I’m writing this about two weeks after the Grand Prix held in Baltimore which will be referred to as GPBalt after this. I went specifically to see what a large competition looked like these days ( remember I used to go to Origins) and to figure out if I wanted to play competitively on the longer term, it’s like going to play at an open at a Master’s golf course to see what the terrain is like and how you would have to train and improve your game to be able to compete regularly.
During the time that I went a number of hot button issues came up in the real world that were mirrored in the fairly insular Magic World involving women, misogyny and in many cases what people will say on the internet as opposed to what people will say to your face.
Here’s what I learned as a competitor:
My original plan was to play with my illusions Delver deck and drill it as much as possible since I was really finally beginning to play the tempo and synergy aspects of it intentionally as opposed to on discovery. I knew the cards, I had worked my way through the difficult rules questions – my version of it had always run a few spirits in it, a Geist, a Geist Honored monk and a main decked Oblivion Ring. Please make no mistake. I ran Oblivion Ring because I hate Planeswalkers and I was still too hesitant about casting instants to count on mana leaks for removal. It was the same reason that I didn’t have Snapcasters in my deck even though I now owned them, I wasn’t sure I played them well enough and I got plenty of advantage by bouncing ( a slang term meaning used a spell to put the card back into my hand) an aether adept to re-cast it onto the battlefield and knocking cards that had been pumped up back down to their original specs. It gave me card advantage, tempo and occasionally phantasmal image allowed me to create that ability to return things to my opponent which they weren’t planning around. Snapcasters are a better card, but almost all the spells I had were reusable on their own.
However after a month, I decided to start trying the Snapcasters, if for no other reason than to learn how to play them to understand their strengths and weaknesses – and I was enjoying the deck. When Lingering Souls came out I decided to rework the deck and I created something not unlike Finkle’s Delver Spirits ( now called Esper Spirits because Magic players at the high level aren’t very original) but I was running some very different cards. Still it was close enough for government work, it was running pretty well when I spent 8 hours play testing it against crazy combo homebrews and current standard decks in the cafeteria. Since I was running a lot of black for the flashback on the Lingering Souls I decided to put in the Evil Twin card because it gave me a lot of the advantages of Phantasmal Image but fewer weaknesses, what I found out though is that in tournment it created so many corner cases that I would have been calling over a judge every fifteen minutes. I didn’t want to get distracted by a card that I didn’t know inside out. I changed it to a second Havengul Lich.
I’ll write separately about the issues with running the GP and how shocked I was at both the expectations of the players and the amateurishness of the only “open” large tournament format supposedly directly sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. Suffice it to say I now understand a number of things that are limiting the appeal of competitive play to people who are not 20 something males. Back to the important competitive things.
I purchased a few cards from some lovely Canadians at Magic Stronghold, Thalia, a playset of Dungeon Geists, and bought a few Chandra’s Phoenixes with my eyes towards a red FNM deck. After a really abysmal single elimination draft side event I played a pick up game with a youngish father who had brought his 8 year old daughter to the tournament (her day 1 record was 4- 4 – 1, which made her record better than both her father’s and mine) he was testing UB control and I was playing my build which I was now officially calling “Not Finkle’s Delvers”. But I did totally change my mana base to match his, ( almost).
Playing the young dad we learned two things – UB control vs Spirit Delvers took a really long time. The only way either of us won was by the opponent being decked. We were both expecting a lot of UB control and Spirit Delvers so we both realized we were in for a long GP. I thought about moving more to UB Aggro or now that I had the pieces flipping over into Finkle’s actual build.
I went home (hotel) and added invisible stalkers and Runechanter’s pikes realizing that I missed the aggro from when I was running a straight Illusions build, and I realized something else. I missed casting the bears. Everytime I cast Phantasmal Bears there was just something incredibly happy making about saying “Bears!” when they entered the battlefield. Looking back I think I should have gone with the illusions delver build. In the first week of January I had to stop playing to help friends costume a show that was going up the week before GPBalt. That meant my hard won lesson about making sure to handle cards and play at least a game or two everyday got put aside, the close we got to the show, the less I could play and keep my skills sharp. The cafeteria folk were awesome and spent 8 hours the Thursday before GP running my deck against everything they had. The most important training was playing in a cafeteria for 8 hours – I’ll get into that more in a different post. The bottom line was that I wasn’t playing the best deck for me but I was OK with it, but then second guessing myself I went back to something else that had happened when playing with young dad.
