For those of you that don’t know me (should be most of you) I’m Asher Hecht, and according to the GP LA coverage I am a self-proclaimed Ringer of the North East. I have been playing magic competitively for around three years in New York City and haven’t had much success except for PTQ Top 8’s, of which I have around 8. For the past year especially I have dedicated a lot of time to competitive magic and ptqing and have averaged around one PTQ Top 8 per season. However, time and time again I have failed to break through. To date I have lost playing for slots four times in heartbreaking game 3s, the most recent being a faeries mirror in a Berlin PTQ that was undoubtedly the best game of magic I have ever played. After that block season I was very disappointed that I didn’t qualify after Top8ing 2 of 5 PTQs and losing playing for T8 in the other 3. I went into the Kyoto season largely unmotivated due to the fact that it was Limited (I largely prefer Constructed) and that I had to dedicate a lot of time into applying to colleges.

I knew I wanted to go to LA for a while, but delayed in actually committing until around three weeks before. I always have liked Extended and wanted an excuse to escape the cold of the North East. I was luckily able to snag a ticket for real cheap and was  really excited at the prospect of my first far-away GP (I have played in 3 or 4 before always with disastrous results). However, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to play and little to no knowledge of the format. The North East players were at a disadvantage for GP LA because there were no local PTQs before the GP. This meant that no one in my area really had a clue about the format. Luckily, members of Team Unknown Stars and other helpful West-Coast MTGers told me about the format and what was viable and what was not. It seemed pretty clear to me that the format was going to be defined by Faeries and its variations and Death Cloud. Those two decks just have the strongest strategies and are very effective. I was pretty sure I wanted to play DC for a while, but turned against it when I realized that even though it did a bunch of cool things (especially Raven’s Crime) it was at its core just a mopey Rock deck. For a while I thought I was going to play UB Tron because I felt comfortable with it and have always loved Tron decks.

Luckily, it didn’t take much for me to switch when I saw the UR TEPS deck and goldfished a few hands with it. The deck felt really good in a fairly balanced format because it could force its combo through better than Elves but was still very fast (I would set the average win turn at 4.5 or a bit lower). The sideboard Gigadrowses seemed like a great strategy against Faeries because they have to Stifle it or just resign themselves to losing on the next turn. The only thing I was really worried about was getting Raven’s Crimed out of games. Going into the GP I didn’t really have a plan versus the GB decks but at the last minute I found Relic of the Progenitus, which completely shuts down any Loam engines and makes the matchup very good as long as you don’t get Persecuted.

So here is the list I used to make top 8 of GP LA

SwathStorm
Asher Hecht
2009 Grand Prix Los Angeles - Top 8

1  Bloodstained Mire
3  Cascade Bluffs
3  Dreadship Reef
2  Flooded Strand
2  Island
1  Mountain
1  Polluted Delta
4  Steam Vents
1  Wooded Foothills

4  Desperate Ritual
1  Gigadrowse
3  Grapeshot
4  Lotus Bloom
4  Manamorphose
4  Mind’s Desire
4  Peer Through Depths
4  Ponder
2  Pyromancer’s Swath
4  Remand
4  Rite of Flame
4  Seething Song

Sideboard:
2  Brain Freeze
2  Chain of Vapor
2  Echoing Truth
3  Gigadrowse
1  Pact of Negation
3  Relic of Progenitus Read the rest of this entry »