Halloween Tourney in Tucson

[chokin]

So I decided to go to the first sanctioned Legacy event in Tucson in a long time (prior to today, the last one I knew of was a little over a year ago). It was pretty far away (45 minute drive) at Magic Tower. It was mostly my buddies that showed up: Team G, Kyle B (pingveno), Kyle M and Andrew (aggro_zombies).

I hadn't really decided what I was going to play. I knew that since it was going to be better tiered stuff, I could get away with playing a solid deck without janky card choices to make up for the lower tiered matches. I had it down to Team America and Tempo Thresh. I asked Team G for some input, and Frank said Tempo Thresh would be a little more solid with the what the field looked like.

So I ran:

Tempo Thresh
4 Volcanic Island
4 Wasteland
4 Tropical Island
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand

4 Tarmogoyf
4 Nimble Mongoose
2 Trygon Predator

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Brainstorm
4 Daze
4 Fire/Ice
4 Force of Will
4 Spell Snare
4 Stifle
4 Ponder

Sideboard:
3 Volcanic Fallout
2 Relic of Progenitus
2 Tormod's Crypt
3 REB
3 Pithing Needle
1 Rushing River
1 Wipe Away

Pretty basic maindeck. I didn't have Cliques, so Predator sounded like a good surprise card. Volcanic Fallouts and REB were because there were 2 Merfolk decks. They also were backup removal for board wipe against BUG Thresh when combined with Relic or Crypt. Needle was a generic option and the grave hate was just in case. Bounce is always good, it was either those or Grips.

Match 1: vs Frank G with BUG Thresh
Game 1 - I win the dice roll and decide to play. We both mulligan (I had no lands). My new hand shows TP, Goyf, Fire/Ice, Ponder, and 2 Wastelands. I throw it away, but peek on top, which had a Volcanic Island, Goose, Tropical Island. Damn. I go to 5 and keep a hand with a Volcanic Island, Brainstorm, and some other stuff. We go back and forth for a while, but he has an advantage. I end up locking the ground with Goyf and Goose, he has the same, only I don't have Threshold yet. I get Thresh and top another Goose, and tap down his Goyf during his turn. I swing all out, he trades Geese with me. He scoops shortly after.
Game 2 - I rip out 4 Daze, a TP, and a Stifle for 2 Relic, a Crypt and 3 Fallouts. Game 2 he starts with a Trop and passes, I Waste it freely. He plays an Island and passes again. I end up getting a Goose and my deck starts to shine as I stop almost every spell. Goose goes all the way.

Match 2: vs Kyle B (pingveno) with Merfolk
Game 1 - He wins the die roll, leads Island, Cursecatcher. I play a Volcanic, and pass. He tries to Silvergill, but I Daze it floating U for that pesky Catcher. He hits me with the Catcher. I play my Volc again and he plays a LoA. I stop that nonsense. He keeps putting down pressure and I keep answering. I remember stopping a Standstill and then the game goes in my favor from there and my 5/6 Goyf pushes him to 2 and then he scoops.
Game 2 - I rip out the 4 Daze, a Stifle and a TP again for 3 REB and 3 Volcanic. I keep a decent hand with 2 fetch, a Waste, Ponder, a Bolt and 2 Fire/Ice. He goes Island pass. I play a fetch and pass. He has plays Mutavault, passes. I Waste it, and pass. I remember that his board ended up looking like 2 Island and a Plains, and I either counter his threats or burn them off the table and Ice his Island twice. I stick a Goose and start to grind him down. He ends up with Sygg and a LoA, They meet Volcanic Fallout, putting him to 10. Goose drags him down and I Ponder into a Bolt for the win.

Match 3: vs Kyle M with BGW Rock
We intentional draw and chop 1st and 2nd ($30 each). We play for fun and I get my ass handed to me.

I trade some Zendikar and M10 rares for some extra store credit and I get a Taiga, 2 Cliques, 2 Threads of Disloyalty and a Sylvan Library. Today was a good day. Hope they do it again soon.

Props:
Frank G for telling me to play the deck.
To Kyle M for chopping with me.
The store for being really fair with trades.

Slops:
Myself for never knowing what the hell to play.
DCI database for not being able to find me.

[Jeff Kruchkow]

How was fallout? Was the double R too hard to get?

