Pseudo-Newb and what I've actually been Playing plus Balticon

The last tournament like thing I played was FNM on May 11. It was standard and it was the first time I had cracked standard in a while.

I did not do well. The first round I remember quite clearly why I lost - I was playing a white humans build and I had no answer for the turn three wurmcoil engine in game 1 which was over very, very quickly, the second game I boarded in some artifact removal and the game became more even but we were almost in danger of playing out to a draw.

It's been two weeks so I can't remember the second round except for the fact that it was another fast green ramp and I died horribly.

Once again I realized that the most important thing for me is to keep moving the cards. I need to play. I don't need to play like the pro's do but I can't not play for a couple of weeks and make decisions quickly enough to stay competitive.  I still don't want to play MTGO so I'm really, really hoping that the Ipad Duels of the Planeswalkers app will work well. If I could play pick up games wherever I am against an AI instead of having to carve out time that would let me get my "maintenance practice" in while still having the rest of my real life that keeps eating up chunks of my time.

I did win the next two matches but I won them very quickly and definitively in a way that made me question whether I was doing well or I was just playing moderately better than my late pairings.  Luckily my last pairing for the evening was someone who was actually one of the known quality better players. In the straight round I beat him because he was playing a rouge combo reanimator deck.

(*newb note - rouge means that there haven't been 50,000 articles on the intarwebs talking about this deck and how it's awesome/evil/weak in other words it's not one of the "in" deck strategies or archetypes.

reanimator - means that it has effects as part of it's strategy where you have things in your graveyard and you have other cards that let you get stuff out of your graveyard - this is a description of strategy not an actual card or ability.

I'm still having a problem identifying when things are combos and not synergies but in this case

combo means that the deck strategy is dependent on a combination of cards to win the game in this case it was comboing Unburial Rites and Craterhoof Behemoth with something that made lots of little creature tokens so unless I killed every single creature he got on the board he'd be able to swarm with lots of those little creatures getting boosted from Craterhoof and tramply.

end of newb note   )










































So when I explained how I was feeling ( because the FNM last week made me wonder what the heck I was doing ) we had so much time that we actually played about six games against my delver spirit deck which was very mid range and my white humans deck which was not.  And I beat him enough with both his better deck than the rouge bit he was playing and he was able to play against me to identify the usefulness of his reanimator craterhoof deck.

The best part of that was that I really felt like I was actually playing Magic.

I really, really like playing Magic.

And it's important to play people who are better than me. Because everything is abstract until I'm actually moving the cardboard.

So

Preparation - I was playing my delver deck for the tournament. I just felt like I needed to to make sure I had really explored that version of it before I changed it.

Results
0-2
1-2
2-0
2-0

That is a 50% win rate for matches and out of 9 games played 5 games were won for a 55.5- % total win rate.

This needs to improve

Takeaways
If I want to play standard i need to practice with standard, no matter how much causal play or teaching with cards I'm doing it's not the same as playing for me.

So what have I been doing for the last several weeks:

Booster Smash

I've been playing multiplayer booster smash with friends to open my box of Avacyn Restored, still a great way to learn the cards and get to play with all of them but not good for Standard practice.

Booster smash - Everyone has three booster packs, everyone gets five lands of each color - don't look other than to take out the land and the token.

Play.

Commander/EDH

I spent another long evening at Mr. Pointy's house playing my own copy of the Kaalia EDH/commander deck.

I'm beginning to get the hang of it and might be ready to modify it. I learned a new variation of casual play where you "attack left" or "attack right" in a multiplayer. I went with the Perfectly Normal Husband who sat between me and Mr. Pointy. He was playing a Mimeoplasm Commander deck and sitting between me and Mr. Pointy he just got smashed to bits in the middle. Once again I seem to be running about 50% win rate when I am playing against better players and none of the games were short  most of them are kind of nail biters in the end so I think that I'm playing strategically rather than luck, I'm certainly not playing top tier decks.

