The date set, I invited people and I got some promises from people that they would be there. As soon as I hit ten people, I made the date definite and started thinking about what deck to play. I wanted to go for something unexpected as a deck. Since I had bought a bazaar of Baghdad some weeks earlier (insane by my standards, but somehow I could not resist the relatively low price that was offered) I wanted that to be in the deck.
Lately I've been toying with the idea to rebuild some classic decks that were played in the old days, but updated a bit to current insights. I remembered reading something about a deck built by Marc Chalice with 4 forks, bazaar, time walk, howling mine and storm seeker. I looked up some ideas (no-one knows what the original deck list was of course, but there are some ideas) and built it close to the original from 1994. What I thought was awesome (although maybe not that good) was that there was a stream of life in the original idea. So I went out and bought 3 beta streams of life (because they were available for my fellow oldschooler Marten) and built a deck with one main deck because that is what the original seemed to contain. Every decklist I found with Marc Chalices name on it seemed to agree on that, but not about every other aspect. I ended up with this, which I think looks pretty great. I added drop of honey because it seemed great if you put it down and then fork a time walk. That would take out 2 creatures and at least there would be some creature elimination in the deck.
I played a couple of games against some pretty good black/red and weenie agro decks, and the deck seemed fine. It won most of the games. This is of course nowhere near a serious playtesting schedule, but it was good enough for me.
On the day of the tournament a nice 16 people showed up, and even number so no-one with nothing to do between rounds. I was happy because 16 is enough to make it feel like you're playing a "real" tournament.
Round 1 I played against Thijs, a fellow Arnhem regular. I kept a pretty decent hand but without moxen. Thijs was off to a really quick start.
He followed up this lighning fast start with a tutor and then, wheel of fortune. I had only played a city of brass by then. But what was worse was what I lost there.
The wheel did net me a library of Alexandria. This might me good enough to keep up the fast paced game Thijs was playing. We would have to see. I played howling mine and just had to wait from there.
I killed of the efreet with my own green mana, but I was taking a lot of damage. I managed to get the deck rolling just before I died and was able to get mirror universe in play. That saved my first game.
The second game I was looking at this opening hand. I figured that I could strip his land, and I had a mox to keep up with the tempo, whatever I drew.
It turned out, this was not enough. Even tough he played not a lot of mana, Thijs was keeping up the pace and on turn 4 I was looking down at this, while I was busy drawing nothing at all. I was quickly overwhelmed by a lot of factories and weenies.
While I was being hammered by Elves, on the table next to me something a lot worse seemed to be developing on a turn 2..
Meanwhile, Thijs and I had gone to our third game, in which I was not drawing a lot of mana. Thijs made it worse by taking out a mox and a land pretty quickly.
This left me without mana, and one thing this deck needs is a lot of mana. The fastbonds are there for a reason. So I was down 1-2. Not a great start of the day. The games were over pretty quickly which left me some time to take some more pictures.
My second game was also against a regional player, Remko. I had a slight advantage here since I lent him some cards for his deck, so I knew what he was playing. I started off with a fastbond, but at that time it made no sense to take extra damage to play extra lands, zo I left it at that.
I played howling mine, and hoped to get the tempo up from there. Remko had already upped his tempo by playing a Serra Angel on turn 3. Yikes.
I was kind of desperate to get a solution for the the serra, so I put down some extra lands, including a bazaar and went digging. A drop of honey showed up, so that should get me out of the mess.
But, Remko had a disenchant for it, so I was not going to make it unfortunately.
In the second game, Remko dropped a lot of vises on me quickly, while I played some lands and a howling mine.
When I tried to fix the damage from factories with a mirror, that was quickly taken care of.
Again, I was looking for answers to kill him I went for a risk with the vises and forked an Ancestral recall.
Even though that looked cool, it netted me exactly... nothing:
I waited and played more and more lands so in the end I could do this just before I was killed:
After the match, I looked at the discrepancy of number of lands drawn versus spells in this game:
Weird how that goes. But since I was now up for another game to decide the match, I was ok with that.
The next match was going to go a bit different than I expected. It looked like a weenie deck on the other side of the table, so I went for as much cards as possible to get the combo going.
That worked pretty well in the first game.
