facebook

CoolStuffInc.com

Turn your cards and minis into cash! Maximize your value with our 25% store credit bonus!
   Sign In
Create Account

I've Got a Story to Tell

Reddit

Year two on the Pro Tour, and somehow I've mised my way to a third. When I look back at it, the most memorable parts aren't necessarily the games I played. A couple stand out here and there, but just as many spotlights are on random occurrences outside the event itself. Here are the ones I find the most memorable.

Pro Tour San Diego:

- I went into this event with the intent of forcing Mono-Green in Zen-Zen-Worldwake draft. Green was criminally under drafted, and your monsters and pump spells would often kill people out of nowhere. Unfortunately, the four Japanese players in my pod had also decided this was the plan. After being stubbornly hooked in, I had a loose twelve playables going into pack three. I first picked a Groundswell over a Terastodon, then followed it with an Arbor Elf. Third pick was an Everflowing Chalice over another Terastodon, and I suddenly had a plan. I took another ramp spell over yet another 'Don, but things took a turn for the worse when the first failed to table. Some how the next two did, and my deck got wild. Round two of the draft, my opponent got a game loss for misregistering his deck. I then played a turn five Terastodon against his slower GU deck. He was not amused.

- The night I arrived in San Diego was interesting to say the least. I stayed with someone who I hadn't seen for a while the first night as well as his friend from in town. After spending a few hours talking to them while they smoked cigarettes and drank beers, I headed back up to the room and crashed into a corner under some blankets. Jet lag and terrible college related sleep schedules caught up to me and I awoke an hour later. Some time in this hour, a fifth of Jaeger had appeared in the room and it's contents had disappeared. Pro Tour vomit number one of the year was witnessed hours later.

- The day before the event, I was talking with someone about Sam Black. For those who are unaware, he is an interesting character. Halfway through thinking of the best description of him, I looked to my left. Sam was standing outside on a sunny California day, trench coat draped around his shoulders. While the rest of the crowd outside was smoking, Sam was silently staring out into the city. We sat and watched this for a couple minutes and walked away.

Grand Prix DC:

- My deck decision process for this event was very simple. Every time someone brought up a new deck, I asked them how their Jund match up was. The best answer I got was “It's close”. One person said it was favorable for RDW, but testing showed it was about 33% for them, aka the odds of them ripping a burn spell on the last turn to win.

- Day one I played a Jund mirror where the only spells I played game two were three Bloodbraid Elves, two Blightnings, and two Sprouting Thrinax. After the match, my opponent walked up to his friend and described the scenario. The response he got was “Who did you play, Ari Lax?”. Apparently I had done something similar to him back in the JSS days involving only casting Lightning Angels and Helixes all match when he was playing Rb beats. Good to know the run wells have stuck around all these years.

- Playing the Jund mirror yet again on day two, I had pulled ahead on board but was at three life. I passed a turn with a Savage Lands up, and my opponent drew his card and tapped one Mountain. All of the people watching his side of the match walked away as he cast Lightning Bolt. He then Pulsed away my Saproling tokens from the Thrinax he killed and lost a few turns later. At the end of the game he flipped his top card and exclaimed “Lightning Bolt! Man, one turn off of the win”.

Pro Tour San Juan:

- For those who are unaware, San Juan is a miserable city. Everything there is surrounded by six foot tall, blade topped fences. Traffic laws also appear to not exist and roadside death was dodged about every five minutes we were in a moving vehicle.

- The house we stayed in was booby trapped for max value by the owners. Literally anything that looked fragile was set up to break to mise the security deposit. Upon arrival a sculpture was positioned on the table in front of the TV half off the edge. Paintings were hanging on miniature nails on the wall right around a tight bend in the stair case and would crash onto the ground whenever someone over two hundred fifty pounds walked by. The glass sliding door in front of the laundry machine wasn't on the track, resulting it it shattering on the ground when we attempted to open it. Finally, there was a clause charging for cleaning if there was sand left in the house. And by house, I mean beach house.

- The beach house had a top floor patio that apparently neighbored that of a member of the Puerto Rican judicial  system who was notorious for calling the police on noisy American tourists. After a night of sangria related activities, two members of the house were sitting up there when one inebriately mentioned this fact. The other person responded “I don't care about a Puerto Rican judge, all you have to do is win a kickball game and you get the job”.

-For about three hours, our house was legitimately concerned someone had died at the Pro Tour. Apparently, this was a reasonable length for an ocean swim for them.

Grand Prix Columbus:

- Prior to the event, Steven Menendian was proclaiming the death of Storm in Legacy to Brian Demars due to the banning of Mystical Tutor. Brian's only response was “I don't know, this guy from Michigan has a pretty good Storm deck”. After their disastrous run with Lands, Brian was giving constant updates on my record to Steve just to rub-in how wrong he was.

- Jason Ford boarded in Submerge against me when I was playing UB Tendrils and actually drew it. His goal was not to hate on a possible Xantid Swarm, but just to have something to pitch to Force of Will over Ghastly Demise.

Gencon:

- Under the persuasion of WoWTCG master Phil Cape, I was persuaded to drive down to that game's Worlds and grind in. I played a Sealed event, where I was granted an invite for going 3-0. The event had a Pro Tour pay out and just for playing everyone was handed a $150 dollar loot card. That's right, I played in a 3 round PTQ. Money went down to 100th place with less than 200 people in attendance. I mised into day two in exactly 64th place as one of four x-4's to do so and somehow put up a winning record in a draft format I had no experience in for a game I hadn't played in two years. I still left marginally disappointed, as I chickened myself into a 10% split with ringer Zach Efland when we played in the limited format. I promptly bashed him.

