In my eternal quest to be a bigger geek than anyone would voluntarily announce in public, I'm flirting with the idea of picking up Magic: the Gathering again. For a little bit of background, I used to be quite into this game... I played the Stardard format for a while and as I've kept all my cards, I have a fairly impressive collection of Legacy decks.
This past weekend, I decided to try one of them out in a Legacy tournament... and boy was I in for a wakeup call.
Here's the deck I played:
4x Birds of Paradise
4x Utopia Sprawl
4x Grul Signet
4x Molten Rain
4x Stone Rain
4x Moldavi Acidmoss
4x Argothian Wurm
3x Wildfire
3x Avalanche Riders
4x Harmonise
10x Mountain
10x Forrest
2x Wasteland
It's a fairly simple RG land destruction deck that I put together primarily so that I could play Argotian Wurm, who's picture I really like. Going into the tournament I was pretty confident, I had beaten a Ravager deck 3-0 in practice the week before and didn't think I'd face much that was faster than that.
So how did it turn out? Well....
Round 1:
I got destroyed 0-2 by a horrible black recursion deck. If you consistently drop a 7/7 turn two.. there's really nothing I can do. I know I should have expected this and had a sideboard with a lot of graveyard hate.. but there aren't really many options in RG and I don't have those cards anyway.
Round 2:
I got the bye... yay >.<
Round 3:
Went down 1-2 against a Green Black LD deck... first game everything worked fine, second game I drew 3 land for every other card and the third game he managed to kill all my ramp and get ahead of the curve. Not a terrible performance, and with a little more luck I think I could have won this one.
Round 4:
Lost 1-2 against a horrible Dredge combo deck. This thing was crazy... it doesn't actually need any land to function (just to speed it up), so that's just a terrible rock/paper/scissors situation for my LD.
Round 5:
Taken down 1-2 by a very quick and consistent infinite creature combo. Again I had some bad draws, but I probably would have gone down without it as he had many artefacts that made land a pleasant assistant to his deck, rather than the necessity that it usually is.
So... 5 rounds and the only match win I registered was the bye. Ouch >.< I had no idea what the meta-game was going into this tournament, and if I had to do it again I would definitely play something different. Not really sure what, but LD just doesn't seem to work in the format.
I still think I'm going to get back into Magic, but I'll try pick up Standard. It's much easier to prepare properly in a limited format than it is in Legacy, so hopefully next time I do a post like this I will be able report some victories.
-Odd
"You can't blame your opponents for apply a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity"
-Bill Clinton
