This past weekend, I attended the Star City Games Invitational in Atlanta. While it was not a great weekend for me when it comes to actually playing Magic, I had an absolute blast all weekend. I learned a couple of valuable lessons that I would like to impart to you today. I would also like to take this time to go over some of my experiences this weekend and why I encourage Magic players to attend events like these.


Before we get started, let me first apologize for the lack of content I’ve been producing. I’ve spent the last few weeks preparing for the Invitational as well as adjusting to a new position and schedule at work, so I haven’t had a lot of free time. It is my intention to not have such a large gap in content again.

The Invitational

We’ll start with my actual performance in the Invitational. For those who are unaware, the Invitational is a three day event. Day 1 consists of four rounds of Legacy followed by four rounds of Standard. For the Legacy portion, I played Ad Nauseum Tendrils, a variation of Storm Combo. I don’t have many Legacy cards at this time, so I was ultimately at the mercy of what decks my friends could loan me. I chose ANT because I have played combo decks in the past and, because of my lack of experience in the format, I wanted to play a deck where I wouldn’t have to interact with my opponent. This turned out to be a mistake, which I will expand upon further down.

For the Standard portion, I chose to play Jund. Fellow Phyrexian Arena writer, Matt Norton, had also chosen to play Jund in the standard portion, and I felt he had a pretty solid list. I have been playing Jund off and on for awhile now, so I am pretty familiar with the deck. Plus, our version had a pretty good game against the Boogeyman of the format (aka Junk Reanimator). It seemed like a good choice.

I should have known it was not going to be a great day after round 1. My opponent was playing a version of Esper Stoneblade. When I played Gitaxian Probe in game 1, he had the following cards in his hand: Counterspell, Force of Will, Spellstutter Sprite, Familiar’s Ruse. He was holding virtually five pieces of countermagic. I learned on the next turn that he drew a Vendilion Clique. It was pretty much over after that. Game two went much the same way.

Round 2 I was fortunate enough to win. I played against RUG Delver, a deck that is not really a great match up for me, as evidenced by game 1 where I got trounced. Game 2 went a little better in my favor. He played a Tropical Island and a Delver on turn 1. I probed him on Turn 2 and saw a hand of six lands and a Ponder. My hand at the time had my second land drop, Dark Ritual, Lion’s Eye Diamond x 2, Lotus Petal, and Infernal Tutor. He was dead a couple of minutes later. We talked about it after the game and both of us agreed he should have led with the Ponder to try to find a free counterspell in case I had it on turn 2, which I did. Game 3 also went in my favor. I drew all the right disruption to remove his counterspells and then went for it on the last turn before his Tarmagoyf would kill me and got there.

At this point I was 1-1 and feeling pretty good. You only had to go 5-3 to make day 2. In round 3, my opponent mulled to 4 in game 1 and then called over a judge to ask how many times he could mulligan. The judge, of course, told him that he could mulligan to 0 cards, and that is what he did. Some of you may be confused about why he did this, so I will explain. He knew his 4 card hand wasn’t going to be good enough to win, so he was basically scooping. However, by doing a mulligan to 0, it means I have to play to try to win the game and he gets to see what I’m playing without revealing any information so he will have an advantage in Game 2 because he could sideboard, and I was still basically blind. On turn 3 when I played a Gitaxian Probe he conceded in response so I wouldn’t know what he was playing.

In game 2, he led with a Delver of Secrets. On turn 2 he blind-flipped the Delver and then proceeded to resolve a Counterbalance. His deck is full of 1’s and 2’s just like my deck. He can pretty much always counter some part of my combo with a blind flip. Game three went pretty much the same way and I couldn’t combo through. I found out the Counterbalances were there to beat the combo decks like mine and it seemed to work pretty well.

Round 4 my opponent was playing Maverick, a deck full of little white and green creatures that try to disrupt the opponent in some way. In game one he was on the play and hit a turn 2 Thalia and I never saw a second land: Game over. In game 2 I had turn 1 Dread of Night to deal with that play. However, I proceeded to draw mostly lands giving him time to find a Qasali Pridemage to kill the Dread of Night and start dropping creatures that slowed me down and killed me.

