I’m slightly confused over my emotions today. Normally, I would be on either opposite ends of the spectrum after a major tournament such as a Grand Prix or even a WMCQ. The feeling of victory is great and sometimes I wake up in disbelief that I’ve made it or sometimes it’s the feel of regret over the weekend’s performance when things don’t fall my way or worse, crashing out.
However waking up today felt different. I couldn’t feel anything at all. I didn’t hit my goal of making the top eight of my home town Grand Prix and finished a respectable 12th place instead, which is my highest Grand Prix finish since errr…. 2002 (I finished 9th then). So why am I neither disappointed nor happy?
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Preparing for the Grand Prix
Rewinding back to my earlier blog post, I decided to put Modern for a week’s rest to prepare for the GP. I haven’t touch Standard since WMCQ 1 in June so I was feeling rather rusty. I’ve been jamming so much Modern and consuming so much Modern content that playing a regular game of Standard felt so underwhelming. Still, I felt I needed to put in the time and effort into this Grand Prix similar to any others that I would have needed to spend money and travel for. So the process began Saturday morning watching how the Pro Tour unfolded. I did look through the Starcity results as well and studied all the matches that came on camera, went through all the deck techs. Sunday came and I watched all of that too. On Monday, I had arrange my car for its regular routine checkup so I could have the couple of hours in the morning to watch the top 8.
My conclusions about the Pro Tour:
- The games and matches were entertaining
- Shota Yasooka is still my favorite Japanese player ever since Tsuyoshi Fujita retired (Yuuya Watanabe coming in a close second)
- Control wasn’t dead
- Aetherworks Marvel or the “Marvelous” deck felt overrated
- What I noticed (and most pros admitted later on in their tournament reports) was everyone was trying to outsmart each other in their deck selection and many fell flat on their faces
- With exception of Shota’s insane Grixis Control list, other top performing decks were all well-rounded decks, evident by how UW Flash performed in the PT.
Like many others, I took a close look at the UW Flash and while I don’t doubt it’s a solid deck, but it had the same problems as Green White Tokens in the previous season. The mirror. It was also going to take a lot of practice and familiarity with the matchup in order to navigate through the field of Spell Queler’s and Avacyns. I wasn’t too opposed in piloting this but the lack of an edge in the mirror made me look elsewhere.
The next obvious choice was Eric Froehlich’s Green Black rock deck. The list seems “Rock-solid”. My teammate Shawn Khoo quickly picked it up and went to work. While the list was good, I wasn’t too in love with it for several reasons:
1. Grim Flayer was expensive and I didn’t have a playset
2. The list lacked removal, something that was key in the current metagame
3. It also had zero plan vs the mirror aside from becoming bigger and faster.
4. The list looked atrocious vs infect (cough cough) Green Red Pummeler.
5. While everyone was saying it could beat UW Flash consistently, I don’t see how a deck that is so low to ground beat something that flies through all your effective blockers while slowing you down with Reflector Mages? Yes Ishkanah helps but still….
Then there was Cars. Reid Duke made Cars look good. Ben Hull made Cars stock lists look easy. Lee Shi Tian made Cars do more than just speed through the highway and pimped up with more colourful tricks. But what we didn’t see on camera is a huge boneyard of car crashes in the Pro Tour. Particularly Team Phanteon’s Hall of Famer Jelger Wiegersma who started out 3-0 in draft and “sped” to 0-5 in Constructed with Red White cars. Someone needs to issue a recall for those faulty units.
So to prepare for the Grand Prix, I set some targets and things I wanted to have:
1. I wanted a deck that was so left field that people wont have a special sideboard plan against it. With such limited time to test, I didn’t want people who more testing hours to use their “familiarity” as an advantage
2. I wanted a deck that ran Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet. Looking at all the lists, most decks shared something in common – zero life gain (aside from Marvelous). Cars and Black Red Aggro won many games by withering down life points and normally just made one final wide push for the last few points. Life gain just messes up that strategy as aggressive strategies in the format do not/rarely have direct damage spells.
3. I was semi worried about Prized Almagam decks, I so wanted to make sure my deck had a consistent answer.
4. I was solely going to test on Magic Online for this event, as the metagame was ripe with what I clearly expected to see for the Grand Prix ie UW Flash, Cars and Black Green.
