US Nationals 2018 Report - by Alex Majlaton *24th*

Every once in a while, a tournament comes along that makes you remember why you started playing in tournaments. A tournament that reminds you that you can still have a blast playing Magic. A tournament that makes you want to write a tournament report. That's what Nats was for me.

I played four straight weeks of tournaments (GP DC, PT Richmond, the team RPTQ, and GP Vegas) so I was unbelievably burned out and very disinterested in Magic (especially Standard), so I skipped GP Pittsburgh despite it being so close to me. Felt great - I don't regret it for even one second. Even though I was so tired of Magic, I still really wanted to attend Nats.





I've noticed this phenomenon about recent limited formats that people generally ended up hating, where you'll always find one weirdo that says they really liked it, then you ask them why and you eventually find out that it was the first format they ever drafted. Everyone seems to have fond memories of when they fell in love with the game. That's what Nats is to me. US Nats 2004 was the first premier event I ever qualified for by top 8ing the enormous-for-the-time 900 player Mid-Atlantic Regionals with Affinity, back when those cards were Standard legal and you could also put four Skullclamps in your deck.

I also went to Nats last year because it was in Richmond, which was super close to me, and had a complete blast despite both doing poorly AND the tournament being pretty awful value wise (because lol at choosing tournaments based mostly on their value).

I looked up flights to Columbus and there were really good flights leaving from Baltimore, but no reasonable ones coming back. Flying was out, so it was looking like I was gonna skip again, because I didn't want to do any driving.

Then, Seth Manfield messaged me about potentially driving to Nats together. I told him I didn't want to do any driving and he said that he'd be willing to drive his car. I told him we wouldn't get there until late Friday night because I had work, and that we would have to leave ASAP on Sunday, also because I have work, and he said he was fine with those. I think he was mostly just looking for anyone to split gas/hotel with. With no more objections for Seth to defeat, after some hemming and hawing, I was in. With the trip in place, anyone else coming would be a freeroll in terms of split costs and good times, so we started looking to see if we could maybe get one more. I sent a message to Andrew Hung.

Andrew is a player from my area that started playing and competing fairly recently. (In fact I know that because on the ride we were all talking about how Dominaria was so much of a better draft format than anything else recently, at which point Andrew mentioned that he kinda liked Aether Revolt. After being disgusted and asking why, he mentioned that it was the format he started playing Magic with, and then it all made sense.) For the past few months he's been asking me about things like draft camps (which I haven't run in a while) and riding to tournaments together, and I was mostly blowing him off for no other reason than that I just didn't really feel like attending any of the things he was asking about. It made me feel bad because I can definitely appreciate when people take the direct approach and ask for what they want, and I didn't want to let my general malaise about Magic prevent me from randomly rewarding that, so Andrew was the first person I thought of when this trip started to materialize. When I asked him if he wanted to go, he was on the fence and asked if I needed a ride. I said that Seth was driving and we just needed to fill his car up, and he was in.

Seth also posted in our local draft group asking anyone if they wanted to come, which prompted Mark Rankin to message me and ask if he should come with us. I said yes obviously, and Rankin's response was to say that if he went 5-0 in this Standard league that he was currently 3-0 but down a game in, then he would come with us, probably not expecting to win. The joke's on him, because he did, and then did the honorable thing by sticking to his word and actually coming. Then, he made possibly the greatest contribution he's ever made to anything, by remembering that our formerly-local friend Hans Buchner lives in Columbus, about three miles away from the convention center, in a real actual house that he was willing to host us in. This trip just kept getting better.

We added a fifth player, Allen Sun, at essentially the last second, and the plan was to meet at Seth's apartment in Columbia, MD before starting the drive. When we were asking if his car was good to fit all of us and handle the drive, Seth's response was "it broke down last week but it should be fine for the trip", which didn't give me a lot of confidence. I made the executive decision that we would take my car, since it's big and relatively new and gets better gas mileage anyway since it's a hybrid. I was still planning on making Seth drive for most of the trip since I was exhausted from work all week, but I ended up taking over after the halfway point since I wasn't able to sleep comfortably in my own front seat.

