[Report] Second Place With Belcher at GenCon Indy 2010 Legacy Champs

[JACO]

Matt Hazard of Team Serious recently finished second at the Legacy Champs event at GenCon. In the final game of the tournament he activated Goblin Charbelcher targeting his opponent to win the 2010 Legacy Championship, only to have his [CENSORED] Taiga revealed 5 cards down! Check out his decklist(s), thoughts, and full tournament report of how he got there after the jump!

http://www.eternal-central.com/?p=659

http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm220/jacowrites/ECArticles/CharbelchYouGG.png

[martyr]

Pretty good report, man. I'm looking at playing Belcher this weekend in Minneapolis, so hopefully I'll have some more infoz to share.

[Patrick]

There is no info to share about Belcher.dec. You go all in and pray they don't have a counter.

[Michael Keller]

Kind of surprising how you ended up seriously dodging Force of Will (or any counter-magic, for that matter) and subsequently ended up going deep in the tournament. It appears your opponents made serious play errors by not countering the critical acceleration components that allowed you to set-up Empty the Warrens. They may have been banking on Goblin Charbelcher, but you still should never let a Belcher player accrue enough acceleration to be able to cast either of those cards.

Counter-magic doesn't necessarily "auto-win" versus Belcher, but it can be just as good as multiple "Time Walks" by replenishing their hand each turn and then creating a clock. You top-decked well and put your opponents in a dre situation, which is a good thing.

I still think Belcher decks are incredibly bad, but congratulations none the less.

[martyr]

There is no info to share about Belcher.dec. You go all in and pray they don't have a counter.

Well, I initally got into Belcher just because it was a fairly cheap combo deck, and I wanted to practice doing maths in my head, but after having played it for a while, I realized that most of the actual skill in playing it has to do with two main things, and one other thing that has little to do with anything you do during an actual tournamentl.

A: Know when to mulligan.
B: Know how to slow roll (most post-boarding).

and the other thing is which version you're playing and how to math the different versions out; Burning Wish, Wish-less, and 2 land all play differently from each other, and have drastically different decisions to make for categories A and B. Those decisions are totally different depending on the matchup, and which versions you decide to play depends pretty heavily on the meta.

I ended up working over the weekend instead of playing, but I was planning on rolling a Wish-less version; bit more suicidal, bit more wonky mulligans, but much more consistent to play. I mean, the OP got fairly lucky, yeah, with top decks and opposing hands and opponents that didn't know precisely how to fight belcher, but no one gives it any credence which is why they don't tend to understand how to play against it. A single action early in the game can tell you whether they know how to beat you or not, and lets you accurately predict HOW they'll play against you...which is probably true of other combo decks, but I wouldn't know.

My point is, the info I was hoping to stumble upon at the 5k was whether a slightly different version would throw opponents for enough of a loop that a Belcher player could exploit their confusion, not whether "my new radical different deck blows all your shitty standard belcher variants out of the water!". It is for this same reason that the OP ran Deus of Calamity in the board; it's a fairly common tactic now, to lock the opponent out of the game in game 2 when they've sided out all their spot removal, but information on the effectiveness of a tactic similar to Deus would be valuable.

[hazard]

"A: Know when to mulligan.
B: Know how to slow roll (most post-boarding)."

These statements are very true. I firmly believe the printing of Pyretic Ritual made the mulligan decisions even easier as the deck can now jump more smoothly from each mana tier to the next. The mulligan decisions are even easier if your opponent is not playing Force of Will as you can often keep a hand with a win condition, knowing that you will draw into the mana you need. The goldfishes of this deck are sick:

http://www.wizards.com/magic/samplehand.asp?x=mtg/daily/feature/104b&decknum=2

[Mantis]

I liekd the first part of your article where you discuss the changes you have made and why. The rest can be summed up like this:
R1 G1: I make 12 Goblin tokens, swing for the win.
G2: I activate Belcher on turn 2 for lethal
R2: G1 I make 10 Goblins tokens he does nothing, I win.
Etc. etc.

But maybe my judgement is clouded because I tend to not like tournament reports at all.
Regardless, I would have much preferred it if you would have spend some more time discussing the mulligan decisions and how to slow roll if it's so important.