Recently I moved from my hometown and childhood home of Lanham, MD to Reston, VA so I could move in with my partner and be closer to work. Reston is OK, but it has the distinct advantage of being about 15 minutes away from the Dulles Expo Center, where they usually host the GPs they have in "DC".
I'm at the tail end of my quest for Gold, and I'm burned out like crazy, so I really appreciated getting to play an event without having to travel very far. I practiced as much as I could with the format - I played in two release events, did maybe 5 phantom drafts, and played maybe 5 sealed leagues on modo. I like both the sealed and the draft format a lot! When you draft and build the decks, it feels like you just got a bunch of packs as a gift or something and you're making decks to play with your friends at the lunch table. The synergies and interactions that are good also happen to be fun. I was very excited for the GP.
I needed 4 total points between DC and Seattle, so I was mostly just trying to make day 2. I tend to be pretty good at going 11-4 in any given GP, so if I could just go 11-4 twice in these two events I'd make Gold. My goal was to just make day 2.
The Main Event
This was the deck I opened.
I'd describe this deck as firmly medium. I had a reasonable curve, reasonable creatures, one power card (the rhino maker), and a couple removal spells. I also had Pyrophobia and Firebolt in the board in case I wanted to swap my white splash for a red one.
The rounds themselves were largely uninteresting. I ended up going 3-3 after my two byes and missing day 2. I lost round 8 to a UW blink deck with Urza that was leagues better than mine, I lost round 5 to a UB deck where my draws were substantially below average, and I lost round 3 to a combination of Hexdrinker and a crucial error on my part due to faulty intuition. It be like that sometimes. The intuition error is potentially interesting, so I'll discuss it.
My opponent had a UG deck. In game 3 he got on the board quickly with a T3 Bazaar Trademage, which put Genesis in the bin, and then had a strong air clock. I had Squirrel Nest and some other pressure on the ground, so I was trying to race by going wide.
The key decision came when I was at 6 and my opponent tapped out for something. I drew Mob. My default intuition from years of competitive play was to wait until my opponent's turn to try and kill the Mage. However, and especially after the past few years of hyperfast trick-heavy limited slugfests, I found that waiting to use removal spells on creatures was more punishing than not - if they defend their creature somehow, then you're way behind on the board. So, my intuition shifted to just using the removal spell immediately while my opponent was tapped out, and that's what I did. Of course my opponent just got it back with Genesis and played it again, and restarted the clock. I presented a lethal attack two turns later with Elvish Fury, but my opponent had String of Disappearances to stay alive, and I died to the Trademage.
If I waited to kill it until after the Genesis trigger like my old intuition was telling me to do, I'd have probably got another turn out of the game, which would have been enough to win. I wasn't even playing around anything specific when I tried to kill it while he was tapped out - Spell Snuff, I guess? I hadn't even seen it, I was just scared of my opponent having something, anything.
After running this scenario by a few friends of mine, my overall takeaway is that heuristics and intuition can only get you so far - there is a point where it's to your advantage to consider as many details as possible when making your decision. In this case, the existence of Genesis and a brief consideration of what my opponent's gameplan was likely to be should have been more than enough evidence to convince me to wait to kill it.
In any case, this weekend was a bust for pro points, which left me in a bad situation - I'd need to top 8 the GP the next weekend in Seattle to have a shot at making Gold. It's really hard to top 8 a GP and I haven't done it since 2015, so I don't super love my chances. I mustered up whatever fight I had left and registered online for the PTQ on Sunday.
Have I mentioned how much I hate PTQs? Everyone seemed to be excited that they were back, but I always hated them. They are brutal tournaments where there's only a meaningful prize for first place, and every loss feels like a knife to the chest. The ones at GPs are even worse - you pretty much can't lose at all. So much has to go your way for you to win. Not to mention the salt - I tweeted a while ago that it's been a while since I played in PTQs, and that I don't remember my opponents being so generally salty. I must not have noticed during my heavy PTQ days, but the average PTQ opponent is not terribly pleasant to play against.
I'm not sure how I'd fix them, or if I even could. I hate the current system with no travel award to first place, and I hate that players are registering for them without realizing that if they win, it might just be unfeasible for them to go. I hate that there's no reward for coming close - if you lose your win-and-in, or in the T8 somewhere, you have to just pick yourself up off the floor and register for the next one.