The chats in the car ride were good. Allen, a Johnny extraordinaire and one of those freaks that likes sealed deck more than draft, kept going on about this Standard deck that killed by equipping Sorcerer's Wand to Famished Paladin and giving it lifelink with Rush of Vitality, and found its combo pieces by playing 24 copies of Rat Colony and using Lost Legacy on itself to strip the deck down to just combo pieces, kind of like Mana Severance in the old Belcher decks. This is the type of deck that would get chewed up and spit out in today's information-saturated internet age, but even though I was rolling my eyes at how bad it sounded, I kind of appreciated that it existed - it reminded me of the old times, when Regionals season was a thing, and everyone was scrambling around looking for "tech" anywhere they could get it from.

Then I had the microphone for a while after I started to drive halfway through and got to talk at length about how I think the state of Magic content is pretty dismal, and how testing for PTs in general is a very misunderstood process by pretty much everyone in the game (especially by myself). I could talk forever and ever about both of these topics, but the short report-friendly version is that Magic content these days is more akin to Cosmopolitan-style "50 Great Sex Tips!"-esque articles than it is to an academic journal, and the main motivation of nearly every content producer (as well as the content industry itself) is certainly not to make you better at Magic. It might not even be third or fourth highest on the list. My current belief is that the only information about the game that you should trust is information that you generate and verify yourself, and the subset of people that have the motivation, time, ability, and willingness to perform this process properly are the people that are (perhaps rightfully) at the top of the game.

As far as selecting a deck for the event goes, I hadn't even attempted to play any Standard since the RPTQ, and my last Dominaria draft was at the PT, so I had no real practice for this event whatsoever. Prior to the PT, I convinced myself that UW was the best deck by a lot and played it to a cool 5-5 finish in Standard. It was the only deck I had any real experience with, but there was no way I was playing it again, since it requires a lot of stamina to play, and you have to be very familiar with how all the matchups play out after sideboard.

I decided to just give up and play mountains. I looked at the lists from Pittsburgh and Singapore, and found a nice looking list with Ghitu Lavarunner and Wizards' Lightning from Grzegzorz Kowalski and decided to just copy it card for card. I needed to know how to sideboard with it, so I messaged Ben Weitz for some ideas. I chose Ben because not only is he very good at Standard, but because the last time I tried talking shit about Gzrezgzorz Kowalski (by asking Ben if he was happy or sad that a "random Euro" top 8ed a GP with the R/G Eldrazi deck he designed), Ben immediately came to his defense, so I assume that he and Grzegzzeregzgz are best friends that share intimate knowledge about their Standard decks with each other. While that wasn't exactly the case, he still came up strong with a bunch of solid strats that really helped me understand the deck. Thanks Ben!

I convinced Seth to play it in the car ride, since in typical Seth fashion he had no idea what he wanted to play and wasn't going to bother thinking about it until a couple hours before he went to bed. He suggested one change, cutting a Chandra's Defeat in the SB for an extra Mountain, since he thought 22 lands were not enough to cast all the 4 drops after board. I dug it, so this is what we registered after we got to the Hans estate in Columbus at 2:30 AM:

4 Soul-Scar Mage
4 Bomat Courier
4 Ghitu Lavarunner
2 Earthshaker Khenra
2 Kari Zev, Skyship Raider
2 Ahn-Crop Crasher
4 Goblin Chainwhirler
4 Hazoret the Fervent

4 Lightning Strike
4 Shock
4 Wizard's Lightning

22 Mountain

3 Abrade
3 Chandra's Defeat
3 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
2 Fight with Fire
3 Rekindling Phoenix
1 Mountain

Andrew and Rankin were both playing versions of the U/B Midrange deck that won the event, and it should come as no surprise that Allen was playing a wacky Johnny-esque U/W tokens deck that I didn't know existed until we were talking about what we were gonna play.