The difficulty with playing commander and legacy formats is that I'm REALLY unfamiliar with all the cards that are used or the archetypes so I awlays feel like a five year old "what's that? what's that one? What does that do? . . " but the people I'm playing with are very understanding and know what I'm trying to do so it's all been good. I'm warming up to commander but I still don't really want to spend time with multiple commander decks I'll stick with one and customize it so that I have something to play with friends who like it a lot.

Intro Pack Wars


My last final was the two days before that FNM. That weekend I was going to a conference with the Perfectly Normal Husband that involved finance and taxes, I couldn't pack enough to really deck build but I did bring some decks in case we got bored. I did get to play some standard ( Humans vs Zombies, Creepy Dolls vs Zombies)  on a really beautiful wraparound porch, but he had also bought packs and snuck in land to surprise me with enough packs to play a few booster smash games on the night they were having the big Texas Hold'em corporate sponsored tournament we played intro packs in the same room so all the high falutin' networking types could find us without having to try to figure out why they keep organizing activities for CPAs that involve gambling.

So we played Angelic Might vs Slaughterhouse with me on the side of angels and him consorting with things demonic, because you know sometimes I have to play against Type.  Angelic Might kicks Slaughterhouse's butt. So for four days of the conference I was playing at least an hour or two of magic per day. Then when we came back it was time to get ready for The Boy's gaming and anime convention that he had been working on all year.

It was his first time as con-chair, hopefully the experience will teach him not to do it for larger conventions. It's best to volunteer with a department not run the whole thing.

However The Boy's convention featured a Magic Tournament - non sanctioned. Prize was two packs.

First time it was better to be a woman playing Magic than a Guy


First things first. My experience with teenage magic players is that the come in a few different flavors, they can either clean my clock or they are super casual, or they are beginners themselves or they are really super arrogant and consider whatever they do superior to whatever else anyone is doing with the cards. There are a few other types but those are the ones I tend to run into.

This convention is open to the public but it is also The Boy's convention and I am going to support it. I put on my best ageless/mostly genderless clothing pack up my backpack full of decks and go.

Is it bad that I was kind of hoping that his school was full of the kind of teenagers that could clean my clock?  I knew given the timeframe that it wasn't going to be any kind of regular tournament. Here's the thing. I brought and FNM competitive deck, I brought the deck that I played at GPBalt which is a delver build and I brought a super casual deck with creepy dolls because I always have fun playing with it.

What ended up happening is that a boy who I knew came over and was happy to find out I'd be playing but I asked him what kind of kids/decks I should shoot for. Because if they were all kitchen table just learning players I was not whipping out a Delver deck. I don't need to win two packs that badly.  However he convinced me to actually play the tournament deck because they were just crossing over from beginning players to being in danger of being "really super arrogant" and it would be good for them to see what would happen against a competitive deck.

When I saw another kid I knew who played I felt better about that because I knew this kid has placed at FNM before so I didn't feel weird. I'm so exactly in the middle between being a new player and being a good player that this really was kind of awkward for me.

I ended up playing pick up games for about two hours before they figured out that the guy who was supposed to be running the tournament had just kind of walked away. The FNM kid was given the ability to negotiate with us an we came up with a kind of tournament that got the packs awarded. During this time maybe half of the boys knew me from outside of Magic and the other half had no clue who or what I was.

And it did occur to me while I was playing and bonding with the other magic players who were all 18-20 that if I were a guy my age coming in with different decks, actual game supplies and a tournament record ( even if it is a sucky one), if I weren't actually someone who ran a game store I would be looked at as either kind of creepy or kind of pathetic. Parents of the students might assume I'm some kind of threat to their children because we have made everything older males do with younger people seem like a potential danger.

Instead because of being female, in that environment, I was either weird and cool, or from the parents point of view just incomprehensible. (weird).

