Subject: Midwest regionals: SeNoR PuPpY Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 12:56:15 -0700 (PDT) From: Brian Kowal To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com So this is my first dojo re-.... oh wait. Whenever i read tourney reports i don't want to hear any of that schlock. Let's skip to the report. Regionals this year happened the weekend of exams so of course i didn't get much studying done. But i still had to take two of the dumb things on Friday and one took until 5:30. What's more i had to borrow my car out to my sister so i was relying on a ride home from college which i was about 15 minutes away from missing out on. By the time i got home it was about 6:30 and i still had to drive to meet most of my team in Janesville to playtest the night before. I called around for the people of Milwaukee and Waukesha who might make the hour drive through hickland to Janesville with me, but most everyone wisely left for Chicago the night before to get "a good nights rest" Yeah right. Nobody sleeps the night before a magic tournament when they can be playtesting all night. My teammate Jacob Jonaska couldn't make it out to Janesville either. He had this thing he calls a girlfriend. So I,m driving out to Janesville by myself with shaky at best directions and Soul Coughing keeping me company. All magic players should listen to soul coughing because they say beatdown in one of their songs. Supposively there were possible tornados in the area i was driving through friday night, but i never saw any twisters on the horizon and made it to Brian Larson's apartment in Janesville just fine. Most of the Team Rogue was already there. Team Rogue if you don't know is: Adrian "Sliverbait" Sullivan Jim "Tall Ass Bitch" Hustad Matt "Where the heck is Matt" Baranowski Jacob "Danger" Jonaska Aaron "certifiable master of Ser-VICE" Sounders and me. Well, ok three of them were there. Jim and Adrian were testing their deck against bad moon black. which we all expected to see enough of at the top tables of regionals. Matt was playing my version of 5cr against Brian Larsen's white weenie deck with promising results. We expected to see lots of white weenie too. Brian's friend was there with his black deck too, which i jumped into testing my 5cr against. Eventually Sounders showed up with copious amounts of snacks which his busty college meal plan had accumulated for us. Full cases of Hershey's chocolate drink is a beating. I decided to rename my deck Senor Puppy. Since i'm already known a little too well for playing/creating Senor Gonzalez in extended and the deck had morphed to 4 giant growths and 4 winter orbs. We playtest until like 2 in the morning or something and i collapse on the couch first. I wake up at what i find out is 6:30 which is just not the best as is with a solid 3 hour drive to the tournament from Janesville. I don't know its that late yet or that registration ends at 9:30 at regionals. I take a shower(new magic tech i caught floating around) while everyone else is woken up. and by the time we leave its about 7:15. Matt gives us the directions to the place and we're off. Its about now i find out how late we are and how far the tournament is away from us. Adrian and Jim are riding down with me and we speed at well over 20 miles over the entire way down. A special thumbs up goes out from both me and adrian to the driver of car liscense C629 392 who we followed down the expressway for most of the first leg of the trip. We just kinda hoped he had a radar in his car and he prooved to be quite a beating in the race to chicago. We show up at the tournament at about 9:15. Which is the fastest i have ever made it to the south side of chicago. Aaron and friend show up a short time later so i can only assume they too were busting out all the way down to regionals. Jake was already there so my fear that he might not show up was gladly not realized. Unfortunately Matt, Brian, and friend were entirely MIA for the entire day! I'd really like to know what happened. So 5 Rogues were there. We were: Adrian playing Feyd-Ratha(Son of Baron) his new control deck which i am sure you will be hearing about soon. we found out it dies bad to slivers. Jim was playing the same thing Aaron was playing the mighty Fiery Death from the Grave!!!!!! featuring the mighty Daring Apprentice. Jacob was playing the almost card for card the counter sliver deck we haphazardly assembled in about 5 minutes for a little scrub tourney in Chicago that Wednesday. And i played my modified version of 5 color red. At the tourney i met a friend of mine, Jacob from Oconomowoc who was in desperate need of a deck. (I gotta help these guys out. i