Pro Tour Chicago 2003 Report
Paul Jordan said in what I believe was his GP New Jersey report that it isn’t important to be good, just less bad than your opponents. I didn’t quite know what that was supposed to mean until GP Philadelphia. For an entire tournament, I played less bad than my opponents, which is a far different thing than playing well yourself. I’m sure most of you by now are aware that Gary Wise did not shock me when I was at two life. This play happened while he and I were playing for Top 8 and, given what we were playing for, and the fact that Mr. Wise is a high profile player, it has become a story that I am often asked about. What very few people know is that Mr. Wise was certainly not the worst offender of that draft pod, much less of the tournament. I had several opponents elect to either not kill me or to kill themselves. I used as many free wins as a man could ask for to catapult myself into the Top 8, where I decided to both draft green white and not draw a sixth land in either the second or third game to cast my Arkoma’s Vengeance against an opponent who I think forgot I had it (bear in mind this was a Rochester draft Top 8.) However, I came out of that tournament richer $800, 3 pro points and, most importantly, an invite to PT Chicago.
Part of the problem with testing for a limited PT, especially in a format where you just top 8’d a GP, is that you figure that you don’t have to do any testing. It is very easy to develop this attitude of “Well, you know, like, its pretty obvious what is going on, and like, I know which cards are better, and I’ll just not draft whatever colors are being drafted around me, and that is that.” This is probably part of the reason that people always say that they feel confident about a limited PT, because you figure you can just wing it. After this PT, trust me, this is simply not the case. A limited PT requires just as much effort, testing and analysis as a constructed PT. Going into Chicago, I had done maybe 6 Rochester drafts total, although I had done quite a bit of team booster drafting. Even though there are different strategies involved, I felt like I had a good enough handle on what was going that I did not put enough time into testing the format as I should have.
As far as the Master’s Gateway is concerned, I found the whole process to be amusing. It is very similar to a situation where a teacher or professor hands out a large project to a class that is due in three months or so, and about a week before its due no one has done any work and everyone is coming to everybody else asking if they have any clue what is going on. I decided about 2 weeks before the PT that I would just run R/G, since in theory it seemed to match up well against everything except Astral Slide (note that I say in theory, since I had not actually played a single game with this deck, I simply saw Jeff Cunningham’s listing from some states level tournament and thought it looked pretty good) and it is a deck that can compensate for a lack of testing (this translates to: I am not nearly good enough to just pick up a control deck and run it in a Master’s Gateway, so I will simply take as much play ability out of the equation as possible.) What I also found to be amusing was how my deck was constantly improving just by talking to people online about what the second two drop in the deck should be. The major problem with the deck is this. You need to have at least 8 two power two casting cost creatures. The most obvious inclusion is Wild Mongrel. After that, the pickings get slim. Real slim. We are talking Elvish Archers slim. Actually, the other creature in Cunningham’s deck was Elvish Archers, and for a while I was just going to run the listing as is, even though Elvish Archers struck me as the biggest pile of crap and Natuko Tracer and Forcemage Advocate both just seemed better, but after getting yelled at enough I was going to switch them for the Advocate. That is, until I talked to Dan Bridy, who suggested Ironshell Beetle. That guy seemed a bit more aggressive to me, and would help out in mirror match situations. Bear in mind that I keep using phrases like “seemed” and “struck me as” as opposed to “tested and came to the conclusion that” because I really had no clue what was going on at all in the least, and I was still better informed than most of my fellow TOGIT gatewayers. Adam Horvath had decided upon running a Mirari ’s Wake deck similar to the version he used to win the New Jersey State Championships, and Krempels and Sonne would most likely decide at the tournament site.
Adam Horvath, Craig Krempels, Matt Sitarski and I drove out to Chicago from TOGIT on Wednesday morning, each of us qualified for a variety of events (Krempels and me: Pro Tour, Master’s Gateway, Horvath: Last Chance Qualifier, Master’s Gateway Sitarski: Last Chance Qualifier, hooking up with some area girl) and optimistic about our chances in these events. Craig decided to play U/G Madness, mostly because he happened to own the cards and because he had run such a deck in various type II tournaments at Neutral Ground over the last few months. The car ride over was rather non eventful as I slept most of the way there. The only major items of interest in the trip there were a) I found some Big League Chew in a vending machine in Ohio, which is a brand of chewing gum whose deliciousness is only matched by it’s toxicity and b) discussing at length the logistics of constructing, maintaining and sliding down a razor blade banister. I can’t really comment on the latter since I was slipping in and out of consciousness for most of the conversation, but ask Matt or Craig if you are really interested.