It was also more acceptable for me to be really competitive against the boys because of the sexism of soft expectations. If I were an old guy trying to beat them for two packs and a meaningless tournament I would have looked at as some kind of competitive freak. If I'm actually trying to win as a woman - well let's say I haven't seen "My Mom won our local MTG Tournament pretty much anywhere. Mom's like MTGMom help schlep their children and run support but there isn't a really big my Mom plays Magic thing.

Once again - being female gives me an out with the mainstream because I happened to be the Mom of the con-chair so other Moms would see it just like going to their kids' science fair. It was the one and only time I've ever had being a legitimate female gamer give me an out with all sides and I was extremely conscious of the fact that it would be rougher for a male gamer my age.

There are complications to that, I don't look like a "MOMTM", so most people figured I was either a friend of one of the teachers or a college student, but really that's just lucky genetics, another woman playing would still have been looked at as safe - to neutral as long as they weren't channeling "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills"  and I AM back in college so carrying the backpack is organic not something I'm doing to fit in or fake anything.  But it really does drive home how gender roles and age roles really do isolate us from each other even in something as innocuous as Magic.

Even here on the journal I am hesitant to identify myself as a parent because there are many other parents who would chatter and it's hard enough to feel like I'm being seen as a person and a competitor but the second you identify yourself as a parent people run to identify you through that label exclusively in a way that doesn't matter for men but is incredibly suffocating ( at least for me) as a woman. I don't want to have to deal with that in the game.

But when I did my review of red card art I did out myself so since this is the competitive journal an the eternal questions of how to identify myself so that I don't get niched out of Magic Culture are continuous distractions to my game play it should go here. Because finding a way to play "appropriately" at that event took up a lot of head space.

Results


I played standard again legacy decks
White Humans won 5 out of 7 games, Delver won 3 out of 4 games, unfortunately the one I lost was in a single elimination game that knocked me out of the running, so I was 3rd which I was pretty comfortable with. They were good games. I go to sling cardboard.

One Last Thing

Here's what I was really impressed with - that con was mixed race and gender all the ways races and genders can be mixed.  It was better than central casting, there were NO minorities or majorities, there was no problem with any of the fancier new gender identifiers being themselves everyone was greeted openly, almost everyone involved with the con is also an active member of their school's gay straight alliance.

The only real "old lady" moment I had was when I realized the genders were about 50/50 ( with nuances on both 50's)  and the color mix was melting pot ( not just black and white either) and not a single one of them noticed or cared.  It wasn't even that things that happens sometimes where it's like 50% white and 50% everyone else. Plain old Caucasians were maybe about a third of the attendees.  It was just gaming and anime fans and my god it was fucking awesome. And when I realized it I cried, because no one there felt awkward at all. (except me, just cause I'm old).

Diversity, they've got it, because their culture is accepting, friendly and loving. And they mean it.

I hope they take over the fucking world.  Or at least gaming.



The other thing I've been doing while I could not play regularly:

So if you are actually a visitor reading here because I gave you this link and you're super bored and waiting in an airport you may or may not know about the ongoing art controversy and gender issues in Magic Online culture re: the art for Avacyn Restored.

And lo it occurred to me that when they talk about women's reactions to the art they are frequently either citing the opinions of girls who already play with them or the mythical " woman who sees the art" so I decided as service to the Magic community to actually record my impressions of "looking at the art" so there was at least one live woman who does play Magic who will not tell you that the art is just fine or tell you that it's so offensive I'm going to quit the game.

So I'm snarky and sardonic and I am 4/6 of the way through my art Review of Avacyn cards

The thing I wrote that started is is here

Pseudo Newb and the Trite Artwork rated PG 13

And then there is the first entry in the Art Review

Pseudo Newb - One Female's Reaction to the Avacyn Card Art   White is on this page

You'll be able to bounce around if you're interested


 Blue is currently Live      Black is Currently Live      Red is currently live     

Green due soon   Other due soon


Balticon is it's own entry later.  I played commander, standard, taught a bit and got about 500 Kamigawa cards. 


The End


Back to the art review for me. Maybe I'll make it to Draft tonight