Thoughts on Nationals 2002

I really dislike planning things. This is probably the cause of every single missed event in my life. I enjoy theorizing about trips and plans and endeavors, but in the end I generally pass it off to someone who turns out to be just as, if not more lazy than I am. Fortunately, Nationals was all planned out for me. I nearly missed out after Regionals, when I felt I did not want to be one of hundreds trying to draw more copies of Fact or Fiction with the same cookie cutter blue deck as everyone else to stay in the single elim grinders, just to hopefully play in a Nationals where I would have to do more of the same. However, Harry promised a tight house. Paul Jordan took care on finding my tickets. CMU took care of building the decks. I just had to show up.

I spent weeks of testing type II, mainly to help the already Q'd Jon “slug” Sonne and Osyp “hsehhlkdl” Lebedowthnkakdi. This testing resulted in having a decent understanding of the Type II format, or at least as good an understanding as one could hope to generate without real interest in the format. My conclusions were basically the same as anyone without a full frontal lobotomy; namely, that control decks dominated and that any attempt to build a beatdown deck would be easily fended off by a barrage of Fire/Ices and Squirrel Nests. Therefore, the decision was between Trench, Tog in its various forms, and CMU Opposition. I was leaning towards Trench for quite some time, until I was a) dying to painland damage and
inability to cast spells. b) I couldn't beat Nest game 1, which I was assuming would become a huge aspect of the metagame and c) I kept drawing Prophetic Bolt.

Rant on Prophetic Bolt!!!

Is it just me, or is this seriously the worst magic card ever? I am almost certain it is. It is a whopping 5 mana for an Impulse (which is nice, but not worth the Impulse) and 4 damage, which borders on worthless in control matchups. In beatdown matchups, the Bolt was so slow because, as previously stated, it is five mana. The most valuable conclusion I came to in testing was, never counter Prophetic Bolt unless there was specific reasons to do so. All of this was realized before the commonplace addition of Force Spike to the Tog deck, which makes the Bolt about a billion times worse. All in all, a pretty hideous card.

Anyways, it basically became a toss-up between the Opposition deck and the Tog deck, both of which I think were about equally as good. When I left for Florida, I had decided to run the Opposition deck mainly on the merits of the rediculously tight sideboard configured by various people. As all decisions in magic that are well thought out regarding deck selections, I decided to disregard this at the last second.

Want to build Tog or Opposition, or anything else? Check out our online shop!

I flew down with Paul Jordan, who is tight for a) getting my ticket and paying for it in advance, b) for loving Dave Matthews Band, the Greatest Band Ever and c) for buying me beer at a moments notice, both at the airport and in Florida. We had good chats about relationships and how they relate to magic, random opinions on various people, and on Dave Matthews. We also had the standard airplane inquiry. This occurs when you and your airplane magic playing mate are playing in coach on those small treys, and some professional looking guy asks you what's up. Paul handled this like a pure gamer dumbass, calling the game a “more advanced version of Pokemon”, generating instant respect from this guy. No other faux pas occur, and we arrive in Florida, ready to be picked up by the endless driver, Harry Ryttenberg, and arrive at the house.

Cast of Characters

This will be an easy reference guide for the rest of the tournament report. The following list is the names of the people staying in the gamer house, along with a quick description.

CMU Peeps:

Mike Turian: Easily the nicest guy in the game, also the consensus master of team rochester.

Andrew Johnson: Came out of a schoolwork induced retirement, a true believer in the ability of each magic player to improve through mistake recognition. Has never lost a bet, ever.

Paul Sottosanti: I thought this guy was pretty random when he randomly submitted a random “Salvo vs. Missile” article on Brainburst (my answer to the question is neither). However, he turned out not only to be a solid player, but also one of the wittiest magic players I have ever met. Wore a Pro Tour shirt at a non-prerelease magic tournament, the ultimate social blunder.

Nick Eisel: The sexiest man on team CMU, if not the whole planet.

Eugene Harvey: Random J. Randomson. Once built a three color Thermal Glider deck.

Jersey People:

Osyp Lebedowicz: One of the best deck builders in the game today. Enjoys many of the same endeavors I do, namely, being an ass to food servers and drive-thru window attendents.

Mark Fedak: The roughest, toughest JSS player in the world. Very well versed in hip-hop lyrics, instigated more fights himself than everyone else combined.

Jon Sonne: If there was an incarnation named “competition”, this mans mug would be on it. Plays about as quickly as old people have sex.

