US Nationals Report *10th*

**Can you stand the suspense? Will Zvi Mowshowitz discover the next great Type II deck? Will his continued inability to draft all things Invasion strike him down before things get that far? Does Wescoe have the Demise? Does Wescoe have a decklist? Will the cheaters be caught? Will they be punished? What will happen to the tiebreakers in the last round? Is Orbosition going to run rampant over a shocked and surprised field? Will one of the finalists sideboard incorrectly due to a lack of playtesting? Will someone qualify for worlds on the strength of Burning Bridge?

Unfortunately, considering stress is not a major problem in this particular part of the galaxy (so it's basically good only for Florida) just about all of these facts have been revealed in advance, thanks to excellent Sideboard coverage of the event. The only questions that most readers don't yet know the answer to are those that concern Craig Wescoe, and they can safely be the subject of suspense even in an air conditioned room in Orlando since given the other answers they are of no consequence whatsoever. To begin at the beginning, a short run-through of our playtesting:

This round of national championships presented Godzilla with a unique challenge: Since our German and English teammates had their nationals the week before our own event, we had to prepare for three separate events using the same format knowing everything we showed would be common knowledge in the later tournaments. Looking back, Scott Johns and I got damn lucky. At first, no one was happy with anything. Kai Budde was ready to play Fires, and that's saying a lot. He didn't think it was amazing, there was just nothing else. Then all of a sudden we notice the Orbosition deck and get all excited. Mello played it against me before I knew what it was, I crushed him with W/U and commented that without Foil the matchup looked hopeless. I was wrong. A week of tuning and learning later, I was going 50/50 with it with proper play. Of course, proper play is something that players who just got the deck last week are far from certain to have.

For a while Scott and I had liked W/U control. No matter how much everyone else said they couldn't do it consistently, we were winning against Fires. The decklist was the tightest I've ever had, in the sense that we spent the last week arguing over the fourth Opt and the fourth Dismantling Blow and someone who shall remain nameless was ready to run 61 cards. I know. At any rate, we managed to come back to the same decklist at the last minute. When we got to the tournament, Orbosition was everywhere and the talk of the event. People were running maindeck Junta Stakes in some decks. We decided we needed that kind of help, and a week after having to make room for Scott's four Djinns we then had to make room for some Junta Stakes. And we used to have such a great sideboard. Now it's ugly as hell. Not that it's wrong, but it's damn ugly.

Normally I'd just skip right to the first draft table, but not this time. I'd like to get a few things about Florida or at least Disney World off my chest first. It's not exactly the most Magical place on Earth. Remember how large portions of Dante's Inferno are actually freezing? That's Florida. All the rolling blackouts in California are so all areas can be air conditioned below freezing. It's as if the fact that it's hot enough outside that a real burning bridge wouldn't have come as a terrible surprise has to be balanced somehow. Or quite possibly caused. No one knows how to turn the damn things down! As in, there isn't even a switch. Either it's on or it's off, even in your own hotel room. There's basically only one good thing about the location, and that's that it saves WotC money. Maybe they get a take of all the cash that players have to pay on Friday to get in, or from the concession stand. As if you need a sign, a pair of lightning bolts actually hit the player hotel on Sunday night! The service is so bad that our clocks in the room were 10 minutes off from each other and they missed our wake up call. Please, please, PLEASE don't make us go back there.

Sorry about that. We now return to our regularly scheduled tournament report. Pod number one:

1 Cain, Joseph

2 Chambers, Adam

3 Jarvis, Steven

4 Lovelace, Chris

5 Minniear, Adam

6 Mowshowitz, Zvi

7 Lazarski, Derek

8 Klevinskas, Jacob

You gotta love seeing that table. Let the other pros take each other out, this is my kinda draft. Even got sixth position. It turned out as well as I could have hoped and then some. First pack, there's green and then white in front of me, so I take a Cursed Flesh and hope for Black/Red. I never looked back. Meanwhile, my old fried Joe Cain is suffering in seat one, as Mr. Third Pick Protective Sphere thinks that his Thornscape Apprentice indicates that he should force green in front of him. Cain's draft was not fun, although he eventually ended up with the other Black/Red deck. It was much weaker. In the end, I had no red or black two to my right or one to my left. As I was saying, my kind of table - drafting each others' cards. The scary moment came in the second pack, when Klevinskas opened Crosis, the Purger . Great, I thought, I have a Black/Red/Blue player on my left. (Before, he was White/Blue.) I open my eyes and there's still a Crosis there! Several players were just shaking their heads as they watched the table hand me an amazing deck on a silver platter. That same pack I got the Crosis, they handed me back a Sulfur Vent in case I had trouble casting it.

