A New Voice: Introducing Anthony Conta

5:15 AM: I close the door quietly as I stumble into my
apartment, half drunk-I would hate to disrupt my neighbors
with my ubiquitous slamming door this early in the morning. Or
my roommate for that matter. After drinking this much, I guess
I should go to bed-I’ve got a tournament tomorrow to win...

5:45 AM: My alarm rings, and I barely remember my head hitting
the pillow-it’s time to travel to Binghamton to take that
Black Lotus as a prize. A part of me wonders if Dunkin Donuts
carries enough coffee for me to get through this day as I
proceed to the shower, ready to kill myself.

Yes, this is how I normally go to tournaments. Well, legacy
tournaments at least-for all my other tournaments, I usually
get at least four hours of sleep. See, being a Magic player is
really hard-you end up killing your day and night when you go
to a big event because you go with a bunch of friends and
usually have to travel to get there. By the time you get home,
it’s 1:00 AM and a bit too late to pregame. The only way to
“salvage” a weekend (and by that I mean hang out with more
than just 99% guys and an odor you can’t really get off you
until the next day) is to party the night before a tournament,
as most of these events are on Saturdays. It’s almost become a
ritual for me.

So why do we do it? Why do we subject ourselves to the pain of
the hangover, dehydration, and sunlight? It’s because we have
a passion for competition and the game; we love to wake up in
the morning and feel that anticipation of winning, that maybe
we’ll be the ones at the top tables, envy of all those around
us, playing for some of the most coveted cards in Magic. It
isn’t just about the cards, it’s about proving to ourselves
and our peers that we have the talent, intelligence, and the
ability to WIN the cards through honest competition and skill.
If it were just about owning the cards, we could have bought
them years ago-that’s not why we compete.

But I’m not here to tell you why we do this; I’m here to give
a tournament report. So, I recently went to Binghamton to
participate in the 5th annual MTG The Source Tournament hosted
by Jupiter Games (perhaps the best card store that does or has
ever existed). The top prizes were allocated via a prize pool
based on tournament standings to the top 16 players, and in
that pool besides various fetch lands, black bordered (read:
prestigious and pimplicious) dual lands, and powerful cards
were one copy of the Power Nine (except Timetwister, but
that’s the worst one).

A brief aside: for those of you who don’t play Magic, the
Power Nine are, you guessed it, the most prestigious,
illusive, rare, and powerful cards in the existence of the
game-they are SO powerful that they are in fact only allowed
in one format of competitive play. As such, they are also the
nine most expensive cards in the game. Outside of the older
format circuit, you won’t come across them at all-just seeing
one is quite rare. Owning one…well, forget about it.

So the prizes for this tournament? If you finished in the top
eight players, you got one of these cards. The cheapest one is
worth about $350 dollars, depending on the condition of the
card. It’s no wonder why people want them; they want to sell
them. I think if I ever won a piece of power, I’d want to keep
it as a memento to the occasion.

So, did I in fact win a piece of “power” at the tournament
last week? No, I didn’t, but I came pretty close. Coming up in
my next post, I’ll tell you all about the tournament and how I
did…

by Anthony "Corta" Conta


Upcoming: The Source 5th Annual Anniversary Tournament

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

The Philly Open in Edison: Tournament Report

This tournament was supposed to be, and I guess is normally, held in Philly at the convention center, the same spot where we played the Star City 5K. Luckily for us, the convention center was booked, so they decided to hold the event in Edison, which is only a forty-five minute train ride from New York, as opposed to Philly which is two to three hours away.

I personally viewed this event as a precursor to States, which will be on December 5th. With so little time between events, it's likely that the decks we see at States will be the same or similar to the ones we saw at this one, in addition to any breakout decks from Worlds. Unfortunately, I still hadn't settled on a deck by the time this event came around, so despite all of my initial protest against the deck, I ended up playing Jund.

Jund is currently the best deck in format. It's strength comes from the amazing amount of card advantage it can generate. For non-Magic players, card advantage in its most basic instance would be drawing more cards than your opponent or alternately forcing your opponent to discard cards from their hand (which Jund does quite well). Another form of it is getting more mileage out of your cards. If you were at a Magic tournament, you would likely hear the term “2-for-1”. This refers to an instance when a player's 1 card is able to destroy his opponent's 2 cards, like a playing a single spell and killing two creatures, or playing a single spell and making your opponent discard two cards. Jund is a deck that constantly 2-for-1's (or better) its opposition. It is also a deck that takes very little (if any) skill to play, which is why I felt confident playing it without having tested with it very much.