Or so it seemed, because then an Armageddon wiped all my lands, and as I had already found out, it does run very badly without lands.
I had the mirror though, and went on getting more cards, so I would be able to draw out the game.
Which I did, and was able to get the storm seeker/fork that was needed to finish.
In went the abyss to get some more creature control.
Again, Armageddons got in my way, and then Icy Manipulators showed up. That was unexpected. And very bad for me, with the Abyss disenchanted and animated specters to keep clawing at my cards in hand.
The game was not getting there, as my lands and mines kept getting tapped, and that shuts down the deck.
Armageddon took out all of the lands again (multiple times), so I lost that one. There was not enough time for a third game, so it was a draw.
That was unexpected. I should have probably tested this deck more. People destroying all of my land or shutting down the mines is very bad for this deck. If I make a deck like this again I will probably add Equinox or counterspell to the sideboard, this deck needs it. Perhaps decks with 2-3 Armageddons were not really a thing in that time.
Next up was Thomas "Timmy the sorcerer" with his mono blue Timmy deck. This may not sound a like a big contender, but Thomas has been tuning this deck for years now, and it has become quite a good deck and there are much easier decks to beat than this one. Especially for the deck I was playing. For starters, Timmy has Icy Manipulators main deck.. which sucks with my howling mines.
I managed to storm seeker Thomas for nine at some point, but was not enough and I had no fork at hand to make it a really big hit.
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| Thomas was feeling really good about this main deck :) |
Anway, it did not work out, so on to game 2. I had boarded in the Abyss and extra artifact destruction against both the bottle and the mishra's factories.
I tried to get rid of a factory with shatter, but that was elemental blasted, so no chance there.
I ended up with no white mana and 2 disenchants in hand, against an onslaught of 4 factories and no other creatures. So naturally, this meant I would lose the second game too.
So, one win, one draw, two losses in matches, where Icy Manipulators, mana destruction and lack of artifact removal were the main causes. So, is this a bad deck then? I don't know. Against some other decks it worked really well (the few games I played in advance against a good troll deck and a GRB agro were very convincing wins), so it is at least very dependent on matchups. When it works, it is rather fun to play because of the absurdities that come with forking al kinds of cards. Although I did not fork any cards of my opponents in key moments ( i was waiting for an Ancenstral recall or mind twist, but neither happened), which was kind of what I was hoping for.
So all in all, not a great deck. I think it has potential in some matchups, but lack of more controlling cards makes the deck very weak against certain cards like armageddon. I may just build another version of this deck with the idea with fork intact, but leave out some other stuff.
Because most of my games were over pretty quickly, I had some time to take some pictures.
And then it was time to determine who was going to be the winner of this tournament:
Which made for some great scenes:
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| Orcish Mechanics against a unholy slug. What's not to like? :) |
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| Fissure and and a not-so-often-seen efreet which is actually quite okay |
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| Terror on a Shivan. Classic. |
The final was a hardcore deadguy deck against Thijs his "Unholy Slugs" deck.
While I was hoping for a win for the Slugs deck, it was not meant to be. I mean, this picture says it all for the first game. Well actually, it was not really a game.
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| Non game 1 in the final.. |
The second game seemed mildly more interesting when Thijs got out a whirling dervish against the impending doom of a Juzam Djinn.
But... it was not meant to be. A fireball came, Thijs giant growthed it, then it was swords to plowshared.
So in came the Djinn and a Vampire, a pretty easy win for Arne. But he was playing a very powerful deck, and the win was well deserved.
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| The winner of the day! |
We went for dinner with some our oldschool friends at a restaurant that almost had the right name :)
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Oh, and not to forget, I traded again, which I love. I traded for 3 cards that I actually wanted and 1 that is always kind of useful. Yes, I only had 3 SL orcs, only 1 psychic venom until now. And I always look for nice cards for my fully FBB mono green deck. The disk is something I will just use somewhere in an extra deck or some multiplayer thing. It's never a bad thing to have more disks.
So, we had a great tournament with 16 people, the atmosphere was great, I got to try out a new deck which kind of sucked against its matchups, I traded for cards instead of buying them and had dinner with great people. Another great OS day. See you all on the next!
