Without bothering with lengthy introductions, I’ll pick up where I left off last time.  If you missed part 1, I ended day 1 on a 6-1 finish, with my only loss being in the very first round of the tournament.  I drafted an insane 5-colour deck, which was pushed over the boundary between good and amazing by a pair of Bull Cerodons and a Broodmate Dragon, and piloted it to a rather expected 3-0 finish, with a final round victory over Shingou Kurihara in the feature match area... er... arena, sorry. (Rather than fixing the actual problems that need fixing, Wizards have decided to start with the aspects of the game that require no attention at all, like renaming the feature match area, now known as The Arena. This way it makes them look busy despite them actually doing nothing productive in areas that do need changing.)

As with the first day we all got up, got ready, got ourselves downstairs, got a taxi to the venue and got out once we’d arrived. Then we got ourselves a place to sit until seatings for the first round were posted, at which point we got up, got ourselves over to the seatings board, got given our seatings (well, our eyes did the getting given), and got ourselves sat down again. Then we drafted.

I’ve found that, despite trying not to, I am often very influenced in how I draft by one particular draft that either I’ve done myself or that I’ve seen as an onlooker. I can go from hating a card to loving it overnight just because somebody 3-0’d a pod after first picking it, or vice versa because I played the card once and it did nothing. Even though taking a sample of one draft, or even one game as an example is generally not a great thing, I seem to find myself doing it a lot. However, this time I didn’t. As much as I wanted to draft another redonkulus 5 colour deck, after about 4 picks it became apparent that this time the packs just weren’t allowing it, and before long I had settled into an aggressive red-black deck, with the option of splashing either a Jund charm I first picked in the first pack or a Sedraxis Spectre I first picked in the second pack. I went into the third pack with quite a solid deck, which was unfortunately rather lacking in the removal department. This meant that, as much as it hurt me to do so, I ended up picking 2 Drag Down over a Blood Tyrant (which by this point I definitely would have played, as my only fixing so far was Grixis and not Jund) and a Sphinx Summoner (for which, at the time, I had no targets anyway).

Here’s what I ended up with:

The deck’s not the greatest, and runs some cards that are rather subpar, including Rotting Rats (which is fine if you pitch an unearther), Hellspark Elemental, and an Infest that kills much of my team. It did however in hindsight perform better than I was expecting, and was quite efficient at getting the damage in there when it needed to. Annoyingly Rich Hagon decided he’d do a feature on me and Marco and the whole brothers thing on day 2, the day on which my draft deck was somewhat uspectacular, and therefore the day on which I figured I’d probably go 1-2 and be rather embarrassed when I crashed and burned.

Self depreciating thoughts aside, round 8 pairings were posted and 100 or so players descended upon the pairings board simultaneously. Oh, that reminds me.

::aside::

Why is it that when pairings are posted suddenly a mass of sweaty human flesh begins to focus into a very small space in a very short amount of time? What’s the rush people? It seems that people are under the impression that if they don’t get their pairings NOW they’ll end up with a gameloss, DQ and lifeban from Magic. Seriously, it’s not gonna happen, so just relax and let other people see their pairing before you start to clamber over a mass of bodies in a bloodshot rage. Please?

::aside over::

Round 8: Vs Calvetto Marcello

I’m not entirely sure whether his first name is Calvetto or Marcello, as his DCI and Facebook seem to disagree with each other, but being Italian the first thing he asked me as I sat down was whether I spoke Italian, and I begrudgingly said yes. Though I can get by with the language, playing magic in Italian is generally very awkward, considering most words they use are the words we use but said in an Italian accent. I therefore find myself either not knowing the word they use for trample or saying the English word in a forced Italian accent.

Calvetto was on my right in the draft and I was fairly certain from what I hadn’t seen and from the reaction I got when I passed a late Warmonk in pack 2 that he was in either Bant or 5 colour. As the game progressed it turned out I wasn’t far wrong, as his first play of the game was a 4^th turn Stoic Angel followed by a 5^th turn Tower Gargoyle. These cards would normally spell game over for a deck like mine but thankfully I’d hit the nuts draw with a 3^rd turn shambling remains, and Calvetto was reluctant to block my 3-power man (must have been iguanar) in fear of the Blister Beetle that I did indeed have in my hand. Eventually he was too far behind in the damage race and my removal sealed the deal. Game 2 I can’t remember much of, which leads me to think he may have been slightly manascrewed, but after the game he was wondering to himself whether the play he made on turn 4 or so would have affected the outcome of the game, so I guess he was doing something during the early turns. I asked if he got the Warmonk, which he obviously did, and reassured him (can I call it reassuring?) that if he made the lifelink rhino at any point in either game my chances of winning would have dropped to somewhere close to zero.

7-1

Sweet, this meant I couldn’t go 0-3 with the deck, and even if I lost the next 2 I’d still be in pretty good shape going into the standard to make the top 50, which was really what I had my sights set on.

Round 9: Vs Jonno Randle

It’s not often 2 Brits get paired each other at 7-1 in a PT, but here I was sat across from the GB national champ himself Too Hot To Handle Jonno Randle. Unfortunately for both of us Jon seemed to have been suffering from the curse of the Englishman: the inability to read signals, and thus had settled in my exact colours, if only with a little more blue to support a Summoner Sphinx and Cloudheath Drake package.  In game 1 I got the start with early creatures, led by an unanswered turn 3 Sedraxis Spectre, and 2 or so removal spells in hand to guarantee that if he did try and mount a creature-based comeback it would be too little too late. In game 2 I stumbled a bit on mana and his deck punished me as it curved into the mahoosive Blood Tyrant I passed him in favour of a Drag Down in the third pack. Maybe a mistake? Who knows.

Game 3 was the most interesting of the match as Jon got into an awkward spell snip situation, in which you keep mana up for it, your opponent inadvertently plays around it by making a 3-drop on turn 4, and you simple sigh and cycle it at the end of the turn and carry on with the game. Then your opponent untaps and drops the gamewinner on turn 5 by tapping out and you sigh even more, and think whether you should have played it differently. The game winner? Volcanic Submersion, of course. On my turn 5 I untapped, tapped all my lands, put my Volcanic Submersion on the table, then thought long and hard which land I should hit. In play Jon had 2 Swamps, a Mountain and an Island. Though I hadn’t yet seen the Summoner in the 2 previous games I was more than sure he grabbed it when it went past me, and in my hand I was clutching onto 2 removal spells. For these reasons I figured that the only way he was likely to win the game was to start laying the card advantage on me, and so down went for the Island, despite feeling that red was maybe a more important colour in his deck. Jonno calmly untapped, keeping his usual poker face of course, made a mountain (inner fist pump) and passed it back to me. As expected, my creatures on the board backed up with removal in hand eventually took the game. And what was the card he had in hand from the start but was unable to cast? Sphinx Summoner, of course.

8-1

So if I win the next round I go 6-0 in the limited section of a Pro Tour. This is quite a nice achievement if I say so myself, and made better by the fact that I wasn’t 0-4 going into the draft. On top of this my deck had now performed better than I could have hoped for, and would be 2-1 at worst – not too shabby for a bunch of mediocre creatures, a removal spell or two, and pretty much no game-winning bombs, unless you count Sedraxis Spectre and Tarfiend, neither of which are at dragon or planeswalker levels. So, who would it be to try and stand in the way of me going 6-0 in the draft?

Round 10: Vs Shuuhei Nakamura

Sadface.

This match was feature matched, as relatively unknown Englishman trying to go perfect in draft against the 2008 Player of the Year makes quite a good story, and also because Rich Hagon was on the coverage team, so if you want full coverage of what happened it’s on the Wizards website, but this is pretty much how it went:

Game 1: I make a turn 3 Iguanar while shuuhei draws for the 3^rd turn, sucks air in through his teeth, discards a Nacatl Outlander and passes the turn back (with 2 mountains in play). The rest of his turns were pretty much exactly the same, and the lone Iguanar got there.