After a cool five hours of sleep, the trip kept getting better after I woke up and learned that Hans lives down the street from a Tim Horton's. In America!! Timmy H was always one of the best parts about going to tournaments in Canada, so getting to enjoy it without having to count a bunch of crappy dirty dollar and 2 dollar coins was a wonderfully pleasant surprise. I got an Oreo flavored iced capp and immediately gave myself brain freeze.

DAY 1:

ROUND 1 - ***BYE***

ROUND 2 - Jacob Frederick, playing U/W Drake Haven

Not having tested my deck any, I assumed that this matchup was horrible after Jacob hard cast a Renewed Faith on turn 4. Maybe it's not as bad as I think it is, but I lost game 1 after drawing my fourth Hazoret before my fourth land. I managed to win game 2, but I flooded out just a bit in game 3.

1-1

ROUND 3 - Jacob Medley, playing mono red

I introduced myself to Jacob and he said that we've played each other before, which is just about the worst feeling in the world. When he reminded me of what the match was like, I remembered that it was round 9 of the Hour of Devastation limited GP and that I beat him playing for day 2, which made it even worse. For what it's worth, I did remember Jacob once we started playing, because he has a very distinct in-game thinking face.

This match was 3 games, with me winning the first and third. The first two games were both decided by Hazoret. The action in game 1 was very fast paced - I remember activating Hazoret to take my opponent from 14 to 12, and thinking that maybe a play like that could've been a mistake, but my opponent seemed interested in racing with his creatures rather than playing defense (despite the fact that my life total always felt comfortably high) so I decided to push damage and try to topdeck a removal spell to put the game away. I drew Earthshaker Khenra and that was enough.

Game 2 was one of those unfortunate affairs where you cast Rekindling Phoenix with intent to block a Hazoret and hope your opponent doesn't have a removal spell for the token. They almost always end in disappointment and this one wasn't any different.

I finally got to be on the play in game 3 and was able to cast two copies of Phoenix before my opponent could cast one.

2-1

ROUND 4 - Brice Sheeler, playing Esper control

I won this match in two games. Game 1 was a nice blend of three things: the power of having a super-low aggro curve, my extreme fortune in resolving the only Hazoret I tried casting, and my ability to dance around Settle the Wreckage. I sensed the Settle as my opponent's only removal and kept Hazoret back, and that was more than enough bobbing and weaving to get the job done. Game 2 was uneventful as my opponent didn't play more than two lands in the second game. Very skillful.


3-1

ROUND 5 - Samuel Wade, playing B/R

I won this match in two games. I got Hazoret online quickly in game 1, which I'm finding is the biggest factor by a wide margin in these red mirrors. Suddenly all this contorting to play black for cards like Doomfall and Vraska's Contempt makes sense. Maybe this is something I should've picked up on as of PT Hour of Devastation, but better late than never I guess. In game 2, I once again very skillfully defeated an opponent that did not play a third land.

4-1

Very pleased with 4-1 (well, 3-1 really) after picking up a Standard deck cold. It was time for draft, which I was very excited about. I sat down at my pod and didn't see a single person I recognized, and not just golds/platinums or even silvers - there weren't even any grinder types that you kind of just have been seeing at everything for the past decade or so (shout out to Andrew Maine, my former player meeting buddy from the pre-sleep-in special days). I liked my chances.

I first picked Time of Ice, second picked Tetsuko, then found that white was very open (although I had to pass a couple Divinations to stake my claim on it, which I was sad about). I ended up with this:

ROUND 6 - Nolan Chaney, playing U/W

Nolan was the one taking all the Divinations going around. I think his deck was quite good. It had 2 Divination, Call the Cavalry, and 2 Blessed Light to fuel his Mirari Conjecture. He also had Forbear's Blade. His creatures weren't that good, but the blade made up for that fact.

I won in two games, on the back of one or two less-than-optimal plays from Nolan combined with a clutch Unwind that I sideboarded in to try and beat the Conjecture.

