The Philly 5K Post-Game

Post game reports for this tournament have been out for some time, so I'm sure those of you who have read the standings know that Jund decks rocked the house, and now it's the deck that everyone is trying to beat. As such I won't blather on about that, but instead talk about some of the things we learned as a group.

Personally I learned two things from this tournament, one from direct experience and one from talking to players.

The first is that White Weenie is not very good anymore. For those of you who don't know Magic, White Weenie is what I would describe as a sub-archetype. As I detailed two posts ago, there are the grand archetypes of aggro, combo, control, and mid-range. Beneath those are these sub-archetypes, basically much more specific ways to construct your deck.

White Weenie decks are a type of aggro deck known for swarming the opposition and making its creatures bigger through the use of (well, since it's still baseball season) steroid-like-spells known as “pumps”. While the individual creatures are not very scary, when a lot of them start running around, things get wild.

In the previous meta-game White Weenie decks were awesome (hell, I played one for two years), and everyone who enjoys them was very excited by the advent of Soldiers becoming a prevalent creature type in the newest sets. Unfortunately they are just not good enough to stand up to Jund.

The second lesson I learned, from talking to several players at the event, is that I definitely do not want to play Jund. Yes, it is the best deck in format, but the mirror match (when two players with the same deck face each other) sounds like a clash of idiot-savants, not any type of skill or mental struggle. The game basically comes down to who can play better spells either first or more often. As far as I'm concerned, that's a whole lot of yawn.

Our team also learned something useful for all of you fans of the new Vampire deck.
Teammate Raja was playing a match with his build of Bella-Swan-Beatdown and had a copy of Vampire Nocturnus on the board (or the battlefield as they call it now). When the card is in play, you reveal the top card of your library (deck) and depending on what it is, your creatures get bonuses.

Now playing with the top card of your library revealed is very unusual, and it led Raja to make an unusual mistake. Instead of drawing the flipped over card and flipping over the next card in his library, he drew two cards. In major tournaments, this is an immediate game loss. Raja was so flabbergasted by his mistake, that he couldn't gather himself in time to argue with the judge about why he had drawn the two cards.

So, all of you Twilight lovers out there, remember that when you have a Nocturnus in play. You'll want to draw two cards because it's weird to have the top card of your deck flipped up...but don't do it.

And the last lesson our team learned is really more for all of you new players out there. I think everyone has this misconception that high level tournaments are populated with only good players running only the best decks. Certainly that is true of events that are so high you have to qualify for them or be invited (like a Pro Tour or Worlds), but most other events allow any player to compete. And, as Kyle learned for the first time, bad players will bring bad decks, and somehow they will still beat you.

Luck and chance are big factors in Magic, so even if you are a much better player with a much better deck, you can easily lose to a total newb who has no idea what he's doing. A singular match or even event is not necessarily a good indication of how good a player is or how good a deck is. It's over the course of many events that it is revealed how good a player really is.

Anyway, with all of these lessons under our collective belt (new for some, old for others), we return to New York City where we will be continuing to compete in local events and hone our skills for whatever the next big tournament is.


Upcoming: New York, the Local Scene

Check us out at: http://sites.google.com/site/teamdamageonthestack