Gifts Ungiven

I actually found out about this one from a Google ad on my own site:

Superstars Game Center is having a $5K Standard tournament. Click here for their information page.

The $5K is structured as a two-stage event, with three different feeder tournaments qualifying you for the top 32 single-elimination tournament where the prizes happen. The whole thing looks like this:

Up to 6 people will qualify from a 64-person flight on Friday, March 13th.
Up to 20 people will qualify from the 200-person main flight on Saturday, March 14th.
Up to 6 people will qualify from the 64-person flight on Saturday afternoon.

Prizes minimally go down to 16th place; if the tournament sells out, Superstars will give prizes to everyone in the top 32.

The entry fee is $30.

There will be the usual extensive side events that you're used to from PTQs and other big events at Superstars, with normal and high-roller drafts.

Once again, click here to learn more, including helpful travel information if you're coming from outside the area (including flying in!).

Superstars Game Center in San Jose is holding a From the Vault: Exiled marathon this weekend. Don't want to pay those big secondary market prices for your fifteen shiny Exiled cards? Come lay down five bucks and fight for them instead. Here are the details:

Each tournament will have an entry fee of $5. The format is Standard Constructed. Tournaments will probably follow a Swiss structure with a cut to top four or top eight, depending on attendance. There will be additional prizes based on attendance as well.

Tournaments are scheduled for...

Friday, August 28th at 7pm
Saturday, August 29th at 1pm and 5pm
Sunday, August 30th at 1pm and 5pm

I hope to see you all there. I'll be attending at least some of these, both to take my crack at winning the set and because, hey, Standard Constructed.

This is a great interview with Tomoharu Saitou, discussing his Hypergenesis deck with the assistance of everyone's favorite bilingual Judge (and GP Trial winner) Riki Hayashi.

I need to buck up my own language skills; then maybe someday I can help interview a Korean player for CFB. While you all wait for that to happen, I recommend checking out the rest of the excellent GP Oakland coverage at ChannelFireball.

I'll be heading off in a little less than an hour to the first flight of the day for the February ChannelFireball 5K down at Superstars in San Jose. If you can make it today, I encourage you to come on down and enjoy some Standard action with the great Superstars crowd while battling for, well, $5K in prizes.

Click here for more information. The main flight today starts at 10am, with a second flight at 4pm, to be followed by the top 32.

Click here to read ongoing coverage of the event. Last night's archetype breakdown is currently posted, with a strong showing for Jund, Naya, and U/W Control.

I'm slowly regaining my coherence this morning after a long day yesterday at the ChannelFireball.com February 5K event. I made top sixteen using a Junk (that is, B/G/W) deck that I'll be writing about in my column this week.

You can see me and the deck in action in the coverage of the Swiss rounds, here. And I do mean, "see," as in addition to being the round two feature match, there's a picture of me playing at the bottom of the page.

If you look at the archetype breakdown for the main flight, I'm the sole "Junk" representative there.

I exited in the round of sixteen (which you can also read about here) after a somewhat harrowing, one-and-a-half hour match against an Unearth deck. I must admit I was not particularly thinking about Unearth when I put my deck together for the tournament. I lost in the round of sixteen to Magic TV host Tristan Shaun Gregson, who was playing Boss Naya.

I'll have more on all of this in my column this week. I had a great time all day Saturday, sparring with the kind of fun crowd I've come to expect at ChannelFireball and Superstars events.

Also, for those who are in the greater Bay Area and also into Legacy, you may be happy to hear that Superstars will now be hosting regular Legacy tournaments. You can read more about that here.

This week's In Development is Stoneforge Mystic Junk at the 5K, which is a pretty straightforward title. I top 16ed our most recent 5K using a W/B/G deck featuring that new lovely Standard power card, the Stoneforge Mystic.

I had a great deal of fun with this deck -- and hey, won some cash, too. Head on over and check it out.

Grant was my opponent in the round of 32, playing the genuinely frightening Unearth deck.

As he describes, his deck just doesn't interact with most of the field. When I realized what he was playing, I had a brief flash of panic before I devised my game plan against him. Our match took an hour and a half, and was by far the longest in that round.

Grant's a nice guy, and I really enjoyed our match - it was among the best I'd had all day.

Video coverage of the ChannelFireball February 5K is up. Here's my match in the top 16 against Tristan Shaun Gregson (of Magic TV fame) playing Boss Naya:

For the record, I didn't have to die that turn in game two. As I mentioned in my column earlier this week, I literally miscounted my mana and, having done so, made the "aggressive" play that made no sense. Ah, well. It was midnight.

I think these videos turned out quite well. Head over to the ChannelFireball YouTube channel to see videos of several matches from the top 32, including the finals, all with quality narration by Eric Levine.

After a hyper-busy week, I had a relaxing time at the Sunday Standard event at Superstars yesterday. With no time at all to prepare, I ran, card-for-card, the Stoneforge Mystic Junk list I wrote about in last week's In Development. I went 4-1 and took second place; I think first may have gone to a Vampires deck that I never ended up playing. I beat Jund, 2-0 yet again in games that were quite fun. I still don't understand why people are so traumatized by this deck, but I may touch on one reason in my In Development this week.