can't help it) He was going to play this hideous furnace of rath/mogg maniac deck. anyone who has ever played in chicago should know how bad of an idea that is. So i gave him a copy of counter sliver to play with. so they put the pairings up eventually and i see on the monitor that i am paired up against Jacob. This isn't a horrible matchup for my deck, but it is annoying that i never get to walk through my first match at these things. I see my opening hand and it has two gemstone mines and an undiscovered paradise. i get first turn guildmage with one of the gem mines and he gets second turn hibernation sliver.probably one of the worst slivers for my deck to deal with. i don't see too much more land though i am getting through for damage pretty well. eventually the gem mine runs out though and i am left with only the undiscovered. this is ok though. i have guildmage and he still hasn't seen crystaline sliver and he's low on life and i got a decent beatdown going. His next turn he topdecks wasteland and kills my undiscovered. i proceed to draw no land with a giant growth laughing me in the face. finally a mountain. if it would have come one turn earlier i would have won. he's at like 2 when i die with guildmage on the table. Game two i sideboard in some usefull goodies, but it doesn't matter because i get two riverboas which just wreck him and a firestorm which i can sit on for some time. He never gets me under 15 and this game i'm almost as manascrewed as game one. the last game i almost sneak through a victory but he has honorable passage for my game winning firestorm. i could have sworn he would have used it when he tried stealing my guildmage and i fanaticed it in response. hmmmm. 0-1, 1-2 that match made me pretty bitter. but i decided to put it past me and make sure i just win the rest of them. heck nobody else has one of my decks right. Jake went on to lose his next two matches and drop out by the way. thanks for the tiebreakers. Round 2: Paul from Green Bay (I didn't get last names) He was playing the tradewind deck that is pretty popular in northern WI thanks to Team Chimera who managed to do well at a lot of tournaments with it. I am very prepared for this deck. It was one of the main reasons i chose 5cr. First game my grangers tear up his hopes at fast mana and my pups,etc. pound him into the ground. Second game i win too. he gets out the lock really fast and my hand has three firestorms in it. i drop all the cards in my hand except for a river boa and go all the way with it. 1-1, 3-2 Round 3 vs. Ron from Florida! This guy supposively came up to chicago because the georgia qualifier was too competitive. that was what somebody told me later. he was playing 5cu. another deck my deck tends to beat. Game one i get a slow start and he pulls wraths very often as well as disenchant for my orbs. Game 2 my power sideboard comes in. i have played 5cu probably 6 times in tournaments and i have never lost to it after sideboarding with this deck. 3 miners, 3 pyroblasts, and 2 forsaken wastes = some good against this deck. double winter orb spells a quick doom for him game two. i do see chill this game so i bring in the sleights for game 3. Game 3 i get double winter orb on him again. he plays cop red and decides to orb lock himself by preventing pup every turn. Yo Quiero Prison! Jackal pup prison is an awesome deck and if there was only a way i could give my opponent a cop:red, i would be all over it :) 2-1, 5-3 Round 4 vs. Nick with counter-chicken from Dixon, IL As an esteemed member of Team Shard, i cannot allow counter-phoenix to beat me. good thing it doesn't. it doesn't matter though since he gets badly manahosed game one. i actually don't even realize what he's playing because he only sees one mountain all game. i side in sleights since red is so violently opposed in chicago usually. Game two he gets a turn two chill which eventually gets sleighted to blue. i wasn't sure if i really should. i mean i am playing winter orbs and red is his only good removal. i still wonder why he played chill at all. Anyway i get winter orb down and he drops another chill. and that's just too good. both red and blue spells cost 2 extra! where do i sign. i should play those in my deck! i beat him down and eventually he has to disk to get rid of the cards he put out. my boas regenerate though and i continue to beat him down after i cast the orb in my hand. Round 5 - Waiken Soo from Milwaukee, WI Wai is a good friend of mine from Milwaukee so i should have known i was going to lose to him. we discuss drawing, but there are still 4 more rounds left and i don't think is that good an idea. plus the players of milwaukee have a little