Morning. Over at Brainburst — I guess they are just called TCGPlayer these days but I still have it bookmarked under the Scott Johns-era URL –  American AJ Sacher has a tournament report about his Pro Tour Berlin experience. AJ, who was making his Pro Tour debut, was the highest finishing Zoo player out of the entire field.  He is pretty self-deprecating about the whole experience but he faced a murderer’s row over the course of the tournament that included Jan Reuss, Antoine Ruel, a Guillaume, Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Frank Karsten, and Patrick Chapin and ended up with a spectacular 19th place finish for his Pro debut.

In the forums for AJ’s report there is a funny story from forum user Balthazar, which I will choose to believe is true, about how Kenny Oberg and company ended up playing the Tezzerator:

“Further on, I’m going ahead and will leak a funny little detail about the Tezzeret deck. Kenny was strongly considering playing Storm or BubbleHulk at the PT, but after he came home from GP Paris, he put out a note on the swedish magic message board that he saw none other than Kenji Tsumura buying Vendillion Cliques and Tezzerets at a dealer in Paris. And from the there the rumours and brewing was off. We were like, “oh, Tezzeret is the Japanese tech for Berlin”, so we (mostly Kenny, Jonathan and some other guys) builded our own version of the “japanese tech”. When we arrived in Berlin we learned that Kenji did not actuly bought the mentioned cards, he was just checking their value. And as we know, the Japanese Tech was not a Tezzeret but Elves. However, Kenny was still happy with his deck.”

Congrats to AJ on a terrific start on his Pro Tour career and to Kenji for warping formats with decks he hasn’t even thought about yet.