Wednesday night we ran into some gamers and went back to our hotel room rather early to get some rest for the gateway and construct Craig’s actual deck. This was a highly technical process where Craig would grab a card that could easily be included in a madness deck in any number from zero to four, and Craig, Adam and I would speculate on it’s usefulness within the expected metagame (which we were purely guessing at.) Craig would then decide how many of those cards he should play. Using this process, Craig built his deck. I finished up my sideboard, including putting in three Composts at Eugene and Craig’s urging, and Adam and I ran a few matches of our decks to get a handle for how our decks ran.
As an interesting sidenote, I offered Eugene $40 that night at dinner to run a pre-constructed deck at the gateway. Eugene considered for quite a while, but eventually said no and ran an Astral Slide deck that wasn’t too much better than a deck that could have been run out of a pre-con. However, we weren’t too far away from seeing the Devastation deck busted out in high level play. I guess we will never know how Tephraderm might have influenced that type II metagame…
A hundred and fifty some odd people show up for the gateway Thursday morning, which is a much greater crowd than before they gave away rating-based invites to the Gateway. Since they have to cut to a top 128 to make single elimination bracketing work, this means basically everyone with a pro point invite gets to sit out the first round. Myself included. Here's the deck I ran for the gateway, courtesy of The Sideboard.
PT Chicago Masters Gateway 2003: R/G Beatdown
Patrick Sullivan
Main Deck
Sideboard
15 sideboard cards
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Round two I play against some Japanese guy playing mono black control. Bless those Composts in my board. We are deck checked, which is a really stressful process for me since I have a better winning percentage lifetime against opponents in sanctioned magic than I do against passing deck checks. I get through mine just fine, but my opponent has to change his sleeves. Game one I play first and have turn two Mongrel going first. If you are not that familiar with how this R/G deck works, this basically means that I have won the game. Especially when my opponent, with two swamps on his second turn, does not have either a Chainer's Edict or an Innocent Blood to stop it. I suspect Smother, but he does not have that either when I attack. I play down a Call of the Herd, and his third turn he simply plays down another swamp. I put Elephant Guide on my Call token next turn and take him to ten. He plays down a fourth swamp and casts Mutilate. This proves much too slow and I burn him out the next turn. Mike Turian, who was sitting next to him, said that he kept a hand with three Mutilates and no Edicts, which would have been too slow even going first.
Game two is going back and forth, I have guys and a Compost early, and he has removal and good mana development. The game progresses to a position where my hand is Volcanic Hammer and two Firebolts, and I dont have any creatures in play. For some reason I am fearing Mind Sludge or some other card he clearly would not have after sideboarding, and I randomly Hammer his nugget when he is not really in burn range. Of course he untaps and plays Visara the Dreadful, which anyone with any knowledge of type II would have been thinking of. By the time I can kill it, I have taken 10 damage and I am easily in Corrupt range, in spite of triple Compost when the game is over.
In the third game, he once again has a hand that is very light on early removal, and his first play is a turn three Ensnaring Bridge while he is already under fire. I have a Compost and very good early pressure, meaning that his fourth turn play of another Ensnaring Bridge isn't helping matters too much. The next turn he plays down a Cabal Coffers and Visara the Dreadful, which is not threatning in terms of attacking but does prevent me from attacking, allows him to remove Grim Lavamancer without using an Edict out of hand (which would allow me to draw off of Compost) and, if the game stalls out, allows him to build up cards in his hand and attack me. My only burn in hand are two Firebolts. I rip a Volcanic Hammer, which allows me to kill off Visara, attack for another 5 damage, and draw a card off of Compost. He is eventually able to get into a nearly handless position with the Bridge and Mutilates my team away, but he is at two life after I flash back all of my Bolts and we are playing a waiting game of who can draw a burn spell first. He has only 2 or 3 in his deck vs. my 10 remaining. I draw mine first. I do mess up this game, and it is something I don’t even notice until a little while after the fact. He has a Chainer's Edict in his yard and has me under Bridge lock. I draw a Grim Lavamancer. I should have certainly held it and waited for another creature, since it is the only creature in my deck that can do anything at all with an Ensnaring Bridge out. If I wait to draw another creature, I have protection from the Edict in his yard, and he would have to use a removal spell out of hand to kill it, allowing me to draw a card off of Compost, or simply kill him if he doesn’t have more removal. This did not end up mattering, but it was a case of me not thinking out a situation properly. Shame on me.
