Gifts Ungiven

Although the new Extended rotation policy means that Onslaught gets to stick around for one more year, the extensive drop-off as October, 2008 rolls around means that two key players in the Extended disruption suite will be departing.

These key disruption spells offered a chance to put someone off their game plan on turn one, and, in the case of Therapy, to completely obliterate their game plan either via Flashback or via Duress into Therapy. Ugly.

Although Shards may well bring some good disruption options, it's fun to think about what's already available to us in the world of Onslaught Extended.

Full thoughts in the extended.

This week's latest developments has rolled around, and as I suspected, it was banned in Extended for being slooooow.

The constant activating of Divining Top bogs games down, which ultimately leads to an increase in the number of matches that go to time and beyond, which in turn leads to tournaments running much longer than they have historically.

I don't think I get any points for guessing the reason.

Earlier this week, we had this preview card and, coincidentally, a video by LSV discussing strong choices for the new Extended. LSV's picks match my intuitive picks -- Affinity, Tron.

Unsurprisingly, there's been some hubbub about the Esper shard in Shards (that's the blue-centric one), with all its permanents being colored artifacts. After all, that plugs more or less directly into the linear mechanic that is Affinity.

The Master could -- maybe -- be an utter house in Affinity. Coming in at three mana, the Master is minimally a 4/4 the turn it comes down, in addition to being an effective Crusade for artifacts -- that is, all your creatures, since you've probably taken the Hoverguards out for this build. With a more explosive start, the Master might just be a frighteningly large finisher, especially without Pernicious Deed sitting across the red zone in the new Extended. Consider:

Turn 1: Darksteel Citadel, Ornithopter, Ornithopter, Springleaf Drum, Arcbound Worker, Frogmite
Turn 2: Vault of Whispers, Master of Etherium

Congratulations. Your untapped Thopter, Worker, and Frogmite are swinging for 6 damage on turn two, and your 8/8 Master can join in on turn three for a total of 20+ damage and the kill.

Not bad.*

I look forward to seeing what turns up at Pro Tour Berlin 2008, and possibly to hating out a bunch of Affinity decks when the qualifier season for Pro Tour Austin 2009 rolls around.

*Yes, that's sort of a dream draw. That said, one of the top finishers at GP Vienna 2008 talks in the audio coverage about an opponent with the turn one play of "land, thopter, thopter, Springleaf Drum, Frogmite, Frogmite, Myr Enforcer, go."

Gatherer, the official Magic database, has just been updated. The updates bring the "Standard" and "Extended" menu options in line with the cards and sets that are legal in each format (and, indeed, the Top is not in the Extended search). There is now also a Shards of Alara Block option. They've also rearranged Gatherer -- before, it was all the block options in one place, with the individual sets below. Now, the sets in each block are grouped with their block option.

Click here for Gatherer

Click here for Standard on Gatherer

Click here for Extended on Gatherer

Fun facts from these two searches:

There are 1,486 cards currently legal in Standard
There are 5,036 cards currently legal in Extended

This has been a week for pleasingly quirky Extended decks.

First, I direct you to this week's Top Decks article from Michael J, where he highlights Scott Honigmann's PTQ-winning mono-white control deck as well as Bradley Carpenter's quite surprising Lightning Zoo. Really, go look, especially for Lightning Zoo.

Second, it's usually worth taking a look through each week's Decks of the Week for interesting standouts. Amidst a bunch of the expected decks, I spied this build from an online PE on the ninth (click through to the extended for the deck list):

With more than another month to go before the first PTQ I'll be attending in the current season, it's good to be mindful of the potential impact of Conflux cards on playable and good decks in Onslaught-Conflux Extended.

Click through to the extended entry for some thoughts on a few interesting cards. My early feeling is that Conflux will help push Burn and Domain Zoo toward success, with a possible role for some new white-splashing control decks as well.

As I mentioned , the industrious BIll Stark has given us all the day two deck lists from GP Los Angeles 2009. Over at Top 8 Magic, Brian has already posted deck lists for the ninth through twentieth places. I took a quick look through the list earlier today and rather than chasing top finishers, pulled some deck lists that stood out from the others.

