Grand Prix Denver Report *23rd*

** You get what you pay for. I decided to play The Solution in Denver for a lot of the wrong reasons, and I got my just desserts. Twenty-third is the lowest I’ve finished in a Block tournament in a long time, and it happened because I didn’t prepare enough. Normally I go into one of these events knowing both the format and my deck inside and out. This time, I chose my deck because I felt it was something solid that I could play and because I felt I had solved the mirror matchup to my satisfaction. In the New York area, Solution decks have been doing very well in the qualifiers, and I figured I certainly was qualified to run the deck. Well, I was right in one sense. I certainly was qualified to run it. The problem was that it was an uninspired choice, the mana wasn’t as good as I thought it would be relative to the other decks and while I didn’t deserve the kind of mana screws I received I did deserve to end up 23rd.

Despite all that, the decklist definitely had some good things in it. First and foremost are the four maindeck Lashknife Barriers and the lack of any copies of Fact or Fiction . These were basically two separate decisions. First, I noticed that the format came down to a battle between armies of bears, and in such a battle a Lashknife Barrier is amazing. I also noted that it does more or less the job of Crimson Acolyte against Red/Green while not sharing the Acolyte’s vulnerability to the attack of the large green brigade. Since the Barrier is a cantrip, it’s relatively low risk. However, since the Barrier is a three drop, it weakens Exclude (and Fact or Fiction if it were still in the deck), and I also sensed that there would be a bunch of creatureless or almost creatureless decks where Exclude would be poor. Therefore, I went to two copies and replaced the other two with Disrupts. I tried to find a creature to replace the last two Excludes but nothing good was left.

I tested the result against what my teammates thought would be the expected field and against some randoms, and though I didn’t actually test against the correct field it definitely let me get my feel for the deck back and get a loose grip on the format. The deck was solid. I knew more or less what my sideboard would look like, but I didn’t find the right mirror matchup card until I saw it in Chris Senhouse’s sideboard at around 10:15am and rushed to the dealers’ tables to buy the last three copies. Thanks, Chris! Note at this point I stop talking about Magic for a while so if you want you can skip ahead to round one – er, I mean round four. You can tell where that is because there’s a decklist.

Back to the timeline, I settled on Solution and having found a deck I could play I went to buy a ticket. The commercial and student tickets I could find were too expensive, and I let myself be persuaded to try something I’d managed to put off for years: Priceline.com. Priceline offers a wonderful and yet terrible service. The good news is that it allows the purchase of very cheap tickets. You get to name your own price, which is basically a gimmicky way of saying that those without enough time to reenter steadily bigger numbers will end up paying more than they have to. Still, they were cheap. The bad news is it seems you get what you pay for, and it’s not just about there being no frequent flyer miles. Being on a Priceline ticket seems to be one step below being put into a packing case and shipped as air freight. You are scum, and the airline gods are allowed and highly encouraged to conspire against you.

I get to the airport and begin to wait on one of the longest lines I’ve ever seen at an airline check-in counter, and when I realize how slow it’s moving I start to worry a little bit about missing my flight. Silly me. There was nothing to worry about, because mine was not a flight that could be missed. It had already been cancelled. I’ve been on the ProTour for over three years and going to a ton of Grand Prix circuit for a lot of that time, and my flights had never been cancelled before. Not exactly on time? Naturally. Massively delayed? On occasion. But not flat out cancelled. Maybe I was just due. At any rate, I finally get to the counter and I’m asked if I mind flying through Chicago. I tell them as long as I get to Denver today that it’s fine. Maybe that was my mistake. At any rate, my new flight doesn’t even board for four hours. Considering they’d cancelled one of many, many flights to Dallas where I was to make my connection, the inability to fit me in one of about ten earlier flights was at the very least puzzling. So in about five hours I’m in the middle seat of a plane bound for Chicago. Apparently I didn’t get my ticket early enough.