Gerard Fabiano: The most fashionable magic player ever. One of the best players in the game from a poker playing aspect. Likes 1 of's and 2 of's more than any other successful player.

Anand Khare: Quietly becoming one of the most consistant PTQ players in the NJ/NY region. Lives as a breathing, talking joke in Rochester, NY, where he attends college and angers the local magic community to no end.

Craig Krempels: My partner in world domination. Spends more time money drafting than I do sleeping. Has a nasty crossover dribble and good vision in running the transition offense.

Paul Jordan: Bringer of beer, plays suspicious Flores-designed decks. Buys me airplane tickets.

Harry Ryttenberg: Driver, driver, driver. Drove a lot. Slept less. Wore a sweater in a hundred degree temperature.

Dan Ksepka: Could teach at a university level, looks like he should be in a middle school classroom. Thoroughly self deprecating and hilarious.

And now we return to the report.

Thursday was grinder day. I actually look forward to the style of the tournament, insofar as the x-1-1 bracket is very annoying in PTQ's, where you have to win out just to see in your tiebreakers pan out. With the grinders, you win and you move on, you lose and you go drink. Or this was my plan at least. I elect to play in a sealed deck grinder, which is just a dumb decision on my part. I receive a pretty good sealed deck, but of course this does not matter for anything since I play sealed pretty poorly and I am just uncomfortable in limited. In constructed, you generally have full information (insofar as deck lists are concerned) and therefore know what to play around. In limited, and especially sealed (since you have no
idea what the card pools are like, whereas in a draft at least you know what you shipped) you don't have very much information, so you don't know if you should play around Muscle Burst, Afflict, Second Thoughts, etc. I am fortunate enough to get a first round bye, and in round two I run into Steve Sadin. The first game I throw away, due to not reading Seton's Scout (for the record, it CAN block flyers) and lost the second game to a timely Grotesque Hybrid on his part. What bothers me is that right after the 1st game he says “You played that game so poorly (which is in reference to the Scout, of which I am not aware)”, which I think is a generally rude thing to do, while in the second game he made every effort to throw the game away. He plays down the 2u flyer where you have to butcher your own guy, and he has out a Fiend on my Fiend, and a Wererat. The rest of his hand is lands. He elects to take away his Wererat (which frees up numerous creatures of mine in terms of attacking). Fortunately, I am able to kill his Fiend and Fiend him, showing the hilariousness of this play. Steve would go on to grind into nationals, and made the most out of his experience by cheating and being DQ'd, a fine way to enter the arena of premier play.

The second grinder I played in was a Type II. Now, like I said earlier, every well thought out decision regarding deck choice is often throw out at the last second for reasons I can't understand. In this case, I switched at the last second to MattR's HEAVILY metagamed Tog deck, including maindeck Gainsay and a Possessed Aven. Matt is a pretty convincing guy, and I decided that even though I hate strategies like maindeck Gainsay, it might be able to push me over the field.

I win round 1 2-0 against a U/G Tempo deck with maindeck Divert, which along with my maindeck Gainsays lead to some jokes about the health of the format. I'm not entirely certain how I won, except that game one he mulliganed and couldn't beat through Tog, and in the second game he isn't able to generate enough tempo with his Repulses (I don't know if they could have been timed better) and he falls into the same trap with the Tog.

Round two I play against the Million Dollar Man. If you did not read my tournament report from Regionals, I hate that deck. HatehatehatehatredhatehateHATE the
Million Dollar Man. I would have Fact or Fictions with that deck that were like:
Birds of Paradise
Llanowar Elf
Darkwater Catacombs
Yavimaya Coast
Duress
and end up getting just a Duress, whereas my Tog opponent would get instants and Upheaval. This is a pretty convincing 2-0 smashing, although one game is dicey and requires a blind Coliseum with no cards in the hand into a Circular Logic to stop a threatening Spiritmonger, but I figure that Spiritmonger deserves to be stopped in the most humiliating fashion
possible.

Round three is against THE GUY. You all know The Guy. There is at least one in every region. The random rogue deckbuilder that brings these idiotic concepts to tournaments to hate the metagame. Decks with no merit outside of rediculous metagame hate, like Burning Bridge and... well... maindeck Gainsay I guess. He had a decent run at states this year, top 8ing and losing to the Kremp, but wrote an awful tournament report that went something along the lines of “I am the nut, screw you netdeckers, slops to people with good ratings who wouldn't I.D. with an utter piece of trash like myself.” We are each given a game loss, him for a clerical error and me for failure to de-sideboard. I draw an opening hand of
Salt Marsh, Island, and 5 fantastic spells, and stall on two lands as he resolves a Destructive Flow which randomly wrecks me. I die to, of all things, a Spiritmonger. Afterwards, he says “lucky for you I did not draw my maindeck Boil ”. He is the one who is lucky, because if he had cast a game one Boil, I would have slit his neck for certain.