5-1

ROUND 7 - Lucas Thompson, playing W/R

Lucas's deck was a W/R aggro curve out deck with a couple tricks like Run Amok and Adamant Will. I was able to navigate around them successfully by being super patient with Gideon's Reproach and won this match in two games also.

6-1

ROUND 8 - Ian Klein, playing U/R

After introducing ourselves, Ian said he thinks he follows me on Twitter, and said that my last tweet was something about getting off Twitter, which he was right about.

My tweet was lambasting the Silver showdown, but I prefaced it by saying that I deleted Twitter from my phone so I didn't get to chime in as soon as the announcement went up. I deleted Twitter because I was spending too much time looking at it during the day (I have to use my phone to do it since it's blocked at my work, thankfully), and at some point I realized that "Magic twitter" is actually very dumb and pointless. I was excited about it originally as a way to "stay connected with the Magic community", but almost all of the tweets are just noise. Nobody tweets out interesting content, discussions are never rational or productive, and most of the time you would not even be able to tell that the people tweeting have ever actually played a game of Magic or have any interest in doing so.

I digress. Ian had the U/R Wizards deck, which was scary - this is supposed to be the "best archetype" or whatever. The games were long and interesting, and Ian gave me a run for my money, but I came out on top in two games.

7-1. 3-0 6-0 in draft.

I collected all my people and we did the record round-up. Seth was also 7-1, Andrew was 5-3, Allen was 5-2-1, and Hans and Rankin were both 4-4. Their plan was to come back tomorrow, do the draft portion, and play the "free" limited PPTQ (where they give you a $40 Flooded Strand promo just for signing up), but the rest of us were still at least somewhat invested in the main event.

We went to a Hibachi restaurant that Hans recommended, which was great because it was a bit away from the downtown area (which didn't matter because we all had cars) so we could avoid the standard post-day 1 gamer rush. I managed to not come close to death, which was lucky because Hibachi places are always a crap shoot because of my shellfish allergy, no matter how much advance warning you give to the staff.

After dinner we went back to Hans's house to crash, but not before Seth loaded up the coverage to review his draft and his games. Side note, this may be one of the things that separates Seth from the rest of us mere mortals - he just immediately went into the lab to review the tapes. Granted, he has the advantage of there being any tapes at all, but it still shows better practice habits than my plans of firing up Hearthstone, losing my Arena match to go 2-3, then getting pissed off and tilt joining another one. (Although this might be a path to the next Silver Showdown.)

Although we did discuss some of his picks, Seth mostly just cackled uncontrollably as Maria Bartholdi made comment after comment like "Wow, Drudge Sentinels - that's a card that doesn't make the cut very often!" and "Seth is navigating this game very well, even though his deck is not exactly on the powerful end of the spectrum!" while he was destroying his opponent despite having to fight through more than one Siege Gang Commander trigger.

We woke up on Sunday, ran back Tim's, and got ready to draft.

DAY 2

My pod had Owen Turtenwald as the only player that I knew for sure I should be concerned about, and Joe Bernal as another player that I had vaguely sort of heard of before but didn't really know much about. It also had Jacob Frederick, my only loss on day 1, so maybe that's who I should really be worried about. At least I've beaten Owen before.

My first pick overall was a decision between Serra Angel, Adeliz, and Blink of an Eye. I think Adeliz is the pick if you're forcing UR, and Blink is the pick if you have a preference for blue, but I ended up picking Serra because it's the overall strongest card and I still wanted to try and stay open. White ended up being cut from me, but blue flowed very nicely, so I played nice with the table and released white after a couple picks in pack 2 in favor of red. I ended up with this:

I thought this deck was quite good. I'm really happy with how I drafted, since I got all 3 Shivan Fires in pack 2 and wouldn't have been able to if I didn't let my first pick go.