Chicago went smoothly, but on the flight to Denver I got to sit next to a very large man who rapidly fell asleep. So far so good, but then he started falling over. In my direction. Every thirty seconds. Eventually I land in Denver, and while the first shuttle bus flew right by without a blink I do manage to find a second one at an adjacent stop before it has a chance to and I get to the hotel. Then I walk across the lounge, down a long corridor, down another long corridor and finally halfway down a third one before finding the tournament area. Meanwhile, all the signs keep telling us (I’ve picked up a random from the shuttle) we’re heading for the Denver Knife Fair, which is also being held there that weekend. I get there, and scout the trial for points of interest but don’t find many. I also ask around for a room with no luck.

I’d had two plans to get a room. The primary plan was to stay with Sean McKeown, who had a room booked all to himself. The other was to stay with Mike Pistulnik, where Alan Comer was also going to stay. However, they had both fallen under the curse of the evil Priceline. Sean and Mike were nowhere to be found, and both me and Alan were getting very sleepy. The problem was that only Mike’s name was on the room, so Alan was unable to check in. Finally, the hotel agreed to give us the room at one in the morning if Mike hadn’t showed up by then, right after I’d finally found a room in exchange for what technology I’d found in the past week, which wasn’t much. Since Mike was about to be charged for the room anyway, once we got the promise we waited it out and then got the room, about the same time that Sean finally made it into Denver – apparently Dallas had been shut down for several hours, which was why Mike wasn’t there yet. We got the room, Mike showed and the next morning I went to breakfast where the hotel restaurant decided I wasn’t worthy of the gift of the milk I’d asked for. Then we all had to make sure we were there to had our decklists in, because they had the idea to have a players’ meeting at a constructed GP for some reason. That turned out to be a good thing, because that’s how I found out about Unnatural Selection.

I know it’s not Priceline doing most of this. But it’s damn creepy.

At any rate, I then handed in my decklist and spent the next three hours putting scouting on the stack and having it fizzle because there were no valid targets. A man’s gotta try though. When the round four pairings finally went up, I saw who I was playing against and proceeded directly to the Feature Match area with the following deck under the tentative name “second solution”:

Round 4: Alex Borteh (Feature Match)

Welcome to Invasion Block. Mana screw commencing… now. Two one land hands lead to two mulligans, and between a mana screw and a mana flood I never get much of anything going. Game one I get off to a slow start and since Alex is playing a pure control deck that means that his deck took control and never gave it back. Early on he cast two Pyre Zombies, and the entire time that I was trying to sneak damage through he had plenty of mana to totally shut me down with them but never did it. He claimed afterwards that his hand was so good that he didn’t need them, which means the game was even more pathetic than I thought it was – if he’d started recurring them I probably would have scooped! It’s also possible he plain old forgot, but whichever the reason it seems to me that his deck is too mana intensive and too powerful to want the Zombie. Game two I don’t have the blue mana for the third turn Disrupt and don’t have the right creatures to avoid walking directly into Fire and Ice, followed by extreme mana flood afterwards. He’d go on to win day one and make the top eight. What I tried to do was take out Repulse and Exclude and trim off of Spectral Lynx and Lashknife Barrier to fit in Gainsay , Disrupt and Pure Reflection.

Round 5: Johnson, Gunnar

There’s often a hole in my memory where I don’t remember one round too well, and in Denver this is it. I literally couldn’t remember what happened during the match, but then recalling a later match jogged my memory. His deck was a Blue/Green tempo deck, which was played early on in the qualifier season in the New York area but seems to be dying off. The deck is totally based around gaining a tempo advantage, with cards like Temporal Spring and even Rushing River . If the opponent gets caught behind and keeps trying to catch up with more expensive spells, he gets himself killed, especially if the cards in question are permanents. I’ve seen it in action and it’s most ugly. However, a deck like The Solution can play out two casting cost creatures continuously, and that’s what happened. Suddenly he’s using Temporal Spring to trade a spell card for a draw step, and using his bounce spells to cycle while Spectral Lynx and Meddling Mage (on Rushing River ) start wrecking him. After the match he commented that my deck seemed designed to beat his, although he quickly admitted that of course that wasn’t true. This deck is more like a test deck, something that will punish those who build decks that are too slow.