Sunday PTQ
The format was Modern Horizons limited, and it qualified for Richmond in November. Here was the deck I built:
This may have been the finest sealed deck I've ever opened in any format. It just has nearly everything you could ever want: two extremely powerful bombs, an engine that lets you find one of them, multiple early drops that are relevant at many stages of the game, the ability to pivot easily, card draw, recursion... I could go on. It's light on removal, but at least it has some.
I showed my deck to Andrew Elenbogen, who was offering on Twitter to look at anyone's sealed pools. I took him up on this offer both with my GP pool on Saturday and this pool on Sunday. He mostly liked the way I built it, but said that he would have preferred the Spell Snuff package to the recursion package.
In round 1 I got a warning for a game rule violation, in which I tried to cast Savage Swipe targeting my fully leveled Hexdrinker and one of my opponent's creatures. Obviously not intentional, I'm just so used to hexproof that I forgot that was a thing I couldn't do. I won the match, but I was still embarrassed.
My matchup in round 2 was a UG snow deck that also had two copies of Cancrix. I managed to win game 1 with a reasonably fast Hogaak after my opponent was milling me without realizing it powered up my engine. I lost game 2 to huge beefy beatdown backed up by a Fallen Shinobi. It was at this point I decided to board in the counters, and they came in clutch - I was able to counter two critical spells, one early and one late, and managed to play carefully around Fallen Shinobi to win a very long game by eventually decking my opponent. Talk about being in the right place at the right time - I had a big blind spot to Spell Snuff and probably wouldn't have considered boarding it in if it wasn't for the impromptu deck clinic with Andrew, so major shout out to him.
In round 4 I played against a player named Katie Puckett. Katie was the Play It Forward winner for GP Toronto in 2017, and had the playmat to show for it. I'm a big fan of that program, so that's what we chatted about before the match. Katie was a really pleasant opponent. Her deck was Jund colored - I think probably BR with the G splashed. I won game 1 on the back of a pretty fast Hexdrinker.
In game 2, Katie's removal heavy deck was doing a great job of keeping my board clear while an Ore-Scale Guardian was clocking me in the air. I had a Cancrix to defend the ground a bit and a Murasa Behemoth to try and fight back some, while Katie had a board of Crypt Rats, Putrid Goblin, Pashalik Mons, and the dragon. My life total was 10 and, empty handed with 9 lands in play, I drew Hexdrinker. I attacked with my 8/8, and she didn't block, going down to 9. Then I thought about whether or not I should play the Hexdrinker.
The big problem is that Katie, who had access to 7 total mana (2 black, 4 red, 1 green), could just activate Crypt Rats for 1 in response to a level up, and I'd lose my bomb & my ability to race her dragon, but at the very least I'd be rid of the Crypt Rats and its imminent threat to deal the last 2 damage to me after two more Dragon hits. After tanking for a bit, I decided I'd have to just suck it up and let her trade Crypt Rats for Hexdrinker.
I cast Hexdrinker, and then activated it once and passed priority, waiting for her to respond with the Rats activation, but something unexpected happened - she let it resolve. I responded quickly by tapping two and saying "activate it two more times?", trying to capitalize on the fact that she may have just forgot about the Rats, and to my surprise, she also let those resolve - the Hexdrinker was now in theory a 4/4 with protection from instants, and out of range of the rats.
Right as I was picking up my other 5 lands to activate Hexdrinker some more, it was at this point Katie realized her mistake - that she could have responded with the rats and I'd be powerless because of the sorcery speed of level-up. She bemoaned her mistake, but said "yeah yeah, just finish leveling". I made a 6/6 and passed the turn.
Katie untapped, drew a Swamp and played it, and then went deep into the tank. Despite the fact that she let me make a fully powered Hexdrinker, she still had me dead on board - I only had two blockers and only one of them could force her to activate one of her creatures if I blocked with it. If she attacked with everything, which she did, every block I could possibly make left her an avenue to kill me. (If she sacrifices Putrid Goblin to Pashalik, it takes me to 9, persists back and makes two more 1/1s, which lets her activate Crypt Rats for 2 and get four Pashalik triggers.) Still, I tried to keep my best poker face and make my optimal block (which I honestly can't remember what it was). After I did that, she thought for a bit, and then conceded - she didn't see the winning line.
We shook hands, and I wasn't sure whether or not I should tell her, but a friend of hers had walked over and pointed it out to her, at which point I confirmed. She was definitely bummed about not seeing it, but she was a really good sport about it.
