Dave’s Personal Blog

I had a good day today.

First, I played my first EDH game with my new (and fairly raw) deck. And won.

Then I took part in a sealed tournament. The deck I build was a somewhat random collection of decent cards… which garnered appreciative comments from friends.

I’m not sure how many players started, but when the standings were posted after round 4 (5 rounds total), there were 42 names on the list.

Round 1 went pretty quickly to me 2-0. Round 2 started with a loss, followed by 2 decisive victories to end at 2-1. I lost the next round 0-2… I hate being on the wrong end of a Realm Razer. But the loss was to the fellow who went on to the top-8 finals.. and may have won.. I left before that match ended. The next round was again a fairly sound defeat at 0-2.

So I was 2-2 after round 4. I was surprised when the standings went up that I was in 8th place.. leading the pack of folks with 6 points due to my tie breakers… if you have to loose, loose to someone good.

Round 5 was intense, as it was likely that only one of us would make top-8 and be in line for prizes. Game 1 went to me quickly in what looks like 6 turns (based on my life totals record) with me still at 20. Game two was hard fought but again only 6 or 7 turns, with me loosing while my opponent was still at 5. Now things got intense… game 3. Once again, in what looks like 8 turns, I’d pulled off another win with the help of Broodmate Dragon who was my MVP all day.

So I was into the Top-8. My first Top-8!

The draft went well… giving me with a strong esper/gryxis hybrid.. with 2 Master of Etherium and a Prince of Thralls and a pile of other fun artifact cards. I’ve started picking colour fixers (tri-lands, panorams, and obilisks) earlier, and the decks are proving easier to build and play.

Alas… in the quarterfinals I found myself seated across the table from Mr. Realm Razer that I lost to in round 3 of the swiss. And guess what.. he’d drafted a realmrazor. Sigh. Anyway… I made top-8, had a full day of fun magic, came out a few $ ahead (so… really… I can claim that I’ve made money playing magic), and left with a few nice rares for trade use.

On the weekend I had a chance to have a sneak peek at a new collectable card game that’ll be hitting the shelves possibly before Christmas: EPIC. A couple games with sample decks. That was enough. It’s fast, it’s fun. Watch for it.

Just a quick update. My stated goal back in September when I decided to get serious about playing magic was to play 16 hrs a week. Well, as of now I’m averaging just over 24 hours per week.

This was a rather frustrating weekend overall. Another cruise qualifier on Saturday. I managed not to win a single match. Mana flood, mana screw, color screw, you name it. A string of bad draws. And my deck dominated in pre-tournament testing. Frustrating.

Sunday was a regular draft followed by a double draft: 2 drafts in a row with a cumulative record. I drafted good decks but again fell victim to bad draws (Eric watched a few of my games and commented afterward that I’d made all the right plays given what I was drawing). I did manage to win one match 2-0 in the morning draft.

Frustrating, but I did get some nice rares.

I made it to draft at work this week. Good thing too, as I had the packs .

I drafted a sick deck… totally sick… and proceeded to go 3-1 with it.

Here it is:

Basic Lands (14) 2 Mountain 4 Swamp 8 Island Lands (3) 2 Grixis Panorama 1 Esper Panorama Creatures (15) 2 Jhessian Lookout 1 Puppet Conjurer 1 Tidehollow Strix 1 Sedraxis Specter 4 Kathari Screecher 2 Cloudheath Drake 1 Skeletal Kathari 1 Sharding Sphinx 1 Sphinxs Herald 1 Etherium Sculptor Artifacts (1) 1 Couriers Capsule Sorceries (1) 1 Blightning Instants (6) 1 Call to Heel 1 Resounding Wave 1 Spell Snip 3 Cancel

I’m on my way home as I write this. Today was States in the US (Champs in Canada) and I was at Superstars for it. I got to Starbucks (a couple doors down from the shop) at 9:00 for coffee and breakfast. There was already a group waiting for the shop to open and starbucks was full of magic players.

It took a while to get everyone registered. Here’s the line when we joined it.

And they had to send some away… Only so many will physically fit in the building. In the end I heard there were 279 players.

Here’s a couple pics to give an idea. One toward the back of the room and one toward the front:

There were the usual regulars, yours truely included, plenty of folks from around the state, and the occasional celebraty… namely Luis Scott-Vargas, recent winner protour champion.

I ran Patrick Chapin’s latest take on 5 Color Control. I went 1-2-2 before dropping. Both draws were 1-1 with third game going to time without a winner.

After a burrito I drafted and started league play.

It was an awesome day! Played a bunch of Magic and got to meet one of the top players in the world.

Tomorrow I’ll be back for more league play and maybe some draft and/or team sealed.

Just a quick update: 26.5 hours of playing Magic this week. That’s not counting time reading about Magic or listening to Magic podcasts, or working on decks ideas.

Since I’ve started tracking it (on Oct. 12), I’ve played 165 hours of Magic… that’s 23.6 hrs/week on average.

This week the guys came over to do some T2 playtesting for the upcoming States. I was running a mostly mono red deck.

I took the deck to the Cruise Qualifier on Saturday and went 1-3 before dropping. Ugh. Started redesigning the deck when I got home, into a blue/red control/burn deal… “Controlled Burn”.

Sunday was all about limited: 2 drafts & a sealed flight. That was better… not great, but both drafts went 2-1 and the sealed was 0-2-1. I totally prefer draft to sealed. If you get a suck pool you pretty much just do badly.