Gifts Ungiven

"Elves are cool. Of course I'm an elf. Samma wagga kan?"

Please excuse me if the quote isn't exactly right. Been a while since I actually pulled out Sprawl Sites.

Seventh place in the top eight of the not-underattended (149 people) PTQ in Roanoke went to, of all things, elves. Well, more properly, an Intruder Alarm deck.

Yeah. More in the extended entry.

I was originally planning on sitting out the current PTQ season, as it's Extended and I don't have the extensive card pool that applies to the current Extended. I'm very much looking forward to late 2008, when Extended undergoes a massive roll-over, and only sets from Mirrodin on (so, Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Ravnica, Coldsnap, Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Shadowmoor, and one more block, as well as eighth through tenth editions of the core set) are legal.

But that's in October. Now, Extended is the territory of fetchlands and unfortunately expensive cards from Invasion (the few of those that I had, I sold off last year).

Still, I wanna give it a shot. It's no fun sitting out through a PTQ season, so, well, I'm going to sit in. Initially, I thought my only chance was to go for an aggro build of some kind, and my thoughts went to Boros, or Dark Boros (Boros with Dark Confidants, more or less).

Then Clair Bigelow brought the Death Cloud to town in Butler, Pennsylvania, and I had my deck. Honestly, Death Cloud just sounds like a Hollywood title (although IMDB lists no movies by that name, "Death Cloud" was the working title of this fine film starring Danica McKellar of Wonder Years and Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem fame). Regardless, it's a beautiful design, and I'm going to do my level best to ape it. More in the extended.

Last week, my Extended affections wore stolen by the Death Cloud deck, as piloted to a top eight finish by Clair Bigelow. Apparently I wasn't the only one. Despite forum protestations that Death Cloud is utter jank, the most recent batch of PTQs had a slew of Death Cloud decks:

Eighth place in Atlanta
Fourth place in Baltimore
First and sixth places in Columbus
Third place in Denver
Fourth place in Madison
Second place in Winnipeg

I'll take a moment to point out that 28 people showed up for the Winnipeg PTQ. The average attendance for each of the other PTQs was 150 people.

That's one or more Death Cloud decks in the top eight of all but one PTQ this week. All but one, I say, because although Robert Price's sixth-place finishing build from Mobile has a couple Death Clouds in it, it is not properly a Death Cloud deck. It's something even better.

A Kokusho deck. With only Basic Lands as its mana base.

I almost giggled when I saw his list. It's great. I think I'm running it.

Price's list and some commentary in the extended.

This past week or so saw two articles on TCGplayer.com concerning the current Extended season.

First up is Zaiem Beg's article succinctly titled Beating Dredge. Mike Flores predicted early in the season that Dredge wouldn't see a single win because it's so easy to hate out...but following that logic, everyone apparently expected everyone else to either (1) do the hating for them or (2) decide Dredge was a bad plan, and few people ran hate. In his most recent Top8 Magic podcasts, Flores has admitted he was wrong -- because he expected people to keep the hate in, anyway, knowing that Dredge is often the "worst case scenario" for what you might run into (and that would have kept Dredge out of top eights). As Zaiem explains in this article, you have to defend against Dredge, because if you don't, it just wins.

Every time I hear someone say, "Well, I'll just concede the Dredge matchup and have a strong chance against everything else," or when they say, "I'll just leave the hate out because everyone else will hate it out," I cringe. If that's your plan, I hope you won't be too disappointed when you don't win the PTQ.

It's a deck, it's out there, and even if you don't think it's that good because it's too fragile, it will crush you if you are unprepared. It's seeing a lot of play because it's relatively cheap to build by Extended standards and it's absurdly powerful.

