One of the great things about doing coverage is that you don’t need to get up at the crack of dawn. I needed a couple of extra hours of sleep this morning after my normally sedentary cat decided to get his hunt on and kill a defensless baby field mouse at 2am.

I got to Neutral Ground as the second of eight rounds was winding down. Early on the top tables were glowing red with Demigod Deck Wins and Blightning Beatdown seemingly on every other seat. White Weenie — or Weenie White as Pierre had me saying in our Berlin Deck Tech — Faeries, and 5-Color variants.

MichaelJ was crammed in at table 16 so we can assume he won Round One but round two was looking bad. I could see from the scorepad that he was down one game and getting beaten down by a Demigod in game two. Mike is never going to win a poker face competition and I could tell he had the answers but not the mana to phrase them.

Mike was playing Jund Mana Ramp and had added Broodmate Dragon as his answer to Demigod — one main and two sideboard. Sure enough he was holding two Broodmate Dragons and two Primal Command but was scuffling on five lands.

Mike was taunted by a Rampant Growth on the final turn and went to 1-1. With 134 players the tournament was just over the 8-round threshhold which meant at least one player with two losses would make the Top 8 but it was unlikely to be Mike with an early loss dragging down his breakers.

If he wanted to play some actual Top 8 Magic he would need to string together at least five straight wins.