Gifts Ungiven

Although I haven't been writing much about it, I've been putting serious thought into builds and testing for the upcoming PTQ season (that starts with Grand Prix Los Angeles 2009 in mid January). Me being me, I'm almost certainly going with a deck that has appearances from at least the colors black and green, but I'll put more concrete info on my deck choice later, after GP LA.

In the mean time, I wanted to set up a pointer to this article by Josh Silvestri that takes a look at the current Extended metagame and offers some very solid advice on how to test for it. Two quick highlights:

Other than that, it means the propensity to keep 'okay' hands is going to get a lot of people killed and complaining about how lucky decks/players/format are. It isn’t anyone else's fault that you kept a hand that lost to turn 1 Blood Moon, or you kept a hand that had a for-sure turn 3 kill on the draw against a deck that can consistently win on turn 3 and possibly even earlier.

This is certainly true. Even in last year's Extended format, I lost at least one game in a PTQ to keeping an "okay" hand, one of those "it'll get there" hands that didn't get there in time to stop the double Shrapnel Blast that took me out of that game.

If you're playing Extirpate in your deck because it’s decent against a lot of stuff by stealing their 'best cards,' you're DOING IT WRONG. Other than artifact removal and Engineered Explosives, there are very few cards that see play in individual decks that are just good against a good portion of the field. You want to find the matches where the opposing strategy is putting you in an awkward position, and have cards available to stop that from happening. With Burn, this is why you see Ensnaring Bridge even though it only is really helpful against two matches. MUC devotes slots to Annul and Flashfreeze, because they help put major dents in linear strategies it has some problems with. Bitterblossom in some sideboards is almost entirely for the Faeries / MUC mirror. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Once again, here's the article.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote a post with this title that had nothing to do with what this post is going to be about. But it occurred to me that the name is apropos, and I really enjoyed the original.

As we head into a new Extended PTQ season, I've been watching and participating in forum traffic concerning new builds and revisions of current builds meant to challenge and win at PTQs (as a reminder, here's an overview of our current metagame). From that forum traffic, I've culled a couple recurring concepts:

Elves is a cheap deck, so many people will be playing it.

Elves is easily hated out, so not many people will be playing it.

Zoo is the default deck.

Mono-blue control will not be common, so why defend against it?

This last one brought me up short, because I think it's the most problematic thought in the bunch. Now, for starters, I'm in an area with a lot (a lot!) of good players, so it's reasonable to expect that you'll run into more than a few mono-blue control builds. However, there's a second, more important point, and it's one that I coincidentally just saw remarked on by Mike Flores in this article from last May. Let's roll out the key sentence here:

The deck to make Top 8 is almost certainly a different deck than the one that you want to actually win the tournament.

Here, let me expand this thought to say that the deck to make top eight is a different deck than the one you'd bring to face the field.

To clarify, maybe it is likely that there won't be so many players running mono-blue decks in the tournament as a whole. However, if you're planning on winning the whole thing, then you're also planning on being at the top tables, and if that's the case, you're going to be playing against decks that good players brought.

Or, briefly, I expect to hit a lot of mono-blue control.

Of course, I also expect to have to plow through a big dose of Elves and Zoo, so what I'm basically coming to is the fairly boring conclusion that anything I need to play has to be able to beat MUC, Elves, and Zoo. Woot! However, I think it's important to be able to point your emphasis in the right direction, and I think that will mean beating countermagic-oriented control builds more than anything else.

After all, the point of going to the PTQ is to win the whole thing, right?

Wizards has finally posted the PTQ announcement page for the current season. Click here to see it.

The announcements went up surprisingly late this time, with at least two PTQs having happened already in North America (in Ontario and Oregon). This coming weekend's crop includes Atlanta, Louisville, and Seattle -- and, of course, Grand Prix Los Angeles comes the following weekend, paralleling PTQs in Mobile and Omaha (and, of course, the Sunday PTQ at the GP itself).

Sadly, the dates for Northern California PTQs are not yet fixed, but we at least know that we will have two in the SF Bay Area (i.e. San Jose) and two in Sacramento. Dates we do know from our friendly neighborhood TO are the last two GP Trials in our area, on the 10th and the 11th (click here for the Matchplay site to see upcoming TO-led events, and click here for Superstars, where other Extended events are also being run).

I'm looking forward to this season, as I'm a big fan of the Extended format these days.

