Personal Dork Assistant

Reporting In

No big pre-release tournaments for Eighth Edition, instead individual stores hold sealed deck tourneys with some WotC prize support. Went out to a little store in Pacific Beach for a chance to play a sealed tournament and the foil Rukh Egg. I'll take the old art over the new one any day, but the foil sure makes it look pretty. WotC sure didn't expect much of a turnout, though, since they only sent twenty foil cards in the prize package. Well, they weren't far off, as there were 24 people playing, which still meant that one would need two match wins in the five-round swiss to guarantee a rukh.

Had some really nice cards in all the colors, which actually made deckbuilding difficult. Lots of creature-kill in black (with a foil Bog Wraith and a Fear for evasion), all fliers in blue (plus two Flight enchantments), two mountainwalkers in red (plus Panic Attack and Enrage as finishers), tons of healing tricks in white, and solid beef in green. Ended up playing black/red two-color because I saw everyone take mountains, and the mountainwalkers could be huge.

Ended up losing the first round in three games, though, as my smaller red creatures couldn't hold up against his green beef in a longer game, and my black creature kill couldn't do anything to his black creatures, especially the Drudge Skeleton as a blocker, and two flying Imps which ate me up. Was actually racing him in damage in one of the games, when I played my Wall of Stone as a tough 0/8 blocker, but then he Sever Soul-ed my wall to kill it and gain eight life from its toughness. Couldn't outrace that.

Oh well, coming up the bottom of the Swiss has been a decent strategy for me in the past, and it worked for me here. Raced through three scrubs (casual players, if you want to be poltically correct about it) with mountain/swamp-walkers and some proper application of Fear. Enrage is basically a Fireball when combined the unblockable guys, and Panic Attack also finished off a few games by keeping their blockers out of the way.

So I was 3-1 going into the last round. Got paired up to the lone 4-0 player, who was a guy only a few rating points short of qualifying for the Pro Tour. Personally, I think it was insane for him to risk it at a chickenshit tourney like this. With such a weak field, each match win for him would only barely be worth one or two rating points, while a loss would be a seven or eight point loss for him. There's a little bit too much luck involved with the cards you're dealt at sealed deck. At least with booster drafts there's skill inolved in your card pool. Anyway, that wasn't a problem for him here, as he got a little of the old school Necro flavor going with Coercion, Abyssal Specter, and Phyrexian Arena. Couldn't kill the spectre with my black creature-kill spells, so he was drawing two cards a turn (and paying one life, BFD) while I was netting zero cards and taking two damage a turn. Not surprisingly, I didn't last long. Second game didn't go much better as I was due for the daily mana screw. Got two lands my opening draw and didn't draw more, but he was being mana-flooded, albeit with only one Swamp. Took some initial damage, but I was drew some land and finally stabilized the board. Of course, just then he rips Blaze off the top of his deck and burns me out with all the land he had conveniently built up. Wouldn't have mattered too much anyway since I was still way behind and he had the Phyrexian Arena in hand for the card advantage if he hadn't drawn the finisher right then.

So it was just bad luck that paired me up vs. the 4-0 player rather than against another 3-1 player, right? Turned out it wasn't all bad, since playing the undefeated player improved my cumulative opponent match win percentage, which was the first tiebreaker. The store guy tossed in some limited edition foil cards as prizes for the top eight finishers. My improved tiebreakers put me into a tie for the last prizewinning spot. The second tiebreaker is my game-winning percentage, and those were good enough for me (thanks to the easy 2-0 wins in the middle rounds) to put me into eighth. Losing in the very first round had hurt my opponents' match-win percentage, since they all already had at least one loss when they played me, and likely another loss after our match, so I needed the help in the last round. Anyway, it got me an extra foiled Creeping Mold out of the deal. Also traded the City of Brass I pulled out of my 8E packs to a kid for his 8E foil Swamp (black-bordered, too) and Diabolic Tutor (only an 8E white-bordered uncommon, but a useful card reprinted from a set I don't own). He probably got more out of the deal in terms of pure $ value, but then I already have two sets of City of Brass, and the foil lands sure are pretty.