Explorer’s Scope: Lessons from the Pro Tour

Round 1: Goblins vs. GWB

I lost the die roll and mulliganed a no land hand into a four land hand with Eternal Dragon and Krosan Tusker. Decision point. This being the first round I had no replays to watch. This hand is sub-mediocre but not awful. I have *something* to do on Turns 2 and 3 even if I don’t have anything to put on the board, and a reanimation spell could make it pretty spicy. Alas, against an Aggro deck I need something immediately or I’m done for. As it turns out I drew three lands and then a Solemn Simulacrum, followed by another land when Solemn trades and cantrips, and then Mind Twist on the turn I was going to die. Sometimes late isn’t better than never.

No worries, I have some good anti-goblin tools in the sideboard. I bring in my Red hate and shuffle up. I see four lands Genesis, Dryad Sophisticate, and Putrefy. A two-drop and removal should help stem the tide of little Green men until I can drop the big butted incarnation. As it turns out, my dryad traded with a cycled Gempalm Incinerator, and Putrefy caught his Boggart Ram-Gang, but a Turn 1 Tattermunge Maniac was quickly becoming problematic. Fortunately Genesis came down just in time to keep me from dropping below 10. Things looked all right until Goblin Ringleader drew into a Goblin Warchief and Goblin Matron. I couldn’t find a wrath and got run over.

C’est La Vie. These things happen against Goblins. I got up to run to the commode, and sat back down to see my Round 2 opponent waiting for me. It was none other than our own ChrisKool. Now this was bad in two ways, it always is a bummer to play someone you know in a tourney (though the 100CS world is small enough that I “know” many of the devotees after only a couple of months) but worse, it meant the Chris had also bombed out in Round 1.

Round 2: Zoo vs. GWB

Game 1:

MTGO lost this replay, but I got pretty thoroughly rolled by Chris’s Zoo deck as he was able to put enough pressure on early that my Juzam Djinn eventually put me low enough to alpha strike. It is starting to look grim for our hero.

Game 2:

This was a brief but interesting game, and fraught with play errors on my part.

I had a solid start with three lands in all colors and Survival of the Fittest, some reanimation, and Tidehollow Sculler. I led with Sculler, wanting to clear out any awkward enchantment removal that could have easily nerfed my hand, but ended up taking Elspeth after seeing no creature or enchantment removal.

On Turn 3 I played out my Survival and was all set to go get Woodfall Primus, but got conservative and fetched out Eternal Witness. This ultimately ended up costing me the game as Chris wasted no time in Lightning Helixing my Sculler, a move which grew his easy to seal with 2/3 Goyf into a 5/6 monster. I also allowed him to promptly play the freed Elspeth and drop me from 18 to 7 in one attack, thanks to a flying Tarmogoyf and his one and two power pals. Suddenly I did not have the time or mana to get Primus in the yard to reanimate (and kill Elspeth).

I had to stem the bleeding by using Survival for my Shriekmaw, which I evoked to kill the Goyf and give myself a chance to topdeck another creature. Unfortunately, Chris added another creature, which meant I was once again facing lethal unless I could gain life *and* block a flyer. I did indeed draw another creature and now had the mana to dump exalted angel in the yard… but rather than wait for combat I used my makeshift mannequin main phase and Chris killed it with Elspeth’s second ability. Frown town.

Not my finest hour, but this sequence highlights just how tight you have to play, how lucky you need to be, overall and just how amazing winning 17 straight matches is against any competition much less pro tour competition. I should probably have mulliganed more aggressively in the first match, but I believe those were the only decisions I regret in that match, there just wasn’t anything I could have done to win those games with the cards I was dealt. In the second game vs. Chris a small decision cascaded into a blowout in just a couple of turns.

After dropping from the challenge I hopped into a ZZZ draft queue to prove my Magic machismo to myself. I slipped into WR Aggro like it was an old shoe and promptly 3-0′d the draft to at least finish the magical portion of my weekend on a high note.

Saturday: Running Good

Luis was picking up right where left off on Friday by defeating sure fire Hall of Famer Gabriel Nassif in order to stand alone as the only player remaining undefeated after the first round of day two.

I was running reasonably hot myself going 3-0 (before losing in the finale) in my online Worldwake prerelease queue. My pool was very average with few allies and little removal, though I did open an Eldrazi Monument. Never-the-less, I manage to finagle my way to the top table before succumbing to my finals opponent’s Black splash Blue deck that would have put the Vampires deck that LSV drafted to finish off day one to shame. It featured double Malakir Gatekeeper, as well as Malakir Bloodwitch and Abyssal Persecuter. As far as I could tell the Blue splash was just for some bounce for tempo and giving the Gatekeepers an assist in removing the Persecuter once the game was in hand.

Despite the “finals” loss I felt like I really squeezed the most I could out of the pool and wanted to jump in another one, but I was going to have to sell off some cards to get to the 30 Tix needed to play again, so I decided to run a 100CS 2-Man while I waited. 100CS is paying out Exodus packs which are currently selling for 4 Tix! This means you only need to win at a 50% clip to break even, and every percentage point beyond that is pure profit. This is one of the better deals online at the moment.

