Flying High and Burning Out: FNM and SCG Open Report

At the end of this article I posted up just over a week ago, I mentioned how I was going back and forth between UW and UB Control. Ultimately, I found myself playing UB Control at the FNM and the SCG Boston Open. Let's start with the FNM.

At the FNM, I went 4-1 to finish in 4th place and gladly accept a double-size payout then normal (normally X-1 gets $12, but this time I got $25). My notes aren't very detailed at all this time. Here's a picture of my notes for the day:

The only two cards I even wrote down are Garruk from Andrew's RUG deck (a deck I still can't beat) and Trailblazer Boots from Josh's casual White Weenie deck. Basically, I was on fire all day at the FNM, winning 8 times and only losing 3. By the end of the night, I was really confident about my deck and I couldn't wait for the Open. Fast forwarding to the next day, I arrived at 9am and submitted this deck:

Creatures:
2x Frost Titan
2x Grave Titan
2x Vampire Hexmage
1x Trinket Mage

Planeswalkers:
4x Jace Beleran
1x Jace the Mind Sculptor

Instant/Sorceries:
4x Mana Leak
4x Preordain
3x Deprive
4x Doom Blade
1x Jace's Ingenuity
1x Negate
1x Volition Reins
1x Consuming Vapors
1x Disfigure

Artifacts:
1x Mimic Vat
1x Brittle Effigy
1x Elixer of Immortality

Lands:
4x Creeping Tar Pit
4x Drowned Catacombs
3x Darkslick Shores
4x Swamp
5x Island
1x Misty Rainforest
3x Tectonic Edge
1x Mystifying Maze

Sideboard:
1x Memoricide
2x Disfigure
1x Chimeric Mass
1x Negate
2x Flashfreeze
1x Into the Roil
1x Royal Assassin
2x Disfigure
2x Consume the Meek
2x Brittle Effigy

A couple things to notice right off the bat from this deck: I run 10, yes 10 1-ofs in this deck! I really felt like it worked fine, as they were mainly spells that I only would ever need once, but could also get away with never casting. Also, it makes sideboarding a lot easier when you can tug at those to bring in other cards from your board. And is that a Jace, the Mind Sculptor?!?!?! Yes, I recently acquired big Jace, and there will hopefully soon be 3 others to join him. I am buying these under a narrow condition: I can only get one if I do 5 hours of overtime on a Saturday. I did it once before, and talk about dreadful. Waking up at 5:30am just to work in a fairly secluded environment for 5 hours does not constitute as fun in any regards for me, but now I have an incentive for myself to go. So if you see me talking about Jace the Mind Sculptor more, just know I worked 5 hours overtime on Saturday mornings for each. But don't worry, I will talk about planty of ways to NOT use big Jace. After all, I did start this blog under the title Casual MTG Creations.

Because I will soon have duties elsewhere around the house, I will not do the game-by-game talk of the SCG Open (9 rounds), but I will make that post either tonight or tomorrow.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived was how huge this event was! 434 players were signed up for the Standard event, and there were tons of other people there just to watch or play side events.

I took this picture right when I arrived around 9, but within half an hour of the event starting, at least 150 more people came in, so you can imagine how packed it was!

I started the day on fire, going 3-0 beating UW Control and a Half (UW with a splash of Black for Grave Titan, Doom Blades, and Memoricide) 2-0. I finished game 1 at 29 life, and game 2 at 22 life. After that game, I made my first trade of the day. I traded my Gaea's Revenge and Tajaru Perserver for a Lim-Dul's Vault, a trade not in my favor, but check out Lim-Dul's Vault and try to catch your jaw before it smashes on the floor. Yes, it's legal in Legacy, and yes I already put it in my Reanimator deck. Round 2, I was against a weird GR Beatdown deck. To start game 1, I rolled an 11. He almost didn't even roll and let me be on the play, but he rolled anyways and nailed a 12! The game was relatively straitforward, until he had a cool play when I had his Wurmcoil Engine locked down with my Frost Titan. He played Manic Vandal to blow up his own Engine and make tokens! Despite that cool play, I just kept the Deathtouch half tapped down and proceded to win from there.

