Title: Heading to Nationals (2)
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Blog Entry: With our own nationals just a mere ten days away from us we are getting more and more excited about it. Most of the players in my playgroup are qualified and we are currently using the results from other nationals that are slowly coming in as we speak. I wrote in part one about our first preperations for the nationals and a deck we hope to finish and run in the nationals. I pick up were I was left... The deck Lately I've been writing some blog's about the creativity disappearing in the game. Mostly when it comes to deckbuilding. My playgroup decided that we wanted to encourage people by pointing out what causes this loss of creativity and showing that it can be done in a different way. We started a deckbuilding project and combined it with our preperation for the nationals. In the first part I already listed the deck, but I will do it again to ease things; "U/B Control" 3.1 Mainboard 2x Oona, Queen of the Fae 3x Bitterblossom 3x Broken Ambitions 4x Cryptic Command 3x Damnation 1x Pact of Negation 4x Ponder 4x Rune Snag 4x Telling Time 4x Terror 4x Thoughtseize 3x Dreadship Reef 2x Island 2x Pendelhaven 3x River of Tears 2x Swamp 4x Secluded Glen 4x Sunken Ruins 4x Underground River Sideboard 3x Bottle Gnomes 3x Cursecatcher 4x Flashfreeze 3x Nameless Inversion 2x Razormane Masticore In a tournament with around 120 contenders I finished 3rd with this deck (15-5 games record). I faced several of the popular achetypes and did quite well against it (Mone Red, U/w Merfolk, U/B Faeries ann Kithkin). Though I have to say it wasn't a very strong field, so those results don't say that much. But although the results didn't gave us much insight about the deck's strengths, the tournament did gave us some insight about it's weaknesses. The major problem with this deck is that it is to slow for this environment. We need to speed things up a little if we really want to compete with it in the nationals. We are thinking in the direction of Mindstone and Coldsteel Heart. I won't say to much about this deck because I want to leave that for an other blog (Creativity; Wrap up), but I do have to say things should be changed to make it the deck were taking to the nationals, for instance; I want to drop 1 or 2 Thoughtseizes and get at least antother Damnation in the maindeck, also I want to drop the Pendelhaven because it's simply not doing anything... So there's enough to do in this area of preparation... Preparation In the last blog (Heading to Nationals (1)) I have described a tournament in detail we have been participating in to test our deck. Since I'm gonna list two tournaments here I'm not gonna make it a very detailed report; Tournament #2 For this tournament I choose to play with a slightly different version of the deck than last tournament: - 2 Pendelhaven -> + 1 Mindstone, + 1 River of Tears. - 2 Thoughtseize -> + 2 Mindstone - 1 Dreadship Reef -> + 1 Island - 1 Broken Ambitions -> + 1 Damnation The changes gave me more speed and a extra board sweeper, which are necessary changes in this environment. In the tournament itself were 17 contenders including myself and 1 other member of my playgroup. Round 1 -> U/B Faerie (1-0-0 games, 2-0) I was quite happy with this matchup, between our deck and the Faerie archetype our deck seems to come out on top. Round 2 -> RDW (2-0-0 games, 4-1) By far my worst matchup, I have to much creature removal which is useles and I can't keep up with burn spells. After sideboarding a doable matchup though (Bottle Gnomes, Cursecatcher). Round 3 -> RG Snow Ramp (3-0-0, games 6-1) A archetype I haven't seen in a while. Is a nice matchup because the Collosus is the only thread in this deck; just let them do what they want, counter Collosus and take control when Oona hits the board. Round 4 -> U/w Merfolk (4-0-0, games 8-1) Islandwalk or not, doesn't really hurt me since I don't have a defence on the board anyway. One word: Damnation. Round 5 -> RDW (4-1-0, games 8-3) Worst matchup, good player, what can I say? Nah really I screwed up in the second match; Bitterblossom and Thoughtseize on turn 1/2 ftl.. If I play like this I shouldn't even dream about repeating those top 16 finishes at nationals... Top 4 -> RDW (2-1) Same player, but now I don't make the mistakes. Final -> Faerie (2-0) Good matchup, fine plays... Deck tournament record (Including last one): 13-2-0, games 27-9. Tournament #3 This isn't a sanctioned tournament, but it is a strong field. We decided to invite all the players we know that are qualified for the nationals for a practice tournament. Not everyone showed up, but most players were happy to test a thing or two... Contenders 13, including me and 3 from my playgroup. In this tournament I decided to run RDW, since that was the deck that gave me the most trouble, I just wan't to gather more information about this deck. Since I suck playing as a aggro player it didn't gave m that much information.. Round 1 -> U/w Merfolk (1-2) I keep burning their guys of the board, leaving me without gas in game 2 and 3 to finish them off... great. Round 2 -> G/B Elves (0-2-0, games 1-4) Still getting used to the deck and make some noobish mistakes which I'm not even gonna bother to tell you. Round 3 -> Oona archetype (1-2-0, games 