, including Eric Levine, and an assist from the already qualified Kenneth Ellis (you can check out his winning list here; it was good to see him up and around).

Clearly, I didn't top eight, or I'd still be there. That said, the tournament started soon after 10am, and I left at 7:30pm, which is excellent for an eight-round event where multiple matches went to time each round. I did that a couple of times.

That's foreshadowing. I'll talk more about it later.

The top tables featured an abundance of Faeries and Zoo; I also noticed some Loam and "Junk" (WBG good stuff) style decks.

Click through to the extended entry for my deck list, my round-by-round tournament report, and some after-action analysis on my deck's issues.

A little while ago, I posted about some curious decks from a PTQ in Sendai. Now, I figured this PTQ was small, but at the time I linked to it, attendance numbers hadn't been listed.

Now they have. Sixteen people.

So, you know, FNM. Except that I gather our local FNM is bigger than that.

This reminds me of listening to the DeckConstruct podcast covering a PTQ in Aberdeen (that's in Scotland) with something like fifteen attendees. You can almost wander in to the top eight at an event of that size.

Still, fun decks. :)

Did you read about Jonathan Loucks's (see how I use the apostrophe properly that time?) Kiki-Jiki deck in this week's Top Decks?

Now you can head over to Channel Fireball and read the tournament report.

And with that, I'm tired from a long week and am off to bed. Looking forward to playing Gifts (sans Akki) eight days from now.

Actually, almost off to bed. I'll throw in something cute in one more post.

Zaiem Beg suggests the ultimate sideboard card for TEPS decks fearing being hit by a Telemin Performance:

If this becomes a popular strategy, board in one Phage. Nice Telemin Performance.

From this SCG thread.

What if we held a PTQ and twelve Death Clouds came?

I was flipping through recent PTQ results from the current season when I saw the top eight from this PTQ in Bogota, Colombia. The standout fact for me was three Death Cloud decks, which is a much higher hit rate than we've come to expect. Now, this was a forty-eight player PTQ, so that's a little less of a shakedown than a California PTQ, say, but it still makes us ask "Is there anything new about these lists?" Let's just walk through the whole top eight (click through to the extended entry for that).

This is not meant to be solely a Magic blog, although it ends up being that the vast majority of the time as my resources (money, time) go toward Magic more often than toward any other game.

That said, even in my limited repertoire of games there are some fun, solid choices that I should be highlighting more frequently.

Back in 1977, Steve Jackson came out with Ogre, a game about apocalyptic future warfare between a force of infantry and armor and one giant, cybernetic tank. Ogre was the second wargame I ever played, and is a classic answer to the question "What's a good introductory wargame?" It has the advantage of covering a lot of basic ground (movement, terrain, differing weapon ranges) with the option of handing the new player whichever side they find easier, whether that's a bunch of simpler units or the Ogre.

In 1978, the Ogre universe expanded with the introduction of G.E.V.. G.E.V. uses the same basic rule set as Ogre, but expands on it to include more detailed terrain options as well as some other more complex rules such as overrun attacks. The default G.E.V. game is armor and infantry versus armor and infantry, but since the game is simply a slight "leveling up" in complexity from Ogre, it accommodates Ogres just fine (and is, in fact, the default rule set for all the follow-on products).

Although the setting of the game is pretty damn bleak (seriously - all the tanks fire nukes, and the fight is happening largely in Western Europe), the game play is swift and fun, with most games clocking in under the hour mark. Ogre/G.E.V. do, indeed, represent a good pair of starter wargames for those who are a new to the concept.

You can read one of my writeups of a G.E.V. game over here at Boardgamegeek. Here's a brief excerpt:

Rushing to head off the assault, PE heavy tanks rolled southeast and engaged the northern pincer of the Combine GEV assault, supported by a GEV and a missile tank, with an infantry company bringing up the rear. The heavies exacted vengeance on the Combine GEVs, using their open firing lines to take two of them apart...

Over at the usual venue, we have an ostensible Alara Reborn spoiler for a fantastic card:

Exsanguination
2br
Sorcery Rare
Choose target player. Name a nonland card. That player reveals his or her hand. Exsanguination deals 3 damage for each card with that name in that player's hand to that player. Remove cards with that name from that player's graveyard, hand and library. That player then shuffles his/her library.

I'm a huge fan of ripping cards from every place a player can hide them. I love that I get to have Cranial Extraction in my sideboard in the current Extended, and when I was concentrating on Standard a couple months back, I kept wishing I could have Extractions there.

The damage on this card is kind of incidental to me, although nice-ish. But I'm really looking forward to being able to denude someone of their key win condition (consider, for example, that this hits well before Cruel Ultimatum).

Assuming this is an accurate spoiler, this card should be a fun addition to the upcoming Standard PTQ season.