The second article, by Kuan-Kuan Tian, has the rather anime-esque title Bubble Hulk: Evolution ("I liked the original Bubble Hulk, but this follow-up series just rehashes all the same ideas. Let's watch I My Me! Strawberry Eggs instead."). Bubble Hulk is a weird Protean Hulk / Reveillark combo build that tries to combo out into a one-turn win. In this article, Tian guides a friend through the playtesting of the deck against Next-Level Blue. You may not want to read the whole thing, but you should at least click through to page two and then scroll down. You'll know when you've hit the funny bit.

I've spent most of the weekend sick (or else, hey, I could have been at the underattended GP Vancouver, right?), so I'm not up for making much sense right now. But I did want to aggregate a couple useful bits of information ahead of next weekend's PTQ here in the Bay Area.

The Top 64 decks at GP Vancouver 2008
The Top 8 decks at GP Vancouver 2008
A review of the prior Bay Area PTQ for this season
A review of this season's Seattle PTQ
The Top 8 decks at the PTQ in Los Angeles

It's hard to say whether one should look for a big influence from the top eighting decks at reported events, or just expect this time to be like last time. The last Bay Area PTQ has in early February, and featured 30 Doran decks, 26 Dredge decks, 21 Blue/Shackles decks, 19 Affinity decks, and 29 aggro R/G/x decks. There were just 9 Goblin decks, 9 Ideal decks, and a handful of other randomness. At GP Vancouver (as recorded here), the single biggest contingent was various R/G/x decks, followed by Blue control, then Doran, then Goblins (!), then Death Cloud...then Dredge and Affinity.

I know I'm going to play Kokusho, so now I'm looking at all of this information, pondering what kind of field I think I'm likely to face in a little less than a week.

Of course, for now I'm just willing my immune system to get it together and purge whatever I've caught from my system.

As I went to take care of an errand today, I listened to show 18 of DeckConstruct. In it, Dan talks about attending a PTQ in Dundee (that's in Scotland, and is a very lovely town) that had 22 attendees.

22.

In contrast, the Los Angeles PTQ on the 16th had 186 attendees.

Also, second place in Los Angeles went to ninjas. Seriously.

Still trying to decide what to play at the next PTQ? In this article Riki Hayashi talks about the Changeling Ninja deck that took second place at the last Los Angeles PTQ:

There are very few actual good cards in this deck. When Trinket Mage is the best mainstream card you're playing, something is certainly amiss. (Okay, maybe Umezawa's Jitte, but Trinks sees more play in Extended.)

Like the Wizards deck, this deck gets by because these draft rejects can combine to form a mighty Voltron-like warrior. When you stack enough synergies together, even Mothdust Changeling can become a monster.

He also talks about which cards you should bring as trade/sale-bait for last-minute shoppers. That's probably worth looking at.

Yesterday I attended the second Bay Area Pro Tour Qualifier feeding into Pro Tour Hollywood 2008. According to the tournament organizers, we had 180 attendees, which puts us on the high end for PTQs for this season (compare with the attendance numbers shown here.

I did not win, but I enjoyed most of my games, and thought I (and my Kokusho deck) did well. My tournament report is in the extended.

Last week, I played Kokusho at our local PTQ and started out strong, then fell back behind the pack. After some thought, I have my revised Kokusho build for next weekend's PTQ, assuming I make it to that one.

More in the extended.

Up until the first of this month, the plan for Extended was a massive rotation in October of this year, during which every set before Mirrodin would drop out of Extended -- this would mean the loss of the Invasion, Odyssey, and Onslaught blocks, as well as Seventh edition.

In the most recent DCI Banned and Restricted List Announcement, Wizards announced a change to this policy. Instead of occasional, massive shifts in Extended, they're now going to a model of dropping the oldest block off each year as a new block comes in.

I find this somewhat funny, as I just listened to old coverage (PT Philadelphia, I think), in which Randy explains the rationale behind shifting Extended in giant chunks, rather than in block increments.

With the new change, Wizards is still dropping Invasion and Odyssey blocks from Extended, along with Seventh edition. Onslaught, however, stays in. On the new schedule, this means that Onslaught will not rotate out until late 2009.

