Magic the Gathering

Tournament Reports

Worlds Rome 2009 — Day 3 Wrapup

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ November 21, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Wow, how a day can change the land­scape! Thank­fully today was drama free in terms of rules, and instead we are treated to a glimpse as to what the upcom­ing PTQ sea­son for Pro Tour San Juan will be with today’s Extended decks. Accord­ing to the stats gath­ered by the Wiz­ards cov­er­age team, Zoo is still heav­ily favored fol­lowed by Hyper­ge­n­e­sis and Dredge in terms of the num­ber of play­ers. We can expect to see today’s decks carry a great deal of weight when the PTQ sea­son does rotate to Extended.

Player of the Year

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Yuuya Watan­abe for lock­ing up the Player of the Year race, just two years after win­ning Rookie of the Year. Yuuya ended the tour­na­ment in 101st place but it was enough to hold off Tomo­haru Saitou who unfor­tu­nately fell short of the Top 8, where he needed a high fin­ish to over­come Yuuya. Con­grat­u­la­tions to Yuuya, he was on such a hot streak all year that it was aston­ish­ing, though he ended the sea­son with a lack­lus­ter fin­ish, he def­i­nitely deserved this title.

Indi­vid­ual Standings

The Top 8 is set, and the Pro Tour twit­ter feed noted that this is the first Pro Tour to ever lack a US or Japan­ese player. Instead the Pro Tour is a col­lec­tion of the world with play­ers from Asia, Europe and South Amer­ica. Lead­ing the pack is David Reit­bauer, the Aus­trian, and the only player to gather 43 points (14–3-1) over the course of the three days. Trail­ing him are four play­ers at 42 points (14–4-0) William Cavaglieri (Italy), André Coim­bra (Por­tu­gal), Terry Soh (Malaysia), and Manuel Bucher (Switzer­land.) Round­ing out the Top 8 are Mar­ijn Lybaert (Bel­gium), Bram Snep­vangers (Nether­lands) and Flo­rian Pils (Germany.)

Pre­dic­tion: Mar­ijn Lybaert def. Manuel Bucher in the finals.

Team Com­pe­ti­tion

My pre­dic­tions pretty much got blown out of the water, we’ve got the Czech Repub­lic, China, Nether­lands and Aus­tria play­ing tomor­row for the Team title. I think we would be quite fool­ish to bet against the Czech Repub­lic as they have been on a tear. But you can never count out the likes of the Nether­lands, and China’s team is quite a pow­er­house though China has yet to truly break into the Inter­na­tional Magic scene.

Pre­dic­tion: Czech Repub­lic def. Nether­lands in the finals.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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