"Card Analysis: Bind" aka Northeast Regionals Report

Round 1. This is excellent. All I have to do is activate this Deed, clear his board, and drop a Bird. Next turn, he either kills the Bird, which is fine, or he makes a play, in which case I have Spiritmonger. He can't answer Spiritmonger. He will have no pressure. I WILL ESCAPE THIS ROUND!!! The only thing that could possibly hinder this play is Bind. “I will activate my Deed for two.” “Ok, I will Bind that, draw my card?”

So ends my Regionals experience. Have you ever read a book, generally one of those soft cover uber-dramas geared at divorced women in their mid 40's, where on the page before the title they have the climax of the entire story, and that entices you to read on? This is my attempt at that. Now, hopefully you will interested enough to hear about one man's tale, about how months of testing went directly down the toilet at the hands of Bind.

The testing for this format proved to be one of the most challenging I have ever encountered. This does not mean challenging in a good way, however. Testing for Pro Tour New Orleans was very complicated, each card choice made matchups entirely different, you had to gauge what developments other people had made to their decks, all that sort of fun stuff. This testing went more something like “Deck X can not beat Braids, no matter what changes are made to the deck. Deck X, however, really smashes red/green, no matter what R/G does.” There was a lot of that line being tossed around. “No matter what the deck does.” I hate encountering that in constructed formats. I am generally not a big fan of saying that constructed is all matchups, but in this format it was generally the case.

Every day for nearly a month a new deck became “the deck I was for certain going to play at Regionals.” First mono black, then red green, then Opposition, then red green blue madness, then red green, then mono black control, etc, etc. The only deck I never really considered was Braids. The reason for that was pretty simple. All the creatures are sh*t. Period. They are all bad. The only thing that can make them worthwhile is Braids; if you do not draw Braids or (gasp!) your 2/2 for four is killed, you are left trying to kill your opponent with 2 mana 1/1's and three mana 2/2's. It just did not have the power level I was looking for. The only thing really preventing me from playing the G/U/r madness deck was the mana base. This probably had something to do with the mana base being nowhere nearly tuned enough; we had cards like Counterspell that the mana base clearly could not support, and we did not even access the insane burn spells that the red madness cards offer. This was the constant problem I was facing in testing. Power vs. solid mana...

Enter the Million Dollar Man:

Main Deck:

Sideboard:

• 4 Jungle Barrier
• 4 Compost
• 3 Slay
• 4 Lobotomy

Osyp (Lebedowicz) took this deck to a late night testing session the Thursday before Regionals. Osyp was running the deck against some hideous g/r/b Zombie Infestation / Wild Mongrel /every single madness and flashback spell/random maindeck Obliterate abomination that Gerard (Fabiano) was piloting. Osyp was smashing the deck pretty soundly, but that was because the mana base on Gerard's deck was so bad that it had a lot of difficulty casting Violent Eruption with a Mongrel or an Infestation in play, much less without one. We were giving Osyp a pretty hard time about the deck, more exactly about the deck's constant turn one mana creature turn two Pernicious Deed start. Osyp went on to describe the deck as “the best deck in the format”, which is a pretty frequent claim from Osyp, and was quickly dismissed. However, Adam (Horvath) and I talked about the deck later, and thought it was actually worth at least a shot. Osyp directed me to the article by Sol Malka, found on Star City Games, (go to the feature article archives, then Sol Malka, I am way too lazy to simply link it for you) that not only gave a deck list but also a very in depth look at the various matchups. I quickly built the deck and was ready to run it in the TOGIT $250 Tournament the night before Regionals.

I won the tournament. Even though I split in the finals with Jon Sonne, I am pretty confident I would have defeated him in the finals had we played again, just like I did in the swiss. What impressed me (and a few others, most notably Adam) about my win was how poorly I was playing. I did not seem to know exactly how Spiritmonger worked on at least one occasion. I screwed up math related to Pernicious Deed on at least one occasion, and one time it caused me to not be able to regenerate my Spiritmongers. None of this mattered. The deck simply dominated. I was feeling really ill and really tired at the time, and figured that with a little practice and a little rest, dominating Regionals with the same deck would be simple.

I was quite wrong, as it turns out. Regionals turned out to be quite the nightmare, from a personal standpoint. My round one match was really awful. Game one I am playing against red green, and keep a Bird/Call/five land hand, and I am soon drawing nothing but lands and mana creatures, and die to his very average draw. What was even more frustrating about this game was, even though I had only made two plays of any board relevance (Call/flashback Call) I could have drawn Pernicious Deed at any point and still easily came back.

Game two I get a reasonably quick (turn 4, I think) Spiritmonger. Since his deck does not have black for Terminate, this causes his deck to simply combust.

The last game...well...that is the Bind game. It actually turns out to be much more complicated than the way that I originally described it. He has turn one Bird, turn two Bird Mongrel. I have turn one Bird turn two Deed (the much mocked start is actually quite tight against r/g). On his third turn he simply attacks and passes, and misses a land drop. This makes the Deed play even more enticing. The way my hand was set up, I could Deed for two (causing him to lose his entire board as he was stalled on lands) and then play a mana creature, leading to a Spiritmonger the next turn.