[Aggro_zombies]

Not bad. Should I post one in this thread or my own thread, I wonder?

EDIT: The decision was to have the third Saturday of every month be a Legacy tournament, and to have the entry fee dropped to $5. This time, the whole amount of money from entry fees was distributed, but sometime in the near future that will be cut to half (since Matt needs to make some money, after all). According to him, next time around we should have at least double the number of people we did this time.

[chokin]

Fallout was fine. I know that you'd expect to have issues against Merfolk, but I didn't see a lot of Wastelands and Kyle said he had Stifles in the board, but not in the main. I actually had my Trops killed more than my Volcs.

Go ahead and post your report here, A_Z. And that's cool that we're going to have a sanctioned event in town. I'm just glad I'll only have to drive 45 minutes once a month. We could popularize it some, but I just don't want to see it become the meta we face every week. We just need to spread the word.

[Aggro_zombies]

Go ahead and post your report here, A_Z. And that's cool that we're going to have a sanctioned event in town. I'm just glad I'll only have to drive 45 minutes once a month. We could popularize it some, but I just don't want to see it become the meta we face every week. We just need to spread the word.
Well, this is going to be something of a lame tournament report, since I didn't take notes and don't remember any of my opponent's names. Disrespectful, perhaps, but I'll make an exception this time since this tournament is a bit of a "big deal" for this area.

Unlike chokin, I knew the deck I wanted to play, but wasn't sure how I wanted to flesh out the skeleton. The version I ended up playing (:u::b::g:) is slower and better against Threshold and control, but the standard "unevolved meta" is all aggro, all the time, and that sort of thing called for a :r::w: splash for Firespout and some life gain. In the end, I went with black because it was already put together and working out all the numbers on the scene was more of a pain than I could be bothered to put up with.

4 Tarmogoyf
2 Vampire Hexmage
1 Eternal Witness
1 Shriekmaw

4 Brainstorm
3 Ponder
2 Intuition
1 Jace Beleren
2 Gifts Ungiven
1 Life from the Loam

4 Counterspell
4 Force of Will

3 Pernicious Deed
3 Damnation
1 Engineered Explosives

1 Dark Depths
1 Volrath's Stronghold
1 Wasteland
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Lonely Sandbar

3 Misty Rainforest
3 Polluted Delta
3 Tropical Island
3 Underground Sea
2 Island
1 Forest
1 Swamp

SB:
1 Academy Ruins
1 Sword of the Meek
1 Thopter Foundry
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
1 Raven's Crime
1 Life from the Loam
2 Pithing Needle
3 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Disrupt

I played the single Urborg because I could not for the life of me find my fourth Sea the night before. It's floating around here somewhere...

Round one against Some Guy #1: Merfolk w/W

Game 1: Merfolk is the absolute worst matchup imaginable for this deck. Not only is the other guy aggro, he's got counters and unblockable guys! Retarded. I get some early action in but am soon facing triple lords (including Lord of Atlantis) and can't stick a Deed or Damnation. Fished into oblivion, I decide to side out Hexdepths in favor of Roflthopter in the hopes that I can use the latter to boost my life total long enough to get in there with loads of damage...

Game 2: This one goes on for longer but is no less of a blowout. I stick some Tarmogoyfs but can't block with them as my opponent starts getting free Ancestrals off of a Selkie. Yuck. In desperation, I drop a Damnation with four lands against a Cursecatcher, and he doesn't realize it. Great success! Once all his guys croak I point out that he could have countered it, and then proceed to get thrashed by Rejeerey, Sovereign, and some other guys.

0-1

Round two against Some Guy #2: Clerics

Game 1: This guy is playing an Extended deck from the previous season, and apparently without duals or fetches. His mana base consists almost entirely of pain lands and Shadowmoor filter lands. To top it all off, he's tribal Clerics with Countersquall, Esper Charm, Path to Exile, and Soul Manipulation backup. Game one he does some stuff that doesn't matter because I Deed and Damnation appropriately, killing off the random 2/2 utility guys he throws around. I eventually get bored and fire off my French copy of Gifts Ungiven, and enjoy spending the next several minutes explaining to him in an outrageously bad French accent what the card does. Gifts finds the bits of the Depths package I'm missing, and I set myself up to have both a counter in hand and Hexmage and Dark Depths in play. He dies to Cthulhu when I finally get around to summoning it a few turns later.

Game 2: No sideboarding required here. We trade blows as before, but he quickly discovers that Tarmogoyf eats his guys for lunch and stops attacking, giving me time to set up. I dredge an Intuition into the yard and recover it with Witness, eliciting the remark "You can't play that." Since I only have :1::g: open, I know that, so I ignore him. I pass the turn, then untap and proceed to cast Intuition. "There's no legal targets," my opponent replies. I stare blankly at him, then reply that there's still cards in my library, which causes him to call a judge. At this point, he helpfully points out that the True Believer I've been totally ignoring for the past five turns prevents me from casting Intuition to go find Hexmages to pop my Depths (in play with a full contingent of counters). FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-. The judge confirms that the current Oracle wording has Intuition target, and after I get over my humiliation I elect to knock Depths down a counter and pass. I spend the next couple turns manually removing Depths counters (RFGing Intuition to Force something in the process) and end the game five turns later with an honestly-gotten Cthulhu token. We spend the rest of the evening making jokes about it.

1-1

Round three against Some Guy #3: :b::r::g:...something

Game 1: Some Guy #3 grumbles a bit before we start about having been mana screwed a bunch. Having spent years under a perpetual mana screw curse, I can fully sympathize with him; however, I almost never get mana screwed while playing Life from the Loam, so I always (superstitiously, some might say) have it in my Constructed decks. My opponent is on the play and opens with Bayou, Thoughtseize, seeing a hand of two lands, two lands that do stuff, a Brainstorm, and two Tarmogoyfs. He elects to take the Brainstorm and walks right into land that does stuff #1: Wasteland. You see, normally I would never do that, but my opponent seemed like an honest guy and made the crucial mistake of debating out loud over how risky keeping his hand was. Sure enough, he's stuck on no lands for a turn and I pull away with first one, then the other Tarmogoyf. He eventually finds a land but not in time to be able to stop my rampaging green monsters from smashing him into the ground.

Game 2: I didn't see enough of his deck in game one to make intelligent sideboarding decisions, so I simply opt not to do anything. He gets a little more mana this game and even puts up something of a fight with two Tarmgoyfs, but I'm left unmolested by discard and sculpt a very good hand with Jace. Both Goyfs die to Deed while I proceed to both draw three of my own and a Volrath's Stronghold to circumvent the Smothers he's playing. At this point, he's still apparently mana screwed, and I begin to pull away from him. He drops Choke to try to stem the bleeding, but despite the fact that it locks down four of my Islands, I have a basic Forest and Stronghold to keep the Goyfs flowing. He dies to two 4/5 Tarmogoyfs, with a third napping in my hand.

2-1

This leaves me 4-2 in games, which is apparently enough to put me into fourth place. There were two Merfolk decks there - a whopping 20% of the field! - which made this deck something of a miscalculation in terms of metagaming. It's much stronger against Counterbalance, control, and various midrange-y things and has a surprising amount of game against Zoo (at least, given my initial testing with a slightly different list).

Afterwards, I jump into a triple ZEN draft and end up with a slow, controlling WUB deck that has multiple Kraken Hatchlings and Reckless Scholars, plenty of removal, and fliers to finish it. I go 2-1 with that and open a Lotus Cobra in my prize packs. Not bad.

Props:
- Eli and Matt, for entertaining my request for sanctioned Legacy
- My opponents, for putting up with my lame jokes
- My deck, for being a blast to play

Slops:
- Me, for not being able to do my opponents justice by giving them names in my tournament report
- Mana Screw, for not letting me play a real game in the third round

[MEATROCKET]

How many people played? I might consider driving my brother and myself down if it seems worth the drive (from Phoenix).

[Humphrey]

only 3 rounds? 8 people event?

[chokin]

Yes, 3 rounds this time. Around 10 people played. It was kind of short notice for some. Like half the people heard about it the day before.

[Aggro_zombies]

Yes, 3 rounds this time. Around 10 people played. It was kind of short notice for some. Like half the people heard about it the day before.
There were also a number of people playing in the Standard tournament who would have played if that hadn't been going on concurrently.

There should be 20+ people next time if Matt and Eli hype it a bit beforehand. I'll try to do so as well but can't really guarantee anything because lab work keeps me on campus late on weekdays.

Also, I forgot the Loam in my main deck, so I added it.