Portland (OR) meta

[ESG]

SCG Portland is coming up. I expect a number of Seattleites to be there (so, control decks), and I imagine some Los Angelenos will come north for it (so, combo decks). The real mystery for me is what the homegrown meta is like. I've heard in the past that Portland has a really small Legacy scene, so it was surprising to me that SCG is making a stop there. I'm interested in hearing from Bardo, Jak, from Cairo, iPhael, Lochlan, the InfoNinjas, and anyone else in that area. What's down there? I think the last tournament report I read from that area had Dragon Stompy and Ascension/Soul Sisters in it, so seems like the Wild West.

[lochlan]

First of all: Bardo and Zilla, why are you not coming to our tournaments at Portal Games? You guys should go ahead and clear your schedules on some Saturday and come play, I'm pretty sure it's a good idea.

Anyway, ESG, to answer your question: there is no "meta game", nobody plays Legacy here. Sadly we do not have an equivalent to Mirkwood (although one of the owners of Portal is also named Anton :p), and Portal is the only store supporting the format.

Overall Combo and Aggro are slightly better represented than Control, but there are definitely a few Control players as well. I would describe the likely SCG Portland field like you suggested: "the Wild West."

Frankly I was also surprised to hear about SCG Portland (not to mention two SCG Opens in Seattle in a single year), but we do have a healthy Standard community.

[iPhael]

While our community is small, there's a lot of testing going on in the group. Maverick has slightly fallen out of favor, but is still represented. Although, lochlan is quite rogue still, so I won't spoil his tech

I primarily play TES and Dredge, as expected, but I do have Omniscience (petals-grapeshot) and most of Aggro Loam built to test as well. We tend to just jam games during the week or whenever we have off down at Portal as often as possible. If I were to name the majority of what I've tested against this month it would probably be:

Fish
DnT
Italia
Esperblade
U/W Top
Dredge
UR Delver
RUG Delver
ANT
Belcher
Sneekyshow
Hypergenesis
etc etc

Not quite the "Wild West", but we do get things like Cephalid Breakfast randomly taking 3rd here and there. But that's kind of the fun isn't it? Going rogue and smashing face