Life Outside PLT1

Brief FNM report

May 19, 2007 on 2:06 pm | In Magic | | DarkSentinel

Ok, this is at Jawyei’s request, a brief battle report for FNM 18 May, Future-Sight constructed.

There were two dissapointments about the ‘tournament’, firstly it was not sanctioned because it allowed Future Sight cards (admittedly I was one of two people to run a FS card - Magus of the Vineyard in my case) , and secondly only six people played, so there weren’t any exciting prizes either (if 8 people had played the winner would have received a FS and a random Kamigawa booster).

The last time I played was in January where I played a version of Dragonstorm without the fiendishly expensive dual lands and won my 4 games 2-0 each. This time I decided to run a slightly tweaked version of Wrath of Nature - somewhere, sometime there’ll be another article on this deck and my thoughts of it’s strengths and weakness (if I have enough time at the end of this brief thing I might even include it here, or I could go to lunch). Friday morning saw me groggy with not enough sleep, and several cards short, by 7 pm I had negotiated to borrow 2 Magus of the Vineyard and a Serrated Arrows and I had bought 2 Scryb Rangers, a Harmonize and a Pendelhaven from various slightly over-priced sources (total cost for those 4 cards: $11).

Decks played last night:
G - Wrath of Nature
UR - Land Destruction Vore
BW - control
B - discard rack
UG - Scryb Force control i-forget-the-name
G - Tron (had cards in it of a beaty nature)

With the exceptions of the two green decks they were all decks I’d seen before, played by those exact same people (for the record, I change decks every time I go). Notably a net-deck aggro, i.e. Gruul would have beaten pretty much everything except the WB control (which was heavy on Faith’s Fetters and the like).
For convenience (MY convenience, not as in ‘for you convenience all motorbike parking on Alfred Street will be relocated to Waiuku’) I will refer to the decks respectively as MGA, Vore, BW, Rack, UG, GTron.

Round One results:
1: Vore vs. MGA - 0:2
2: UG vs. GTron - 2:?
3: BW vs. Rack - 2:?
Comments about MGA game:
This is a bad matchup, for Vore. Scryb Ranger is a good counter to it (return land, flash, pro-U), sufficient mana acceleration meant no land screw and having cheap fatties and pump meant that at best Pyroclasm would hit an elf, a ranger and a forcemage (that sounds like a joke - ‘an elf, a ranger and a forcemage walk into a bar and…’ nvm) and then vore would get hit - hard. Vore did resolve in both games, but in the first game the damage race was in favour of MGA and in the second two 2/2 vores hit the table and died to a necessitated Pyroclasm.

Round Two results:
1: MGA vs. UG - 2:1
2: BW vs. GTron - ?:2 (or might have been 0:1)
3: Vore vs. Rack - 2:1
Comments:
Control-aggro hybrids are a really bad matchup. Against aggro MGA can win through higher clocks, and against control it has all sorts of nifty features which are the cornerstone of the deck. the UG hybrid was a hard match-up, since it can counter key cards (but isn’t really worth mulliganing to get the Leylines), drop fat creatures and untap mana producers and blockers for Timbermare using Scryb Ranger. First game saw UG mull to 4 and then die. Second game saw MGA keep a 4 land hand with Elves and a Forcemage and drop a Leyline, followed bydrawing a large amount of land and facing 2 Giant Solifuges swinging from the UG side of the table. Third game saw UG do lots of stuff with Scryb Rangers and saw lots of trading with Forcemage’d Timbermares against Spectral Force, Scryb Ranger for Scryb Ranger etc… UG should have won this, with slightly more strategical use of its 2 Scrybs.

Round Three results:
1: MGA vs. GTron - 2:0
2: BW vs. Vore - 2:1 (I think)
3: Rack vs. UG - 2:?
Comments:
Not really sure what the GTron deck does except play Squall Line for lots. And drop some annoying creatures including Scryb Rangers enchanted with Verdant Force. A lack of good top-deck (i.e. anything but lands) saw MGA get beaten down to 2 life before drawing Groundbreaker for the win. Game 2 was over in 6 turns or so, although Ghost Quarter targetting Urza’s Mine actually gave GTron the Forest it needed to activate the green Totem, which met Krosan Grip.

Final standings (P/W/D):
MGA: 3/3/0
BW: 3/2/0
Vore: 3/1/0
GTron: 3/1/0
UG: 3/1/0
Rack: 3/1/0
(Possibly 3 and 4 were switched - not sure how Vore made it that high when it’s win was vs. the 6th place, and GTrons was vs. the 2nd place, and both went 0:2 to the 1st place deck).

Prize for first was 2 foil Basking Rootwalla. I’m off to go eat now, will analyse MGA later.