Round three I am paired against Noah Boeken playing Psychatog. Even though aggressive decks are assumed to have an advantage against Tog, the r/g deck plays so much burn (which borders on useless against Psychatog) that I think the matchup is pretty good for Ttog, especially a version running as much dedicated early game control as Noah had. I take it to a third game because of Noah's mulligan/no-turn-three Tog in game 2, but in the other games he stunts my offense, plays a Tog, and slowly builds up enough to kill me. Matt Sitarski was watching my third game, and said that I should have been making an effort to attrition out his Tog with burn rather than go to his head early in the third game. I think I should have stuck with the plan that I went with, since I didn’t have any creatures in my hand early on outside of the Grim Lavamancer in play and removing the Tog from play would not have helped me to push through any damage. I don't think it would have mattered much either way, since Noah played down a Delusions of Mediocrity after I had sent a lot of direct damage to his dome, but perhaps there could have been something done differently.
The TOGIT crew is almost all done by the time round three is over, so I get the opportunity to do a bit of practice drafting and hanging out with the rest of my day. One practice draft proves incredibly frustrating, as I draft a great deck that has Glarecaster and Visara on top of an otherwise strong pool, and lose in round 1 to some idiot with Silklash Spider who, after beating me with the spider in both games in spite of playing like crap, goes off to brag to his friends about how he beat the Glarecaster/Visara deck in spite of neither of those cards coming up in either of our games. Sigh, Magic sometimes.
I also get to watch the Last Chance Qualifier, and try to help out Adam with his card pool. The problem was this - his green was excellent, his black was rather shallow but had two Swats and maybe a Crown as removal, and his white was also rather deep with two Pacifisms. So, he could run g/b and splash the Pacifisms, or just run w/g with no real direct removal. I suggested running the w/g version since the cards were just so much better (Catapult Squad, 2x Glory Seeker, Crowd Favorites, other good cards) and Adam reluctantly accepts. He goes on to lose to Sparksmith, which of course is an extremely unlikely situation in this format. Matt's card pool is slightly better but not by a whole lot, and he is out sometime around round 5. Also occurring in this gateway was the most unsportsmanlike match of magic ever, where Paul Reizel, after topdecking Mythic Proportions against his idiot beanbag opponent in game three, ran up and down his table high-fiving other magic players and hugging myself and national champion Eugene Harvey before coming back to his table to slam down the fat pants on his Silent Specter to finish off his by now quite upset opponent. It was at once awful to watch, and at the same time, the greatest thing I have ever seen. Unfortunately, Paul fell one round short of grinding into the Pro Tour.
Speaking of that, wow did that ever go poorly for me. I can't quite pinpoint what went wrong, which is nearly as bothersome as doing poorly in the first place. I sit down to a fairly easy draft table for the first four rounds, in fact joking with Paul Sottosanti (who grinded in the night before) that I am the highest profile player at the table. What's more is that I am being fed by Paul, which means that I should be in for a fairly friendly draft. I pick red cards in seat 5 early on, not establishing a second color but figuring on going white since Paul was g/b and there were already too many blue drafters at the table. I wish there was some way to communicate this to the person whom I was feeding, who easily could have gone into green (there were only 2 green drafters at the table, Paul and the guy in seat 2, and 3 is about average in terms of green drafters at a table) but stuck into white and looked visibly upset when I started taking white cards sometime in pack one. This doesn’t end up mattering all that much for him, since all the good aggressive white cards (Glory Seeker, Daru Lancer, Gustcloak harrier etc) end up getting opened on his end of things and all the windows I have to take average white cards are overshadowed by superior red cards. I also get a Lightning Rift in pack one, which I take over a Shock, and try to pick up as many good cycling cards as possible.
For you less experienced drafters out there, when you take a card like Lightning Rift, keep in mind that there are two different types of cycling cards. There are good cycling cards, cards like the cycling lands, Choking Tethers, Akroma's Blessing, and so on. These are good cards that you would want in your deck anyway, and they happen to be insane if you have Lightning Rift out. Then there are bad, or “Gerard” cycling cards. These are cards like Lay Waste, the Disciples, and so on. These are cards that don't do nearly enough except when you have the Lightning Rift in play. Generally you want to avoid bad cards. I know this doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world to figure out, but you would be stunned what kind of cards people will run under the justification of the Rift. Running cards that basically just say “Cycling 2” leads to you getting mana flooded quite a bit, so you want to try to avoid that.
Unfortunately for myself, I am not able to pick up enough quality cycling. I almost take a cycling land over a Skirk Commando I am so desperate for something to make use of my Rift, and later on my Astral Slide. I end up drafting a deck with two good Cyclers (Secluded Steppe, Akroma's Blessing) one average cycler (Renewed Faith) and three bad ones (2x Lay Waste :(, 1 white Disciple.) My removal ends up being pretty good (including two Sparksmiths) but my creatures are crap; the largest creature I have outside of a morph is Crude Rampart, who really only gets to get his beat on for real once. I figure if I get turn two Sparksmith or Lightning Rift I can mise (duh) but I am up for an uphill battle otherwise.