- On Sunday, I finally ventured into the Magic hall. I was greeted by a free M11 draft on MTGO on computers they provided there. At one point AJ Sacher and someone else started birding my match and plays were being discussed when a major project leader for Magic Online asked them to leave to protect the integrity of the draft. I ended up winning, but to be fair their presence might have overcome the advantage my second round opponent was trying to gain by screen peeking.

US Nationals:

- A large group of people from Michigan had decided to drive down to grind. After an unsuccessful day, one member of the group asked if anyone else when the Legacy side events were. The simultaneous mass response: “I don't know, I'm qualified”.

- Michael Jacob was piloting my car home, jamming away to his Japanese pop music and video game soundtracks from his Ipod. All of the sudden, he mentioned something about required listening and everything changed. The following songs came up in order: “Doesn't Matter” by Janet Jackson, “Changes” by Tupac, and some unidentifiable 90's pop song. The Japanese pop music soon resumed, but the state of shock I was in was indescribable.

Pro Tour Amsterdam:

- After being no sirred by all of his attempts to reason with the front desk, Kyle Boggemes somehow managed to stay the entire trip in the same hostel as us without paying the establishment.

- Matt Marr may have experienced the worst beat of the year. After starting 4-1 in the constructed portion, he stepped outside with about half an hour in the round. He noted a group of people he had seen around to watch for when seatings were up and sat down. The only issue was the people he was watching were not in the Pro Tour. When he finally realized what was going on, he rushed in to find he had missed the first pick of his draft and would not be able to participate. This resulted in a forced 0-3 and him missing day two when a win would lock him in.

- After the WotC sponsored party, a mass of players descended up Amsterdam in various states of sobriety to find a specific bar. I initially was going to take the lame route and go home, but was inspired by another sober member's plan of “Following the leader until he passes out”. This was immediately followed by the person leading the group collapsing backwards into a cluster of bushes. Fortunately, a group of followers pulled him up for an immediate recovery and we were on our way. By the end of the night a threat to push someone in the river was realistically countered by “I will pull you in too and you can't swim”, I had someone holding onto my backpack so that they could walk, and a Pro Tour champion declined a pool of $200 to run the hooks when he realized “If you guys pay me to do this, that also makes me a prostitute”.

- Around noon on Sunday of the top 8, I witnessed Pro Tour Vomit number two on the year during varous tourist activities. The only response of the near by natives? “Welcome to Amsterdam!”.

Grand Prix Portland:

- I'm always a fan of the anemic beats, so I have to give this a shout out. The night before the event, I witnessed Alex West delivering a Goblin beatdown in M11 draft. He easily 3-0'ed a draft, with reasonable decks falling to pings from a Balloon Brigade and Goblin Pikers in Tunnels. This may have been the most amusing deck of the year, and based on his opponent's faces was easily up there on the tilt value scale.

Grand Prix Toronto:

- While I stayed to finish up a draft that had taken over twenty four hours to complete due to the site closing Saturday night, the people I drove with left me with another ride home despite the fact one of them was also in the same draft. Karma struck them hard, and they were detained at the border and arrived home after I did. Apparently Chinese citizens need to take their green card when they leave the country. The one mise they got was that the border guards were so preoccupied with this that they failed to notice another person's passport was expired, something that individual only noticed after they got home.

Grand Prix Nashville:

- Kai “Kmaster” Ruan managed to sleep for 18 of the 20 hours we spent driving to and from the event. The other two hours were spent on homework. He also slept at least 9 hours a night and often between rounds. I'm not sure how this was possible.

With respect to actually playing Magic, I've learned a few very important things.

  1. Testing should consist of figuring out technical play as well as card choices. Having the perfect 75 is great, but so is figuring out things like whether to attack their mana guys or not and what cards a match up actually revolves around. Also, consider what the real issue is before binning a deck that's losing. The best example of this was how I discarded Jund for having mana issues before Pro Tour San Diego, rather than just adding a land or two. Sometimes it's not something that can be fixed, but often times there's an answer.
  2. Having a plan while drafting is better than just taking the best cards. Even if it means passing an objectively better card sometimes, this means your deck can play for a specific game plan. Often times people draft decks with cards that conflict with each other to the point that one is devalued or blanked if you have the other. Ideally the opposite should be true.
  3. Learning to notice mistakes is really important, but just as important is learning to rebound from mistakes and keep looking to win. This includes moving on from busted events to take down the next one.

Next year boots up almost immediately for me, with a couple semi-local Extended PTQs followed by Grand Prix Atlanta. For those of you looking at the format, you better have a good reason to not run Thoughtseize or Cryptic Command, and possibly a reason to not run both.

I'll leave you with one of my best stories from my first year on the tour.

The event was Pro Tour Honolulu, where I had just finished going 1-5 drop on day one. Day two rolls around and I'm still tilting and sick of Magic after a couple drafts. A couple members of the house I was staying in suggested that we head out to a specific beach and despite not being dressed for the ocean I agreed.

The one thing that made this beach stand out were the waves. They weren't massive as the weather was calm, but I was told they meant it. Being from Michigan, I assumed this was just people being stupid. I birded some people get leveled by the waves before deciding to head in myself. At first I stayed fairly shallow, but I ended up slowly moving further out.

I'm not sure whether it was a stronger wave, a misstep into bad footing, or just being a bit too far out that did it, but I fell over and got pulled by the strong riptide. I managed to stay in place, but the next waves kept knocked me down and did the same thing. My choice of baggy cargo pants turned out to be a poor one as they filled with sand, pulling more with each successive tide. I finally broke free and pushed back to the shallows, but there was one problem. The only reason I was able to make my way back was the removal of any extra weight.

And that's how I ended up naked on a public beach in Hawaii.

Sell your cards and minis 25% credit bonus