So what caught my eye at first was this:
And it was love at first sight. It had everything I wanted in a deck for the GP, it was fun to play, and it was the same archetype that I tested intensively with Chye for Pro Tour Sydney. All it needed was a good sideboard plan.
Enter Black Red Control.
From the Monday before the GP, I knew the metagame would be UW, BG and Cars. Yes there would be sprinkles of other decks, but I knew these were the Big Three. I put together the Black Red Madness on MTGO and went to work. Here were my notes after 4 days of testing.
1. 18-7 in matches across 5 leagues
2. 4-1 vs UW (80%), 0-1 vs BG (0%), 3-1 vs Cars (75%) and 11-4 vs everything else (73%).
3. 23-12 in games vs Chye in a variety of gauntlet decks including an even 8-8 pre and post board games.
With that kind of statistics, I wasn’t looking elsewhere and started understanding and fine-tune to what made the deck really clicked.
1. Cryptbreaker is bonkers. Half the battle is won when a turn 1 Cryptbreaker goes unanswered. In Round 3 of the GP vs a mirror matchup, my Cryptbreaker drew 10 cards and ran away with the match.
2. Voldaren Pariah (or dubbed Papa-Rich) is an absolute nightmare. The threat of madness-ing out the big Papa-Rich was enough for most decks to hold mana and sadbag removal. The mind games of “do you have it?” threw so many people off their game over the weekend.
3. Kalitas Traitor of Ghet. Main deck. This was a last minute inclusion and it was amazing. It was the least expected card coming out of the main 60 and made those attacks with Scrapheap Scrounger so difficult to defend. Props to Chye.
4. Removal overload post board. Here’s where the true technology came in. The Black Red deck had many resilient creatures – Haunted Dead, Prized Amalgam, Scrapheap Scrounger etc. However, UW Flash, BG and Cars all shared the same philosophy – play abit of control, deal with whats on the board and let their creatures finish the job. Hence you would expect to see inclusions of Skywhaler’s shot, Galvanic Bombardment etc all coming in post board at the expense of…. Some creatures.
So the game plan was – be the better control deck. I brought in six extra removal spells against all three decks, trimming the four offs in the deck, added Kalitas for the Cars matchup and Distended Mindbender for the UW matchup. It all felt great.
So my final list here:
The Grand Prix itself
Day 1: 7-2
I lost one to a double mulligan and a 2 swamp hand. The other was a close one vs former GPKL champion Ding Yuen where in game 3 I somehow was staying alive after taking care of the following:
Liliana, the Last Hope x 2
Verdurous Gearhulk x 2
Kalitas Traitor of Ghet
Grim Flayer x 2
And all these without getting a single Haunted Dead to activate my 2 Prized Almagams in the graveyard. Sadly the final death blow was Ding Yuen activating his Hissing Quamire to crew his last remaining non-land permanent - a Smuggler’s Copter to fly above my Cryptbreaker for the final lethal points.
I needed to win 5 straight in Day 2 to make top 8.
Day 2: 5-1
The deck worked like clockwork. I was drawing live, my plays were crisp, I drew out some tight situations and my trusty Cryptbreaker showed up in my opening hand more times than average. My matchups were:
RD10 - UW Control: 2-0
RD11 - UW Flash: 2-0
RD12 - BR Madness mirror: 0-2
RD13 - BR Madness mirror: 2-1
RD14 - GR Energy Pummeler: 2-0
RD15 - Mardu Cars: 2-0
The one loss for the day, which knocked me out of contention, was against my own WMC Captain – Chye. There were no complaints of my draws, but Chye drew slightly better.
So 12-3.
12th place.
US$1,000
As I’m finishing up this article, I still don’t feel anything inside relating to my entire GP experience and its results. Its probably the confusing combination of disappointment of missing out and a good performance overall. I always tell myself to focus on continuous improvement and I think I probably achieved exactly that.
The WMC team overall did pretty good as all four of us cashed. I guess its the right kind of momentum we need heading into November. There's still some work ahead as we count down the final 3 weeks to Worlds.
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Epilogue:
So at the end of the day, as I was unwinding over a scrumptious Japanese meal with my lovely wife, she asked me a question:
“If you had made Top 8, how you think you would have done?”
I looked at her and paused for a moment.
“I really think I could have won it all.”
-end-
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