So what's the upshot of all this? Well, all of Invasion block is gone with the rotation, so there will be no more Vindicates, Deeds, or basically any other worthwhile multicolored card not from Ravnica block. In addition, the Invasion sac lands that power out Ideal and TEPS will be gone.

On the other hand, we have another year of Onslaught fetchlands ($$$) and Instant-speed Storm spells. Hmmm.

Assuming no changes, then, we'll lose Onslaught in late 2009, Mirrodin in late 2010, Kamigawa in late 2011, and so forth.

The middle of the week saw a new crop of PTQ decks appearing on the PTQ Hollywood 2008 page, per usual. Also as usual, Northern California decks were absent. Come on, Matchplay -- get those decklists in! You can read my PTQ experience from last weekend, but I'm afraid I can't comment much on the overall pool of competing decks. We need Riki Hayashi hanging around and counting decklists or something.

What do we learn from the decklists this week? Well, first off, if you want to attend a small tournament, go to one in Anchorage in early March. 15 participants. The Honolulu PTQ was also small at 40 people. All the other tournaments were over 80 attendees, with the biggest being the 156-person PTQ in Des Moines, won by Adrian Sullivan. Of course, the San Jose PTQ was 180 people...but once again, it's not being reported.

When I look at the decklists from each week, I'm looking for two things. First, I like the general feel of what made top eights, as there's some chance that will inform people's deck choices for the coming weekend, which will in turn inform my thoughts about what I'll be playing against. Second, I want to see what odd, quirky things people managed to top eight with.

In that latter category, this week delivers with some fun notes. Click through on the links to get to the top eight decklists for that PTQ.

Paul Ewenstein's sixth-place finisher at the Boston PTQ is a Gifts Rock deck, an archetype that's not particularly in favor right now. In this case, Gifts lets him have a bevy of one ofs, including a singleton Damnation, one Extirpate, one of each of Primal and Profane Commands, one Putrefy, one Smother, one Vindicate, one Shriekmaw, and most fascinating of all, one Reveillark. I have no idea under what circumstances you find yourself thinking, "If only I had a single Reveillark!"

Rusty Kubis made it to third place in Des Moines with a G/W aggro deck packing such Extended favorites as Worship, Otherworldly Journey (Kamigawa represent!), Phantom Centaur, and Tallowisp. Seems weird, but hey -- how many Extended decks can actually kill a Phantom Centaur? Especially with Saffi waiting in the wings to bring it back (ah, right -- Saffi's in there, too).

Honolulu saw the return of Ninjas, with Michael Ching's sixth-place finish. Unlike the second-place finisher in LA, Michael is all in on the Ninja plan, with Higure, the Still Wind in the main. He still has the Standstills. I have to respect his solid 4-4-4-3 sideboard that includes four more Ninjas, as well as Stifles, Threads, and some Crypts.

Rick Powell hit fourth place in Manchester with a Scepter-Chant (AKA "No Stick") deck that packs a little extra something in the form of a pair of Leonin Abunas that presumably sits in to guard the eponymous No Stick and three Lightning Angels. Just because. It honestly looks janky, but apparently it works.

We round out this week's PTQ touring in New York, where Josh Meckles took Gifts Rock to fifth place in a field of over a hundred. His deck looked pretty normal, until Meloku caught my eye. However, it wouldn't have merited posting about it until I realized that in addition to the Clouded Mirror, Josh ran a single Visara the Dreadful. Go on, click through. Although I'm never one to turn down a 5/5 flyer for six mana (and my deck of choice runs four of them), I wonder for which matchups you Gifts and show the opponent Eternal Witness, Genesis, Meloku, Visara.