My first round my opponent does not seem really good from the way he was drafting, but still ended up with a pretty solid deck containing Starstorm, 2x Lavamancer’s Skills and plenty of wizards, and Words of War (not a bomb outright, but certainly not bad against my deck where it outright kills anything outside of an unmorphed Crude Rampart.) My deck doesn’t exactly come out to play in either of our games, especially in the first where I cycle my useless cycling cards into lands and Lightning Rift (tight!!!) and eventually lose to his Starstorm and post-Starstorm Ascending Aven. The Starstorm put me in a real bind the whole match, since I really could not gauge what his situation was in terms of if he had the Starstorm or not, and if he had any creatures in his hand if he did. He was cycling a lot of spells, some of which seemed random in terms of timing if he had a Starstorm (for example, he Tethered down a random guy instead of a Battlefield Medic at some point on my endstep instead of tapping down the medic, which points to him not having Starstorm since he could have wrecked me in the specific position if he had it) and it was possible that he was just getting flooded. However, on the last possible turn he had before the game would have gotten out of control, he cast Starstorm and the Aven. Either he set it up really really well or he just ripped the Starstorm, I really don’t know. The second game it was obvious that he had it but there was not very much that I could do. What made this game even more irritating was losing to Aphetto Alchemist and Sage Aven. Generally that combination of cards requires Lavamancer's Skill to do any real damage but here those two were enough on their own. My board of Nosy Goblin (frown) and Skirk Commando could not get through the untapped aven while it hit me in the air for one a turn. This process continued for five or six turns until I was in burn range. I did not have too much fun as this was going on.
My round two opponent seemed like a nice enough guy, but the draft went rather poorly for him. Outside of being one of the many u/r drafters at our table, the packs didn’t exactly break in a favorable manner for him. He had a Butcher Orgg and I think one Lavamancer's Skill, but not too much else of note. And my deck this round looked like something else. I had both Lightning Rift and at least one Sparksmith in play by turn four in both of our games, and our games were less like the Magic you and I know and more like some random deviation of Magic, where he got to play down a card, and then I got to remove it and draw a card until he conceded. He was, however, pretty good-natured about the ridiculous draws that I got and his 0-2 record.
Round three I was paired against Paul Sottosanti, which was annoying because he is both a friend of mine and someone with a vastly superior deck. He was b/g and a little short on removal, but had an insane creature base with Wirewood Savage, Snarling Undorak and Barkhide Mauler (some of these are in multiples) topped off with Tribal Unity and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa. Our first game is a pretty pathetic display on my end. Our turns progress something like this:
Me: Hit you with Gustcloak Harrier, cycle an awful spell
Him: Hit you with Barkhide Mauler, play another fatty
Me: (Repeat my previous turn)
Him: Hit you with both of my fatties, play another one
Me: Play down Goblin Sledder
Him: Kill you
Game two I have a turn two Sparksmith, which is a good place to start, but he has a Festering Goblin and I am in this annoying position because I can't really beat into the Festering Goblin without losing my Sparksmith, which is really the only thing keeping the floodgates from opening. However, this gives him enough time to Cruel Revival away the Sparksmith without falling too far behind in the game. Paul is also playing very conservatively against my Goblin Taskmaster, dropping him into the single digit range without his board being terribly stable. However, between his fat creatures and Tribal Unity, he is able to win the game before I might or might not have been able to squeeze out a win with an Akroma's Blessing covered alpha strike.
Round 4 I have to play against the one person whose name I recognized at the table besides Paul's, and he can't remove a Sparksmith in game one and is horribly land screwed in the second. My Lay Wastes (frown) add insult to the whole process.
These 4 rounds of magic were easily the least satisfying rounds of Magic that I can ever recall playing. I had 37 pretty unexciting cards, 2 Sparksmiths and a Lightning Rift. If I had these cards early, my matches generally went very well. If I did not, the games generally went very poorly. I think its a pretty poor situation when I could draw up my opening hand and reasonably guess if I was going to win or not. I don't know if this experience was mine alone here, but I wasn’t pleased with it at all.