Game 2: This time Shuuhei had mana, and after I killed a vein drinker with Blister Beetle and Skeletonize (I also had mana... a lot of mana), he simply untapped and made a Charnelhoard Wurm. My attempt at holding it off with an 8/8 Tarfiend was thwarted by a pre-combat damage Drag Down for 4, which got Damage through with the Wurm and put the Drag Down back in his hand. My attempt at stabilising with Infest and Bloodpyre elemental seemed good for a while, but he just made more creatures and we were onto game 3.

Game 3: I mulligan into a 1-land, 2-cycler hand on the play and think whatever, I’ll get there.  I got there, made turn 3 Shambling Remains, and watched Shuuhei draw, suck air in through his teeth, discard a card and pass the turn back. Nice 6-0.

9-1

Yus! I did it! Though in my previous 3 nationals performances I’ve done consistently well in draft, I’ve never managed to hit the perfect X-0, with 5-1, 5-2 and 6-1 to date, but for me to finally achieve it in a pro tour? That’s just awesome. Now I just need to win 2 more rounds...

At this stage the number of us from the motherland doing well had dropped significantly, with both Marco and Neil hitting a big brick wall (of reverence) and 0-3’ing each of their pods. Guy Southcott However managed to 2-1 leaving him at 7-3 and needing (so he claimed) 2 more wins to hit his target and top 50 the tournament, and Jonno Randle had won the last round of the draft and was now trailing (just) behind me at 8-2. And so began the final uphill struggle.

Round 11: Vs Ari Lax

It was Ari’s first PT, and he seemed rather excited at the prospect of top 8’ing his first time on the big scene. Though I’m sure it was all very friendly, he did seem to have a bit of trouble with keeping quiet during the match, which began to grind a little towards the end of the match. I think I may have had a somewhat awkward moment on the train back, where I mentioned the above to Marco out loud without realising that Ari was sat behind us in the same carriage. Oops!

In game 1 I got the draw you’d like to get and led off with a Sculler into a Procession. We traded resources for a while and eventually my early pressure got the better of him. At this stage Ari decided to take his sideboard out and slam 12 of the cards on the table and exclaim “I came prepared!” which, again, was probably nothing more than genuine excitement, but did come over as a little arrogant/annoying. In game 2 we once again traded resources in the early game while he infested my board and then dropped a warhammer in the hope of racing back. His only creature however was a Mutavault which wasn’t particularly effective against my knight of Meadowgrain. He needed some kind of flying beater and fairly soon (I was beginning to apply pressure), and his deck answered the call by providing him a Mistbind Clique off the top. When you’re hitting for a difference of 14 generally the race is won...

I can’t remember anything about game 3 other than he won. D’oh.

9-2

Both my losses were to a faeries deck, both were to Americans, and both were in the first round of Standard. Last time I lost though I won 9 straight matches. So surely this meant my path was clear right through the top 8? At this stage the unstoppable force that is LSV had somehow (my guess: big cheats) managed to notch up a somewhat impressive 11-0 record, with a 6 point gap between him and the rest of the world. This meant that I could potentially get paired against him, and there was some discussion as to whether this was a good thing. I’m not saying a mirror match against LSV is ever a good thing, but that with him now a lock for top 8, it might have been possible to appeal to his good nature and get a cheeky concession.

Round 12: Vs Luis Scott-Vargas

Well, here it is. I asked, he said no. Fair enough – if I was at 20 or so consecutive undefeated matches in PTs I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t scoop either. Before the round Rich Hagon had begged me with pretty please to beat Luis so that he could do a 1940s BBC style podcast report of my crushing victory over everyone’s favourite colonial fellow in the name of our great queen (or something along those lines), and so there he was at the start of the round, eager to see me put an end to the ridiculously long win streak. If you want to hear said podcast it’s on mtg.com and is rather good, unlike our games which were rather dull. In the first game I looked good with my double Knight of Meadowgrain until Luis laid down triple Cloudgoat Ranger, made his infinite men slightly larger and ended the game in quick fashion. In game 2 it was my turn to do the above, and in game 3 Luis stumbled on mana while I chomped on a Glorious Anthem with my Wispmare and then just made more/larger men than he did. Woop!

10-2

This now left me in a position of needing only one more win to be able to secure a place in the top 8 with 2 rounds still to go. What had seemed a distant dream a few days ago was now a very close reality. Was I really about to top 8 a Pro Tour?