As a final fun note, the given in Extended right now is that you really need to be prepared for Dredge, and that that probably means 6+ cards in your sideboard dedicated to the Dredge matchup. Consider this quote from feature match coverage of PT Houston 2002:

This weekend in Houston there is a sea of Reanimator despite the fact that everyone else knew the deck was popular. The average sideboard seems to have 6 to 10 cards specifically against Reanimator and even many main decks have cards that were chosen because of their ability to deal with a single huge monster. Coffin Purge, Diabolic Edict, Chainer's Edict, Reprisal, Gilded Drake, Parallax Wave, Rushing River ... there's a lot you can run if you want to beat Reanimator.

It seems that living from the graveyard is a popular way to avoid interacting with other decks...until they decide to bring the hate.

One of the emerging stories of this PTQ season has been mono-red burn. The canonical burn deck, called "$40 Burn" in some places, is a package of creatures that all double as burn, burn spells, and a topping of Shrapnel Blast powered out with artifact lands. The goal here is simply to race every other deck, knocking them down before they get to do their thing.

As part of attempting to talk SSO into going to Sacramento with me this weekend, I've put together a slightly variant take on that deck design. Full list is in the extended.

Yesterday, SSO and I made the two-hour drive to our state capitol to play in the last nearby PTQ of the season. We joined a crowd of 206 people in the Sacramento Convention Center for eight rounds of Extended leading to a blue envelope and an invite to Pro Tour Hollywood. Incidentally, they've posted the full information for Pro Tour Hollywood, including side events and the last-chance qualifier.

I played Kokusho, and SSO played a slightly different version of the Red Burn deck. We both went 4-4, and had a good, if exhausting, time. I woke up at 6am, and got home at 11pm.

The full tournament report is in the extended.

Lisa: Look, there's only one way to settle this. Rock-paper-scissors.
Lisa's brain: Poor predictable Bart. Always takes 'rock'.
Bart's brain: Good ol' 'rock'. Nuthin' beats that!
Bart: Rock!
Lisa: Paper.
Bart: D'oh!

(Thanks to The Simpsons Archive for this text.)

Gerard Fabiano recently took the top prize at GP Philadelphia 2008 with his modification of Barra Rock (named after Giulio Barra who top foured PT Valencia 2007 with a very solid, very midrange WBG Rock build). In a recent conversation with Brian David-Marshall on the Top8Magic.com podcast, Gerard said that he picked Rock because it was just how he likes to play -- and recommended just going with the style of play you enjoy.

I've found that, by and large, I really enjoy the "Rock" style of play -- midrange, with on-board control and disruption. I'm not as fond of draw-go play, trying to figure out which things to counter and which not to. Similarly, although it can be fun to just lay down the beats, I do prefer a more controlling approach. Really, what I like is the ability to disrupt and knock holes in the opponent's game plan. It's a very interactive style of play. This can leave more room for mistakes, but it also just makes the game more fun.

With that in mind, and during a few of the more boring gaps in the conference I attended last week, I was considering what kind of build I might use for another PTQ this season, or if I were going to try the Last-Chance Qualifier at Pro Tour Hollywood 2008. It's no more pure Kokusho for me -- the lack of good, fast disruption means that combo and draw-go control tend to walk all over you. With that in mind, check out the extended for my most recent take on the venerable Rock archetype.

The September 1, 2008 Banned and Restricted List announcement is up. Here are the changes:

Extended

Sensei's Divining Top is banned

Legacy

Time Vault is banned

Vintage

Time Vault is restricted
Chrome Mox, Dream Halls, Mox Diamond, Personal Tutor, and Time Spiral are no longer restricted

I don't have much of an opinion about the eternal formats, but there's already some discussion and dismay about the banning of Top in Extended. The explanation will come later on this week in the upcoming Latest Developments column, but if I had to guess, I'd think it would be a time issue. Decks that run Top benefit from using it every turn, and each activation adds time -- sometimes, a lot of time -- to each turn. Over the course of a match, and then over the course of an entire tournament, that's a ton of extra time. Extra time means more matches going to time, more draws, and a general train wreck for most tournaments.

That's my guess, at any rate -- not power level issues, but time.