My pool:
| WHITE 2 Angel's Mercy 1 Aven Squire 1 Battleflight Eagle 1 Captain of the Watch 1 Crusader of Odric 1 Divine Favor 1 Divine Verdict 1 Griffin Protector 2 Pillarfield Ox 1 Rain of Blades 2 Safe Passage 1 Serra Avenger 1 War Falcon 1 Warclamp Mastiff | BLUE 1 Courtly Provocateur 2 Downpour 1 Encrust 2 Faerie Invaders 1 Hydrosurge 1 Master of the Pearl Trident 1 Mind Sculpt 1 Negate 1 Scroll Thief 1 Sleep 1 Stormtide Leviathan 1 Talrand's Invocation 1 Tricks of the Trade 1 Omniscience |
BLACK Bloodthrone Vampire Cower in Fear 3 Crippling Blight 1 Disentomb 3 Mind Rot 1 Public Execution 1 Ravenous Rats 1 Sign in Blood 1 Vile Rebirth 1 Zombie Goliath |
RED 1 Chandra's Fury 1 Fire Elemental 1 Firewing Phoenix 2 Goblin Arsonist 1 Goblin Battle Jester 1 Krenko's Command 1 Searing Spear 1 Torch Fiend 2 Turn to Slag 1 Volcanic Geyser 1 Volcanic Strength 1 Wild Guess |
GREEN 1 Acidic Slime 2 Bond Beetle 1 Bountiful Harvest 2 Deadly Recluse 1 Farseek 1 Flinthoof Boar 2 Naturalize 1 Prey Upon 1 Rancor 1 Roaring Primadox 1 Sentinel Spider 2 Timberpack Wolf 1 Yeva's Forcemage |
ARTIFACTS 1 Clock of Omens 1 Elixir of Immortality 1 Phyrexian Hulk 2 Ring of Evos Isle LANDS None. Well, a shiny Swamp, but whatever. |
Not a bad pool, but scattered. White and Blue are each strong but shallow, with 8-9 playables each. Red is deepest, followed by Green. Green's Farseek also lets me splash my only good Black card, Public Execution. The first thing I tried was mashing my Blue and White together, but this only got me to about 20 cards, even with some marginal inclusions. If I wanted to play Blue or White, I would have to pair them with Red or Green. I contemplated Red/Green but that left most of the best cards in my pool on the sideline. The White matched better with Red than Green, filling in the gap at 4 mana in my Red. I should probably have looked more at the Blue paired with the Green, but I'm pretty sure that would have left me with just Prey Upon and Public Execution for removal, which was not where I wanted to be in sealed.
I played:
1 Aven SquireI was fairly happy with the build. Rain of Blades came in a lot, but only because lots of 1-toughness guys kept showing up on the other side of the table.
1 Battleflight Eagle
1 Captain of the Watch
1 Crusader of Odric
1 Divine Verdict
1 Griffin Protector
1 Pillarfield Ox
1 Safe Passage
1 Serra Avenger
1 Chandra's Fury
1 Fire Elemental
1 Firewing Phoenix
2 Goblin Arsonist
1 Krenko's Command
1 Searing Spear
1 Torch Fiend
2 Turn to Slag
1 Volcanic Geyser
1 Volcanic Strength
1 Wild Guess
1 Phyrexian Hulk
10 Mountain
7 Plains
Nothing very exciting happened in my matches. I felt a little nervous in the first two rounds but at no point during the day did I feel like my state of mind was causing me to play poorly. No tilting, managed my nerves well, and I was able to shake off my streak of picking up my second loss in the first half of the tournament.
I started out 4-1, with my loss coming in round 2 to my friend from Pittsburgh BJB. My only real blunder of the day came in round 5 against my friend Silent Steve, where I miscalculated the size of his attacker because of forgetting to add a toughness for Exalted. This meant Rain of Blades + Chandra's Fury + Block with goblin token did nothing, when in my head it killed his Zombie Goliath leaving 1 damage from Fury on his now 1/1 Crusader of Odric. I ended up winning the match, but that misplay very likely cost me that game.
