I teamed up with Vermonter Ze'eva Chasan and former Vermonter Jordan McCutcheon for SCG Baltimore. We decided the formats pretty early on, as Ze'eva has a lot of practice in Legacy and Jordan had the most practice in Standard, and I was pretty much a brick in both. Modern's more my speed. I played the same list as my last post with Oozes and 1 Abrupt decay. Ze'eva is a Burn master, so she played that. Jordan was really high on the Ben Stark Sand Strangler red deck, and it was really good.
It was my first ever team constructed tournament, and I had a blast. It's just a really fun experience, even though we didn't do particularly well. My teammates were awesome. I would look over and say to myself, "Wow, they can't win" and then two minutes later I'd see them shuffling up and they'd say "I won." In the team event, I actually only finished three of the eight matches we played, Jordan and Ze'eva either both won or both lost before I had the chance to.
We finished the day 4-4, and then I played the Modern Classic on Sunday. I played almost all fair decks throughout the whole weekend, including U/W or Jeskai 4 times, the mirror or pseudo mirror 4 times, and some Grixis Death's Shadow. I went 5-3 in the Modern Classic.
I am most proud of beating Abzan twice, once in the Open and once in the classic. The matchup on paper normally favors them immensely, not only because of how good Lingering Souls is straight up, but also how it nullifies your Liliana of the Veil, while making their Lilianas better. Recently, people have added Gideon, Ally of Zendikar out of the sideboard for even more midrange firepower, and it's another card that's super hard to beat. However, Bitterblossom completely overperformed here, since my 2 drop was lights-out against Liliana, but their's would just walk right into her. Also, Dreadbore was amazing, killing Lilianas, both of the Veil and the Last Hope, and Gideons, in addition to any creature that my opponents had. The sideboard plan was awesome as well. I bring in 2 Blightning, 1 Eternal Witness, and 3 Kitchen Finks, and all of those are great in the midrange battles.
As for the U/W and Jeskai matchups, I kinda went 1-2, but really I was about to lose a matchup but we lost our team match before I could. I ran into a problem that I found out about in midrange vs control matchups back in the days of Thragtusk Jund against Sphinx's Revelation control decks. Having a good game two and three matchup is great, as most of your control matchups get better after sideboard, but they have to be damn good to actually eke out the match win. Magic is just a high variance game, and if you bank too much on those two games of the match and disregard setting your deck up for game one against control, then you are setting yourself up to fail if you have awkward draws in just one of those games. This makes me want to address the main deck, mostly the threat suite. The good news, when fighting control matchups, is that since the games go long, you are going to have more time than usual to see the cards that are there to swing the match in your favor.
I also lost a match to Merfolk and had a too-close-for-comfort match against Humans in the team open that we did not get to finish. Merfolk has interestingly become something of a roadblock for this list. On paper, the matchup looks really good, but their deck is very consistent and can punish you for stumbling on lands or by drawing too many.
I halfway liked Scavenging Ooze and halfway hated it. It was solid when I exiled a million of my opponents' creatures and gained a bunch of life, but that didn't happen that often. I hit one opponent's copy of Lingering Souls before it could be flashed back, but that wasn't really even that good and didn't work that well. It was supposed to be good against Storm, but it's really just an easy Lightning Bolt or mini Grapeshot target. It also is just straight Grizzly Bears against the UW deck, never ever ever has it been problematic for an opponent's Snapcaster Mages, and outside of that it just doesn't do anything there.
Moving forward, I want to give Tireless Tracker a try. It's a little bit like Courser of Kruphix, a card that has done good work in the deck in the past that was cut for mana consistency reasons. Three of the green midrange decks I played against had them and they looked great. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, etc etc, but it seems like it's what we're looking for. Tracker is a single green, great with the high density of fetchlands, awesome in control/midrange fights, and is a good mana sink that can straight up walk away with the game later on, similar to Ooze. I have a feeling that Tracker might help out against both Merfolk, as a late game card to pull away with, and against control matchups as at least a 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 if you play it right.
I was planning on doing an audio blog post about this whirlwind of a weekend, but I've come down with a nasty cold and probably won't be doing anything voice-related for a little bit, hopefully I'll be back on the ol' stream soon to pwn some newbs. Thanks for reading!
