Kinda-sorta OT for this thread (though I don't think there's a better place for it...) I cubed with Shamim and his playgroup at UCSD last night. I thought it might be fun to write another half ass tournament report.
It has been a long time since I've played against active competitive players, and that became pretty immediately apparent to me once the matches started. I drafted UB control with a couple pieces of artifact ramp, which I'm pretty certain was correct for the seat I was in. I just finished reading through the draft strategy thread a few days prior so I was eager to practice leaving myself open in a draft and looking for what colors are underdrafted. That part, at least, went well for me.
I found myself playing pretty glacially slowly in most of my matches (with the exception of round 3 vs Shamizy's monored). I'm just not good enough at control to play quickly when there are a sufficiently high number of lines of play and threats to worry about. Not good when you've got 6 other people in a draft waiting around for your match to finish. Anyhow... the matches were:
Round 1 against Abzan midrange
This opponent seemed like he may have been a bit newer. Still, he was a surprisingly good player and a super nice guy. Game one went pretty standard, I slowed down his plan, played Meloku (who is really gross with Shelldock, I realized...) and killed him. Game two was... pretty dumb. We got stuck in a really odd board stall for a long time where he had Athreos, a bunch of crappy guys, and a
warden of the first tree while I had one of his creatures mind controlled and a fist full of durdle and
tempo cards. I tried to fight through it for approximately one mortal age before finally seeing that he'd kill me in a couple of turns and scooping. We realized the entire rest of the room was waiting on us and I offered to high roll for the last win. DQ jokes ensued before my opponent told me to take the win.
Round 2 against UWR control-combo
I want to say my round 2 opponent was named Jerry? I met a bunch of new people last night though so I might be mixed up. He was on a pretty standard UWR control deck with a small infinite turns combo element via looped
Time Warp. Another really nice guy, and clearly a very skilled player. He was patient with me as I took the slowest turns in the world and used top and brainstorm wrong over and over. Highlights of the game were me stopping his time warp combo (I think I even used Daze to do it...) as well as his clutch burn killshot against me while I had the board dominated and he had two cards left in his library. The loss was my own fault, as I'd accidentally forgotten to leave blue up for the
damnation he knew was underneath my
Shelldock Isle and had taken four from
celestial colonnade a few turns back (I'd made the mistake of clarifying the timing rules out loud, and he immediately started playing around it for the next like 15 turns. I'd hoped he'd miss the mana mistake, but he was very on top of the entire game state for the duration of our match). After game one, again I realized that we'd spent something close to an hour on one game, so I told him to just take the win and run.
Round 3 against Shamizy's monored
Game one Shamim played LD spells and wastelands.
Game two Shamim didn't do anything on turn one or turn two, and then I used mana rocks to cast
Myr Battlesphere
Game three we had a hilarious fight over a
Young Pyromancer which involved me mind controlling it, him untapping and trying to
red sun's zenith it for x=1, me casting
Daze into his three open red mana because a 1/1 guy was worth more than a daze. I did cool shit with a
coalition relic to cast
engineered explosives set to 4 for his
Hero of Oxid Ridge before realizing it left me one mana shy of the activation cost for explosives and promptly dying.
1-2 on the night with a few lessons learned (I'm not good enough to play control under a time limit, shelldock+meloku is gross), and a fun time had! Thanks again to Shamizy for letting me join him and his crew!
. There are also fringe interesting interactions since it's just straight damage. I can't imagine ever cutting it.