tradewind rider pool going. looking back, why the hell didn;t i draw. either of us is out of the running if we lose anyway. Plus Rob Castro, master scrub is in the 3-1-1 standings. either of us might get that lucky pairing right? (just kidding rob. you know i'd never disrespect the WI T2 state champion {not on the net anyway}) also i would have probably had a much better chance of playing control. On the other hand it wouldn't have mattered since my tiebreakers were shit anyway. I win game one very quickly. i tell him its all about my voodoo regionals card : contract from below. i forget though he has an answer to that.. You see Wai is the leader of the fearsome Milwaukee team Ron Jeremy's Army. He has a host of doctored up cards to use against me and he decides to invoke the power of ron with the mighty Pearl Necklace. (its a doctored up snowblind. did i mention Wai has too much time on his hands?) Second game we fight it out until i get forsaken wastes. by the look on his face, its game. and i certainly think so, but i continue to topdeck nothing after nothing after nothing. the pearl necklace cannot be stopped and he gets something to finish me eventually. The last game much the same thing happens. That necklace should be banned. I was impotent next to the power of Ron. 3-2, 8-5 So i'm knocked out of the running. i'm playing it out just to see how well i can finish. Round 6 vs. Nathan from Chicago playing Tradewind Its all about firestorm and guildmage. (can you tell i can't remember what happened this round) i sweep because its tradewind. 4-2, 10-5 Round 7 vs. Shane from Battle Creek, MI playing heavy counter tradewind. The more control, the better i like it. he gets poor draws both games and i wreck him in two. 5-2, 12-5 Round 8 vs. Eric from Greenwood, IN playing mad elf action deck. many people were talking about this deck. he was undefeated for a while. then he got knocked down to play scrubs like me. guildmage was kinda good against his deck. i just wish i would have gotten a simmoon game 2 or three. game one, first turn guildmage stops his deck pretty good. game two he got an eladmari out and i couldn't stop his sentinels. i had firestorm in hand, but since i drew no removal for el, i lost. game 3 i think he was manahosed. 6-2, 14-6 Final round vs. Jake Welch from Milwaukee, WI playing the worst pox deck i have ever seen in the game of magic. HOW does he go 7-2 with that thing. can you tell how i did. game one i wreck him pretty well. i side in the wastes once again, once again, i am the one who is forsaken. i draw no threats after droping wastes and he topdecks steel golem. and i have to wonder why in the hell he was playing undiscovered in that deck and happened to get it every game i got winter orb. game 2 just sucked and it was for a ponza rotta too. game 3 i get hideously mana hosed as he draws more wastelands than i draw land. steel golem beats me down. 6-3, 15-8 and that was the tournament. Jake and i agreed to a prize split in case one of us made top 16. but he didn't. As for team Rogue, We did have one player in the final 8. A big congratulations to Jacob Danger for qualifying for nationals. He went 7-1-1. The field was almost exactly what we predicted it to be. I expected tradewind to be the most popular with bits of white weenie, black weenie, 5cu and counter sliver. I still think the best deck to play in this format is either countersliver or the deck that i played and if there was another regionals tomorrow, i would play it again. Adrian and i both played in hansen's tournament the next day and both of us narrowly missed the final 16 on tiebreakers. going 3-1. oh wait, i almost forgot the decklist. copy away dojoites. if you read this far you must be either really bored or really need a deck. Senor Puppy (5cr) 4 Jackal Pup 4 Granger Guildmage 4 Mogg Fanatics 2 goblin vandal 4 river boa 3 barrow ghoul 2 man o war 1 sexitup monkey 2 disenchant 2 firestorm 4 giant growth 4 incinerate 4 winter orb 3 undiscovered paradise 3 gemstone mine 3 city of brass 1 reflecting pool 4 karplusan forest 2 forest 4 mountain sideboard 3 pyroblast 2 sleight of mind 1 tranquil domain 1 disenchant 3 dwarven miner 2 forsaken wastes 1 firestorm 2 simoon Another great tournament run by Ken Roth(the best magic judge i've ever played under) and great lakes games. Todd Hansen gave us a very exotic location this time at the Republican Headquarters. Bob Dole on the soda machine! Looks like i'm playing a lot of type 2 at orgins. == Brian Kowal Member and co-founder of Team Rogue, Team Shard and The Sexecution Society Member of Cabal Rogue sexecutor@yahoo.com _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com