These videos come out of that match. I’ll preface them by saying that they are not live — my apologies. I am still getting a handle on Camtasia, and I felt like doing live videos might be more than I was up to for a first run. Once I get comfortable with the software I’ll go live. Unfortunately MTGO ate the first one so these are just Games 2 and 3. Be kind!

–Editors Note: In regards to game 3, the video was corrupted in transfer, we will try to get it up in a timely manner, sorry for the delay!–

I felt like I really scratched and clawed to keep myself in Game 2 and gave myself as many outs as I could to draw into a potential win. This is really the mind set that I strive to be in at all times, as Magic really epitomizes the concept of “luck” being the result of hard work converging with opportunity. I was able to capitalize on this in the second game when I had the good fortune of my opponent not playing his recruiter when it would likely have hurt me the most. This is the kind of thing that happens when I really focus on maximizing my plays, and it almost never seems to happen when I am playing fast and loose.

Friday: Preparation and Honest Assessments

I first checked on the PT in after Round 4 on Friday. I saw that while some of my rooting interests were already unlikely to make Day Two, LSV was sitting at 4-0. “Great” I thought to myself “now Jace will never be less than 50 Tix,” assuming of course that initialed one was piloting a Blue deck. Then I checked the feature matches and was shocked to see that Scott-Vargas had turned his back on the Blue Brahmin and was slinging Wild Nacatls and Cunning Sparkmages of all things.

This really impressed me, as even before reading his article this week (the first section in particular is a must read) I knew that some hard decisions must have gone into LSV opting to abandon counterspells and card drawing. Wanting to something to be good and wanting to play something good are all to often contradictory goals. Being able to honestly assess where a deck stands relative to its likely competition and make the changes that are needed (even if that means changing decks) can be a difficult, and sometimes gut wrenching experience. Not making the difficult decisions can lead to an 0-2 drop instead of a sustained run at success. This is as true in the Singleton world as anywhere else.

In my case I knew there were changes and improvements that I wanted to make to my deck. The deck shown in this article is betwixt and between a midrange deck and an Aggro deck. The only one-drop that can be construed as aggressive is the Loam Lion, yet I am still playing potentially punishing four drops like Iwamori and Juzam Djinn, both of whom are fine cards but are at their best when they can come in to finish the job, rather than try and start it themselves. I am also missing powerful synergistic pieces. For instance: Doomed Necromancer is a card I had intended to include. He shines as a reanimator that is worldly tutorable (not to mention fetchable via Survival), he also plays very nicely with Reveillark, but can be an early beater if necessary. Instead of this multifaceted cog, the list I entered in the Weekend Challenge has Fleshbag Marauder in its slot, a fine card but basically a silver bullet against a few strategies, almost the definition of a sideboard card in this format.

Why weren’t these (and many other changes made) changes made?

If I’m being honest the answer is a lack of commitment and inadequate preparation on my part. I’m not even talking about running endless 100Cs gauntlets, or grinding away in 2-mans to prepare myself. I mean simple things like setting “doing well in the Challenge” higher on my priority scale than hitting snooze that one extra time in morning. I did not prioritize this way, in fact I snoozed twice so that when I finally woke up (for the 8:00am PT start) I had no time to make the changes that I knew I should. But most of all the problems with this build are simply a reflection of my lack of reps with this format. I haven’t played it long enough make many profitable changes based on theory, let alone to put together a seamless deck.

You see, when it comes down to its 100CS deck design, testing is an inexact process — to say the least. In a 60 card deck, if you are testing a prospective card you can put in four, to ensure that you draw it regularly and can evaluate it within the context of a variety of game state, the nature of singleton makes this kind of testing rather tricky, so changes tend to be made and adhered to based limited hands-on experience until you reach a certain level of familiarity with the format. Until then all you can do is accept this reality and keep paying your dues.

Where to get a 100CS game?

This brings up the last topic I wanted to bring up. The best place to find a 100 Card Singleton game is in the Casual Room. It has not been widely adopted as a tournament format (yet!), so you only rarely see brave souls attempting to get a game going in the Tournament Practice Room. However, gaming in the Casual Room comes with some issues attached, since “Casual” means different things to different people. In general, without opening up the whole “what is Casual” debate, I would recommend setting up your matches as “best two out of three” rather than “single game” if you want to play against more competitive 100CS decks. Most “very Casual” gamers tend to stick to the single game matches so you can play your Mind Twists and Ravages of War without having to deal with people giving you grief about them. Besides, 100CS allows a sideboard for a reason — use it.

When you do play against someone who seems to have a competitive deck, and who is reasonably cordial I highly recommend that you “buddy” them. The 100CS community is small and growing, and this way you can quite quickly set up a network of people who have competitive decks, and if you do want to get some reps in against a certain type of deck you can message your buddy and get down to it!

Finally: get thee to the 2-man Queues! The 8-mans hardly ever fire, but there is often someone waiting in the 2-mans. As I already mentioned, you can double your Tix by winning just a one match and the decks are usually reasonably sound… if they aren’t, so much the better for your collection.

Next Time…

Worldwake is finally upon the online community, so I plan on zeroing the Explorer’s Scope in on the WWW and ZZW formats for the next few installments. I’ll be putting in my Singleton reps as well though, so that next time I focus in on 100CS I’ll hopefully have some interesting decks and potential innovations to share.