Subject: Origins Report: Open, Nationals, and the Dojo Invitational Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1998 21:24:14 GMT From: komc@my-dejanews.com Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy Hi, all! It's been a while since I last posted a report; this one will be long. Don't worry - it has both tech for the deck-hungry tech-skimmers, and analysis and anecdotes for those who like 'em. :) Have fun! Myself, my girlfriend Angelique, and another friend, Joe Reil, left Vermont Wednesday night to begin the 14 hour trip to Columbus. I _will not_ bore you to death with trip details. We arrived about 11 am, and entered the VERY long registration line. While in line, I missed the 11 o'clock Open. Damn. I signed up for the 2 pm Open, and went looking around. Didn't take me long to find Alex from Team Legion. I chatted with him a bit, and he finally showed me this very tech deck - with Oath of Druids! - he had just gotten from fellow Rogue Cabalist Adrian Sullivan. A quick correction to posts I've already seen on the Dojo - The Legion got this deck from us, Cabal Rogue. :) The bulk of the deck is Adrian "the Corrupter" Sullivan's design. I worked with him pretty intensively on peices of it, and most of the metagame shifts in the deck over the course of the weekend were my ideas, but it's his deck. Anyone who disagrees, you are wrong. :) Oh, there were a few other Oath decks around, but none as strong except Rob Hahn's version - and of course Rob is also a Cabalist, and had access to our tech and results during his construction. More on these decks in a bit. I met up with Adrian - he was psyched as Broken Oath had qualified one and almost two people in the midnight open. We chatted a little, and agreed Oath might be bad in the next opens - everywhere you looked, people were building and testing the deck. Uh, oh. Well, I was committed to running with it, and it did well, but crashed on me. Adrian's Oath is more solid than mine in general, but lacks the Enlightened Tutors I had in my early version to help avoid "lack of Oath screw". It's a combo of one, but when you don't get it after running through half your deck, it hurts. When it happens two games in a row vs a BAD green/red deck... Sigh. Well, I failed to qualify. So I played in draft side-tourneys, picked up random points there, chatted, and generally soaked newtech. I'd like to mention here an interesting note about Origins. The metagame was _very_ hard to keep up with. It shifted several times a day, with different decks coming into and out of style with stunning rapidity. Early events had a LOT of mono red and mono black. By the end of the weekend, black was _so_ dead it wasn't funny, at least as a suicide speed deck. Red held on, but only by altering somewhat, running more burn and less permanent creatures. Oath just loved decks that had to have creatures out. :) Black suicide is a bye for Oath. It is simply very hard to lose. White weenie also made a comeback, as did Prosbloom - both of these decks are decent vs Oath, especially if the WW runs lots of enchantment removal as later decks did (I understand there were around 11 MAIN DECK enchantment removal cards in the National winner's deck!). Standard tradewind decks were very dead by the end of the weekend, although living death tradewind seemed to still be viable, and forbidian decks started popping up. Friday Night a group of players ran The Gauntlet - you have to beat 5 different decks with your deck - one game vs each one, no Sideboard. Some very good players were there. I set out to prove Oath could compete. Running through, I beat down Chris Pikula, Brian Kibler, Altran, Mike Flores... Flores is the king of trash talk, he has to be. Our game was the funniest thing in the world... Finally ran into Rob Hahn - running Oath. Oath vs Oath. :) Well, Rob drew and casted Sylvan Library first. That was game. He impulsed around a dozen times before the game was over. :) A new world record? I fought it out as gamely as I could, but he just had too much card advantage over me, and kept getting more as the game went on. But, I think I proved my point - Oath is damned good. It took an Oath deck to beat an Oath deck. By the way, only one deck beat the Gauntlet that night. It was Brian Kowal (sp?) running Senor Stompy! Um, but green is dead, right? Green sucks, doesn't it? Um, no, it doesn't. Watch for this man, folks - Brian is another Cabalist, a _fine_ player, an we will be seeing more of him in the future, I'm sure. Broken Oath - As of the Gauntlet 4 Oath of Druids 3 Static Orb 3 Propaganda 4 Impulse 3 Brainstorm 4 Counterspells 3 Dissapate 2 Forbid 3 Mana Leak 2 Sylvan Library 2 Gaea's Blessings 3 Spike Feeders 1 Spike Weaver 1 Rainbow Efreet Rob's Oath deck was a bit different - he built it around the 5cU model, replacing Wisdoms with Feeders, running burn as the primary kill. Very strong deck. I slept in on Saturday. The Gauntlet ran till about 6 am, and then I went out for breakfast with the folks who ran it. Got to bed about 9, woke up _much_ later... About 4:50 pm I went looking for the DCI open house/town meeting. Finally found it about 5:15, and walked in late. Some general notes of import from the meeting: 1) The DCI is working hard to keep Magic going strong. The very fact that they were willing to hold this meeting, and have quite a few people show up to answer our questions, proves that. Kudos to you, Rob for the idea, and to WotC/DCI for following up on it so well. 2) WotC is trying to balance the number of sets per year. They hear that three per year (what they are doing now) is too many, but when they did 2 one year, they heard it was too few. They are under pressure from distributors to go to more than three, but are NOT doing so because of player concerns. They are listening on this issue, so write WotC about your feelings. 3) There is no dartboard where the DCI makes banned/restricted rulings. (darn! I was so sure...:) In addition, the players made it clear that ethics in the game remained one of our top group priorities - this is an issue the DCI _must_ take a leadership role in if the game is to stay strong. I'm missing stuff - it was a great meeting. Hopefully someone (Rob? Cathy?) took notes, an can post them for everyone to see. If you missed this meeting, shame! This was important. From what I understand, the final 8 at Nationals had 4 decks - Bloom, White Weenie, burn, and - Mono Green Spikes?!?!? Yup, for the first time in the history of Magic, mono-green took two spots in the top 8 of a major tourney. Um, I repeat - green apparently _does not_ suck... I got to very briefly see one of these decks - from memory, it was something like: Spikey Green 16 Forests 4 Wastelands 4 elves 8 Walls 4 Survival of the Fittest 4 Feeders 4 Weavers 4 Wildebeasts 4 Uktabis This is _not_ an exact listing, but rather a general one based on what I saw in the deck. Very nice deck, and it did very well. Survival is, finally, a STRONG green card built for green decks to play. Survival player vs mono red: "Play a wall, use mana from the wall, ditch an elf for a weaver. Next turn, lay the weaver. Cast Ball lightning now, burn boy!" Or vs Mono Blue. "Well, I have one scragnoth main deck, what're my odds of getting him out? Ditch a wall, here he comes! Steel Golem/Double quicksand, you say? Um, move a spike. Eat scraggie fang. Disk? Ditch something, Uktabi..." Oh my, is this card good. I don't have decklists for the Top 8, I'll leave that for someone else... The whole weekend was a blast. Green made some strong comebacks, our Oath deck wreaked havok with the environment, and I got to play Magic with some of the best players ever in the game. Next report - the Dojo Invitational! Kevin McLaughlin Member of Cabal Rogue -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum