I just got back from the Atlanta StarCityGames 5k and Unity Entertainment's Pro Tour Austin PTQ and I'm exhausted. I think it's great that we've been able to have MTG weekends again. It really takes full advantage of a weekend. StarCityGames did a GREAT job of running the first leg of the weekend event. Almost 400 people were in attendance, which made for a tough event. I'd love to see SCG eventually running "Grand Prix" caliber events, with Pro Points and everything. But we'll let the all powerful bureaucrats deal with that one though. With SCG giving out so much in prize money, it makes traveling to play magic much easier and exciting for the serious players.

Unity Entertainment ran a very good PTQ as the final part of the weekend, however they did choose a VERY small venue to host the location. They had around 230 in attendance for a 1 slot PTQ, which is HUGE. We were sitting literally rubbing elbows. It would be nice to have promoters utilize their power to upgrade or purchase Pro Tour slots at any time. It would've made for a more reasonable chance at winning the much heralded Austin slot or slots.

With that being said, it was a weekend of Standard gaming, and at this point in the Magic season you've probably figured out what the top 5 Standard deck lists are and what their weaknesses appear to be. The SCG 5K showed that there were no clear winner as best deck. In fact, the eventual winner wasn't even a deck you would think would carry home the trophy. And second place went to Combo Elves!!! I'm not really going to go into a lot with this topic, but I thought you should see the winning deck list:

Elves Combo

By Charles Schutt

Creatures

2 Burrenton Forge-tender

4 Devoted Druid

4 Elvish Visionary

4 Heritage Druid

4 Llanowar Elves

1 Mirror Entity

4 Nettle Sentinel

4 Ranger Of Eos

4 Regal Force

Spells

3 Commune With Nature

4 Manamorphose

4 Primal Command

Lands

4 Brushland

5 Forest

2 Mosswort Bridge

1 Reflecting Pool

2 Windbrisk Heights

4 Wooded Bastion

Sideboard:

2 Burrenton Forge-tender

4 Chameleon Colossus

3 Cloudthresher

2 Kitchen Finks

3 Guttural Response

1 Treetop Village

I watched several of the matches the pilot of this deck played and it was THE perfect scenario for him. In a sea of 5 Color Blood decks, B/W Tokens, Faeries and Mono Red his metagame choice was more about pairings than it was about having the silver bullet to all of the aforementioned decks. I watched him beat a 5 Color Blood Player and a Token player simply because they could not stop the throng of Elves from taking over. With main deck Forge-Tenders and several ways to get them it put a huge set of handcuffs onto the Blood and it was simply too fast for the Tokens.

Other matches that I saw had players making bad plays against the tiny green woodland creatures, which I guess is a determining factor of wins and losses, but it seemed a bit of a fortunate result for what I feel is a brittle deck. I don't want to take anything away from the achievement here, I'm basically saying he was Lucky (despite me not believing in Luck). Actually what I really want to say is that it is very tough to test a deck such as this. So many players are NOT combo-inclined so playtesting might equate to a waste of time as they can't give you the quality of play that one would need against or for this deck.

I decided to play the Faeries and ended with a 6 Win 3 Loss record placing me at 40th place. While I enjoyed playing the deck, it conked out on me several times making this a tough decision for me in the near future. Here is my list:

Creatures

4 Mistbind Clique

4 Scion of Oona

4 Spellstutter Sprite

Spells

2 Agony Warp

4 Bitterblossom

4 Broken Ambition

4 Cryptic Command

1 Jace Beleren

1 Oona's Grace

2 Ponder

1 Terror

4 Thoughtseize

Land

1 Faerie Conclave

6 Island

4 Mutavault

4 Secluded Glen

4 Sunken Ruin

2 Swamp

4 Underground River

Sideboard

2 Puppeteer Clique

2 Flashfreeze

2 Sower of Temptation

2 Snakeform

2 Deathmark

4 Peppersmoke

1 Soul Manipulation

Let me first say that Sower of Temptation NEVER works for me in a sense that he always dies. I get to grab a victim for 1 turn at the maximum. To me, Jace works ONLY in a control environment. Oona's Grace works better in the aggro environment because you can hold a land in hand with a Broken Ambition and decide which one to do at EOT or perhaps countering. I went with a couple of Ponders because I liked the idea of thinning searching for that ever elusive Turn 2 Bitterblossom. All in all, this version worked very well for me. The Puppeteers worked very well against the Green Decks.

I'm not going to go much into matchups as I think my losses were very non-typical for the deck. In the 9 rounds, I played Kithkin 1-0, 2 Swans 1-1, B/W Tokens 0-1, 3 Blood 2-1, 1 Faerie 1-0 and a Jund Ramp 1-0. Any questions, please feel free to jump onto the Forums or Message me directly.

Thanks for Reading!!!