Round 1:

I started off the tournament playing a mirror match, meaning I played against someone who was also playing a Jund deck. How effective you are in the Jund mirror is directly tied to how lucky you are. This round it favored my opponent, as I ended up stuck on few lands both games, and he ended up playing better cards than I did.

Round 2:
I ended up facing the guy I was sitting next to in the prior round. He knew that I was playing Jund, but I never got a chance to look at his deck. It ended up that he was playing the new Standard “Dredge” deck. “Dredge” has become an archetype name for decks that play creatures from their graveyard (or bin), where creatures normally go to die. When the deck isn't working, it doesn't actually look like it's doing anything other than putting cards into its bin, but when it is, it can put multiple (often a lethal number of) threats on the board all at once. Luckily for me, he never got to that, so I won handily.

Round 3:
I played a really nice guy who was running a deck he called “Indiana Jones”, which was a rogue deck based off running the trap cards found in the latest set. The deck wins by milling the opposition (forcing them to put all of the cards in their deck into their graveyard). But my constant stream of creatures and burn spells proved to be too much for him.

Round 4:
My opponent wasn't exactly verbose, which made me suspect that he was playing the mono-Green Eldrazi deck, a deck a friend of mine had joked about as being a deck for anti-social people since you never have to talk to your opponent to make understood what you are doing; you just keep attacking them. It turned out that he was playing Team America, one of the few control decks in Standard. Right now the format is extremely unfriendly toward control decks, but I had also had a lot of practice against the deck as two of my friends and teammates were running it. I beat him with a stream of discard spells, as it is hard for a control deck to do anything without a hand.

Round 5:
I got paired against a deck I couldn't actually beat. 5-Color-Cascade is an incredibly bad match up for Jund, as it basically does what Jund does only better. The only reason the deck hasn't taken off is that it is even slower than Jund and loses to any type of aggro deck. My opponent was a really cool guy though, and he gave me some pointers about how to handle the match up, which might come in handy in the future.

Round 6:
Another control pairing, which favored me pretty well. I easily won Game 1, but ended up getting rocked in the Game 2. My opponent said that his deck had about a 25% winning percentage against Jund in the first game, but it went up to 60% after he brought in his sideboard changes. He also commented that the 40% still got to him a lot, and sadly his deck didn't draw any lands. I beat him easily, but I was sorry he lost the way he did since he was a cool guy.

Round 7:
Being 4-2 I looked to stand a good chance of breaking into the Top 16, the prize cut-off for the tournament. And then I came up against Boros, which isn't exactly a favorably match up for Jund, especially when your opponent gets the “nuts” hand (Magic lingo for “awesome”). Game 1 he basically killed me before I could play a spell. Game 2 I managed to stabilize and get rid of his hand, but I was already at 6 life, and two top-decked (cards drawn directly off the top of his deck) burn spells easily finished me off.

Round 8:
Now, at 4-3 I was really only hoping to get out of the tournament with a winning record since I was out of contention for the Top 16 and any prizes. And then my opponent sat down across from me, and we both just laughed. I had met the guy briefly when he beat my friend Isabel in the Jund mirror in Round 4, so we both knew it was a mirror and basically a matter of luck. Unfortunately mine didn't hold up. I took the first game pretty handily, but after that he came storming back and just played better cards than I did. I ended the tournament at 4-4 and placed 46th overall out of 173 participants.

The rest of our team did respectably for themselves as well. Matt and Joe (a pseudo-teammate) represented their Team America decks very well with winning records, but were unable to break into the prize bracket. Kanvaly also did decently with a Bella Swan deck he borrowed from Kyle (or should I start calling the deck Team Edward now?) Derek played his own variant of Bella Swan, but started the tournament 0-2 and ended up dropping after that, though he was a good-sport and did stick around all day to support us.

Conta ended up being Team DOTS's representative in the Top 8 going 6-0-2 with his Boros deck, but unfortunately got eliminated in the first round facing Jund (which made up half the lists in the Top 8).