I felt really weird about the match. She caught her first mistake quick enough such that if she pushed at all for the chance to respond to the third level up activation, I'd have probably just let her have it, or at the very least I'd have to call the judge over and explain what the sequence of events was and look like a huge asshole and a rules lawyer for trying to fight to have her mistake hold up. I thought a lot about it, and my main takeaway was that she did not feel entitled to the chance to correct her mistake, even though she caught it pretty quickly.
In the spring of 2018, I had a pretty big conflict at work with a former coworker, and it caused me to spend a lot of time examining my own sense of entitlement. The conflict, which I will spare you the gory details of, made me pretty angry at the time. In the weeks afterward, after I cooled off a bit, it gave me a chance to kind of zoom out and see what was driving my frustration, and I determined that it was a sense of entitlement - for whatever reason, I felt incorrectly entitled to a certain amount of responsibility at work, and the result was a huge divide between myself and a coworker that I really looked up to. As much as it sucked to lose that relationship at work (which, in retrospect, was way out of my control anyway - I wasn't the only one who was wrong in the situation), I'm glad it happened. Once I adjusted my behavior (and not just at work, but in as many aspects of my life as I could apply those reflections to), I found myself a lot more empathetic and understanding of other people, and I can't help but feel like I've been reaping a whole new set of rewards as a result.
Playing competitive Magic for many years and against many overgrown children has kind of conditioned me to expect any given opponent to act entitled in spots like that one. I played a match at a PT once where, in game 3, my opponent surveyed the board, thought they were dead, offered a handshake and conceded, only to see that they weren't actually dead before we could clean the cards up, asked to take the concession back, and went as far as to make me feel like the asshole when I tried to get a judge involved to sort out the situation. I love competing, but my extreme cutthroat days are probably behind me, and when I find myself in spots like that nowadays my default is to just let my opponent have what they want within reason so I can avoid the stress of potentially looking like an asshole for trying to enforce the rules.
Katie could have very easily put me in yet another spot like that, and didn't - only because from what I could determine, she didn't feel entitled to. Katie, you are incredible and I wish every Magic player was like you. If I could somehow give you the MC invite from this qualifier, I would.
I won round 5 and then drew into the top 8. I was hoping it would be soft, but it had some weight to it with a few players I knew and/or recognized, like Craig Krempels, Ryan Phraner, and Philip Yam, who snuck into 8th place at 5-1.
I asked everyone I knew that was still around the venue for draft advice and got a ton of different answers, which kind of confirmed my suspicion that roughly all the archetypes are viable. Still, I hadn't actually drafted that much since I focused my prep mostly on sealed, so I couldn't be sure that I was the best player in that top 8. My favorite two archetypes from the few drafts I had done were UB Ninjas and UR Draw Combo, so I was just hoping to fall easily into one of those two decks.
I was seated to the left of Craig in the draft. My first pack was horrible - the only two interesting cards it had were Krosan Tusker and First Sliver's Chosen. I took the sliver because I didn't feel creative enough yet to draft a deck where Krosan Tusker would be a valuable inclusion. Craig then passed me Sling Gang Lieutenant and Graveshifter, which I was happy to snatch up. I took Urza's Rage 4th and Carrion Feeder 5th, and decided to try and draft RB Sacrifice, but was thrown off by 6th and 7th pick Settle from Reality, which I took to see if I could end up in BW Changelings. White dried up very quickly though, so I tried to go back to red. Blue was never available at all. In pack 3 Craig passed me ANOTHER Sling Gang and ANOTHER Graveshifter, so I was feeling better about my deck, but I had a really hard time getting cheap drops.
I ended up with this:
I hated it. I felt like I would just get run over by decks that actually had 2 drops.
My quarterfinals opponent was UB Ninjas, which was the deck I wanted. I lost game 1 after missing my 3rd land drop for multiple turns and couldn't help but think "ahh, it's so good to have PTQs back again, can't wait to do this every weekend again." To my surprise, I drew Sling Gangs a lot in games 2 and 3 and won fairly easily.
My semifinals opponent was Ryan Phraner. I've known Ryan for a while, and while he doesn't play all that often, I've been seeing him at a few east coast tournaments lately. He was also playing UB Ninjas - no wonder I couldn't get any blue. This matchup was really long and intricate, and it also went to three games. In both of the games I won, I dealt the last few points with Urza's Rage.