Click through to the extended entry to see some of the more unexpected builds, including Time Spiral non-allstar Roiling Horror as a finisher in a Martyr deck, and many other intriguing card choices.

With the MTGSalvation Conflux spoiler just thirteen cards shy of complete (assuming it's mostly correct), it's time to check in again and see if this mid-Alara set is going to cause any significant changes in the current PTQ season.

I have some full notes in the extended entry, but my true standout cards are Path to Exile, Hellspark Elemental, Volcanic Fallout, Worldheart Phoenix, and Might of Alara. I discuss a few others, but these are the ones that I foresee having some real impact. Of these, Path slots into certain control and aggro/control decks. Hellspark Elemental goes into mono-red burn. Volcanic Fallout may go into certain aggro builds. Worldheart Phoenix might be a Gifts finisher. Last, but not at all least, Might of Alara goes into Domain Zoo.

So does this shift the metagame? It might make Domain Zoo a stronger contender, and it might make All-In Red decks much riskier. Perhaps we'll also see some more U/w control again, with Path going in as the super removal card in those decks.

The financial upshot here is that you probably aren't looking to pick up any rares to retain your competitive edge as Conflux spills into the Extended format.

(And, as noted, more commentary in the extended entry.)

Deck lists went up this week the January 24th PTQ in San Diego, which should be the last set of pre-Conflux PTQ results we see.

First, was that attendance correct? 74? That's awfully low for California. I'd buy it if someone said they'd dropped a "1" from the beginning of that number.

The winning deck was a blue-green-white build with a wide range of utility creatures including Birds, Teeg, Rhox War Monk, Archmage, Vendilion Clique, and Venser. This was backed up with Bant Charm, Spell Snare, and double Jitte and Sword of Fire and Ice. In fact, in what is necessarily an act of convergence and not replication (since Kenneth Ellis's win at San Diego came before Flores made his post) it looks a lot like the Mike Flores re-do of Critical Mass that he posted a little while ago.

The sideboard includes an even distribution of Affinity, Storm, and graveyard hate.

The rest of the San Diego top eight was fairly combo-tastic, with three Storm decks and two copies of Elves. The other two were Affinity and RGW Sligh (NB - I may be misusing the term here, but that's what other people are calling it, so I'll stick with that).

There will be some post-Conflux PTQs on the 14th, two weeks ahead of my first PTQ in the new format. I'll watch those results with some interest, as well as whatever Magic League results show up in the meantime. I don't expect significant changes, although Hierarch will probably go into any Ellis-style decks, and Path to Exile means that All-In Red is an even worse choice than it already was (it may also impact Affinity's performance). Beyond that, I don't have any solid predictions for Conflux-dependent change in the PTQ metagame.

Addendum - After I wrote this, but before posting, I read Brian David-Marshall's most recent The Week that Was where he tells us that two Modesto-area players got into a car accident on the way home from this PTQ. I'll quote a bit here:

After playing in a Pro Tour qualifier for Honolulu two weeks ago, Robert Cash and Kenneth Ellis were involved in a car accident driving home from San Diego to Modesto. Robert was killed in the crash and Kenneth was seriously injured. My deepest condolences go out to Robert's family and friends and my wishes for a speedy and complete recovery go out to Kenneth and his family.

Although I didn't know Robert and Kenneth personally, they've both been going to many of the same PTQs I've been to, and were part of the friendly PTQ crowd. I'm very sorry to hear about Robert, and I hope Kenneth recovers sooner rather than later.

DeckCheck has a top eight for us from a GP Trial for Hannover, giving us one of our first views of a post-Conflux Extended top eight. I'll link to the decks of interest in the extended, with notes on their standout traits.

Someone asked why we see Shizo and Okina in Doran/Junk decks these days, but not Eiganjo. I wrote a reply in the Wizards forums that I think is worth reprinting, so here it is:

Each nonbasic you add to your mana base increases your exposure to auto-losses from moon effects. So you're doing a cost-benefit analysis for each land slot to see if it should be a basic or something else. The Doran deck is going to naturally want to start with some combination of fetches and shocks to make sure you hit your turn one, two, and three mana marks, so much of the base is already spoken for. From there, you need to have a certain number of basics to (1) fetch, (2) reduce your damage from fetching later-game lands, and (3) increase your resiliency against the moons.

