I went, I saw, and I 2-2’d. This serves as a short
report on how I prepared for the tournament and how the matches went. I also
talk about a lesson that I find myself relearning whenever I scrub out of a
tournament like this.
Preparing for the tournament
I started out quite confident with my deck choice about
two weeks before the tournament. I was running a fairly stock RDW deck with
only Tibalts added in after WAR was released. I figured that one of the best
ways to see how well the deck would fare at the tournament was to see how often
I could make 8 wins before my second loss on the best-of-three ladder. So, I
set out to do that. I was able to do it twice in a row, getting me at seventh
place of the ladder. I stopped doing the ladder here because I was also doing an
experiment on how fast rank degraded and how high up one can be before one can rank
sit the rest of the season with confidence. Instead, I continued my testing on
the traditional constructed event queue, counting wins the same way. Out of
seven trials, I was able to achieve the 8 wins before second loss three more
times. I made a few tweaks such as adding Chandras to the sideboard. I then
took a few days break from this to do my draft experiment.
After concluding my draft experiment, I saw that my rank had
degraded to 86th place (after over a week of not playing). I decided
to continue my training on the ladder. That was when the proverbial crap hit the fan. While I
was drafting, new decks had emerged from WAR. I kept running into and
losing to UR drakes made much more consistent with finale of promise. I did 11 runs and not once made it to 8 wins before my
second loss. From winning 5 games on average before my second loss, I went to
winning 2 games on average and was in the 90% bracket of the ladder. It was then
that I decided to test other decks. I tried Esper Hero, UR Drakes, 4C Dreadhorde,
and Gruul Aggro. None except Esper Hero got me back to top 1000 of the ladder
and even then, I eventually lost enough times to get kicked out again, and the
deck felt like an auto loss to the Command the Dreadhorde decks. Eventually, I
looked at my RDW list again, made changes like taking out Risk Factor from the
75 altogether, and ran it on the ladder. It was able to get me back to the 200th
rank range and so with only 1 day left before the tournament, I decided to just
go with the deck that I knew best.
Tournament Matches
Suffice it to say, I did not feel very confident going into
the tournament. My first and second matches were against Dreadhorde decks. I
won the first and lost the second. Both matches were textbook. The one where I
won was where I was able to lower the opponent’s life total fast enough to make
the namesake spell of the deck useless while the one that I lost was where the
opponent was able to stabilize with life gain enough to ensure him the endgame.
After that I went against Boros Aggro. The deck was really just Mono White with
a splash of red. I lost game 1 to mana screw but won a very tight game two. I
would have lost game three as well had I not been a bit luckier than my
opponent. He was out of cards in hand and I had a lightning strike. He had a
3/4 Tomik, Distinguished Advokist and a Venerated Loxodon versus my Tibalt
Token. He swung with both creatures, allowing me to block the loxodon, ping Tomik
and kill it with my lightning strike. The following turn I drew experimental
frenzy off the top which proceeded to take over the game.
Finally, I lost the 4th
match to the mirror. I only had two 4 drops (both Experimental Frenzies) in my
list since I felt this was the right number for 20 lands. Looking at the RDW
lists that got into the top 8, this may have been my biggest mistake. While I
have not reviewed the list in detail, those that I saw ran 5 4-drops (in some
combination of frenzy and Chandra). Still, while I did lose game 1 to my
opponent drawing experimental frenzy before I did, I lost game 2 to being stuck
on 3 mountains with both frenzy and Chandra stuck in my hand.
Lesson Learned… Again and again
As someone who loves the game and plays it competitively, I’ve
had my share of both sweet victories and bad runs. We often think about the
latter more than the former, and there is a tendency for some (or at least for
me) to obsess about what could have been done differently. At the end of it
however, a very important lesson that I find the need to keep reminding myself
is that well, there’s only so much one can do. Learning from the loss is
important to improve, but beating oneself up over it is neither helpful nor
healthy. Statistically, even a player who has a 70% win rate versus the field is
exposed to a 34.83% chance of winning only two or fewer matches before his or
her second loss, and I don’t claim to be one who has such a win rate.
And so we play, we lose, and try again.
May the shuffler be with you and congrats to all those who made it.
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