After a dissappointing latter-half of 2008 Steve Sadin was excited to get 2009 started with a win. Last season started off great for him with a Top 16 in Kuala Lumpur but Steve described his win today as his first Constructed deck win since 2007.
I am in the middle of a lot of media this weekend at PT: Kyoto. In addition to the normal video coverage and blogging for Top8Magic, I will be making my first stab at Twittering via the official coverage Twitter feed and you can follow along at MagicProTour.
I am excited to get things underway. We spent the day yesterday poring over decklists and talking to players and it sounds like the field for Standard is going to be largely Red-White Lark, Faeries, 5-Color, Blightning, and various Heights decks. Of course the decks we will be looking to Deck Tech will have unique takes on established archetypes or will be something unexpected like the Green-White Planeswalker deck from the SCG 5K last weekend which can Garruck out Martial Coup and ultimate those tokens a turn later for the win.
Also spent the morning yesterday taking in the local sights which prompted a new game from me and Nate Price that involves taking pictures of other members of the coverage team taking pictures. We had a four picture parlay at one point that is unlikely to be topped now that everyone is on guard.
In addition to the awesome coverage work that Bill Stark and Dane Young did covering GP: LA, Bill has followed up with an exhaustive burst of typing over at TheStarkingtonPost.com to post ALL the decklists from Day Two of the GP. Below you can find the decks that finished from 9th through 20th in that event and you can look through all the lists on Bill’s blog. I was only going to post 9 - 16 but when the next four players are Martin Juza, Sam Black, Gabe Walls, and Adam Yurchick I decided to just keep going a little while longer.
A couple of notes:
The top tables of this tournament were absurd. It was a pretty hot little Top 8 but then as you keep scrolling down the standings you have a former World Champion, a pair of Worlds Team Champions, Gavin Verhey locking up another invite on his climb to PT inevitable PT success, rising star Martin Juza, Gabe Walls, and Adam Yurchick.
The Top finishing Elf deck was in 18th place but it warrants looking at as LSV suggests that Elves might be good again based on the Storm front that is rolling in for the PTQ season.
The highest finishing Death Cloud deck — Michael Jacob’s — did not have any actual Death Cloud in it but Brazillian superstar Carlos Romao’s did. With or without the Clouds, the Raven’sd Crime package seems like it could be a nice way to combat TEPS decks from crafting that perfect turn.
I broke the ManuelB deck away from the traditonal Faeries listing mostly on the basis of Azami, Lady of Scrolls. Although you could easilly lump it in with the Fae this deck is something else altogether.
Gabe Walls’ Slide deck was certainly an unexpected but welcome surprise. When people were prepping for Berlin I definitley liked Edge of Autumn as a sneaky cycler and was glad to see it have some success although it would have been nice to see Walls make a return to the PT in Hawaii.
Death Cloud
Carlos Romao - 9th Place
Grand Prix-Los Angeles
Format: Extended
3 Damnation
4 Smother
3 Garruk Wildspeaker
3 Raven’s Crime
1 Worm Harvest
4 Sakura-Tribe Elder
4 Kitchen Rinks
4 Thoughtseize
4 Life from the Loam
3 Death Cloud
2 Crime/Punishment
3 Barren Moor
2 Ghost Quarter
1 Godless Shrine
2 Overgrown Tomb
2 Golgari Rot Farm
3 Tranquil Thicket
2 Windswept Heath
4 Polluted Delta
2 Forest
4 Swamp
Sideboard:
4 Bitterblossom
2 Persecute
3 Darkblast
3 Circle of Protection: Red
3 Ravenous Baloth Read the rest of this entry »
A crowd gathered last night under the skull of the black themed Feature Match area to watch Jon Finkel square off with none other than Mike Long in the semifinal round of the I Came to Game Invitational.
Lan D. Ho, Eric Atwood, and Dan Burdick pulled the exhibition tournament together for their documentary I Came to Game. They selected 8 of the Pro Tour’s biggest stars from the last decade plus to take part in a single elimination tournament using the Top 8 decks from Pro Tour 1.
The lineup included Paul Cheon vs. Jon Finkel, Kenji Tsumura vs. Mike Long, Mark Herberholz vs. Mike Turian, and Gab Nassif vs. Patrick Chapin. The latter player won each matchup on Friday with Finkel putting on a Prison primer with Baxter’s deck against Cheon. Paul seemed pretty surprised when Jon tapped his own Winter Orb with an Icy and paroled all of his own mana while Cheon languished in solitary.
The decks were redrawn randomly on Saturday. Chapin had Baxter’s deck while Turian had Poulter’s. Chapin took the seat in the finals by winning the mind numbing battle of wills over Turian’s Land Tax.
“He wasn’t willing to discard,” laughed Patrick who was willing to sit on one land all day before giving his opponent the card adantage and mana advantage from the Legends enchantment.
The headline battle was the match between Finkel playing the Lestree deck against Long with Hammer’s Millstone deck. By all accounts Finkel was at a large disadvantage but he managed to emerged victorious — attacking with an Elf and a Factory in game one — to square off with Chapin for the trophy this evening.
Everyone is a few minutes away from the first round of the Philadelphia Standard Open hoping to earn a sizable chunk of the $5,000 prize purse. There are plenty of Top8Magicians in attendance with no consensus deck among them.
