Well, PTQ Amsterdam season is over and my greatest efforts failed to get me the Q in a 4 week odyssey that took me back and forth between home in the Chicago suburbs, Pittsburgh, Detroit (with an extra day at a motel in Livonia, MI taking advantage of the wi-fi to PTQ online), GP Columbus, and GenCon in Indianapolis. The brand-new Fauna Shaman decks and unusual quantity of good (and Jund-ready) rogue decks caught me unprepared in Pittsburgh, so all I got out of the weekend was a handful of packs and a desire to innovate, but not in time for Detroit where I had the same problems and finished out of prize. Craig dreamcrushed his way to a free plane ticket after starting 0-1 though. GP Columbus was my breakout Legacy event, so I guess I'm satisfied with my 5-4 finish (8-6 including GPTs), but 6-3 at the PTQ brought me nothing but a draft set of M11 and happy memories of finally drawing a sideboarded instant-win Manabarbs against Turboland and of being totally crushed by a sick RUG brew that unleashed a steady stream of mana acceleration and countermagic culminating in a super-effective Destructive Force.
These disappointing events left me feeling really burned out on Jund, such that I woke up with a "bad feeling" about Jund the morning of the Columbus PTQ but no time to audible into UW Control instead, and I didn't enjoy either Midwest Masters LCQ I played in at GenCon. Won with turn 2 Leech again, yawn...lost to color-screw again, yawn... Luckily, I had put together a Fauna Shaman list of my own (with Craig's help) in Columbus and he lent me the cards I needed to play it in the PTQ. $24 worth of playtesting either, I can safely say that SuperFriends is a bad match-up. How do I know? Because I lost to it three times in a row! That deck definately wasn't overrepresented at the tournament as a whole, planeswalkers just have it in for me. (Damn you Spreading Seas! I thought I was safe!) I dropped from the tournament after losing to Boros Bushwhacker (remember that deck and its nut draws?) and went to the other side of the TCG room to drown my sorrows in some Spoils sealed.
The Spoils is a TCG similar to Magic, but with more skill-testing mechanics and 1000% more penis jokes. It's the perfect antidote to any magic player's case of the "poor mes" because you don't get mana/color-screwed or mulligan down to 4 at inopportune moments. You start with 2 lands (resources) in play, can play any card facedown as land and even sac it to play it as a spell later if it has an ability called "flip-up", and spells are essentially colorless, as long as you have one or more of the right color resource in play based on the "threshold" requirement for that spell, so for instance if you had a mountain and forest in play, you could still play 2 birds of paradise if they cost 1 with threshold of one G. You start with 8 or 9 cards in hand and mulligan (one-time) by shipping any number of cards to the bottom of your deck and drawing that many more. Every turn you choose whether to play a resource (land) or draw a card, and playing a resource is almost always better because you can also choose at any time to pay 4 to play a resource or pay 3 to draw a card. This makes strategy more interesting because not only does playing a spell cost you a card, but every 3 that it costs also costs you a draw. So do you want tempo here, or card advantage? Combat gives you more opportunity to gain an edge over opponents who don't think everything through, because it's a little more complicated: First, combat damage does go on the stack, second, you can have multiple combat phases on your turn (and when creatures attack together they basically have banding), third, creatures have a 3rd attribute (speed) that works like first strike, in that your 2/2/3 guy has first strike when it's blocked by or blocking a 2/2/2, but it's the other way around against a 2/2/4.
I walked out of there with a bunch of packs and I had a lot of fun outplaying opponents at a game I barely know the rules to just applying lessons learned from studying Magic strategy. I didn't have the same pressure to succeed since this was only the 2nd time I've played. With Magic, I have inflated expectations that make the game less fun if I don't go into the tournament with the right attitude. Plus, trying another game is always a good change of pace and maybe it will break me out of this rut. I had so much fun, I did a Spoils draft on Sunday, got some more packs, which I still haven't opened because I want to find someone to play a 2 man sealed game or something.
After returning to "my world" on the MtG side of the room, I did ante up one of those packs "gunslinging" against another connoisseur of fine collectible card games, Sam Black, who had enjoyed success but was denied the fruits of his success (like a free cruise and big money tournament) back when Spoils was the hot new game, before it collapsed financially. His EDH Lands deck was too much for my type 2 Bant Shaman deck (with Noble Hiearch as the general lol), but afterwards I picked his brain about some card choices and left convinced to finally move my Mana Leaks from the sideboard to the maindeck and to cut a few underperformers, and good deck construction advice is worth a Spoils pack anytime. I'll post my current list later.
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