Hey there! Last week, I wrote some more about Return to Ravnica Limited, and between then and now, I’ve had the opportunity to play a lot more. As I write this, I’m sitting in a Boeing 737 somewhere over Northern California on my way to Seattle for the Pro Tour. I left for the U.S. on Thursday, and during the past four days, I’ve done close to twenty Return to Ravnica Drafts, and learned a lot. I also was able to play in the first Team Limited Grand Prix in many, many years. The GP was quite the experience, and today, I’ll be bringing you some of the highlights from the weekend.

As I mentioned, we made it to California late Thursday evening, after spending thirteen hours in the air. We didn’t get much else done that evening, and we went straight to bed after arriving at the hotel. Our third teammate had arrived a couple of days earlier, and he was in full swing playing a Team Draft in the lobby when we arrived. Our plan was to get in as many Drafts as possible during Friday and also find time to do a practice Sealed with some opponents. We found some good opponents in Brad Nelson and Glenn Jones on Friday morning. It’s always nice when you are able to find quality opponents, especially when you are looking to practice for an upcoming event and want to play against the best opponents possible. Later that day, with were able to do just that, as LSV, PV, and Cheon were looking for Draft opponents. We managed to squeak out a win in that one even though we were outclassed by a magnitude when it comes to skill. The rares opened were quite something, as you can see from this picture.

It was getting quite late, as we had done three Team Drafts, and each one took two or three hours, so it was pretty hard to find anyone with enough energy to play some Team Sealed. We stumbled into the Marriot lobby and managed to find Andreas Nordahl and Sveinung Bjørnerud from Norway. They had opened a practice Sealed Pool earlier and agreed to play some games against us. We ended up putting together a Rakdos deck, an Azorius deck, and a Selesnya deck that splashed black. The Azorius deck featured two Archon of the Triumvirate, Supreme Verdict, and Righteous Authority as the rares. The Selesnya deck had Trostani, Selesnya's Voice, Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage, Korozda Guildmage, and some decent token support. The Rakdos deck had Carnival Hellsteed as the only good rare, but it did feature eight removal spells, so it had a lot going for it. The only good rare we didn’t play was Hypersonic Dragon, as the Azorius deck was already so filled with playables, and the Rakdos deck couldn’t afford to splash blue due to its aggressive nature. We only ended up playing a couple of games with the Azorius and Rakdos decks, but we came to the conclusion that the Sealed pool was very good and we would be glad to open a similar one the following day.

Filled to the Brim

We had two byes, thanks to my Gold Level, which meant we had to go 7–2 the first day. However, as making top two was the real goal, we were not even sure if having two losses would mean you were eliminated from that. The Sealed pool we received was very strong, with only one of the twelve rares being bad (Guild Feud), and we even had a foil rare to make up for that. We had some insane bombs in blue and red, with Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius, Cyclonic Rift, Mercurial Chemister, Sphinx of the Chimes, and Chaos Imps. Our other rares were Ash Zealot, Righteous Authority, Martial Law, Chromatic Lantern, Growing Ranks, Desecration Demon, and Corpsejack Menace. Izzet and Rakdos were quite clearly choices from the start, but the third deck caused some headaches. We first tried a Selesnya deck splashing blue for Cyclonic Rift and Righteous Authority, but we ended up switching things around since the green cards were actually not all that good. The straight-up Azorius deck was better even though it was the weakest of our three decks. Here is the deck I played.

"Izzet Control"

• Creatures (14)
• 1 Frostburn Weird
• 1 Guttersnipe
• 1 Lobber Crew
• 1 Mercurial Chemister
• 1 Sphinx of the Chimes
• 2 Izzet Staticaster
• 2 Voidwielder
• 4 Goblin Electromancer
• 1 Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius

• Spells (9)
• 1 Syncopate
• 1 Thoughtflare
• 2 Street Spasm
• 3 Inspiration
• 1 Civic Saber
• 1 Izzet Keyrune

• Lands (17)
• 7 Mountain
• 8 Island
• 2 Izzet Guildgate

Buy This Deck

Now, it’s not very often you get to play a deck this sweet, with a full set of Goblin Electromancers to go along with all the instants and sorceries. All you value lovers out there are probably very envious right now of those three Inspirations and that Thoughtflare, not to mention the three rares. Not getting to draw a boatload of extra cards with this deck was practically impossible. In one practice game, I went real deep and drew sixteen cards with Sphinx of the Chimes during one turn.

One Round at a Time

My deck had seemed good, and I was perhaps a bit blinded by the rares and overall quality of cards. The main problems were that the deck actually didn’t have a lot of removal except for the Street Spasms and Izzet Staticasters. Any kind of flyer my opponent played was causing me problems, especially since my clock was often very slow, which meant I could not really try to race. The fact that many of the bombs in the format are huge, flying creatures meant my deck was actually not all that good. If my opponent just played small creatures, things were fine, as I could take them out quite easily. We might have made a mistake while building our decks, as we put our one Annihilating Fire in the Rakdos deck that already had a fair amount of removal. We should probably have put it in the Izzet deck since it would at least have helped out a bit with problematic flyers. All the matches I lost felt really close, and many times, my draws were awkward in some way or the other. With all the card-drawing this deck provided, it was annoying to be flooded after playing three Inspirations.

Three Strikes and Out

I’m also really looking forward to Grand Prix: Utrecht in March. I hope they make some adjustments to how team tournaments work, as there will probably be more teams present, and I don’t really look forward to playing thirteen rounds Day 1. The only thing that remains for me now is to actually decide whom I am playing with—not an easy task.

On Sunday, we did some testing for the Pro Tour and then went to the site to look for some Drafts. I teamed up with Andreas Nordahl and Jussi Tuurinkoski (whom I played in the Grand Prix with), and we did a Team Draft against Williams, Sperling, and Rietzl. We won very easily, mainly because they had suddenly made the top two, and double-queuing was not an option this time. I suppose Rietzl would have been fine with that, though.

Next Stop: Seattle

As always, if you have any questions or comments, be sure to voice your opinion either through Twitter or via the comments section below. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to check the comments section of my articles while traveling, but I’ll try my best to answer any questions once I return home. Next week, I’ll be bringing you a tournament report from Seattle, which I hope ends with me winning the PT.

Thanks for reading,

Max

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Maxx on Magic Online

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