Gifts Ungiven

The DCI automailer just sent out this snazzy poster reminding all of us that Pro Tour Hollywood is on the horizon, a mere two weeks away:

I'll be there, playing in side events (starting with the Pro Tour qualifiers).

Here's the info page on the Pro Tour

Here's the info page on side events

After dropping from the PTQ on Saturday, I eventually wandered over to the Feature Match area. I arrived in time to watch hall of famer Zvi Mowshowitz play Helmut Summersberger in game two of their round 15 match. Here's the video:

You can read the text coverage of the match here.

Afterward, I caught a bit more video of Zvi explaining his deck's strengths, using an earlier matchup as an example:

On Saturday morning before the PTQ began, we managed to catch a game between future hall of famer Shuhei Nakamura and fellow Japanese player Osamu Fujita. You can find Shuhei's decklist in the top eight coverage, and you can read about Osamu Fujita's deck, a Tsuyoshi Fujita design, here.

Decklists are now available for day one, day two, and, of course, the top eight at Pro Tour Hollywood 2008. Here are the links:

Day One, A-M
Day One, N-Z
Day Two
Top Eight

So, are there any interesting outliers of note? Curious deck choices we didn't hear about? The two standout "weird" decks of the tournament were Manual B's mana-greedy control deck and Stuart Wright's B/R Tokens build, but I'm always curious about other nonstandard choices people brought, and how they paid off. Let's take a look (in the extended):