Eiganjo makes Doran a little tougher if he's running into big blockers, or if someone's trying to burn him out. Shizo actually solves that blockers problem, and Doran's going to be Smothered, Putrefied and Exiled way more often than he's going to be burned, so that's not an especially useful ability. It's almost certainly not worth the additional exposure.

The Moon effects force us to be more honest with our mana bases, an observation I've heard in the last few months from both Rich Hagon and Mike Flores (Mike in a top eight podcast, and Rich commenting on the fact that the Pro Tour floor at Berlin saw far more basics in play than the parallel Standard events). Each time you choose something other than a basic land, you must do a serious cost-benefit analysis to decide if that's worth the increased exposure.

Writing for Evolution in Spain, Juan Miguel Garcia reports on a recent GP Trial for Hannover. You can click here to read Juan's tournament report, including a breakdown of the tournament metagame, the top eight deck lists, and a report on the top eight. Mind you, if you can't read Spanish, you may not get much out of the tournament report section itself. But for those of you who aren't good with Spanish, the deck lists for the top eight are in English.

As Juan points out, five of the decks in the top eight include Conflux cards. I recently looked at another GP Trial which saw Might of Alara and Path to Exile making their way into Zoo decks, and Knight of the Reliquary showing up in its expected place in a Loam deck. Click through to the extended entry for the interesting tidbits from the Evolution top eight.

Gifts Ungiven is an excellent card.

I like searching decks. I like searching my deck to get a card I need to set up an engine. I like searching my opponent's deck to remove a card they need. As a consequence, I really enjoy the idea of Gifts Ungiven, and I've been thinking about whether a Gifts deck is a good call for the current Extended season.

Of course, saying, "I plan on playing Gifts" is a lot like saying, "I plan on cooking with flour." While it may constrain what you might possibly be making, it doesn't actually say much about what you will be making. With that in mind, I wanted to take some time to think about Gifts. And because I'm already a bit of a research wonk, I decided to look back through the history of Gifts Ungiven in Extended PTQs.

But first, let's take a look at the card itself. Unsurprisingly, given the name of this site, I get a lot of searches coming here asking questions like "How do I use Gifts Ungiven?" So, how do we use it?

At its most basic level, Gifts is card advantage. You will end up with two cards in hand for one card expended - basic card advantage.

Expanding on that, there are a number of ways people use the card.

To get what I need

Many Gifts decks include a framework that basically lets you Gifts for a defined pair of regrowth cards along with one or two targets you actually want. For example, you might have Eternal Witness and Reclaim in your deck. If you subsequently find that you absolutely must get your single copy of Fracturing Gust to close out that pesky Affinity deck, you can Gifts for Witness, Reclaim, Gust, and something else. Even if the opponent puts your Gust in the graveyard, you're guaranteed to get at least one effect in your hand, whether its Witness or Reclaim, that can get that Gust back.

To get what I need right now

If you look at, say, Patrick Chapin's Gifts deck from PT Berlin, you'll see that he has three different sweepers in the deck (in his case, Firespout, Wrath, and Engineered Explosives). In this case, instead of needing to rely on reanimation, you can be sure that you'll get some form of the type of card you need, simply because you have at least three options, so you can only ever lose two of them to the graveyard post-Gifts.

This is also why we want to diversify between Basic and Snow-Covered Basic lands in our decks - so we can Gifts for Forest, Snow-Covered Forest, Breeding Pool, Stomping Ground, and guarantee we get a Forest immediately.

To set up an engine

There are a lot of engines that you can put in place quickly with Gifts regardless of where the actual cards end up in the Gifts split. Consider the Tron player who Gifts for Mindslaver, Academy Ruins, Life from the Loam, and something else. No matter where you put those cards, unless you can attack the Tron player's graveyard, they're going to get the Ruins out, get the Slaver back, and lock you out. Similarly, you can Gifts for a Life from the Loam and three Onslaught cycling lands, and you suddenly have a super-powered card draw engine.