I drove down here in a car with Jacob Van Lunen, Jacob’s friend Greg, Gabe Carlton-Barnes, and Matt Ferrando. MichaelJ drove down with a resurgant Josh Ravitz and two other players. Between those eight players in the two cars — I am sitting on the sidelines for this one to bring you updates and maybe draft some — there was only one deck that overlapped two players. That is partially due to card availability since Ravitz provided the cards for half the decks but gives you an idea of how open this format appears on the eve of Worlds.
I say ‘appears’ because it may very well be all Fae and Reflecting Pools come the Top 8. If that is the case then the feelings of my carmates will be able to be summed up by this sticker we parked in front of at a NJ Turnpike reststop.
One of the public events at GP Okayama this past weekend was a Super Grand Prix Trial for GP Kobe — the 2009 GP schedule can be found here — which offered the winner three byes, entry, and transportation to the event. (I would imagine the organizers were happy none of the Austalian or Europeans in attendance won the Trial.) The format was Extended and provides one of our first peeks at the post-Berlin metagame. It was a pretty small event considering the prize — most of the public event thunder on Sunday was stolen by what was essentially a five-slot qualifier for Kyoto — that only had 17 players. Nonetheless it was something I was eager to look at as I am sure you are too.
It sounds like these lists will show up on the Mothership sometime in the next week or so. Both Mike and I are off this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday so they won’t be appearing there. In the meanwhile I figured I would post them here. Before you continued reading below the fold… How many Elves decks were in the Top 8? Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know if this is going to get linked anytime soon on the English side of the Okayama coverage but I thought people might be interested in the winning decklist — and the Top 8 decklists — from the Legacy Open on Sunday for an uncut sheet of Mishra’s Workshop and a bunch of other cards printed in Antiquities. There were 48 players, which meant 6 rounds and a Top 8 playoff. In the end it was Yuu Saitou, a Level 2 Japanese judge who won the prize with his AdStorm deck
AdStorm
Yuu Saitou — Winner
GP Okayama Legacy Open
1 Badlands
3 Bloodstained Mire
4 Gemstone Mine
3 Polluted Delta
1 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
2 Ad Nauseam
4 Brainstorm
4 Burning Wish
2 Cabal Ritual
3 Chrome Mox
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
2 Infernal Tutor
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
2 Mox Diamond
4 Mystical Tutor
2 Orim’s Chant
2 Pact of Negation
4 Rite of Flame
Sideboard:
1 Cabal Therapy
1 Diminishing Returns
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Hull Breach
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Infernal Tutor
1 Orim’s Chant
1 Pact of Negation
1 Pyroclasm
3 Shattering Spree
1 Tendrils of Agony
So one 6-2 player did advance to the Top 8 but as predicted — based on a round two loss to someone who stayed in and lost something like four more matches — MichaelJ’s breakers left him in the dreaded virtual Top 8.
Mike earned a draft set for his efforts, which he promptly repaid to me from a draft gone by.
On the brighter side, Nick Feitel — aka Kephalid — was waiting to play in the finals as I was packing up to head out to meet my wife for dinner. He was playing a WW deck designed by our Mockvitational winner. The deck is called Kithkin Calcano.
Asher took his ridiculous looking deck and rattled off four wins in five rounds. He then packed everything up, dropped from the tournament, and left for what I can only presume is a very hot date. It’s too bad because we are getting a covergence of boring at the top decks — Faeries, Kithkin, and 5-color. I know Asher’s list probably falls under that last heading but it caused a little bit of a stir everytime he played. (Although that could have been people trying to understand how he wedged Mutavaults into the mix.
Preposterous
Asher Hecht
NY States 2008
3 Mistbind Clique
4 Bitterblossom
4 Spellstutter Sprite
2 Broken Ambitions
2 Condemn
4 Doran
4 Cryptic Command
4 Esper Charm
3 Bant Charm
4 Nameless Inversion
4 Vivid Creek
2 Vivid Marsh
4 Reflecting Pool
2 Mystic Gate
3 Yavimaya Coast
4 Secluded Glen
4 Murmuring Bosk
3 Mutavault
Sideboard:
2 Chameleon Colossus
2 Puppeteer Clique
2 Jave Beleren
3 Thoughtseize
1 Comdemn
3 Wrath of God
2 Deathmark
Mike is done. Guttural Response #1 kept a Cryptic Command from resolving but when Mike had to evoke Cloudthresher against Fairies, the second one languished in his hand while Spellstutter Sprite took on the yeoman’s task of countering the green fattie.
Here is the deck he decided to play:
Jund Mana Ramp
Mike Flores
NY States 2008
1 Broodmate Dragon
4 Firespout
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Jund Charm
4 Chameleon Colossus
4 Civic Wayfinder
4 Cloudthresher
2 Farhaven Elf
4 Gift of the Gargantuan
2 Primal Command
4 Rampant Growth
4 Fire-Lit Thicket
5 Forest
1 Mountain
4 Savage Land
2 Swamp
4 Treetop Village
Sideboard:
3 Mind Shatter
2 Shriekmaw
2 Broodmate Dragon
4 Guttural Response
2 Primal Command
2 Lash Out
