WorldWake Preview Part 5

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 4

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 3

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 2

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

WorldWake Preview Part 1

BDM, Flores and Will discuss the Top8Magic.com WorldWake Preview Card: Spell Contortion

Top8Magic Fans,

BDM just got back from a week at Wizards and the Columbus Pre-Release and I will be interviewing him on Tuesday afternoon EST. We would love to get some fan questions in there for the podcast. Here are some ground rules:

1) Identifying Yourself - Please give us a name and location to mention on the podcast.

2) Confidentiality - We will try our best to answer your questions to the best of our ability, but some information will be confidential.

Now post your questions!

Best,

Matt

Paul Jordan is a frequent contributor to Magicthegathering.com, former NJ State Champion, and a teammate of Steve Sadin and Michael J Flores at Pro Tour Charleston, where they finished in 26th place as Team Two-Headed Giant. Steve (who did an excellent job of coverage at UK Nationals) sent Paul the breakdown of decks and Paul has produced the following analysis of the Standard rounds in his first ever piece for Top8Magic.com.

Thanks to my once and future teammate, I was able to do some number crunching on UK Nats. This won’t be a full-blown thing, as it was a pretty small tournament, but there should still be a nugget or two worth exploring. Let’s take a look, shall we?

U.S. and Japanese Nationals saw victories from 5Color decks built around the powerful sorcery, Cruel Ultimatum. In England, they took note and filled their deckboxes with Vivid lands and Reflecting Pools in hopes of adding another title to Grixis’ mantle. What they got, however, was something quite different. Instead of a field full of Faeries, White aggro decks and Elves this was one littered with Blightning and Jund decks — along with the ever-present mirror match.

5Color Control decks remained the most popular, eating up 17% of the field in the UK , though it did lose about 5% over Japan and the US. Faeries, White Aggro and Elves! all lost between 5 and 10% of their share of the field, largely being supplanted by Jund and Blightning. The UK also seemed to fill out the ranks with a much larger variety of onesy-twosy decks that had their own categorization. Steve Sadin already did a breakdown for the mothership here, so I won’t delve much further into it, but you get the idea. It was a vastly different field.

A lot of people no doubt noticed the 58% win rate of Blightning decks over two National tournaments and chose it as their weapon of choice as a result. With so many more people running the deck, it was not likely to sustain the great numbers. As expected, there was a drop, but it still came through, with a very manageable 52%. Nothing dominating going on there, of course, but still worth keeping track of. Surprisingly, the pitfall for this deck seems to be in quote-unquote random decks. Jund and 5CC, the two most popular decks outside of Blightning, were both handily kept in check at 79% and 56% respectively, but Blightning only won 44% of its remaining matches, with each minor piece of the metagame taking a bite. None of those decks faced Blightning more than 8 times, but they all combined to put some serious hurt on the would-be best deck.

So what was the best deck? It is a little difficult to say. With such a small tournament, and such a wide variety of decks, there were a lot that had very few matches played. This led to some difficulty in really understanding how each deck did. So you could say that Doran and its 18 matches at 79% was best, or Kithkin at 25 and 64%, or Elves! at 47 and 60%. I could understand an argument for any of those. I’d lean towards Elves! stirctly due to sample size, as losing 4% over almost double the matches from Kithkin is, well, pretty good.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to infer any concrete meaning from this tournament, as the most matches of any one deck against another was 16 (Blightning vs. 5CC), which is an extremely low number with regards to sample size. What we can look at, though, is the overall performances. So while this is going to be the end of the analysis, I’ll send BDM and Matt a spreadsheet that hopefully they can link you to if you want to come to your own conclusions.

UK Nats Spreadsheet

Despite being at the tip-top of the standings throughout the closing rounds of Dutch Nationals, potential Hall of Famer Frank Karsten lost in the quarterfinals of this year’s Dutch Nationals. It was a missed an opportunity for the Netherlands bring the same star power to the Team Championships as the U.S., Brazil, and Japan. Kevin Grove is the Dutch National Champion, playing Cruel Control The team will also include; Niels Noorlander, who wwas playing Faeries; Tom van Lamoen, who was playing an exciting red-white control deck with Swans of Bryn Argoll and Baneslayer Angel; and Johnny Niemeijer, playing JundBlood, as the alternate.

Tom van Lamoen was the reigning champ from last year’s Dutch National team and earned that title on the back of another unusual, non-combo Swans deck. After virtually dissapearing from the Magic scene for a year he made the team again with another unexpected Swans deck. He has reportedly said it will be his last National team berth since his pet card will not be legal next year.

Tip of the hat to Sven Dijt of manamaze.com for the link to the coverage and the decklists, which I have copied here for your convenience, as well as the story about Tom’s Swans (no relation to Tom Swan).

Dutch Champion Kevin Grove

Cruel Control
Kevin Grove - Champion
2009 Dutch National Championship

3 Island
4 Reflecting Pool
4 Vivid Creek
3 Vivid Meadow
2 Vivid Crag
2 Vivid Marsh
2 Mystic Gate
2 Sunken Ruins
2 Flooded Grove
2 Cascade Bluffs
3 Kitchen Finks
3 Plumeveil
2 Shriekmaw
4 Mulldrifter
1 Reveillark
2 Cloudthresher
1 Essence Scatter
1 Agony Warp
3 Firespout
2 Makeshift Mannequin
4 Cryptic Command
2 Hallowed Burial
1 Cruel Ultimatum
1 Martial Coup
1 Pithing Needle
3 Jace Beleren
1 Ajani Vengeant
1 Liliana Vess

Sideboard:
4 Great Sable Stag
4 Anathemancer
4 Volcanic Fallout
2 Runed Halo
1 Identity Crisis Read the rest of this entry »

My brother, Zeilend and myself arrived at Fight House in NYC for the M10 Pre-re. The venue is small and not really equipped for hosting events. Because of the limited space, the organizers could not do continuous flights, so we had to wait a bit for the next scheduled event to start. Of course, all this information was available, should we have had the foresight to look at the organizers website or read the emails stating the event schedule for the day.

Here is the pool I received for Gold flight, which started around 1pm:

Read the rest of this entry »