The only pick of that draft I wonder about was when I took a Voldalian Serpent late. The guy on my right clearly wanted it and clearly was rather pissed off when I took it. Was it the best card for my deck, although my deck was good enough that it stayed in the sideboard (although it got boarded in twice)? Absolutely. But he apparently switched into black because of it. He took away all my four casting cost 2/2 flyers, which would have mattered to me if I'd wanted them. So in the end it was for the best, but I wonder if I should have known it would set him off. I was being extra extra nice to Derek Lazarski because of the Crosis, but just because he was being cooperative doesn't mean he had priority over the damn thing. Then again my only blue card was a Crosis, later joined by Crosis' Charm. Maybe I'm just worrying too much.

I don't still have the deck, but I'll describe what I can remember. The blue was two Island , a Sulfur Vent and a Chromatic Sphere to cast the Crosis' Charm and Crosis. Oh yeah, that guy. I had to cut out all the one and two casting cost creatures because they would die to my two Urborg Shamblers. My creature base had one unfortunate Morgue Toad in it (the other blue source), but was otherwise great. Multiple Mire Kavu , a Caldera Kavu and other such good stuff. I had a bunch of removal from a Cursed Flesh up through Exotic Curse to two Plague Spores . Short of more broken cards, it had everything I can ask for. But before anyone goes out and takes any of my advice, I must warn that my record in Invasion Booster Draft is downright horrendous. Still, I like to think I know how to Rodchester.

Round 1: Jarvis, Steve

Jarvis just ground in. Although he didn't have anywhere near as good a deck as I did, he did have most of the tools that could stop my deck. He had one of the two Obsidian Acolytes and he had the Crusading Knight . So guess what happened? Yep. Game one, out comes Obsidian Acolyte and Crusading Knight . I manage to use one of my two red removal to kill off the Acolyte, and win by using Plague Spores on my own Swamp to not die to the Knight. Game two the Acolyte comes out again. So does Crusading Knight . This time I'm not so lucky. When the game ends I'm holding two Plague Spores , Exotic Curse and two Swamps. I show him and make a witty comment, something like "you suck." I guess you had to be there. At any rate, guess what happens game three! That's right, Obsidian Acolyte . He's representing Confound like no one has represented anything in the history of Magic. I use the Scorching Lava on the Obsidian Acolyte so he can use the Confound and I can untap with the remaining Plague Spores , he saves it with Stand/Deliver! So of course I then walk right into the Confound because I don't have much choice. I'm just mana screwed enough that I can't recast the Voldalian Serpent (I'm up to three Islands for that) after putting it out with that unfortunate Toad the first time, and stuck with that and what I couldn't sideboard out of my black removal as well. That kept him from ever having to tap out, and I've managed to once again lose round one.

0-1

Round 2: Chambers, Adam

Adam has the TurboHarpy deck, which against my two Urborg Shamblers is looking less than strong. We're on turn two and I have a solid draw when a Judge comes over. Adam asks him how bad it is. The Judge says "pretty bad." He says the game is over, takes Adam's deck away for examination. He gets a game loss for forgetting to register one of his cards. I offer to let him off the hook if I can have a freebie for later, since this is the last matchup I'm worried about, but no such luck. To round off such an interesting, skill based match, he stalls on land with only three Swamps and dies.

1-1

Round 3: Cain, Joseph

He comes in with us both knowing he's in for quite a rough matchup. Accidentally running multiple Sinister Strengthed Mire Kavu into normal Mire Kavu didn't help. I doubt it mattered though. My deck was just flat out better - think Maggot Carrier . He either gets The Draw or he gets overwhelmed. He got overwhelmed.

2-1

Pod 2 (everyone 2-1):

1 Wostal, CJ

2 Mowshowitz, Zvi

3 Jakobson, Tuli

4 Steht, Lee

5 Price, David

6 Pustilnik, Michael

7 Comer, Alan

8 Wescoe, Craig

This table wasn't looking as good, and it didn't go as well. In the first pack, Wostal opened a black card and I followed with a Scorching Lava . In the next pack I opened Sabertooth Nishoba and set about drafting G/w/r. Jackobson goes into White/Blue after his first pick Glimmering Angel . The only other green mage at the table seems to be Alan Comer. I decided to try and not draft green before the tournament. Scott Johns keeps drafting these 'angry little man' decks and wrecking people, but whenever I tried that sort of thing I ended up with a whole lot of nothing. Hard to win with nothing. But it wasn't like I had a choice here. In Rodchester, if the cards and your position tell you what you're drafting, then that's what you're drafting, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. Things were going reasonably well if not spectacularly. I was picking up more than enough solid cards, but I was missing the two drops and wasn't picking up broken cards.