Round six I got absolutely blown out of the water by a nutty UW deck with multiple Unsummons, Talrand's Invocation, and Arctic Aven. I lost 2-0 and never really got a foothold in either game, with my opponent finishing game 1 on 14 life and game 2 on 24. There was one time when I attacked with a 3/3 Griffin Protector into his Talrand's tokens when it is possible I should have attacked only with my 4/3 flyer (2/1 + Battleflight Eagle) and used the Protector to hold back his 2 tokens and 1 Welkin Tern. As it played out, I attacked with the 3/4 and the 4/3; he flashed in Faerie Invaders to block the 4/3 and traded a token for my Protector. If I don't attack with Protector, he probably takes 4 and flashes in Faerie Invaders in the End Step, and is then able to start attacking through Griffin Protector anyway. I think I needed to be a little aggressive there to get his life total down to a more manageable range, but it's possible I should be settling in for a grindy long game at that point.
The last round didn't go very well for me either. I lost a close game 1 when my opponent has Talrand's Invocation, Archeomancer, recast Invocation on the last three turns before I died with him on 4 life. Game 2 I get out to a big lead, 16-8, but then my deck stops doing anything while my opponent chains together Archeomancers (2 real, one Clone) and Essence Scatter. His clock was sped up a bit by Cathedral of War, but I end up dying to Archeomancer beats. The third rebuy of Scatter was backbreaking as I had been sandbagging Captain of the Watch, which would have probably won me the game if he had anything but another Archeomancer on his last turn before he killed me. In retrospect it's possible I could have stabilized by just running it into his second or third casting of Essence Scatter, because there was a turn where I said go with the Captain and nothing else in hand, but there was no way for me to know that at the time. Ah well.
4-1 with two rounds to go is a good position to be in, and on another day it's possible I might have been able to sneak into top 8. I don't know if round six was a win-and-in for me because my breakers weren't super good having lost in round 2, but X-1 with two rounds to go is a fine place to be. As it happened I lost the last two, but I feel better about it than if I had been dead early and rallied to 4-3. I probably won't be at a PTQ that small again for a long time, so it's kind of disappointing to miss top 8, but it was nice to see everyone.
I have a box of Return to Ravnica preordered and I'm preregistered for 4 prerelease events. That should give me plenty of packs to practice sealed before the next PTQ on my schedule (I believe October 13th and Dream Wizards, not sure).
My goal for today was to be at the peak of my mental game. I don't know if I did that, but I do feel like I made some small progress. After my last blog post I was recommended a sports psychology book called The Inner Game of Tennis, and I think reading it helped a bit (thanks Dan!). The biggest things I took from it were (1) how to approach criticism/improvement in a nonjudgmental way that doesn't lead to self-doubt and discouragement, (2) techniques for quieting the mind when it starts to race due to nerves/worry, and (3) how to be in a frame of mind where you care about winning and have a "will to win" but maintain enough emotional detachment from the peaks and valleys of actual wins and losses that you don't tilt yourself after a bad beat or an exhilarating win. The only shortcoming I can think of in terms of application to Magic is that the book focuses on being in a good state of mind to perform procedural memory tasks (free throws, Magic on "autopilot") under pressure and not on being in a good state of mind to perform working memory tasks (doing a math problem that you don't have memorized, "tanking" in Magic) under pressure.
Using the stuff I wrote about last week as well as some of the stuff I read about in the book, I was able to mostly head off any emergent tilt and quiet the early butterflies.
Next weekend is prerelease weekend, and I am super excited, especially because I managed to trick one of my roommates into learning Magic and then into coming with me on Saturday. I'm sure I'll have more to write about then.
Until next time!
In my opinion, I don't think you want to autopilot in Magic. Professional poker players and chess players don't really autopilot.
ReplyDeleteDon't autopilot. Magic is a game with a constantly changing board state and it is imperative to be alert to all changes. Moreover, serious chess players are almost always thinking several moves ahead. I think it's important for you to be actively engaged in what you're doing up until you sign the slip.
