I'm not sure how close this trip came to not happening at all. Normally I would have driven down without any issues and taken as many people along as I could. However, about 5 days before the trip I walked out to my car only to find my driver's side mirror had been maliciously fodder launched. Luckily my car has more than 5 toughness, but I definitely lost 5 life when I saw the damage. I started up a convoluted series of emails with mike wawzdacjklsdjcz to try and get the ball rolling on another car. After waffling a bit because of "school" and "girlfriend" and other nonsense, Peter convinced Mike to go and Nate Crouch finally called me back the next day. Surprisingly it all came together and myself, nate, mike, and peter headed down to the hotel fashionably early on friday night. Which hotel was that? Well, I didn't actually bother writing that information down, figuring the address would be enough. After driving through downtown indy for a while without seeing many addresses, I began to regret that decision. We stopped at a hotel that was obviously too nice to be ours and used their phonebook to determine that our hotel was located right off the highway and we just hadn't seen it. 20,000 more one way streets later, we'd gotten back to the other side of downtown indy and navigated our way to the lovely "Days Inn," conveniently located across the street from what we assumed was a prison.
We did some practice sealeds before going to bed and our builds matched pretty closely, but it showed that there is still a lot of room for variation in this format. I built both decks with 16 lands and a few other mana sources, which Mike called ambitious. After playing another PTQ in this format, I have to disagree. Getting flooded is awful and seems to happen a lot when there is such an abundance of nonland mana sources. If you have absolutely nothing else and an average curve, then I can see running 17 lands, but I certainly wouldn't make that my default.
I awaken the next morning, relieved to see that Peter has not been snatched away during the night by a hungry goblin, and we head to the tournament site.
My pool was nuts and I went 6-1-1 and made top 8. I don't have the whole decklist but it included the following:
2 nameless inversion
eyeblights ending
o-ring
fertile ground
michael vick (wren's run packmaster)
Imperious perfect
cairn wanderer
changeling hero
shriekmaw
footbottom feast
and some more elves. So yeah, basically pure removal driven elvish insanity. Aaron hauptmann built another u/w/b deck with the same pool afterwards and that one looked pretty good too. Red was really my only weak color, and that was just fine with me. I asked Bill Stark after round 2 how many elves he would need to play elvish promenade in sealed. He said he wouldn't play it ever, but when pressed he guessed something like 10. Well I had 10, I did play it, and at the end of the day, I agree with Bill's initial assessment. It was insane for me one game but the rest it was a mulligan and I boarded it out in almost every matchup.
There was one particularly amazing play in the last round where I attacked a battlewand oak into my opponents changeling titan, then nameless inversioned it to make it bigger! Huge, like a 6/2 or something. Yes, for those counting at home 7 is greater than 6. This was a case where I made a play that seemed like it would be awesome without actually considering whether it worked. Don't do this. It wasn't even really a good play even if it worked like I wanted it to, since I would have been trading 2 for 1 and the packmaster was in play so there was no urgent need to do this. For better or worse, michael vick kept this horrible mistake from costing me the game. He also came out in game 2 and by the time my opponent had wild ricochet mana up, I didn't need to cast anything.
Peter managed either a 6-2 or 5-3, and mike had more than zero wins with his rediculously awful pool, which is more than I would have gotten.
The draft for the top 8 was extremely strange, both in card quality and signaling. Still, I made some mistakes and could have had a much better deck if I hadn't.
Things started off fine, with a 1st pick nameless inversion over changeling titan, then a 2nd pick final revels over nothing even close to final revels. Then in the 3rd pack there was nothing that strong in black and it was plover knights or fertile ground. During drafts preceding this tournament, I'd been valuing fertile grounds very highly and tried to go 4-5 color green whenever possible. Whenever I'd done this, I'd won or done very well in the drafts. So naturally I decided this was a good time to abandon the strategy that had been working for me up till then and move in on the consensus worst tribe in the format. Riiiiight. This was a combination of me wanting to try out B/W kithkins after seeing quill-slinger boggarts that I knew would table and me doubting that my usual thought process was good enough for a top 8 draft. After that I picked a knight of meadowgrain, but when I was faced with taking a cenn's heir 5th pick, I chickened out and started drafting mediocre green cards. It's worth noting that the first packs were extrordinarily weak, at least it seemed that way to me.
Then in the second pack, I was passed a sower of temptation 2nd pick. Now there had been approximately zero blue cards worth taking in the first pack. This means the guy to my left was not in blue, so fine. I took the sower since there was nothing else that great. However without any blue cards at all from the first pack, only 3 black cards, and no mana fixing, I didn't want to risk moving in on faeries and not having enough cards, so I continued to take high quality black cards and mediocre green cards. The missed fertile ground really haunted me here, because even without any good blue cards, if I'd had a fertile ground, I would have taken the risk on blue, knowing I could go base green blue and splash my black cards or maybe even splash the sower if I got more fixing. As it turns out blue and faeries in particular were wide open and I should have been drafting them from the sower onward. But I decided that I was in too deep, and stuck to my colors, drafting a B/G deck with some good cards but no real tribal synergy or tricks. It was basically
1 shriekmaw
2 warren pilferers
1 marsh flitter
1 moonglove extract
1 nameless inversion
1 final revels
15 fair to poor green/black cards with no synergy
1 giant's ire
I lost in the quarters to Mike Krumb in 3 games. His deck didn't seem that great overall but it definitely had bombs, namely Galepowder mage, mirror entity, Packmaster, and an elf and kithkin harbinger to fetch some combination thereof.
In game 1 we both played a bunch of forests and I declined to play a moonglove extract in favor of a guy on turn 3. He untapped and championed michael vick into play off his own leaf gilder on turn 3. Whoops, I guess. I managed to kill the dogmaster with a nameless inversion and moonglove, but not before losing a creature I didn't have to. After attacking with a goblin token and him blocking with a wolf, I daggerdare'd the token to have them trade, then in the 2nd main inversioned/moongloved away the packmaster. What I should have done was do this after he blocked but before damage was stacked. The wolf would lose deathtouch and I would have kept my goblin. Someone pointed this out to me during the swiss when my own packmaster died, but because I already had the game won, it didn't sink in. I actually think having that goblin token would have been pretty important because it would have forced his galepowder mage to hold back and bought me some time to draw final revels. He played a bunch of guys and mirror entity and I was soon outclassed by it.
In game 2 I found a shriekmaw and a warren pilferers and killed 2 of his bombs. He took 2 points of burn because he thought flamekin spitfire cost 4 to play and 2 to activate instead of the other way around, but this didn't end up being relevant.
In game 3, he got off to a quick start and harbingered for galepowder mage, then galepowder maged a harbinger to get mirror entity before I got any removal to stop this from happening. I played nath's elite and won the clash normally and again after he galepowder maged it, showing a shriekmaw. I eliminate his two harbingers and evoke shriekmaw on his bog-strider ash, returning it with pilferers. Although there was a mirror entity on the table, I believe I have to kill his two evasion creatures here, as I was already at 10 and had dealt him almost no damage, and there was very little removal left in my deck that will deal with either of those. I had a skeletal changeling to defend against mirror entity, which at one point was his only creature. He had the packmaster though, and started making wolves. My attack was stymied by deathtouchers and then by goldmeadow harrier, so losing as few creatures as possible and drawing final revels became my only out. He eventually attacked all out and played avian changeling, having me dead on the board next turn. I drew, attacked with an oakgnarl warrior and shriekmaw. He chose not to make a wolf to block and went to 4. This would've been enough for the giant's ire I'd been holding to finish him off...if I had a red source. Without it, I lose to changeling the next turn.
All said it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about the format. Drafting in a PTQ T8 was really exciting and I am going to try and do it again as soon as possible. I will be in chicago next week trying to get there.
Till next time, GL HF players.
*This is not meant to imply that Peter is a goat. He is actually a changeling.