Round 6: Wee, Olwen

I knew what Olwen was playing because I’d watched him play an earlier match while I was still trouncing Mr. Bye. He’s playing Red/Green, and as he suggested if I lose this one I’ll never live it down, especially since he’s willing to sacrifice his creatures for damage way too aggressively. For some reason he kept refusing to pay the kicker on his Skizziks, for example. Not having the second red until next turn is NOT a valid excuse! So I managed to block and make favorable trades a lot, and he never produced the massive amount of burn that just might have actually finished me off in either game.

As usual, before the final round of the first day there is great commotion as players with one loss ponder the question of the hour: Should I be a wimp? In laymen’s terms, they have the choice of whether to draw or to play. If they draw, they get to play on day two. If they refuse the draw and boldly play on, the player who wins enters day two with an actual chance and the loser will never be one of those timid souls who knows neither victory nor defeat. He will however know about side events. Mathematically those whose goal is to make it to the top eight shouldn’t be drawing, and I’ve proved willing time and again to roll the dice. I was prepared to do so again, encouraged Lucas Hager to do the same when he asked, and I was paired up against someone else who didn’t want to wimp out so I didn’t have to force anyone to play.

Round 7: Keaten, Chase

Chase is playing the dark version of Solution, which basically means he has a lot more black sources and casts Dromar’s Charm. Not knowing too much of a good thing when he sees it, he also names Dromar’s Charm on his first Meddling Mage , figuring he’d already cast one of his and it was the most powerful spell available. That would make sense, except that I wasn’t showing any black sources and there was a reason. Of course, he probably just thought that meant I was holding Charms I couldn’t cast. What I was holding was Absorbs I hadn’t had a chance to cast, and using those instead I managed to control the board and attack for the win.

Game two got ugly. My draw was four copies of Spectral Lynx and a bunch of non-black lands. On his fourth turn, he played an Unnatural Selection and killed one of them. Luckily that was before I could cast the other two, so they got to sit in my hand for a time. He put down a Meddling Mage and named Repulse . It seems I’ve gotten very good at not having the card people name in my hand, probably because it also isn’t in my deck at the time. All four copies of Repulse are siting in the sideboard along with the Excludes and I believe one Galina’s Knight, replaced by Gainsay , Disrupt and Unnatural Selection . I doubt he’d attack into the Lynx with the Mage, so I’m attacking with the Lynx in the hopes that he’ll break down and kill it. I get my wish after a while, and out comes Lynx number three. He uses Vindicate to kill that one, and out comes Lynx number four. He plays one of his own and kills it, and now I’m looking at Lynx number five. Meanwhile, I’ve drawn into a Stormscape Apprentice and a Voice of All . He has the Lynx and the Mage, and we trade two damage a turn back and forth. I’m ahead on life by one turn’s worth, and I manage to draw into my own Unnatural Selection . With that in place, no one dares move. If he’d tapped out, he would have lost Meddling Mage advantage, perhaps worse. Still, he can’t stop the Voice of All and I win the race right on schedule. By then there was a crowd watching, because everyone else had already intentionally drawn.

Round 8: Hager, Lucas

As happy as I was to help Lucas realize he didn’t have to draw, I’m even happier now. I get to play against a Red/Green deck! Here’s to a good matchup well earned. It’s a rematch of the last round of the Swiss in Tokyo, except that this time we can’t intentionally draw into the top eight and we both have new and improved technology. I have Spectral Lynx and the amazing Lashknife Barrier . He has Tinder Farm . That’s right, Tinder Farm . Don’t laugh, it single handedly won his whole match against Ryan Fuller! We both agreed that it spelled big trouble. At any rate, there was a distinct lack of quality draws. In game one I got off to a fast start and dominated the board. Game two I drew nothing and his deck rolled out of the gates like it was supposed to. Game three he has to sacrifice the amazing Tinder Farm for his one shot of red mana for a while, but the resulting removal and creature buy him some time. He can’t find mana, but I drew a bunch of it and don’t have a Lashknife Barrier . I have to work fast, because I can’t let him draw out of it, so I go aggressive. That does let him trade damage back, and when he gets the red mana off the top I come dangerously close to dying – in fact, if I hadn’t topdecked a chump on the last turn I would have died. Without Lashknife Barrier , the long game is only neutral.