Round 13: Vs Masayasu Tanahashi

So, this was it. I knew he was playing faeries as he was playing on table 2 during my match against LSV, and so I was neither particularly happy nor upset about my pairing. I won the roll, which is huge in this matchup, and then mulled to 5 cards, which is also pretty huge. My 5 was pretty good though, and saw me lead a Sculler into another Sculler into a Glorious anthem and start beating for 6 after taking apart his mediocre hand. Before I knew it, the Scullers got there, and I was 1-0 up off a mulligan to 5. Nice start!

Game 2, and another mulligan to 5. Sigh. This time, however, it came from my opponent. A Thoughtseize turned it into a mulligan to 4 and a Sculler turned it into a mulligan to 3. Meanwhile I made some creatures and some ways of pumping my creatures, and turned a second mulligan to 5 into a 2-0 win.

I DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Marco was standing behind me with his hand outstretched for the high five, and I gladly provided. Barring some strange mix of pairings shaftings and bad matchups (see: nationals 2006; nationals 2007), I was in the top 8 of my 4^th ever Pro Tour. I’m actually getting quite excited by it just writing it down, but oddly at the time I was fairly calm. I think I’d learnt from my previous 9^th finishes at nationals that getting excited before the last round is a very, very bad idea, and calling home and telling mum you’ve top 8’d is an even worse idea – especially if this means they then call further relatives and spread the word you made the top 8, only to later find out you actually didn’t.

But enough of that.

Round 14: Vs Cedric Phillips

“How does an ID sound to you?”

“That sounds like a pretty good idea!”

“Good luck in the top 8”

WOOP

After this there was not much left to do other than patrol the tournament hall, tell people I was in the top 8 and then play the modesty card when they started congratulating, and treat myself to another bottle or two of Pocari Sweat. I also called home at this stage because, well, I had to, and then walked around a bit more and told some more people how awesome I was. Shingou Kurihara also approached me at some point and asked me if I wanted to team draft, which was awesome, and to make it even sweeter I turned him down (I’m just too pro for him. And also we were just leaving for dinner...). We went for dinner, I bought a round of drinks (I probably should have payed for the whole dinner, but at this stage I was running quite low on yen – I didn’t have the prize money yet), we went home and did some testing of my quarterfinal matchup (well I say we, it was actually the rest of the Brits while I fell asleep on a sofa next to them), and I went to bed.

I’m not going to go through my quarterfinal matchup, as it’s covered in detail on mtg.com and I’m fairly sure anybody reading this will know how it ended anyway. Sure, I was gutted, but when you’ve just made the top 8 of a Pro Tour – something EVERY magic player dreams of someday doing but actually doesn’t expect it to ever happen (I was once one of these players) it’s hard to remain gutted for too long. And in good tradition, I’ll end with some props and slops.

Props:

-Top 8’ing a Pro Tour.
-monkey park for being full of monkeys
-Japan for being so Japanese
-Vending machines for selling Pocari Sweat
-Marco + others who told me how to sideboard (before the swiss and top 8), and Marco for giving me the decklist (though it wasn’t really his list).
-Rodry for passing me 2 Cerodons
-Shuuhei for keeping risky hands and not using his level 8 skills to draw out of them
-Guy Southcoutt [ENG] for being token Scotsman (and bringing me a bottle of Pocari Sweat when I lost to Nassif)
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Slops:

-Nassif for being a spawny French <EXPLETIVE>
-Cruel Ultimatum for being so powerful
-My weak digestive system
-Japanese food for angering my weak digestive system
-WOTC for putting zero effort into making the PT something to remember. They remember to bring that useless Serra Angel Statue, but forget to host a player party or print tshirts. Not to mention the player lounge that got cut after Valencia, which was awesome. Nice one Wizards.
-Having to fly back to England and go back to uni.
-Guy for not getting the 2 wins and top 50 he really wanted in the last 4 rounds of constructed.

Signing off

The Mattoj
Pro Tour Top 8 competitor, Kyoto ‘09
Level 4 Pro
Official modest person

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