Coming into the final leg of the season, I’m one pro point ahead of Joe Soh for the captaincy slot in Malaysia. However with the recent announcement for Pro Tour 25th Anniversary, Joe leaped ahead by securing additional 3 points to put him in front by one point. This turn of event became an interesting topic leading up to Nationals 2018.
For the past year and a half, I have been testing extensively with Chye both limited and constructed. For this year, due to my work schedule, I decide to prepare on my own but my testing routine have been very haphazard. I was playing MTGO at either 11:30pm after work or catch a match at 7:30am while I’m having breakfast. Overall I still squeezed in roughly an hour and a half to two hours a day of testing for 2 weeks (a couple more hours on the weekend) but I wouldn’t say it was intense.
I played Esper Control (tuned by Chye) for GP Singapore and it was a great deck. Unfortunately it was in the hands of a lesser experienced pilot and I realised the lack of paper practice combined with my lack of experience in the mirror basically binned my GP campaign. As a result, while I still believe Esper was good, I wasn’t going to be able to pick it up again the upcoming Nationals. With MTGO, I was able to build and fiddle around with several decks aside from Black Red Aggro. I tried Mono Blue Storm, Green Black Stompy and also Green Black Snakes. I wasn’t a fan of Turbo Fog so I skipped that and while I ditched Esper, I had UW Control in my back pocket as Approach of the Second Sun was still a thing. After playing 2 leagues each, I was 90% locked on Black Red when I bumped into Steven Mann (RandomDrooler) on MTGO. Steven helped me out with Dredge in preparation for the 2016 World Magic Cup and he was sporting a BG Snakes list he went 7-1 in a PTQ few weeks earlier. A few things were different to my BG Snakes list I tested which was (a) Max 4 Chupacabras (b) Manglehorns in sideboard and (c) NOT siding out Llanowar Elves versus Chainwhirler decks. He advocated that I give it a go and I was impressed.
Together with Jeff Cunningham, who has been providing Steven with insights on card choices etc, I was doing well with the deck online. However Black Red was still tough mountain to climb. The combination of Rekindling Phoenix into Glorybringer was too backbreaking. We chose to ignore Chainwhirler and to maintain Elves in the deck punished me more often than rewarding me with the tempo. I was frazzled.
With 3 days to Nationals, I went back to Black Red and felt I had a solid list which was slight deviation from Hareruya Latin’s PT list which didn’t run a single copy of Hazoret. It wasn’t because Hazoret wasn’t good, but I felt I wanted Phoenix just for the Malaysian anticipated metagame of Red and Green.
So this was the list I played for Nationals:
4 Scrapheap Scrounger
4 Bomat Courier
4 Goblin Chainwhirler
2 Pia Naalar
2 Kari Zev
3 Rekindling Phoenix
2 Soul Scar Mage
2 Glorybringer
3 Chandra Torch of Defiance
3 Abrade
2 Unlicensed Disintegration
2 Cut
2 Heart of Kiran
4 Canyon Slough
4 Dragonskull Summit
1 Swamp
2 Aether Hub
14 Mountain
Sideboard:
2 Hour of Glory
2 Chandra’s Defeat
2 Magma Spray
2 Insult
2 Doomfall
3 Duress
1 Abrade
1 Glorybringer
As always I wont be going in round by round, but will be sharing the highlights throughout the tournament.
- Round 1 on Day 1 was scheduled to start at 9am sharp and players were seated at 855am. I was still scrambling to find my way out of the parking lot at 858am. I never cut it that close to a tournament start before.
- I not only had to register my deck, but also sleeved up my cards in a new set of Hareruya sleeves. My kind round 1 opponent gave me 5 minutes to sleeve up everything and shuffle.
- But after all that mad rush, my opening hand on the play was crap and I started the day with a mulligan.
- My opening plays were T1 Bomat Courier, T2 Scrounger, T3 Bomat Courier and Kari Zev.
- His first play on the draw was a T3 Search for Azcanta. Way too late.
- Round 2 I was “fortunate” enough to be paired with Christopher Lee on Red Blue Gifts. I mulligan a reasonable hand to dig for an Abrade and sat on that Abrade for the win both games.
- Starting out 3-0 I sat in Pod 2 for the draft, avoiding Chye and Joe (who were both in Pod 3) and drafted a pretty good Blue Green deck. After clearing the first 2 rounds, I was up a game in the final match of the first pod on what I thought was a Black Red Sacrifice deck. In Game 2 I stumbled on mana and took some early hits before stabilizing and winning through the air. My opponent cast Sovereign’s Bite to buy him a turn and bring me down to 5. I had no lethal attacks but brought him to within one draw step and he peeled:
- Off to game 3, again I had slow start and took six damage early from a Viashino Pyromancer. This time I stabilized on 12 life and attacked in the air with my Windreader Sphinx and Skyrider Patrol to once again bring him to a single draw step of 6 life. At this point, I declined to make one of my two Druid of the Cowl flying to deal him an extra point. Sovereign’s bite appeared again, putting us both on nine life and the decision not to deal the extra point started to feel very bad. I could muster was another attack for 8 points. I dug 3 cards deep to look for my Pelakka Wurm but it wasn’t there. My opponent untapped and showed me last 2 cards:
- Good game. Pelakka Wurm was 3 cards deeper.
- Draft 2 was uneventful except that later on I found out Chye had taken a Foil Liliana pack 1 pick 1 after telling me how crap it was early in the day. But I guess what he meant was crap to play but too much value @ USD25 to pass up (zzzzzzz)
- My deck was an OK Blue White deck, but later on played with the guy who drafted on my right. He was on Blue Green with Windreader Sphinx AND Tezzeret. Holy moly….
- At 7-1 I played Wilson Hang (spoiler alert – He’s the new national champion), to ace the pod. Game 1 I kept a reasonable hand, failed to find land #3 and died. G2, mulligan to 5 and somehow scrapped out a win. G3, mulligan to 5, fought back real hard but fell short to the National Champion Aura. It was a tough loss and the earlier decision to not make the Druid of the Cowl fly haunted me once more.
- Day 2, I arrived at 835am. No more last minute panic dashes for me.
- First round of the day narrowed defeated Nicky on storm. He stumbled hard in game 3 and I was fortunate enough to walk away one win from the Top 8.
- Next round I stumbled hard vs Chong Lam. Was never in the match.
- Final round, this was it. After taking game 1 vs BW vampires I felt I was in the drivers seat. I stumbled on mana in g2 and we were off to the decider.
- On turn 3 of the third game, I cast Goblin Chainwhirler to wipe out two 1/1s from the board. My stacked hand was another Chainwhirler, Magma Spray, Unlicensed Distegration, Abrade and Glorybringer. Rethinking back how I LOST the match is just too painful, but it came to down a 1 off sideboard card in his deck:
- I’ll leave it as that. So my Nationals campaign came to a halt due to some superb timing of limited all-stars. I’m still one point down (Joe lost in the semis). Congrats to Hang and Kayne for making it to Worlds. It’s by far the best international experience for me in recent years.
- So while I’m still feeling rattled over the weekend’s outcome, I probably need to find the strength somewhere to make one last push – in Grand Prix Hong Kong. This season is close to a white wash and I need to make sure it doesn’t end on a complete disaster.
Props:
- CnH for good organisation and timing
- Hang and Kayne, congrats once more
- My home internet connection to let me test consistently. My line was pretty bad weeks prior
- Chye for drafting Foil Liliana p1p1. I see you different now as a Limited Specialist
Slops:
And
(“Why didn’t you give me the wings to fly??”)
-PM out-
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