Round 9: Batarseh, Sammy

He’s playing another Black/Red/Blue deck. I take control of game one, but I have to keep using my painlands to activate my two Stormscape Apprentices, without which I would have had to give him a lot more time. As a result, he suddenly plays the last two cards in his hand I’m stunned to find out I was just reduced to zero life by a Ghitu Fire . Looking back on that game, at first I thought I’d been playing like a moron. I was in complete control of the board, why risk wandering down into range of such a common spell even if I don’t think it’s a very common choice? It seemed very hard for me to lose any other way. But the more I think about it the more this doesn’t hold up. If I do one less damage to myself he gets one more turn, and he has another turn to draw the last land or draw into card drawing that gets him there. It’s also very likely that someone holding a burn spell would have used it on one of my creatures, since that would have cut the damage by half. At any rate, there are plenty of spells that can rescue his board position, especially Void , and Prophetic Bolt or Fact or Fiction can always lead to big trouble. Taking a chance on Ghitu Fire is better than taking a bigger chance on giving a control deck extra time. Then again, it’s possible I could have taken one less point by being careful. It’s odd playing against these decks, because they’re trying to play basically pure control but between painlands and Undermines opponents can randomly find themselves in burn range. Game two was considerably less interesting, since I didn’t get the three mana I needed to cast the Pure Reflection in my hand let alone get a normal overall draw. Fun.

Round 10: Thompson, Skylin

He’s still got amateur status, which means I should get to relax. Unfortunately the way his deck played it was a nightmare. He was using a Red/Green/Blue deck, one of those that starts off with Blurred Mongoose and then plays a ton of card advantage cards. I got out a Lashknife Barrier and watched as he threw his kicked Kavu Titans away for Galina’s Knights when I triple or quadruple blocked with a bunch of protection from green creatures, but he still had Flametonge Kavu and Mystic Snake and Exclude and Fact or Fiction and Prophetic Bolt . Since he managed to keep up early on and draw his mana consistency, I found myself totally overpowered despite solid draws. No attempt to make unfavorable trades could undo enough of the damage. This matchup is apparently just horrible when they go all out to play card advantage rather than aim for the tempo, which is a sure way for them to lose. I think he just drew more threats than normal and smoother draws than normal while I got a low-power set of cards, but it’s clearly not good if they survive the early game intact or in his case even on the offensive.

Round 11: Pistulnik, Michael

There’s a broken link on the Sideboard for this rounds’ results, which confused me for a bit because I’d clearly already gotten my face smashed in by Sammy Batarseh in a previous round. Luckily it’s easy to remember playing against someone staying in the same room. The first two games are basically preliminary activities before the real fun. I get to smash him with a fast draw full of creatures with Protection from Red, and then he strikes back to even the score with a bunch of Lightning Angels while I struggle with my draw in turn. Then in game three we both stall on land at three and start discarding. He discards an Aura Blast , so I decide I’m tired of discarding. I put out Pure Reflection , he Aura Blasts it, but the second one stays down. Then I force out an Unnatural Selection , and I think the game’s over. In case anyone doesn’t realize, this is an insanely powerful combination, since you can make all the opponents’ creatures Reflections and all of yours Dorks and then cast a creature. Things are looking good, but then he topdecks his only Unnatural Selection ! Suddenly every time a creature spell is cast there’s going to be a big fight over what lives and what dies. I worry when he starts to get a land lead, but I have the early tempo on him before he recovered and I have more creatures so I can fight when I want to. The problem is that I’m holding the second and third Galina’s Knights, so those are uncastable because they would just die to his Unnatural Selection . I do manage to sneak in the damage before he finds a way to take control, but barely. That was one weird game.