The night itself is fabulous however, with quite a few of us enjoying alcoholic beverages while Craig, Anand, Jill Costigan (the second sexiest person on the trip, behind Nick) and I made good use of the swimming pool. I get to sleep till three in the afternoon, wake up, and watch the progress of Team Togit, who are lighting up the constructed portion of Nationals.

Sidedraft Story!!!

Disney had a total fix on the money situation, obviously. The way it worked was that you paid something like 27 bucks for a weekend pass, but you could use your pass once a day to take 10 bucks off of an event. Since we weren't playing in any events that day, Fedak and I decide to join, since it was something like less than three dollars to draft. Randomly drafting with us was Sol Malka. During deck construction, I ask Sol how he did on the day, to which he replies “Man, I had one of the worst days of Magic in my life. Just everything went wrong. I went 1-5, which is so bad, and I played Tog twice (with his deck, the Million Dollar Man) and that matchup is fine, especially after board.” I give him some sympathy, holding in my laughter as best as possible. Fedak was not as polite. To quote Adam Horvath (after his experience playing MDM at Regionals) “I Lobotomied away my opponent's Togs and Nightscape Familiars, and he was still almost able to deck me with a Coliseum.” Fedak and I went on to have a highly unsportsmanlike matchup, with each of us wishing each other “bad luck” and requesting that one eat the others sh*t. Fedak would go on to lose to Malka, thus failing as a man.

Team PTQ!!!

I elect to run it with my partner Craig Kremples, and “Random” Paul Sottosanti. The deck construction portion and swiss rounds are pretty uneventful, with us having a pretty standard cardpool (u/w, u/b, r/g) and pretty standard opponents on our way to a top 4. The Q is a two slotter, and the judges make us play the top 4 with our sealed decks (which is sorta frustrating, since we could have team rochestered any of the other three teams under the table, but no matter) against a pretty decent local team. I win my match, Craig loses his and Paul is able to squeak out a second game win (going to three) when time is called. Now, I am pretty certain that we were not given enough time to finish our match, but the judges say otherwise. The most obvious way to resolve such a situation is to just have Paul finish his match, but the judges say that all three of us have to play one game without sideboards. Paul loses, Craig wins, and it comes down to my match. I have a rather rediculous U/B deck, and he has what appears to be a pretty bad R/B deck. This illusion was shattered by a turn six
Cabal Patriarch, something I could have stopped pre-emptively with a Last Rites on any turn from 3 to 5, except my impression was his deck was just pretty bad and I had better things to do with my mana anyway. I have a few outs in my deck, but none come up in time, and I am one of many notches on the Cabal's belt after the game. Our opponents were very polite and gracious in victory, and I hope to see them at PT Boston, or at least GP Jersey.

Random Thoughts, other things!!!

I think that every year, someone will come through Nationals that will be referred to as the “next Eugene Harvey.” I think this is just not reasonable. I think the type of talent that Eugene Harvey has will never come through a grinder again. Or at least not for a long time. Expect to see that phrase used every Nationals, and expect the prediction to never come true.

Losing in the finals of a PTQ is way worse when your losing it for two teammates as well.

Florida's bugs are way larger than any other bugs I have ever seen. And they are pretty aggro. Like, Mad Dog aggro.

Watching Anand interact with Osyp is like watching a battered wife go through all the syndrome. He sucks up the beats, swears he will never come back, and then begs for forgiveness.

Andy J does not have the hookup in Florida. You know, the hookup. (wink, wink)

Red is the worst color ever in limited. Probably about as bad as Bill Walter. Maybe worse.

Deep Analysis is going to define type II in the same fashion as Fact or Ficiton once Invasion Block rotates out. It might actually be worse.

Everyone who made it to Nationals who didn't deserve it got a good kick in the nuts at the event itself. Probably the best part of the whole weekend.

People shouldn't play in team events with friends that are way worse than them, even for fun. It just leads to bickering.

In his next top 8, Eugene Harvey should make an effort to speed his play the hell up so everyone can catch their flight.

I am pretty certain Adam Horvath is well on his way to stealing Christmas. Just be forewarned...

Peace

Patrick Sullivan