Magic the Gathering

Tournament Reports

Lee’s Weekend in Atlanta

By Lee Steht ⋅ June 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I just got back from the Atlanta StarCi­tyGames 5k and Unity Entertainment’s Pro Tour Austin PTQ and I’m exhausted. I think it’s great that we’ve been able to have MTG week­ends again. It really takes full advan­tage of a week­end. StarCi­tyGames did a GREAT job of run­ning the first leg of the week­end event. Almost 400 peo­ple were in atten­dance, which made for a tough event. I’d love to see SCG even­tu­ally run­ning “Grand Prix” cal­iber events, with Pro Points and every­thing. But we’ll let the all pow­er­ful bureau­crats deal with that one though. With SCG giv­ing out so much in prize money, it makes trav­el­ing to play magic much eas­ier and excit­ing for the seri­ous players.

Unity Enter­tain­ment ran a very good PTQ as the final part of the week­end, how­ever they did choose a VERY small venue to host the loca­tion. They had around 230 in atten­dance for a 1 slot PTQ, which is HUGE. We were sit­ting lit­er­ally rub­bing elbows. It would be nice to have pro­mot­ers uti­lize their power to upgrade or pur­chase Pro Tour slots at any time. It would’ve made for a more rea­son­able chance at win­ning the much her­alded Austin slot or slots.

With that being said, it was a week­end of Stan­dard gam­ing, and at this point in the Magic sea­son you’ve prob­a­bly fig­ured out what the top 5 Stan­dard deck lists are and what their weak­nesses appear to be. The SCG 5K showed that there were no clear win­ner as best deck. In fact, the even­tual win­ner wasn’t even a deck you would think would carry home the tro­phy. And sec­ond place went to Combo Elves!!! I’m not really going to go into a lot with this topic, but I thought you should see the win­ning deck list:

Elves Combo
By Charles Schutt

Crea­tures
2 Bur­ren­ton Forge-tender
4 Devoted Druid
4 Elvish Vision­ary
4 Her­itage Druid
4 Llanowar Elves
1 Mir­ror Entity
4 Net­tle Sen­tinel
4 Ranger Of Eos
4 Regal Force

Spells
3 Com­mune With Nature
4 Man­amor­phose
4 Pri­mal Command

Lands
4 Brush­land
5 For­est
2 Moss­wort Bridge
1 Reflect­ing Pool
2 Wind­brisk Heights
4 Wooded Bas­tion

Side­board:
2 Bur­ren­ton Forge-tender
4 Chameleon Colos­sus
3 Cloudthresher
2 Kitchen Finks
3 Gut­tural Response
1 Tree­top Village

I watched sev­eral of the matches the pilot of this deck played and it was THE per­fect sce­nario for him. In a sea of 5 Color Blood decks, B/W Tokens, Faeries and Mono Red his metagame choice was more about pair­ings than it was about hav­ing the sil­ver bul­let to all of the afore­men­tioned decks. I watched him beat a 5 Color Blood Player and a Token player sim­ply because they could not stop the throng of Elves from tak­ing over. With main deck Forge-Tenders and sev­eral ways to get them it put a huge set of hand­cuffs onto the Blood and it was sim­ply too fast for the Tokens.

Other matches that I saw had play­ers mak­ing bad plays against the tiny green wood­land crea­tures, which I guess is a deter­min­ing fac­tor of wins and losses, but it seemed a bit of a for­tu­nate result for what I feel is a brit­tle deck. I don’t want to take any­thing away from the achieve­ment here, I’m basi­cally say­ing he was Lucky (despite me not believ­ing in Luck). Actu­ally what I really want to say is that it is very tough to test a deck such as this. So many play­ers are NOT combo-inclined so playtest­ing might equate to a waste of time as they can’t give you the qual­ity of play that one would need against or for this deck.

I decided to play the Faeries and ended with a 6 Win 3 Loss record plac­ing me at 40th place. While I enjoyed play­ing the deck, it conked out on me sev­eral times mak­ing this a tough deci­sion for me in the near future. Here is my list:

Crea­tures
4 Mist­bind Clique
4 Scion of Oona
4 Spell­stut­ter Sprite

Spells
2 Agony Warp
4 Bit­terblos­som
4 Bro­ken Ambi­tion
4 Cryp­tic Com­mand
1 Jace Bel­eren
1 Oona’s Grace
2 Pon­der
1 Ter­ror
4 Thought­seize

Land
1 Faerie Con­clave
6 Island
4 Mutavault
4 Secluded Glen
4 Sunken Ruin
2 Swamp
4 Under­ground River

Side­board
2 Pup­peteer Clique
2 Flash­freeze
2 Sower of Temp­ta­tion
2 Snake­form
2 Death­mark
4 Pep­persmoke
1 Soul Manip­u­la­tion

Let me first say that Sower of Temp­ta­tion NEVER works for me in a sense that he always dies. I get to grab a vic­tim for 1 turn at the max­i­mum. To me, Jace works ONLY in a con­trol envi­ron­ment. Oona’s Grace works bet­ter in the aggro envi­ron­ment because you can hold a land in hand with a Bro­ken Ambi­tion and decide which one to do at EOT or per­haps coun­ter­ing. I went with a cou­ple of Pon­ders because I liked the idea of thin­ning search­ing for that ever elu­sive Turn 2 Bit­terblos­som. All in all, this ver­sion worked very well for me. The Pup­peteers worked very well against the Green Decks.

I’m not going to go much into matchups as I think my losses were very non-typical for the deck. In the 9 rounds, I played Kithkin 1–0, 2 Swans 1–1, B/W Tokens 0–1, 3 Blood 2–1, 1 Faerie 1–0 and a Jund Ramp 1–0. Any ques­tions, please feel free to jump onto the Forums or Mes­sage me directly.

Thanks for Reading!!!