Community Cup Grand Finale
Ok, I’m at the airport now with a lot of time to kill. Here’s the last installment of my Community Cup Challenge report.
Thanks in part to the goblin Zo-Zu deck going 3-0, the community team finished the difficult Commander event with a slight lead over Wizards. From there, we headed downstairs to the main lobby, where pizza was ordered and a few hours of casual drafting and sealed play (with paper cards) ensued.
Of course, Wizards couldn’t just let us draft any old cards. We started with Kamigawa block drafts, with custom packs holding four rares each. Not crazy enough? Ok. Every single card was foil. Now, I didn’t draft or play much during Kamigawa, so all the cards were much new to me. I put together an aggressive red/green deck than won one match but lost two more.
There weren’t official prizes, since we were just playing random casual games. However, there was a foil Rise of Eldrazi set present. After each match, both players would draw one card from it, then the winner got to pick which one to keep, giving the opponent the other card. So potentially you could pull a foil Gideon Jura or Vengevine just for winning a fun game of Magic. That match I won in the Kamigawa draft? No, I didn’t pull my third Gideon of the day, but my opponent drew a foil All is Dust, which I decided to keep. One of the matches I lost? I drew a foil Kargan Dragonlord, which my opponent (the inimitable Chris Kiritz) kept.
From there we moved to Zendikar/Worldwake sealed, using the four-pack, 30-card format (I ran 13 lands each time, and that seemed to work well). I cracked open my packs to build a deck. First pack had a terrible rare, second had Nissa Revane. First Worldwake pack was meh. Second was the capstone on the day of ridiculous luck, the $80 icing on the cake. Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I offered to open other packs for people, or perhaps buy some lottery tickets. I’ll have to be careful the rest of the year, though. I’m fairly sure I used up my supply of luck. All crit misses at D&D night from now on.
Then I put together a solid black/red deck full of removal and good creatures (my blue was too terrible to use, even with Jace), won a match and took the foil Linvala, Keeper of Silence.. Then I went back to my hotel and went to bed.
The Standard event the next day was pretty low-key for me. The other team members disagreed with my deck selection and gave me a vampires deck to play. I didn’t like the deck and had never played it before, although I’ve obviously played a lot of monoblack decks. I made a valiant effort to make it work, but went 0-3, only winning one game. I fell to an Eldrazi Green deck, the Red Decks Wins variant that leans on tons of burn spells, Kiln Fiend and Devastating Summons, and Tom LaPille’s Time Sieve/Open the Vaults combo deck. To give you an idea of how that deck works, I would play Magic for three or four turns, then he would take eight or more turns in a row until he found his win condition and I died. Not really the stuff fun and interesting Magic stories are made of.
When all the chips were down, though, the community team steamrolled to an overall win by a score of 299 to 262. That’s pretty decisive, despite all the obstacles.
Next week I’ll write a bit more about the experience of hanging out at Wizards of the Coast HQ for a week, meeting the people who make the games we love and playing Magic 18 hours a day. For now, it’s sufficient to say that Wizards treated us like kings the whole time, everyone I met was unbelievably cool, the whole experience was so amazing I’m not sure it was real, and I defeated Mike Turian and Aaron Forsythe at Magic.
Update: check out a photo of the winning team (and the Cup).
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