I Have No Standards

So yesterday I played Standard for the first time in a long time. It was a fun experience. I mean, it didn’t go well, and I’m not sure I’d be eager to take it on in the future, but, still, it was a fun time.

I found out about the tournament last Wednesday, when Nam posted it on the Northeast Ohio Gaming forums. By Friday, I had a deck to play, Adam Budweg’s UB Faeries:

4x Cloud Sprite
4x Nightshade Stinger
4x Spellstutter Sprite
4x Oona’s Prowler
4x Scion of Oona
2x Mistbind Clique
2x Sower of Temptation
1x Loxodon Warhammer
4x Faerie Trickery
4x Familiar’s Ruse
4x Secluded Glen
2x River of Tears
Xx Islands
Xx Swamps

Sideboard
4x Pithing Needle
2x Sower of Temptation
2x Mistbind Clique
3x Extirpate

And, uh, some other cards. I’ll probably get that updated later. Maybe. I’m sure there were some other things in there. Cards seem good in a Magic deck, you know? Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s required that there be at least 60 cards in the maindeck and 15 cards in the sideboard.

Anyway, I really liked the look of the deck. In fact, I still do. I’m about three drinks away from trying to put that together in Vintage. Okay, four drinks.

Nam told me that Budweg told him that it’s more of a tempo deck than Josh Silvestri’s list, which can be found here. That sounds about right. Most of that tempo seems to come from the hands you start out with, though. I mean, there were a lot of games where I just had to play beatdown and hope to draw into something useful.

Maybe.

I could actually just be really bad.

I did have to be told after the tournament that Pithing Needle comes in against decks running Desert because Desert kills this deck. That little tidbit I learned myself.

Right.

So the tournament was at a new store in Shelby, Ohio called Realm Comics. It was a pretty okay store housed in half of the bottom half of a Masonic Temple. There was bolted door that I assume went either to the vault of jewels and dead bodies or to the parking lot. Shelby is in the middle of nowhere, but is surprisingly conveniently located between Toledo, Cleveland, and Columbus. Plus it’s not excruciatingly far off of I-71. Basically the one complaint I heard about the venue was that the tables were really dirty, and they were.

Oh, well, the other problem people had was that the three guys running the store played in their own tournament. One of them even split top-two, an Ancestral Recall and a box of Lorwyn boosters. How good for him. And the store, since they can have a tournament for it next month too.

Anyway, thirty-one people showed up to play. Pretty good.

Round 1 – Josh – MBC

Who am I kidding? I played against Elfman, and was extremely disappointed to find out he wasn’t playing Elves. He seemed cool though, and I’m glad to have met him, though I was upset that he didn’t want to roll two six-sided dice, add them, multiply by another sixer, then subtract a twenty-sider, looking for the lower result. Oh well.

Game one opened with me playing some lands and Oona’s Prowler, while he raped my hand with two or three Skull Augurs. After being hit by Standard’s version of Hymn to Tourach, my hand was none too hot, so Elfman was able to stabilize with Graveborn Muse followed by Korlash the Magnificent and killing my Prowler with Tendrils of Corruption to gain six life. Pretty good. I was holding Psi-Blast in hand but he only went down to six from the Muse before he attacked for lethal.

I had Oona’s Prowler again and Scion of Oona to start game two, but he 2-for-1’d me when I tried to make a Mistbind Clique during his upkeep. I thought things were still going okay for me when I countered his first Korlash and had a Sower for his second, but he had removal for my Scion then the Sower. Liliana Vess kept my hand-size down and then I died.

Yep, pretty bad. He ended the second game at 24 life. I told him afterward that I was disappointed that he didn’t go on to win the tournament after beating me in the first round. I was half kidding.

Round 2 – Caleb – MUC

I’m pretty sure Caleb was playing Counterspell.dec. It seemed pretty neat, and, as he pointed out, it really didn’t do anything but draw cards and counter things.

Game one was going great as I had Cloud Sprite then Oona’s Prower to beat down and he, umm, drew some cards and countered some things. Things looked bleak when he transmuted Tolaria West for Desert, but I topdecked Scion of Oona like a champ and won the game anyway. Scion of Oona was definitely a card I wanted to see more of every game.

The second and third games were surprisingly similar, so I think I’ll just combine them into one paragraph with double the stakes. I play some little beater guys; he plays Guile and smashes my face. The difference is that in game two he played Teferi, and in game three, I Extirpated Teferi and Razormane Masticore. In neither case was it particularly close. Well, I guess in game two I knocked him down to one life before he won. Whatever.

Round 3 – Randal – Vintage

When I played against the third person I knew, I decided that was it for me.

“Randal, you want to just play Vintage for this instead?”

“Sure, I don’t care.”

“Me either!”

So we played two Vintage matches in the time everyone else took to play one Standard match, if that tells you anything. Randal was testing his new WBG Gaddock Teeg list:

4x Dark Confidant
3x Jotun Grunt
3x Gaddock Teeg
3x Aven Mindcensor
4x Glowrider
4x Tarmogoyf
1x Kataki, War's Wage
4x Thorn of Amethyst
4x Duress
3x Swords to Plowshares
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Vamp. Tutor
1x Regrowth
1x Mox Jet
1x Mox Emerald
1x Mox Pearl
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Rudy
1x Black Lotus

4x Mishra's Factory
1x Bloodstained Mire
1x Polluted Delta
1x Windswept Heath
2x Bayou
2x Scrubland
1x Forest
1x Plains
1x Swamp
4x Waste

SB
4x Leyline of the Void
3x Disenchant
3x Engineered Plague
2x Sword of fire and Ice
1x Yawgmoth's Will
1x Gaddock Teeg
1x Balance

It’s a pretty good list, I think. I think it needs a couple more Duress effects, though, or something else that lets it interact a little bit more on turn one. Especially since that’s when he lost two games against Belcher. There are lots of good plays to make against Belcher in that deck (not the least of which is Gaddock “Your Win Conditions All Cost 4” Teeg), but most of them are two drops, which means Belcher gets three free turns on the play.

Against TranStax, Gaddock Teeg went 1-2 again, losing to a crazy draw with Ancestral that ended with Tinker for Sundering Titan and the win and scooping to a board filled with artifact hate. I think he should have waited that game out, though.

He did, however, go 3-1, if not better, against Fish. He’s got some big dudes in that deck.

It could be okay against Gush strategies, though I don’t remember how he did against Jerry Yang’s GAT deck. It’s so crazy, it just might work.

Of course, all the talk among the Cleveland gamers was the December 8 Gamers Lounge tournament:

Second Saturday Vintage Tournaments

The Gamers Lounge
127 E. Market St.
Downtown Sandusky, OH
419-621-0282
www.theherozone.com

All tournaments are full-proxy, and everyone who enters will get a free premium card just for signing up!

December 8, 2007
Registration - 12 noon
Tournament - 1 pm
Cost - $15
Prize - Full cash payout of entry fees awarded to top four
1st: 50%
2nd: 30%
3rd: 10%
4th: 10%

Yeah, Vintage sounds awesome right now. Everyone who is anyone will be there. I think I even heard Elfman say he’d be interested, since it’s full proxy. Yeah!