The Northern California PTQ dates for the current season were announced today at the GP Trial. They are:

February 28th, at Superstars in San Jose
March 21st, at Great Escape Games in Sacramento
April 4th, at Superstars in San Jose
April 11th, at Great Escape Games in Sacramento

That's a solid four PTQs in our area, which is quite nice. I look forward to going to as many of them as possible (right now, I think that'll be all of them).

One of the downsides of any PTQ season is the mixed bag of my strong interest in a specific format at that time, and my unwillingness to write about what I'm actually thinking about for the format, as I'd like to retain whatever edge my customization brings until I go to an actual event. There's no small amount of misplaced ego there, since I clearly can make some very bad deck design decisions, but nonetheless, as long as I'm actually thinking of playing a given build, I'm not all that excited about talking about it.

Also, I'm in a bit of design limbo now anyway, as the first PTQ in my area comes after Conflux releases, so that may completely alter my deck choice via expanded design options.

Switching gears, then, we can take a look at what's been doing well so far. Obviously, my GP Trial experience was a fascinating mix of moderately expected decks, going Affinity, Dredge, Hulk, Burn, Tron. No Zoo or Faeries there.

Deckcheck has started posting top eights from various PTQs. First, we have the top eight from this last weekend's PTQ in Louisville, which saw a mono-white deck take the win. If you've been reading Flores' new blog, you've seen a similar deck. Likewise if you've been reading the Lumbering Justice thread on the Wizards forums. The variant played by Scott Honigmann features a single Mistveil Plains so that you can't be decked to death after your life total is insurmountable, as well as two Sacred Foundries to support sideboard Boils for the mono-blue matchup. Elsewhere in the top eight, Dennis Taylor brought a burn deck with three maindecked Sulfuric Vortexes (Vortices?), which is similar to the burn deck I ran up against at the GP Trial that had all four in the main. Michael Belfatto's Affinity ran triple Shrapnel Blast and a pair of Tarmogoyfs, which is kind of interesting.

Over in Kruft, the top eight saw four Faeries decks, with Raul Porojan (a name you'll recognize if you listen to Rich Hagon's podcasts) taking the top spot. Although they weren't all exact copies, nothing stood out to me in the various Faeries builds as particularly exciting (although it's worth noting that Raul was packing triple Relic of Progenitus in the sideboard as graveyard hate). Notable among the other decks were Sebastian Knorr's Dredge and Xavier Paulis's Bant Aggro. The Dredge deck is packing an exciting new enabler (and not coincidentally, random kill condition against Elves and Storm) in Brain Freeze. Consider the fun play of land, Chrome Mox, Brain Freeze yourself to ditch six cards on turn one. Not bad. The added ability to just hold the Freeze in hand and randomly kill an Elves player is gravy. The Paulis Bant Aggro deck is a pretty straightforward aggro-tempo build with undercosted creatures equipped with Jittes and backed by cheap countermagic. Seems good.

Looking through these early lists, I'm most excited by the Brain Freeze in the Dredge deck; I love that dual purposing of the card as both strategy enabler and random kill.

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.

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.)

Here's the archetype round up from the four PTQ top eights from last weekend that have posted on the Wizards site. I'll bold the winning archetype in each case.

Rockville: 1 Burn, 1 Rock, 2 Mono-Blue Control, 1 Affinity, 1 UGW Control, 1 Mind's Desire, 1 All-In Red

Adam Levitt's UGW deck featured a MUC frame with Kitchen Finks in the main and triple Kataki in the side, as well as triple CoP: Red.

Madison: 3 MUC, 1 Sligh, 1 Tezzerator, 1 Rock, 1 Affinity, 1 UB Tron

Columbus: 2 Affinity, 2 Zoo, 1 Death Cloud, 1 Mind's Desire, 1 MUC, 1 Elves

Interesting that Affinity is still going strong even after the double top eight in Los Angeles.

Burlington: 7 MUC, 1 Elves

Check that out. In fairness, the third place finisher had Tarmogoyfs and a single Rude Awakening in his deck, hearkening back to various levels of blue last season. Regardless, that is one mirror-rific top eight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clearly I haven't been in a position to write a lot in the last week; I was thinking of going to a Standard tournament, but that did not happen. However, I'd like to point people toward two good articles at ChannelFireball.com. We have:

Initial Technology - First Thoughts on Alara Reborn - Luis Scott-Vargas walks through the Alara Reborn cards that have been spoiled so far and highlights some of the likely hits.

The Riki Rules - PTQing for Fun and no Profit - Riki Hayashi talks about his experience at this PTQ, and why a judge might want to play at a PTQ, even without a high likelihood of actually winning the event.