Throwing down the Gauntlet: Team Standard at Grand Prix
- Madison
March 27, 2006
As you may or may not be aware, Grand Prix - Madison
was last weekend. Of course, because I'm a magic
freak, I decided that I was going to go. Because the
format was Team Standard, I needed to throw a team
together. Unfortunately my first team ended up
bailing because of work and family issues, so I had
to find a new team.
The first new member was actually a preplanned
reserve player, so I didn't have any trouble with
that. The last person for our team was actually
chosen an hour before the tournament began, at the
tournament. So I was busy running around trying to
make a deck for this person (he didn't bring one
along) so he could play. Eventually I got his deck
done, but it didn't come out as well as I had hoped
it would. So without further ado, let me give you a
brief Tourney report (brief because of reasons to be
explained later).
Team Name - LMA (Last Minute Alliance)
Spot A - Me (W/B Orzhov Control)
Spot B - Trever Allcock (LMA-Style Greater Gifts)
Spot C - Nick McDonald (Last minute IzzeTron)
Two of these decks were built by me, whereas Trever
was the one who worked on the Gifts deck. I really
like the way the decks were built, although we made
the fool move to select poor spots for each of our
players to be in. I should've been in B because most
of the Aggro players were in that spot, and Nick
should've been in Spot A because that spot was
mainly Control. Now on to the match reports.
---
Match 1 - Vs. Pizza Boys
Spot A - B/W Owling Mine - Tie 1-1
Spot B - Boros Deck Wins - Win 2-0
Spot C - White Weenie - Win 2-0
Not much to say about this match. They were all
playing below average builds of decent decks. I
ended up drawing because we ran out of time and he
pulled a move I wasn't expecting (Compulsive
Research targetting me with 3
Underworld Dreams in
play, then losing during my draw step to 3
Howling
Mines and a Kamunist), whereas my teammates simply
went smack-and-bash on their opponents. I'm not
going to say anything seriously negative though as
they were really cool guys and they apparently
didn't play in many tournaments.
1-0
---
Match 2 - Vs. Faddy Josh
Spot A - Heartbeat Combo - Lose 0-2
Spot B - Ghost Dad - Lose 0-2
Spot C - Gruuling Beatdown - Lose 0-2
I blame myself 100% for us losing this match. I was
working on Nick's decklist, throwing stuff from my
Guildpact uncommon playsets into the sideboard so
we'd have 15 cards. Apparently when we were
registering our decklists, I accidentally gave Nick
three
Shattering Spree instead of four, so he had a
14-card sideboard. One of the judges caught that
before our match began.
Now I didn't know this, but apparently if one
decklist gets screwed up, your team gets a game
loss. Not just the player with the faulty decklist,
but every single player on your team. Now I normally
wouldn't care about this and would try to make it up
during the games. Unfortunately, every single one of
our opponents were playing decks that we could only
beat after sideboarding, which made things
especially difficult for me as I was playing
Heartbeat Combo without any way of getting to my
Ivory Masks. We all lost, not even going to Game 3.
Although this did give us 25 minutes to drive over
to McDonalds to get a bite to eat before the next
match.
1-1
---
Match 3 - Vs. O RLY?
Spot A - U/R Magnivore - Loss 0-2
Spot B - Orzhov Control-Aggro - Loss 1-2(?)
Spot C - Zoo - Loss 0-2
Somehow we ended up playing against the same team
that Nick ended up going to the tournament with.
Apparently Nick was dropped from his team after one
of his friends ended up replacing him, which
explains why he wasn't on a team. They were cool
guys however, so I didn't have a problem losing to
them. The guy I lost to simply outplayed me,
although he got a few lucky topdecks to screw with
my mana the second game. Trever ended up losing
because Spot B
Cranial Extracted away all of the Ryusei's (LMA Tech v. Aggro), the Tatsumasa he
fetched via Godo got
Terashi's Grasped, and two
Paladin En-Vecs stopped him from laying down the
smack. Yet again I wasn't able to see what Nick was
doing because Trever's head was in the way, but I
did see him losing to an overaggro to kill him the
last game.
And then, for no reason at all, Nick decides that he
wants to drop, even though we had a decent chance to
make it to the second day if we won the rest of our
matches. Trever and I try to talk him out of it and
so do his friends, but he decides to be stubborn and
refuses to not drop. There was no reasoning behind
his decision besides the fact that we had a slim
chance of making it to Day 2, even though he had no
way of leaving without team O RLY. So eventually we
cave in because it was useless arguing with him, so
we drop against better judgment.
1-2-Drop
---
Even though we ended up out of the tournament
earlier than I wanted us to be, I'm not going to say
I had a bad time at the Grand Prix. Sure I was upset
with Nick, but I still had a great time talking and
trading with the other magic players. Plus I got a
really cool playmat, which is the only mat I've ever
used where I haven't gotten bad luck using it. The
dealers overpriced everything as I expected, my
opponents were all cool, we actually managed to find
somebody to be on team Last Minute Alliance (thank
you Nick), and I had a really fun drive back to
Appleton with Trever.
Before I end this article, let me give props
where props are due:
-Nick McDonald for joining our team at the last
minute, which was the inspiration for our team name.
-Trever Allcock for being an awesome friend, coming
down to the Grand Prix with me to compete.
-Team Faddy Josh for winning the Grand Prix.
-The judges and tournament organizers for making the
event a blast, even though there were a few errors
with the seating arrangements at first.