After three games that never really ended, I offered to play him with my white deck so he could at least see how it ran against a different deck. I was way more comfortable playing the white deck and won 2-1. After tossing and turning a bunch I started wondering if I should just run the white deck. The I realized I hadn’t tuned the white deck or looked at it seriously as anything other than a goto FNM deck and hadn’t seriously played it since I added the Heroes of Bladehold ( fun card is fun!) It was midnight – I had registered for the Grand Prix but you don’t register your decklist until the next morning. So I had my cards and card options all spread out on the second hotel bed but went to sleep thinking about what a white deck would look like, especially since I had Thalia now.
I woke up a 7 convinced that I should be playing white and spendt an hour putting together a white build that I literally called “because I’m crazy” . If I had played it that would have been it’s name on the registration sheet too.
Main deck (60 cards)
2 Champion of the Parish
4 Doomed Traveler
2 Gideon's Lawkeeper
1 Mikaeus, the Lunarch
2 Accorder Paladin
1 Grand Abolisher
2 Leonin Relic-Warder
2 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
1 Drogskol Captain
3 Fiend Hunter
2 Geist of Saint Traft
1 Mentor of the Meek
3 Mirran Crusader
4 Hero of Bladehold
2 Geist-Honored Monk
32 creatures
1 Bonds of Faith
3 Honor of the Pure
1 Midnight Haunting
3 Oblivion Ring
1 Curse of Exhaustion
9 spells
4 Glacial Fortress
2 Moorland Haunt
11 Plains
2 Seachrome Coast
19 lands
But the problem I was running into was I didn’t completely trust my build for the mana base and additionally I couldn’t figure out the best way to side board. I then veered crazily between trying to construct Finkle’s Delver or rebuild my original Illusions deck – finally I ended up with this build based on my extreme insecurity due to lack of playtesting:
Main deck (60 cards)
4 Delver of Secrets
2 Invisible Stalker
3 Phantasmal Image
2 Snapcaster Mage
3 Drogskol Captain
2 Geist of Saint Traft
2 Dungeon Geists
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Ponder
3 Vapor Snag
1 Revoke Existence
2 Runechanter's Pike
2 Dissipate
4 Lingering Souls
4 Drowned Catacomb
2 Evolving Wilds
4 Glacial Fortress
6 Island
2 Moorland Haunt
1 Plains
2 Seachrome Coast
1 Swamp
Sideboard (15 cards)
2 Dungeon Geists
1 Phantasmal Image
1 Revoke Existence
2 Mana Leak
1 Demystify
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Geist-Honored Monk
1 Tragic Slip
1 Divine Offering
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Curse of Exhaustion
1 Snapcaster Mage
When I went to double check my registered list against my actual deck ( on sight) it was two minutes before the printed deadline – I had built and taken apart three decks. When I checked my sideboard it was a card short- I had left the fourth phantasmal image with the remnants of an illusion deck. I threw in Timely Reinforcements instead.
Here are things I learned.
I love Surgical Extraction. A lot.
Changing your deck because of something that happened the night before instead of sticking to your original strategy is called and “audible” and apparently Magic the Gathering players took that term from football.
Audibling is stupid. I shouldn’t have done it.
No one running an artifact combo deck expects a delver build to have Curse of Exhaustion. That change was good.
I got much better at using a sideboard at the GP.
Don’t play a deck you don’t love because you are sick of looking at those cards by round 5.
I can’t read or keep track of the Scars Block in artifiact combo decks because the artwork blends together and all the cards look alike. That block is seriously over designed into homogeneity, they use almost all the same compositional arrangements and the stylebook apparently overemphasized the spiky curvy bits to the point of crushing artistic differentiation. I do not like the Scars Block, I will probably not be seriously competitive until it cycles out of Standard.
Elesh Norn Grand Cenobite is a killer card – stop it at all costs.
Buy more Surgical Extractions.
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