Now with two weeks to prepare for States, it's back to the proverbial drawing board, though I haven't decided whether I will choose to optimize my Jund deck or go for something completely John Cleese.

Anyway, I will be taking a brief break from my duties as blog-author and turn the reins over to Conta who will have tournament reports both for this event and for a Legacy tournament he played in up at Binghamton. In the meantime enjoy yourselves, have a Happy Thanksgiving, and you'll be hearing from me post-States.

New York, the Local Scene: An Introduction

Until about a year ago Neutral Ground was the leading gaming store in the New York area and the hub for all Magic players in Manhattan and arguably all of New York. However, after Neutral (as it was colloquially known) shut its doors in December of last year, the Magic community has become somewhat decentralized. Several stores in the boroughs have risen to prominence, like Kings Games in Brooklyn, but for us Manhattanites the new spot is Jim Hanley's Universe.

JHU or Hanley's is a comic book store located on 33rd between 5th and 6th that happens to have some space for hobby gamers to do their thing. The people who run the place are extremely nice, and the community there is great too. Not to speak ill of the dead, but these were areas at Neutral that weren't always particularly strong. However, the one great thing Neutral did provide that Hanley's can't was a massive gaming area where major events could be held. Hanley's doesn't have that kind of space, so now major events are held at a variety of locations like in the boroughs, or worse, New Jersey.

Hanley's holds Magic events three times a week: Standard and Drafting on Thursday, Drafting on Friday, and a sort of free play on Monday (which I've never attended). Our crew goes to the Thursday Standard events almost every week, and occasionally to the Friday Night Magic (FNM) Drafting. Local events for constructed are strange beasts in two regards:

1.)Most of the people playing in them aren't highly ranked and range from beginners and more casual players to avid competitors, which means that at a local event you can go 2-2 (or sometimes even 3-1), and if you're ranked highly, still lose points because your opponents are so badly ranked. For those of you who don't understand, ranking in Magic is based off your opposition. When you beat someone who's better than you, you get a lot of points. When you lose to someone worse than you, you lose a lot of points. So when everyone is lower ranked than you are, you can only gain points by going undefeated or maybe 3-1. As such very highly ranked players tend to shun local events in order to protect their ratings, which isn't as pretentious as it sounds, since high enough ratings can get you invites to and bye-rounds at major events.

2.)Local events tend to generate their own meta-games that don't necessarily reflect the meta-game you would find at a major event. People are much more likely to bring homemade decks instead of net-decks (lists taken off the internet) or try new things. I remember a couple of weeks ago everyone brought control decks that “should beat Jund and Boros” two of the major decks in the overall meta-game. However, at the local not many people were playing them, so all of these control decks just ended up playing each other.

I myself tend to be much stronger at major events than local events. I rarely managed a 3-1 or better at Neutral, and I think the highest I've managed at Hanley's is a 2-1, but most of the time I just end up 2-2.

Our teammate Raja, on the other hand, recently went 4-0 and is consistently good at the local events. His secret: masterful meta-gaming of the local. When I asked him once about some strange choices he was making with his Bella Swan deck, he told me, “Your choices would be right at a major event, but I'm trying to make a deck that wins here.”

So that's a brief introduction and rundown of the local events in New York. Luckily for me, there is a major event on Saturday out in Jersey, and States is shortly after that on December 5th. The prize payout for the upcoming event is not cash but rather foil sets (shiny cards that are worth roughly twice as much as normal cards) of some of the major rares in Standard right now, like Baneslayer Angel (worth $50 a piece non-foil), Lotus Cobra ($20ish), and fetch lands ($15ish). Unfortunately I don't really have a deck yet. Right now it's between Eldrazi Green, which busted out of Nashville at the last Star City 5K like the Alien through Kane's chest, or [gasp] Jund. Yeah I know I said I would never play it, but it is the best deck and format, and it takes virtually no skill to play, so lack of playtesting won't be an issue. But we'll see...

Finally, I'd like to take this time to give a shout out to our teammate Conta who placed 13th at a Legacy event with 170 contenders. He claims that he's going to write a tournament report on it, so hopefully I'll have that posted here for you soon.


Upcoming: Hopefully some news involving shiny Baneslayers...


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