So that's how you can use Gifts. How have people actually used it? Click through to the extended to see how Gifts has shown up in the last three Extended PTQ seasons.

Over at the Evolution blog, Ruben Gonzalez asks "Que fue de Battle of Wits?"

Or, in English, "What happened to Battle of Wits?"

In the article, Ruben looks at Battle circa 2005, with Sam Gomersall's list, then looks at how the list was updated for 2008 by Alex Yatsenko of Russia, who bravely piloted it to a 5-3 finish (including one win over Steve Sadin, who picked an even worse deck to try and win a Pro Tour with).

Ruben has some interesting commentary in his article, including a discussion about how the 2008 deck has focused even more on actually finding a copy of Battle, along with other changes to try and make the deck more effective. Once again, you'll need to be able to read Spanish (or enjoy the quirks of machine translation) to read the article, with the added bonus this time around that the deck lists are also in Spanish. Still, if you can swing it, it's a good read, even if you (like me) don't relish the idea of showing up to a tournament with four decks instead of the requisite one.

(Sorry about the lack of correct diacriticals. I'm trying to figure that out.)

We have another post-Conflux top eight list from an Extended GP trial, this time in Berlin. Here's the DeckCheck link.

Click through to the extended entry for comments on the deck lists.

In testing for the upcoming PTQ here in San Jose, I've been using this gal:

It's awesome, by the way. It also reminded me of the same feeling I had when I was running this lady at the Superstars Standard $1K:

Specifically, exalted is a brilliant keyword. Why is that?

In his recent article Rethinking Investment Theory: Everything Has Haste, Zac Hill discussed the way in which Sorceries and Instants beat out the random beater, by dint of having an immediate effect - effectively, "they have haste." Thus the title. I tend to agree with Zac's concept that a straight-up, wait-a-turn investment in a creature is kind of disappointing. This is why I tend to prefer creatures that have comes-into-play effects or have some other potential immediate value (e.g. Eternal Witness and Sakura-Tribe Elder, respectively).

Exalted is, much of the time, an immediate ROI, regardless of what else is going on with the creature in question. In the case of Battlegrace Angel, the immediate value is twofold, as by buying into the 4/4 flyer for next turn, you also get +1/+1 and lifelink for whatever you had in play this turn. This was brilliant much of the time in Standard (and has me, tangentially, thinking about playing Battlegraces as finishers in Extended).

In the more subtle case of my testing with Noble Hierarch, I found that the presence of the exalted keyword changed all my late-game Hierarchs from terrible draws (cf Birds of Paradise) into value draws. Now instead of a mana developer that you no longer need, you have something that reads "G: Give a solitary attacker +1/+1." Clearly you wouldn't play that on its own, but it means you suddenly have a topdeck that can do all sorts of things - like, for example, winning a Tarmogoyf war.

Over on Five with Flores, Michael J referred to his old article The Breakdown of Theory, which discusses the three-phase model of a Magic game. The phases are, briefly:

Phase 1: Manascrew (aka mana development)
Phase 2: Interactive play
Phase 3: Noninteractive play

Cards that get you out of phase 1 traditionally suck when you draw them post-phase 1. The presence of the exalted keyword converts Hierarch from a phase-1-only card to a card that has some value in all phases of the game.

So that's why I'm so high on exalted right now. All in one concise little package, it solves the dual problems of delayed ROI from a creature and of mana smoothing being a poor late-game topdeck. That's impressive for one little keyword.

The first PTQ Honolulu of the Bay Area is this Saturday at Superstars Game Center (click there, or click here for our TO's page).

I'm bringing a Gifts deck, which explains my recent Gifts Ungiven retrospective.

Although it's my policy to not post my deck list until I take it to at least the first relevant event of the season, here are some of the observations that came up in testing:

Hierarchs are out

Even though Noble Hierarch is an excellent example of the exalted keyword, it doesn't suit a control-oriented Gifts deck of the type I'm using.