ReplyDeleteI need a better word, apparently. I didn't mean "asleep at the wheel," I meant playing like you do when you're in the normal flow of the game, as opposed to the turns you tank. New players have to tank almost every turn because they haven't developed the mental shortcuts that more advanced players have yet--this is why they tend to play slowly. Chess players tank every turn because the game is structured such that you have time to do this. If magic players thought a comparable amount of time before each game action, games would take hours.
ReplyDeleteI checked up on how long serious chess games are to be sure, and stumbled across a bunch of chess players arguing about whether playing "speed" or "blitz" chess is good or bad for your game. Opinion seems divided, with some saying it helps your pattern recognition and others saying it makes you impatient and too prone to going with instinct when you should be thoroughly analyzing.
Some comments on your deck: You built for one really good rare and one decent rare. (Serra Avenger isn't much better than Faerie Invaders in SD because you can't use the extra mana the turn you cast it as reliably).
DeleteYour deck has lots of removal, but not so much that you can expect to kill every creature that they play. If your deck leans this way, it is very possible to go for an aggressive strategy to try to apply pressure, then use your removal to finish them. The problem with your build is that your removal is EXPENSIVE and awkward. Additionally, if you're going to go for an aggressive build, it is better to go with lots of creatures with efficient power to cost ratio, so that you don't have to kill all of their blockers. They will be forced to trade their better creatures for yours.
Your deck doesn't have enough punch. Sealed decks are so much more powerful than draft decks, also loaded with removal. A decent deck should be able to stonewall your terrible creatures and remove your decent threats. This would be ok if you were on c minotaurs, fire elementals, servent of nefarox, zombie goliath, veilborn ghoul etc... as your mediocre monsters of choice because once they stabilized, your terrible threats would still force a trade, but you have too many 1/1s and 2/4s.
I don't really like the following cards in your deck:
safe passage (this is not what your deck is trying to do. so few of your cards are worth 3 mana and a card to save from damage based removal, and the number of times that you win a close race with this will be dwarfed by the number of times that you are grinded to a halt and you need more threats.)
g arsonist (so low impact)
g arsonist (so low impact)
k command (so low impact)
volcanic strength (better in the sb, asking to get blown out, mt walk only relevant 50% of the time)
ox (if you're even thinking about blocking with this deck, you have no hope unless you've drawn captain. the fact that they feel comfortable attacking means you've already lost)
wild guess (a little better than the rest on this list)
At the very least you should have played the battle jester over safe passage to allow you to keep attacking without killing everything they played.
I would have built something along the lines of:
d recluse
d reculse
flinthoof boar
timberpack wolf
timberpack wolf
torch fiend
y forcemage
roaring primadox
firewing phoenix
g battle jester
fire elemental
sentinel spider
acidic slime
phyrexian hulk
prey upon
rancor
farseek
searing spear
turn to slag
turn to slag
chandra's fury
public execution
volcanic geyser
Here you have primadox with slime and forcemage. You also have additional removal in execution and prey upon, as well as a better suite of higher impact creatures and a rancor to help force through damage. You have infinite spiders, so you don't have to kill every flyer that they play, and enough removal that you shouldn't lose to a bomb. All in all the deck has a decent aggressive plan A, but you don't have all of the terrible cards that cause you to fall further behind if plan A doesn't go perfectly. I'd say this deck has a lot more play and will allow you to win games on O or on D.
It sucks to lose out on captain, but he's not even a free win, and for every time he's unbeatable, I think you will find many more times that you're drawing terrible red and white cards that you were forced to put in your deck to get to 23. Just think about it. Captain doesn't say win the game if they don't kill it like Staff of Nin, Stormtide Leviathan, Elderscale Wurm, 5/5 flying exalted abyss. At best it is worth two cards. The body and the captains call. The green list even has the possible upside of primadox, acidic slime, rancor, execution being worth two or more cards depending on the gamestate. I think the little bit of power that you lose from drawing the good half of your r/w deck is mitigated by the consistency of the R/G/b deck. Your good draws aren't even that much worse.
Thanks, this was very helpful.
Delete