3-4) I was playing against a playgroup member which runs a slightly different Oona deck than me; he uses Infiltrators instead of the Telling Time. I burn them of the board as fast as possible so he loses his cardadvantage and eentually the match. Round 4 -> U/w Merfolk (2-2-0, games 5-5) Again Merfol, but now I;m actually playing quite well. I burn only the necesarry things of the board (Stonybrook Banneret and Merrow Reejerey) and I win the race. Tournament finish; 7th. Both tournaments gave me valuable information. The first gave me the insight that the deck became faster and it can win games in a stronger field, which is utterly positive. But it also taught me that I still need to work on the deck, mainly the sideboard. Since the RDW matchup is far from ideal and the results from the played nationals (next paragraph) show that this archetype is becoming more and more popular. The second tournament showed that the deck is utterly vulnerable to a player who plays RDW against us and knows our decks weaknesses (Shadowmage Infiltrator in this case). Last but not least it confirmed I suck at playing aggro strategies which is something I need to work on in the future More Preparation So I described three (test)tournaments, the results of those, our deck and the way were going to prepare ourselves (By participating in tournaments and testplay). Is that all? Luckily for us there's a bit more. We made a gauntlet a few weeks ago that we used for testplaying our deck, it looked like this; 1) U/b Faeries 2) Quick 'N Toast 3) Elementals 4) G/B Elves 5) Mono Red / RDW 6) G/R Snow Ramp 7) Reveillark (Both combo and without it) 8) Doran Rock & G/B GoyfSeize Rock 9) U/w Kithkin 10) U/w Merfolk We based the list on the regionals from several countries (US/Japan/Germany) and our own metagame. But now the results of nationals are coming in and the metagame shifts. Maybe it doesn't if you look at the achretypes but it does in popularity of some of them. If we take a look at the nationals we see a lot of diversity in the top 8 finishes, while the Faerie deck dominated before; Top 8 Australian Nationals (2008/07/20) 4x U/B Faeries 1x Seismic Swan 1x Dragonstorm 1x Reveillark 1x B/R Furystoked Tokens Top 8 Canada Nationals (2008/08/03) 2x Reveillark 2x RDW 2x G/B Elves 1x U/w Merfolk 1x Quick N' Toast Top 8 US Nationals (2008/08/03) 2x RDW 1x U/B Faeries 1x Reveillark 1x G/R Goyf aggro 1x Quick 'N Toast 1x U/G Control 1x G/B Elves Top 8 Italian & France Nationals (2008/08/03) 5x RDW 3x Torrent 2x Quick 'N Toast 2x B/R Furystoked Tokens 1x U/w Merfolk 1x G/B Elves 1x U/b Faeries 1x Seismic Swan These results will influence the metagame of the upcoming nationals as we saw happening earlier with the Australian Nationals. Both the Seismic Swan and the B/R Furystoked Tokens deck have seen significantly more play during the other listed nationals. The same could happen with the Torrent of Souls archetype that was quite succesful during the Italian nationals, even taking the top prize there! The metagame shifts more and more to a Faere unfriendly metagame; we see more Merfolk decks popping up, Kithkin archetypes dissapearing due to Firespout and Cloudthresher seeing more play, new archetypes rising and so on. All of this results in a everchanging metagame and thus a different gauntlet. We adepted our gauntlet to the recent succes of some builds; 1) Mono Red / RDW 2) U/w Merfolk 3) U/B Faeries 4) Quick 'N Toast 5) G/B Elves 6) Reveillark 7) Seismic Swan 8) U/w Kithkin 9) B/R Furystoked Tokens 10) Torrent There are three new decks listed in our new gauntlet, which means there is a metagame shift going on (our opinion). Since we can't see the numbers behind this gauntlet I also would like to add that Merfolk decks are more and more popular these days, because it beats Faeries quite easily. But also this shift in the metagame had already been countered by fast, mainly red, strategies. We see the RDW and B/R Furystoked Tokens having more and more succes, so we should keep an eye of those strategies. The most consistent decks at the moment seem to be; B/G Elves, Reveillark and Quick 'N Toast. Since we aren't playing one of the ten listed decks I can't say how our deck will perform in this metagame... yet. For now I can see the most similar deck (U/B Faeries) has trouble in this enviroment to perform well, so we should really consider if it's worth the risk playing our deck... The wrap up Preparing for nationals is something we take very serious since although my playgroup has good players, we still lack the international succes to prove it, and we feel we are ready to make this next step. We try to do this in our own way with a innovative deck (for this metagame) and hope to encourage players everywere to come up with their own decks and bring creativity back into the game. We have shown some testresults, a gauntlet and our current deck (which needs more work) to give you a little idea about how my playgroup prepares for our nationals. There will be at least two blogs upcoming about our prepartion (more tournament results, a more detailed one about the metagame and one about our deck and it's matchups). Hopefully you've enjoyed reading this blog and you will read my future blogs as well, until then, cheers, Gello
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