Round 12: Prawdzik, Nathaniel

Nathaniel is playing Domain, which should be another really bad matchup for me. Did I mention I didn’t do enough preparation? That’s the beauty of block constructed. As I said at the start, you get what you pay for. He also said that he kept losing after sideboarding, and that he was just not going to sideboard. He lied about not sideboarding, but he should have stuck with his instincts. The good news from game one is that he took momentary leave of his own rules and tried to Harrow on turn three and it got Disrupted. The way he put it was “I never Harrow when it can be Disrupted. Even first game. Even if I have to discard. I don’t do it!” Apparently that’s a good rule, and in the games we played afterwards for fun he did indeed discard to avoid walking into one. Without his mana, he died to a creature attack. Game two I continued to luck out, as he failed to do anything of importance and the creatures went in for the win again. I ask to see his deck, and his setup after sideboarding basically doesn’t have any of the cards I fear. I have dead Aura Blasts and I’ll be naming nonexistent cards with Meddling Mage , but he basically has nothing left to win with. I give him some advice, and after that we play for fun unsideboarded because I’d already desideboarded before he asked, and he basically crushes me in a bunch of games that seem close but he claims are that way by design. I’m not the biggest fan of his version but it does seem to be getting the job done.

Round 13: Williams, David

Williams is playing a copy of the deck that 9-0ed the first day of Kobi in the hands of two different players. That means his mana sucks but his deck is indeed full of good stuff if it works right. Once again we trade poor draws in the first two games, with my deck working properly in one while he doesn’t get his color and in the other my getting mauled by Lightning Angels while looking for an Unnatural Selection . In game three he puts out Galina’s Knight to my Galina’s Knight and I’m holding Unnatural Selection . If only I can get more land I’ll be set! But I stall at two lands. Dave is taken a bit aback when instead of another target for Jilt I put out the Unnatural Selection, but without land there isn’t much I can do and I just get overrun.

So in short I end up 23rd, which is worth $250 and a Pro Tour point. I do a quarterfinal and a semifinal for the feature match coverage and me and Alan Comer build a new deck for block that so far hasn’t worked out too well. That morning we proceed to the airport, and I finally get to the end of a very long line. I hand the clerk my passport and tell her my flight information, and she asks for my ticket. I remind her it’s an electronic ticket, and there is no ticket. She asks me again. Eventually she gets tired of this and gets me my boarding pass. I ask about getting on an earlier flight and I’m told flatly “not on this type of ticket.” Which of course is a vicious lie, since shifting people onto earlier flights when they’re not paying for it is done for the airline’s convenience and not for the customer. Why would they cripple themselves? If that wasn’t enough, I’d heard a minute previous that at least one of the earlier Dallas flights was totally sold out. In other words, Priceline appears to be a license to torture.

Moving on, I then had a few hours to kill in the airport. The entire concourse had only a McDonald’s to get anything above room temperature for breakfast, so I went back to the main terminal and waited in a huge line that collapsed to nothing right after I got what I ordered. After that I went to the arcade to have a good old game of Ms. PacMan. I could live with 50 cents a play, times change, but you got one life. ONE! Normal is three. You got your second one for finishing the Cherry, but when I messed up twice on the first and second Banana, that was it. Two lives. Is nothing sacred? Then we sit on the runway for an hour, and the flight attendants wake me up about four times for totally unnecessary seat belt signs.

I know it’s a rather roundabout way of saying it, but the whole point I’m trying to make here is…

I HATE MANASCREW!

That’s all I’m really trying to say. And if you ever wake up and find yourself in an existential quandary, full of loathing and self-doubt and racked with the pain and isolation of your pitiful, meaningless existence, there’s still a little place… but do NOT fly there on Priceline. Unless you’re willing to pay the price. And don’t forget to playtest!

- Zvi Mowshowitz

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