Seth was also 7-1, and had the pod with BBD and all the 8-0s. He showed me his deck afterwards and it was awesome - the type of deck you imagine is possible in Dominaria, but never actually get to assemble. It was a Jeskai legend-themed deck, with maybe 10 legends - 2 Tiana, 2 Kwende, Danitha, Traxos, etc. He also had Urza's Ruinous Blast and TWO! copies of Karn's Temporal Sundering. It looked both really powerful and really fun, and I was so sure that we'd have to wait for Seth to finish the top 8 before we could leave the event.

ROUND 9 - John Sauer, playing U/W

I played 3 intense games with John. My hand game 1 was great, but I stopped playing lands after 4 (which is normally a great thing) and he had Baird, so I couldn't both keep pressure up and building the board. I eventually had to switch to full defense mode and died to his copy of In Bolas' Clutches. I won game 2 with a nasty curve out.

I did have an interesting decision in game 3 that probably lost the game for me. I was under a lot of pressure traded almost all of the board off after fighting through two copies of In Bolas' Clutches (thanks to John's Tragic Poet). I was at 4 life, and his only card in play was a Mesa Unicorn to my nothing. My hand was Shivan Fire and Keldon Raider (that I couldn't cast until next turn), and I decided, without much thinking, to just kill his unicorn while he was tapped out. This plays around things like Adamant Will and Jousting Lance, but is otherwise a spew of my removal spell since I can just block it after replaying my Raider. I was immediately punished by John drawing a Cloudreader Sphinx that I hadn't seen all match, and I got two more draw steps to deal with it and whiffed on both.

I'm still quite bad in these spots. All of the recent hyper aggression in limited lately pushed my intuition towards killing everything as fast as possible to avoid the feel-bads of dying with a removal spell in hand, but in general Dominaria limited rewards patience. Rather than spend a minute or so evaluating the risk, I just went with my gut, which was poorly calibrated for this format by all the other formats in the past couple years. I'm not sure I would have won that match if I held my removal spell, but I'd have had a much better chance in the rollout.

7-2

ROUND 10 - Jacob Frederick, playing U/W

Here was my chance to get revenge for day 1. Jacob flashed a copy of Board the Weatherlight while he was shuffling (and he was 0-1), so I was hoping that he just didn't know how to play limited and that I would have an easy clean. I could have debunked this line of thought by realizing that he did no worse than 2-1 in draft yesterday.

I lost a medium-length game 1 after the board kind of stalled out and he drew Zahid, which my deck had no really good answer for outside of Clutches and a million bounce spells. I eventually died to it.

I won game 2 with a nice curve out.

I lost game 3 in two giant chunks: the first chunk was a surprise Kwende to hack my life total from 13 to 5 (with a 2/2 flyer and Jousting Lance), and the second chunk was when he finally cast Board the Weatherlight and found... his own copy of In Bolas' Clutches. Come on, does everyone have to have this card? I fought as hard as I could to the very end, but he peeled a Syncopate to deal with my desperation Blink.

It is a rare and awful feeling to lose to the same person more than once in the same event.

7-3, and out of contention for Top 8 :/

After this round, I heard from Ben Wienburg that Owen and Joe Bernal's decks were both insane, and they were playing each other for 3-0. I thought my deck was excellent, but I guess the card pool for our pod was just out of this world and my deck was simply average.

ROUND 11 - Adam Bialkowski, playing W/G

Adam said he died to Owen, losing on turn 5 in one of the games. I told him about how I lost to two consecutive UW decks with In Bolas' Clutches, and then killed him on turn 5 in our first game, which made me feel pretty bad. He mulliganed to 6 in the second game and never played a third land, so this match was over super quickly.

8-3. 4-2 overall in limited. Not quite what I was hoping for, but still thrilled that I did better than 3-3 in a limited portion ever.

I caught up with Seth after the draft and he ended up going 0-3 with that awesome deck. :(

It's hard to describe this exact feeling, but I was thrilled to get to play with my super fun Standard deck again, and also thrilled that I only had to play two more rounds of Standard.

