Tournament Report 9/15/13

My weekend actually started on Friday, but I didn't go to a tournament until today, so yeah...

On Friday, I went to the usual card shop to get two boxes of Shattered Alliances.  Out of those boxes, I pulled eight Super Rares and nine Very Rares, so that was pretty good.  The relevant cards that I pulled were two Queen Kalima, one Eternal Haven, one Twilight Archon, one Blitzer-Mech Falkora, and one Kivu, Ingenious Shaman.  Unfortunately, I didn't pull any of the Super Rare Dragons, so that was sad.  On the bright side, I pulled a total of zero Calamity Bells and Serpens, so there weren't any wasted Rares or Very Rares.  I might not even buy any of the Solar Eclipse decks because I don't need any of the cards from there.  We'll see...

The fourth Snogal also showed up, and we decided to get the Magic Deck Builder's Toolkits.  We got a total of three (one for him, one for Aki, and one for myself), and we spent the rest of our time making decks to play for fun.  The fourth Snogal also bought a Kaijudo deck I made for him (LWN Aggro), so he'll hopefully be able to start playing in tournaments.

Yesterday, Aki and I met up with Ray.  We mainly played Kaijudo, and Ray decided to enter the evening Vanguard tournament at the other card shop for some reason.  He used Aki's Vermillion Narukami deck and lost in the Top 4 to Aqua Dorks.  That's about it.

As for today, I went to the Kaijudo Set Premiere at the usual card shop.  Ray and the fourth Snogal were able to make it as well.  Just like last time, everyone got five packs of the new set to make a deck from using a minimum of 30 cards.  There would be three rounds, and each player would get a promo card for each round they win.

My sealed pool was decent.  I had to use all five Civilizations, which I kind of wanted to avoid.  I ended up running a 34-card deck that included 16 Multi-civilization cards, so that wasn't very good.  However, from what everyone else was saying, a huge chunk of their decks were Multi-civilization cards, so I guess mine wasn't too bad.  I even used a few Mono-civilization vanillas so that I wouldn't get mana-screwed as easily.  The holos I pulled were Doomblast Scaradorable and Finbarr's Dreadnought; they aren't that great overall, but they're really good in sealed.

In the first round, I played against my Round 2 opponent from this Kaijudo tournament.  I rushed him with Phase Scout and Plasma Pincer, and he couldn't deal with them since his Blockers had Guard.  Once he finally killed my Phase Scout, I ended up bouncing his last Blocker with Crystallize to win.  Don't be mistaken, Crystallize is still a horrible card, it's just that your options are very limited in sealed... I ended up winning the second game using Doomblast Scaradorable to kill his King Alboran and beat him down.

For the second round, I was up against Ray.  Apparently, he had to play against the fourth Snogal in the first round and won.  Anyways, he got a very good sealed pool, including stuff like two Repulse, four Blade Barrier, a bunch of nice Light Blockers, and Borran, the Reality Shaper.  Luckily for me, I was prepared for such shenanigans.  I was able to use Magma Ram to banish his Sentrus, and Doomblast Scaradorable was able to deal with the rest.  He wasn't able to do much, since I also had Aqua-Reflector Nomulos to gain card advantage and keep me safe.

In the third round, I played against my Round 3 opponent from this Kaijudo tournament.  Apparently, he had gotten a bye in the first round, then won against Eman of TCGWise in the second round.  Anyways, he tried rushing me in the first game.  I was able to stabilize with Stingwing and Nomulos.  I used Crystallize on his Prototype Gunship so that it wouldn't kill my Phase Scout, and I also got a Repulse as the third shield he broke, meaning that I got to halt his last attack of the turn while also getting a free shield.  I was able to get around his Sentrus using Phase Scout, which let my Plasma Pincer kill his Onslaught Trooper without getting blocked.  Afterwards, I dropped Finbarr's Dreadnought to ensure my victory, since he had almost no cards left, while I had a full hand and a field full of creatures.  In the second game, he didn't open up nearly as aggressively, so I rushed him instead.  My Ghost Bites kept killing his creatures, and I was able to finish him off with Doomblast Scaradorable.  He was able to drop Skycrusher's Volcano-Ship, but it was too late.  I had four attacking creatures out, including Doomblast Scaradorable, and he only had three shields, one of which was a Flamewing Phoenix that I used a Ghost Bite on earlier.

With that, I had gone undefeated and earned three promo cards.  I got to choose them from a randomized pile of promos, and I ended up pulling three copies of Ba'kaar Frostwing...  I was audibly upset, since I didn't go 6-0 in games just to win three of the worse of the two promos.

Fortunately, Ray won two of his matches (he won Round 3 against Fwazalaza) and pulled one of each promo.  The fourth Snogal ended up getting a bye after losing his first two matches, and he pulled a Veil Stalker.  Because Ray doesn't use Light and the fourth Snogal doesn't use Darkness, I was able to trade them each a Frostwing for their Veil Stalkers.  The fourth Snogal ended up giving the Frostwing I traded him to Ray, since he wasn't planning on using it.  How sad.  But, I guess it worked out for me, since I was able to get two Veil Stalkers for myself and one Frostwing for Aki.  I ended up giving Ray two Deep Mind Probes and the fourth Snogal two Lore-Striders for their decks to repay them for helping me get Veil Stalkers.  And also because those are the only non-holo cards they wanted from the set, so I was saving them the trouble of buying packs to pull them.

And, the fourth Snogal ended up pulling a Falkora, which Aki wanted a second copy of.  So, we're going to trade the Kivu to the fourth Snogal for his Falkora, since he wanted Kivu for his LWN Aggro deck.

I guess that's about it.  I did test my new Megabug variant quite a bit this weekend, but I don't want to talk too much about it since I want it to be a surprise at next weekend's Kaijudo tournament.  I'm still trying to win more copies of Necrose, so yeah.  But, I'm not that confident in my Megabug deck anymore.  All everyone plays at my locals is Dragons and Control.  This new variant is supposed to do pretty well against Dragons, but in testing against Aki's LWF Dragon deck, I only won about half of the games we played.  And, I fear that this new variant has a worse Control match-up than before, but I can't really test that because no one on Team Snogal plays Control.

I may end up going with a completely different deck, but I just don't have any ideas.  The fact that I pulled two Queen Kalimas kind of makes me want to run a deck around it, but I'm not sure.  I could certainly try, though I would rather use Eternal Haven over Queen Kalima.  I was really hoping that I could get a second Eternal Haven so that I could just use two of each in the same deck, but that didn't happen.  I'll see what I can do, but I can't really think of anything at the moment.