Then Alan Comer opened Rith. Then on the way back he got passed another one. Not only is the only other green mage a teammate, but if we're paired up against each other we can basically just go get lunch - I'm not the winner. Meanwhile, he has his creatures so he's letting me have stuff like fifteenth pick Voracious Cobra and I'm set on Giant Growth effects so I'm passing back stuff like Gaea's Might . But it was like trying to run a blockade getting cards at that table. It seemed like anything you passed hoping to get back would get counterdrafted somehow. David Price snatched up two Elfhame Palace and took away some cards before taking Agonizing Demise over Teferi's Moat , putting him in W/U/b instead. But what took the cake was that Jackobson decided to switch into green in the middle of pack two!

The first hint I had that something was amiss was when he randomly took away my Utopia Tree , but suddenly he was taking Rooting Kavu ! I think he ended up with W/U/r/g. He splashed a Ghitu Fire and a Shivan Wurm . At any rate, his little adventure served to take away my Might Weavers and therefore leave me with only three two mana creatures. I managed to pick up an Armadillo Cloak , one Thornscape Apprentice as my only tapper and a decent amount of removal, but I was less than impressed by the deck. I was convinced that I'd build it wrong and even built right it was lousy.

I shouldn't have despaired. The silver lining of not knowing what the hell you're doing or how good a deck is is that when the deck looks about as fast as TurboLeviathan as played by Chris Benefal in a top eight with the camera about to switch over and is about as broken as my television, which is old and doesn't work that well but still works, and your confidence level in the mana base is about the same as your confidence in the President, well, you can be wrong! Scott Johns says it's a great deck, and he would have built it the exact same way. He wants to fit in the Kavu Scout but agrees I can't cut anything. Mike Pistulnik likes it a lot too. And this type of deck I can play. Maybe I did all right after all.

Round 4: Wescoe, Craig

We get a friendly match going as we discuss what happened in the draft. The general consensus is that I got reamed and no one has any clue what Jakobson was thinking. At any rate, I get a good mix of creatures out but can't break through if he holds back. All of a sudden, he decides to use his Wash Out and being the bad drafter I am all my creatures on the table are green. So I'm down to eight with nothing but a bunch of lands. I slam the Pincer Spider back down with the rest of the not-easy-being brigade right behind it. He keeps attacking, letting the Spider eat a flyer each turn and letting me counter-attack. I manage to get him down to something like three where a well-placed Explosive Growth would have finished him off and it looks like he's going to have to hold back since he can only get me down to one, but he has the Repulse for the Spider and goes in for the win. In game two, I put out the Nishoba with a Cloak I'd been holding in hand for it if it survived, and he decided to use the Wash Out . It seemed early, and I had the six lands so Nishoba came back down. He tapped out so I Cloaked him up and went in for seven. He had the one Demise, which to my knowledge was his answer, and despite letting me have a free seven point swing I still couldn't stop his flyers.

2-2

Round 5: Wostal, CJ

Comer's managed to lose too despite a pair of Riths, so I'm just happy to not be playing against him. My deck seems to have more power in it, except for this one very minor problem known as Tangarth. It should be mine, damnit! MINE! Oh well. At any rate, it makes its appearance, and he tries to kill off a Thornscape Familiar with Mourning on it. He says "put damage on the stack." I hate those kind of situations. Clearly he doesn't understand how Tangarth works, and if I call a judge and let him hang himself there's a good chance I get to kill the Mourning . Luckily for him I just didn't feel like it. It takes a little while for him to understand how it works and he's still pretty skeptical, but he buys it and picks up the Mourning . The next time he taps the Minotaur there's some Explosive Growth and he dies a horrible death. Without his hero the board is untenable. His deck just doesn't give him the tools to fight. After the match, I'm walking around and find out that Craig Wescoe got a match loss for having only, say. 17 cards in his deck. The land got registered, but that was about it. So not only do I lose to him, he goes and sabotages his tiebreakers.

3-2

Round 6: Steht, Lee

Having a good deck without the cheap creatures in it turns out to mean that it plays guys out and the other side more or less falls apart. I think I put out Alpha Kavu with Rooting Kavu and Kavu on his side as well, and he had no play where I couldn't just save my guys and no attack I couldn't mostly nullify. It was that kind of match, and I won it at the draft or deck construction table.

4-2

Stay tuned for tomorrow and the Millstone 's quest to crush bad decks!

- Zvi Mowshowitz

** [**](#top)