ROUND 12 - Nick Moore, playing B/R aggro

I assume this was B/R aggro, because he had Bomat Courier and Scrapheap Scrounger in his deck. I got him to 11 before we traded boards and then he cast a Chandra, which I blew my last two cards in hand to kill. He drew Hazoret within the next turn or two and I died super quickly. It's possible that I should have ignored Chandra and played to try and peel burn spells, but I don't have a great intuition for these situations in this Standard format.

I won games 2 and 3 on the back of two copies of Phoenix in game 2, and a bit of flood from Nick in game 3.

9-3

ROUND 13 - Riley Curran, playing Jeskai Dynavolt

Riley immediately asked me if I wanted to split and I said sure. I generally dislike splitting, especially when sizable sums of money are involved, but we were basically playing for pennies and I was thinking about the disaster scenario where I lose, fall out of the top 64, and miss out on the $62.50 I'd have got if I said no, so I split. I think Riley's heart wasn't really in it after that, because I destroyed him very quickly after he mulliganed three times in two games. His deck was cool though.

10-3, good for 24th place, $125, a deck box and some sleeves. I tried looking up the final standings for Nats 2004 to compare the two 24th place prizes, but 24th in 2004 was only $275 - not much more - and 26th place was $0. I did have fun looking at all the blast-from-the-past names though.

Riley made it comfortably in the top 64 and won $75, so I found him after the standings went up and handed him $25 in cash. I take a lot of pride in paying my splits as fast as I possibly can, even when they're for less than what I spend every week on pizza.

Andrew ended up one win short of cash, and Allen ended up splitting with Seth in the last round as they fought for mincash. Rankin showed up to rare draft (looool at this practice in 2018) on day 2, dropped to enter the "free" PPTQ with Hans, and then they both 1-0 dropped that after learning it would be 8 rounds so they could hang out and drink in Columbus.

It was about 5PM at this point, so we had to immediately start the journey back home because most of us had to work on Monday. I was exhausted and didn't want to drive for most of it, so I told myself that I was only going to take us out of Columbus to the first pit stop for drinks/snacks, but we ended up stopping at the Kopper Kanyon Grill for dinner, because the Yelp reviews suggested that they had good buffalo wings. I got conned by the server into getting the spiciest wings they had, so I ended up wanting to retain control of my car for the rest of the drive home in case I needed to immediately emergency stop for... you know... reasons.

All in all I had a blast going to Nationals. It is my favorite tournament in Magic and I think I'm going to try to attend every year as long as it exists in a format similar to this. I'm glad I got to play Dominaria limited one more time, since it's quite possibly the finest draft format I've ever played. I'm also glad that this Standard format is dead forever.

Props

Competitive tournaments with a draft portion - please have more of these!!
Rankin - for basing his decision to come on such a dumb reason, actually following through with the result, and then getting us the lodging hook up with...
Hans - for hosting a huge gang of last minute buffoons. We miss you in DC homie.
Ben Weitz - for the last minute mono red SB strats, most of which I ended up ignoring anyway
Tim Horton's - for letting me enjoy all your delicious treats without having to leave the country


Slops

Seth - for 0-3ing the second draft with maybe the coolest Dom limited deck I've ever seen
Rankin - for having a phone without a headphone jack
Riley Curran - for mind tricking me into giving him $25
People who write Props & Slops and give slops to themselves because it's against the law to be mean to other people on the internet in 2018 but they don't have enough slops to give out otherwise - you can do better
"Magic twitter" - for being a gigantic cesspool that is generally void of any actual Magic content
Kopper Kanyon - for having yelp reviews that made it sound like it was a cool, hipster-y, off-the-beaten-path type place and ending up being a biker bar with crappy wings. Surprised it wasn't called the "Kopper Kanyon Klub".
Ben Friedman - for val, because it's been a while. Tighten up!!

I'm playing the team PT with Neal Oliver and Jonathan Morawski. I haven't decided if I'm going to play the GP the week beforehand, but I probably will. Either way, see you in Minneapolis!