Round 3, I was against a UW control list. Game 1 ultimately ended when I used Volition Reins on his Gideon Jura. I was at 32 life when I won. Game 2, he got a turn 2 Leonin Arbitor out, and I couldn't draw any removal for it forever, so I lost. However, I came back in game 3 to win without losing a single life point.

From here on out, it was all downhill. I lost 1-2 to a Boros deck who was able to hit me for 12 in one turn with Masticore. Had I lived, I would have taken over the game because I had a rebounding Consuming Vapors and a ton of control magic waiting to happen. Next, I was against another Boros deck, but this time I went 2-1 and liked my chances for goinf X-1 on the day. I played against Darkvine next, and thanks to slow play by him, I somehow squeezed out a draw on time and turns.

Now I'm 4-1-1 and still in contention for top 16/top32. However, I was against Valakut Ramp next. Talk about an impossible matchup! You can't respond to land drops or Valakut Triggers, so you just have to grin and bear it. I had a very fast 0-2. However, the game being played to our right certainly wasn't a quicky. Here's 2 quotes from that game:

Judge: "Why are you playing with the top card of your library revealed?"
Player: "That's my graveyard"

Head Judge: "Attention magic players, there are 5 minutes left in the round"
Player: "Okay I scoop, let's go to game 2"

Yeah, talk about a long day. it was a UW Control Mirror, and they had nothing but answers for eachother, so neither had any way to win and they were grinding out to no avail.

Back to my slide, I was against RUG next, a deck I still can't beat. The only game I won I had 2 Frost Titans and a Grave Titan in play together. We wound up going to overtime and extra turns before I simply scooped to him so he could get into the top 32 to get his last SCG player point to lock in as a level 2 player for the 2011 season. I intended to drop at this point as I knew I couldn't win anything at 4-3-1, but I forgot to mark it on the match slip, and when I got to the Head Judge 30 seconds later, he said it was too late as pairings were already printed and were about to be posted. So I played my 9th round anyways. I was so tired that I completely punted. I got -12ed by my own Jace TMS and I had the chance to rip a Frost Titan out of his hand, but I didn't. I had cast Duress on his when he had 2 cards in hand. I saw Island, Frost Titan. I decided to cast my Jace TMS to blow his up instead of casting Memoricide to eliminate his win condition. PUNT!

Despite that, over the course of the day, I had tons of trading, and wound up collecting a ton of cards I needed to boost my legacy deck and for a Machine Control deck I am about to make (but more on that later). As I was going person to person trading, I came across this guy who is about as serious as they go. I wound up going through 5 binders when I saw this:

Yeah, I'm not kidding. And he also had 5 more on the previous page. He couldn't find a single card that he needed, but when you have 5 binders and over 20 Jace TMS, there isn't much you're missing. Another guy I talked to asked me right off the bat if I needed any Power. Yeah, he didn't find anything he needed either. However, despite all that, I was able to trade for a ton of awesome cards that I wanted. Here's what I acquired over the course of the day:

Standard stuff (on left): Inferno Titan, Stoneforge Mystic, 2 Silence, 3 Ratchet Bombs, Voltaic Key, 3 Grand Architect
Legacy Stuff (on right): textless Cryptic Command, Watery Grave, 2 Thoughtseize, FNM Tormod's Crypt, Reanimate, Lim-Dul's Vault

I was really pleased with all of my trades. I have an immediate use for every card between Reanimator, Machine Control, Boros, and Valakut Ramp (a deck I will be re-making). Just as I left, I decided to indulge in the epic card store and got myself 3 Dazes.

I would have gotten a third, but I intend to get the Japanese Jace vs Chandra that's coming out December 3rd, and in the Jace deck, there is a Daze.

Overall I had an awesome time, and I can't wait to go to the next one. And guess what! There will be a next one fairly soon! SCG recently announced their schedule for the 2011 season, and they're coming back to Boston April 15 - 17! So hopefully I can pass the time and tune up my skills by then and maybe a can get some prize!

That's all for now, until next time just keep trading