Draft two was once again a rather unspectacular collection of players. I recognized roommate and lawyer Jon Becker, Rochester area resident Mike Thomas and some guy I played at PT Boston, but the table is not chock full of professionals. The table starts out pretty normal, with black and red alternating between the seats. If you haven’t followed much of the strategy of this format, it was assumed that black and red would have to alternate between seats because if you can’t remove a Wellwisher or Sparksmith from play it is nearly impossible to win. Therefore, everyone needs removal.
Anyways, I first pick a blue card in seat four in the first pack (a Backslide or something stupid) after the person ahead of me picked a Natuko Husk, after the person ahead of him picked a Pinpoint Avalanche. So it would make sense that the colors would break down as r/w in seat 2, b/g in seat three (assuming the person ahead of him went white, otherwise it is r/g and b/w, which is probably less desirable for both players) and me in seat 4 going u/r.
The 8th seat drafter takes a blue card in pack two, which is perfect. Blue is generally deep enough to support two drafters at an 8 man table, so you want the two blue drafters to be four seats away from each other. This spaces the two of you out nicely and also creates a major disincentive for someone else to try to go blue, since they will be fed too closely by another blue drafter. Anyway, everything is looking fine until the guy in seat three cracks open a Slice and Dice. Now, positioning-wise it would have made a lot of sense for him to just stick to his b/x situation and ship Slice and Dice, but he just messes up totally and takes it. Bear in mind that the person I was feeding had moved into red at this point, so player 3 was being fed by one red drafter (seat 2) in packs 1 and 3 and two red drafters in the second pack (me and seat 5). I almost consider backing out of red and going b/u except that in the next pack, I open Starstorm.
So now I am full-blown red, and I think the person ahead of me takes a hint and never takes a red card again. However, it is pretty annoying when a bomb is opened, and based on previous picks you know you should get it, but the person takes it and you know he’s actually going to try to run it. Still, everything is pretty much going ok except for my lack of Lavamancer's Skills, and in pack two I crack a Gustcloak Savior. I just take it, partially because its a bomb that is easy to splash, partly because I have a Riptide Shapeshifter and no other solders in my u/r deck (surprise), and lastly because otherwise Slice and Dice guy gets it and there was no way I was going to let that happen. The draft ends without anything of note really occurring and I figure my deck is probably the second best at the table behind Becker's insane 4x Natuko Husk/3x Glory Seeker beating, but if we get paired against each other we could draw and I could just try to run the rest of the table.
Alas, it was not to be. In round five I get paired against the guy who I was feeding, who in the third set of packs gave me a 15th pick Mistform Dreamer. Very nice. Anyhow, the first and second games we split through mana flood on both sides, and the third game his draw is something like this.
Him: Mountain Goblin Taskmaster
Me: Land, go
Him: Forest, Invigorating Boon, attack for one
Me: Land, go
Him: Cycle this land onto my goblin, take two, forest Elvish Warrior
Me: Land Morph
After this point, the next few turns progress into me trying to block and him punching me in the mouth. He made no effort to play around Starstorm, and had I drawn it at any point he would have been left with nothing but some insect tokens off of his Symbiotic Elf, but it wasn’t to be.
I was rather dejected at this point, espcially since pretty much all of my friends were doing well. I know that sounds horrible, and I obviously would not root against them, but it makes you look like a pretty big ass when Aaron Forsythe comes up to interview you about CMU/TOGIT because you’re the only person not playing. Sigh.
Still, the weekend was far from a total loss. I spent the remainder of my time there drinking, money drafting, watching the greatest draft pod ever, (Pod 1 of draft 4, it really was something to watch) cheering on friends, drinking, going out to eat about every three hours with some of the best company in the world, and lastly, drinking. The Pro Tour really is an excellent collection of people to spend your time with, or at least most of them are.
After his performance at Chicago, Craig Krempels pretty much locked up Rookie of the Year, which is a pretty exciting situation. I know its still early, and some random Frenchman can come along and win a Pro Tour or something like that, but as far as I’m concerned, Craig has that shit locked up tight. He is not Q’d for Venice (frowns) but you'll see him in Yokohama, which is a limited PT. That means put him on your fantasy team.
I don’t quite know why I had so much to say about 7 total rounds of magic, most of which I lost. Maybe because I haven’t written anything in quite some time and I felt obligated to a degree, and maybe it's because I’m starting to finally learn that I can't just screw around and expect to do well at the PT like I can at a PTQ. This should seem obvious enough, but often times its very easy to miss obvious stuff.
I’ll see you all in Venice, or the Legions pre-release probably. I haven't seen any of the new cards outside of those previewed on the Sideboard, and I don’t intend to read the spoiler, so feel free to try to screw me with really obvious morph tricks from the new set. I can almost promise you that it will work.
Peace
Patrick Sullivan