My finals opponent was Felix Sloo. He mentioned that we played each other before, in GP New Jersey in 2017. I couldn't remember, so I felt pretty bad. His deck was BW, splashing red for the flashback cost of Smiting Helix (at least, that's all I saw). It seemed like a removal control deck, so I liked my matchup a lot, since my deck was built around Sling Gang and Graveshifter. I was on the play somehow in game 1 (I was only on the draw vs. Ryan, which meant that the low seeds kept beating the high seeds, luckily for me!), and I won pretty easily with Sling Gangs. I flooded really badly in game 2 and lost to the Farmstead Gleaner & Sadistic Obsession combo after blowing the only removal spell I drew before it was assembled.
In game 3, I opened up a 1 lander and mulliganed. My 6 card hand was also a 1 lander, but it was a bit closer - it had Alpine Guide, so if I could find a mountain I'd be in decent shape. I thought about it for a while and decided that even if my top card was exactly Mountain, I'd need to draw another land after that and have my Alpine Guide live, and even then I still couldn't play all the other cards in my hand, so I took (what was for me) a very disciplined mulligan to 5. So this is how it's going to end, I thought.
My 5 card hand was Swamp, Swamp, Carrion Feeder, Alpine Guide, Sling Gang Lieutenant. Better than both my other hands at least, so I kept and kept my scry card of Swamp on top.
I played Feeder on 1, drew my swamp on 2, and topdecked Sunbaked Prairie to play my Alpine Guide on 3. Felix played 3 swamps and his first play was Farmstead Gleaner on 3. I cast Sling-Gang on 4 and kept the pressure up. His play on 4 was Sadistic Obsession, which luckily for me still didn't leave him with any good blocks. His play on 5 was a removal spell on Sling-Gang, which I countered by just sacrificing to itself. On 6, he finally got to block my Alpine Guide, but it was after I cast Graveshifter to get back the Sling-Gang, so I pushed through enough damage to get him down to 3. He untapped and conceded on turn 7.
I couldn't believe that I won. My 5 card hand was really really good. I was kind of stunned.
I wish I could say that winning felt amazing, euphoric, like a relief. The truth is that I felt bad, I felt guilty. I'm getting old and soft. Phraner has never played in a PT before. I wanted him to win. You know how they say the bad feeling of losing is bigger than the good feeling of winning? In this case, the bad feeling of crushing dreams is bigger than the good feeling of winning. It was even worse for Felix. This was his first PTQ top 8, ever. I've lost in the finals of a PTQ before - 5 times. 7, if you want to count RPTQs. And that doesn't count qualifying matches in PTs or GPs, either. It feels awful every time. I hate that I gave that feeling to Felix, in his first ever top 8. It makes it hard to enjoy the feeling of winning. I have played in 35 PTs, and Richmond will be my 36th - I really do not need to participate in one more. Maybe my competitive days really are over - if I can't deal with losing, and I can't enjoy winning, then the only move that makes sense is to just not compete.
Some amount of blame has to go to the system though. Not even four months ago I top 8ed a PT, and somehow I'm already back in the pits, denying people their first invite so I can have my 36th. I guess it's not a problem that's unique to me - anyone in the pro club but not in the MPL is uncertain about how they're going to get to participate in competitive Magic in 2020.
Still, it always feels nice to qualify. For each of my 35 PTs, I've almost always had to worry about how I'm going to qualify for the next one, and that feeling of "will I ever qualify again" never, ever went away. Even after my PT top 8 in Cleveland, I still walked away wondering if I was really truly good enough to keep qualifying for and playing in PTs.
I have Seattle this weekend, and it's super unlikely that I'll get to Gold since I need to finish in the top 8. That's not so bad though - I'd have to plan an extremely expensive last minute trip to Barcelona, worry about preparing and getting cards for a brand new (and from what I heard outrageously broken) modern format, and take even more time off work. I have a strong suspicion that PT Richmond will be the last PT to exist as we know them, and it's not until November and it's really easy and cheap for me to travel to, so I kind of just want to check out from competitive Magic and enjoy one last event with my PT friends as we all ride this sinking ship together. Plus, if I do top 8 in Seattle, I'm gonna feel even worse about stealing an invite right out of Ryan and Felix's grip and then just lighting it on fire.
Huge props to Dice City Games, my sponsor for these tournaments, to Andrew Elenbogen for the sealed clinics, and to Katie Puckett for being a pleasant and sporting opponent.
nice
ReplyDelete