Glittering Wish is still too slow

Although it makes me sad, Glittering Wish isn't fast enough, either on its own or as part of a Gifts package. Around the time of PT Berlin, Pat Chapin said the Gifts engine isn't powerful enough without a wish component, but in my testing to date, having the Wishes in the deck really weakens me.

This makes me sad, because conceptually, wishboards are awesome.

Shadowmoor gave Gifts some good tools

Even when you're not wishing for hybrid cards (another cool feature of Shadowmoor vis-a-vis some Gifts decks), Shadowmoor and Eventide gave some great functional addenda to various Gifts packages. Consider, for example, the value of having Selkie Hedge-Mage as part of an anti-aggro Gifts split.

Three for me

Some Gifts decks run three copies of the eponymous cards, some run four. In my experience so far, four is one too many most of the time, as although I do want to see a Gifts by turn four or five, seeing one in my opening hand is unnecessary, and seeing two makes me a seriously sad panda.

That's all for now. I'll have more to say post-tournament.

I was thinking of talking about the SCG Richmond $5K, but our man Michael J covered enough of it in his column on the mothership, so I'll leave it alone.

Instead, let's take a look at the most recent batch of PTQ top eights as we pitch into the next PTQ weekend (where I'll be playing, and for which I'm still trying to pin down my exact final strategy).

The first standout observation of this batch of top eights is that wins went to double Affinity, double Faeries, and one copy of Zoo. Looking past the blue envelope in this set of top eights shows us that Zoo continues to be strong, albeit largely in WRG rather than Domain variants, and that Faeries decks are starting to pack single copies of Meloku as a possible finisher. The third part of our stock triad - combo - remains a strong contender, with Storm and Elves decks finishing in multiple top eights as well (although with some clustering, suggesting certain environments are more prone to hating out the appropriate combos than others). The strong outlier choice is Bant Aggro, with a number of finishers in a couple of the top eights.

What's the take home message? Nothing super exciting. Be prepared to face down mono-blue control, Storm combo, Elves combo, and Zoo, with a side order of Gaddock Teeg there just to screw you up, courtesy of Bant.

Click to the extended for comments and links to the most recent round of top eights.

I just watched Gab Nassif's spectacular topdeck to win his way out of the quarterfinals in Kyoto.

I'm reminded of earlier today, when one of my opponents commented that I was topdecking like a champ. I said that I'd put the cards there in the first place because I wanted to draw them...

I did not do particularly well at today's PTQ, but I stayed in to try and suss out the issues with my deck choice. Across sixteen games, I mulliganed to six five times, and to five fours times, which suggest to me that there are basic structural issues here.

Click through to the extended for a deck list and a brief tournament report.

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.

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.

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).

Two days shy of the next batch of PTQs, DeckCheck serves us up a set of decks from two PTQ top eights in Italy, one in Rome, the other in Milan, both ostensibly having 100 players each.

Looking across these sixteen decks, we find some updates for Tron, Elves, All-in Red, and Bant. Click through to the extended entry for links and commentary.

I attended the second of the Bay Area PTQs for Honolulu today, hosted as they ably are of late at Superstars Game Center in San Jose. Superstars is having a Standard $1K next weekend. However, if you're in the general NorCal area and still want a shot at qualifying, there's also a PTQ the same day at Great Escape Games in Sacramento (click here for more info).

I had a fun, if insufficiently successful day today. The title is only sort of misleading; I'll explain it in the extended entry, along with the deck I brought, and a round-by-round of my tournament experience.

Overall, the tournament metagame this time around was a mix of Faeries, which really does seem to be the favorite of skilled pilots, as well as B/G Loam, Naya Zoo, Affinity, Storm, Slide, Elves, and Conley-Woods-style ReliquaryGeddon (if you don't know what that is, click here for BDM's column discussing Conley's deck, and click here to read about Conley's PTQ win). As far as I could see, the Big Domain style decks seem to have fallen away since the last Sac PTQ, probably because they're actually not all that great.

Once again, click through to the extended to see my deck choice and my round-by-round.