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Events
Gortzen wins Pro Tour San Diego
Image courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
After defeating Luis Scott-Vargas in the semi-finals in Pro tour San Diego, Simon Görtzen defeated Kyle Boggemes in the finals in a hard fought match of the Jund mirror match. Congratulations to Simon Görtzen for becoming the first Pro Tour champion of 2010!
The other big story of this weekend was of course Luis Scott-Vargas going 16-0 in the Swiss rounds, sweeping both Standard and Draft. In Standard he ran ‘Boss Naya’ a deck designed by fell Pro Player Tom Ross. At the end of the Swiss he had an astounding 11 point lead over second place meaning that 2nd place won nearly 4 fewer games than LSV. Luis’ undefeated streak dethrones Ryan Fuller’s 14-0 performance at Pro Tour Tokyo back in 2001. Notably he also lost before reaching the finals of the event.
Many of us were hoping that this event would show the decline of Jund, and while there are definitely proven decks out there that can compete and beat Jund, it is still a difficult deck to topple having taken three of the eight slots in the top 8 from the vent, and composing nearly one third of the players on day one.
To see the official coverage and deck lists head on over to Wizards.com and you can download the Top 8 broadcast videos on this page as well.
The complete Top 8 finishers are:
- Simon Görtzen from Aachen, Germany
- Kyle Boggemes from Waterford, Michigan
- Luis Scott-Vargas from Oakland, California
- Craig Wescoe from Cincinnati, Ohio
- Daniel Gräfensteiner from Nürnberg, Germany
- Niels Viaene from Gent, Belgium
- Yoshihiko Ikawa from Nishitokyo, Japan
- Jeroen Kanis from Rotterdam, Netherlands
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While Jund is obviously a strong deck, I wonder whether it’s actually better than some of the other contenders. Just from the numbers you present, if all decks were equal and therefore you could basically just pick 8 random decks you’d expect 2-3 to be Jund if 1/3 of all decks are Jund. Obviously, Jund won the whole thing against another Jund, but still with so many people playing it even if every game were 50-50 it still isn’t that statistically improbable (though I haven’t done the math for this.)