The most interesting deck I played against was the Mono-Green Tokens build in my last round match. I beat him 2-0, but I got to see how the deck worked better in some additional games we played after the match. I'm still favored, but the ability for his deck to do an end-of-turn Cobra Trap followed by an Overrun is hilarious. Similarly, an Eldrazi Monument powered by Garruk, Cobra Trap, and Bestial Menace is awesome and kind of scary. Fortunately, SMJ is a true cockroach, and can endure through these kinds of problems.

Most awesome was when I killed his Garruk and got Cobra Trapped afterward. Just imagine the Indiana Jones flavor there - the planeswalker calls down a Maelstrom Pulse to drive off his opponent's planeswalker ally, and suddenly a swarm of cobras springs forth from the scorched earth left behind.

Awesome.

Other great fun on the day included a thirty-minute comeback game against Mythic, which saw me go all the way down to two life, and then come right back up to over sixty life and the win, and using a Tectonic Edge to screw up my Jund opponent's combat math and swing for the win with my Knights.

I'm really enjoying Standard right now, and look forward to any opportunity to play it with our great pool of local players.

At the last 5K, Shaun Gregson mentioned that Superstars would be having "something" special toward the end of March. I noticed that the Superstars schedule has updated, revealing the event. It is:

Superstars Spring Tournament Series Standard 1K

This is a 1K Standard tournament that has the requisite prizes and that qualifies the top 10% of the field for entrance to a 5K on June 26th, 2010. Listed prizes for this week's event include various foils for first through third place (Worldwake set, Jace, and Baneslayer, in that order) in addition to the qualification and other prizes based on attendance.

This tournament costs $20 to enter, or $18 if you preregister on the web. It starts at 10am on March 27th - next Saturday.

You can always check the full schedule of events at Superstars by clicking here. As a reminder, the normal Magic schedule looks like this:

Monday - Draft at 7pm (ZZW)
Tuesday - Draft at 7pm (WWW)
Wednesday - Standard at 7pm
Thursday - Legacy at 7pm (10 proxy)
Friday - FNM featuring both Draft and Standard at 7pm (ZZW draft)
Saturday - Special events each week, so check the schedule
Sunday - Standard "win a box" tournament at 10am, along with special weekly events

...and, as always, if you can round up a set of people who want to draft, you can draft, scheduled or not.

If you're within driving distance of San Jose, you should swing by for some of the events at Superstars. It's a great environment full of nice folks.

Earlier this week I wrote about a Standard $1K this Saturday that plugs into a not-fully described "big" event leading to a $5K down the line. Today, ChannelFireball released the full info:

The ChannelFireball Spring $15,000 Series is a collection of $1K qualifier events spread across a variety of formats, all feeding into a $5K in late June. You can either pay $100 to enter the $5K, or qualify by ending up in the top 10% of the field at any of the preceding $1K events. There are, of course, prizes for winning the individual $1K events (this time around, first place gets a foil set of Worldwake).

Here's the schedule:

March 27th - Standard, $20 entry fee
April 3rd - Extended, $20 entry fee
April 10th - Standard, $20 entry fee
May 1st - Sealed (Rise of the Eldrazi), $30 entry fee
May 8th- Sealed (Rise of the Eldrazi), $30 entry fee
May 15th - Booster Draft (Rise of the Eldrazi), $30 entry fee
May 22nd - Standard, $20 entry fee
June 5th - Sealed (Rise of the Eldrazi), $30 entry fee
June 19th - Standard, $20 entry fee
June 25th (a Friday) - Standard, $20 entry fee
June 26th - The Spring championship, $100 entry fee or qualify via one of the $1K events

Pretty cool. I'm going to be attending at least some of these qualifiers, and hopefully the big show at the end as well.

The ChannelFireball 15K Spring Series continues this weekend, with a brief dip into Extended. Come on by Superstars Game Center in San Jose this weekend for an Extended 1K featuring its own prize pool and qualification for the Spring Series 5K finale for the top 10% of the field.

Here are all the details.

I couldn't make it to last week's Standard event, but I plan on being there this weekend, with an all-new Extended deck along for the ride.

If you can make it to San Jose, come on by and play for prizes, qualification for the 5K, and a chance to see what weirdness I'm bringing this time around.

Congratulations to Phil Yam for winning the CFB Spring Series 5K this weekend. You can read the full coverage by clicking here - it includes a good deck tech by Phil about the Mythic build he piloted to victory.

I clocked in at 3-2 on the day before dropping, but since I won't be talking about my tournament experience in this week's In Development, I'm including a tournament report and deck list here.

Click through to the extended entry for both.

While select members of the ChanneFireball crew were off in Minneapolis dominating U.S. nationals, I attended the most recent even in the ChannelFireball 15K Summer Series.

Click through to the extended entry for my tournament report, and some thoughts about preparation.