The Bind ruins this plan, obviously. However, my position isn't that horrible. I am able to play the Spiritmonger two turns later with Duress backup (a random Duress, the only one left in the deck post board, but it was quite good to draw in the situation in question). This turns out to be perfect, if he has Violent Eruption in his hand (he tapped out for something the previous turn, perhaps Kavu Titan) and I hit it, I have a perfectly stable board. It is in the hand, and there is only one! I am back in this one! Of course, the next turn, he makes an attack that only makes sense if he drew another Eruption, which he did. The game still isn't lost though. The next turn, I draw something pretty decent in the situation, and attack with Spiritmonger or something. The damage race still favors me, I think, and I have the ability to A) trade threats in combat, whereas he can only chump mine and B) draw Pernicious Deed, Spirtmonger, Jungle Barrier or Slay at any point to put him behind for good, and Fact or Fiction basically assures one of the following. His next draw step yields... Keldon Necropolis. This is really horrible for me in the current position. It means that I have to kill him in about four turns since I am at eight, assuming that he manages his resources correctly. He does not have that much mana, which means that he has to stop attacking me. If he continues to attack, he will have to chump block with Birds and Elves, which he does not have enough mana to do and still activate his Necropolis. He can not really even gain anything from an attack in any event. He does hold back for one turn, and draws Gurzigost. I am dead to that. He can get six damage through with it the next turn and then Necropolis me out the following turn. I can not even attack through it, since it is 6/8. I draw, and it is not Deed, so I spend a lot of time on my turn thinking, hoping that he will forget about Gurzigost's upkeep... and he does! He says go again. I attack with everything, holding back as many Birds/Elves as I can, since I can not sit back and wait to die to the necropolis. He blocks in a very odd fashion, causing him to not be able to Necropolis me out the following turn. However, his draw step yields a Fires of Yavimaya, giving him enough trample damage with his Kavu Titan to kill me.

The second round I play against Tog. This deck, for the record, has absolutely no game against Tog. It goes to three games on the strength of his 5 card hand, but I have no ability to establish myself in any of the games where he has reasonable hands.

I am totally dejected at this point. It was one of those “why do I even bother moments.” It does get very difficult sometimes, especially in the last few months, to continue to play magic even though things have not been going well at all. Before I could blame this on the luck intensity of Sealed Deck as a format, but this was constructed, and I basically failed. Craig (Krempels) tells me to stick in a few more rounds so I would not dwell on things, and I did, defeating the standard 0-2 Life Burst deck. In round four I actually had a very interesting, close match with a Lightning Angel control deck, and then ran into Tog again. At 2-3, my worst performance ever in a qualifying tournament, I decided to drop.

On the other hand, it was simply a delight to watch (Mike) Stein and the Rock (Adam Kirschner) plow through opponent after opponent with the deck. I have a theory about Spiritmonger. It is way more effective in the hands of teenagers than adults. I was having constant problems generating enough mana to cast him. I watched Anand (Khare) lose a critical match with four Spiritmongers in the grip and four lands on the board. Stein and Rock, however, were playing him on turn three or four of every game, and ran him into the end zone four turns later.

Recently I was watching some ESPN Athletes of the Century Deal. The focus of this particular story was Bo Jackson, the very talented baseball/football player of yesteryears. One highlight of his football career in particular was a game against the Seattle Seahawks. At this point in time, the Seahawks had a highly vaunted defense, and there was some questions regarding Bo Jackson's ability to play two sports at once. The Raiders had the ball inside of their own ten, and Jackson broke this rediculous run, shrugging off linebackers and defensive backs on his way to the end zone, and ran right through the tunnel. You know, the tunnel that the football players come out of at the start of each game. He just kept running, right through it. It took various security people a couple of minutes to finally bring him back.

As I was watching Mike Stein smash a red green deck in the latter rounds, Spiritmonger reminded me very much of that run. Brushing off Birds, Calls and Mongrels on his way to an unstoppable run. Everyone tried to get in front, only to be knocked over. If he had only given that sort of effort on my team.:(

Oh well, I have already resigned myself to winning a Nationals Grinder, and having that launch my highly successful Pro career. I hear its possible...

Props:

Osyp and Sol Malka: The deck was tight, even if it couldn't stop Nightscape Familiar backed up with bounce.

Stein and the Rock: What else is there to say

That guy who packed it up to the Rock in round 9: For packing it up to the Rock in round 9. A class act.

Slops:

Anand: Everyone craps out after doing well. Grow the hell up.

Adam: An unreasonable amount of bitterness.

Peace

Patrick

“How you gonna act like I don't get loud? How you gonna act like I don't rock crowds, and leave a lot of people with a gap-toothed smile?”

Ludacris-Saturday