So I ended Legacy at 1-3. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, but I knew if I 4-0’d Standard I could still make day 2. I ended up dropping after round 6 because in game 1 of both rounds I drew all of my lands and in game 2 of each round I drew no lands.

So my first Invitational ended in a 1-5 drop. It was definitely not my best performance. However, I learned some lessons from the event that I will use to my advantage if I qualify again later this year. In hindsight, playing ANT was probably not the right call for Legacy. While I felt proficient in piloting the deck and performing the combo I did not know enough about Legacy to know which cards to play around. I feel like if I had been playing a interactive deck like Delver or Stoneblade, I could have had a better shot outplaying my opponents.

Another lesson of the weekend is not one I learned but one I reinforced. I know my fellow auther Brad wrote a piece a few weeks ago about tilt and how it can destroy you. Also, Jackie Lee wrote a fantastic article on the subject as well recently. You should definitely give it a read. After finishing 1-3 in Legacy I could have very easily self destructed. I was able to focus on the task at hand though and try to sweep the Standard portion. Had my manabase decided to play fairly with me, it may have still been possible. You have to learn to take the losses in stride.

Saturday

After my terrible performance on Friday, I had decided not to play in the Standard Open on Saturday. Instead I decided to spend the day enjoying some of the other activities being offered. Fortunately, Steve Argyle was on site doing alters and signing cards, so I was able to get my Liliana of the Veil’s signed, and that was probably the second best thing to come out of the weekend for me. We’ll get to the best in a little bit.

After talking to my friends between rounds of the Standard Open I started to regret not playing because the sting of the previous day had worn off quite a bit. I had considered doing a draft or a Standard win-a-box, but I decided to head over to the Ascension area instead.

First off, Magic will always be my favorite game, but as some of you know, I am a huge fan of Ascension as well. They were having an Ascension Immortal tournament on Sunday and I planned to participate, especially after Friday’s losses in Magic. I noticed they had boards set up and were doing demos of the new set. I watched a game being played by Magic Pros William Jensen and Zvi Mowshowitz.

While watching the game, I was approached by the Stoneblade representative who was running the area. Turns out, it was Magic Hall of Famer Rob Dougherty. We talked about Ascension and Stoneblade’s other game, SolForge. We then played a match of SolForge on his iPad and he crushed me. I was now 0-2 against Magic Hall of Famer’s in various games (my first loss being to Shuhei Nakamura on camera at GP Charlotte).

I continued to watch the Magic Pros playing until my friend Blake came up to me. I found out he had not done so well in the Standard Open and dropped. So we spent the rest of the afternoon playing Ascension so I could practice the new set for the Immortal tournament. I got to talk a little bit to Rob and Zvi about the game as we played and thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon. It’s not often you get to hang out with professional Magic players.

Sunday

As it turns out, maybe I should have played in the Sealed Classic on Sunday as opposed to the Ascension Immortal tournament. The Sealed Classic only had about 70 players and they were still giving a $5,000 prize pool, plus the top 8 would qualify for another Invitational. However, I didn’t know that would be the case and didn’t get to the event site until after the Sealed Classic had started.

I’m still glad I played in the Ascension tournament. There ended up being 29 players over all. I felt pretty good about my chances in the event. I had played a lot of the new set the previous day and I have played quite a bit Ascension in general. My outlook wasn’t so good after round 1, though. After my opponent beat me, I found out he had placed in the Top 32 of the Ascension World Championships last year at GenCon, and his cousin was the reigning World Champion and was also playing in the event. They actually drove 13 hours just to play in this event.

I did win my next 4 rounds however and made it into the top 8. The highlight of the event was playing against Zvi Mowshowitz himself. With that win, I now move to 1-2 against Magic Hall of Famers across various games. I also won my top 8 match as well. However, I lost my Top 4 match by 0 points. That’s right, 0 points. In Ascension if there is a tie, the win goes to the player who went second. It was kind of a bummer to lose like that, but it’s just part of the game. So I don’t get to be made into an Ascension card, yet. The event was actually won by the reigning World Champion giving him yet another card in the game.

Wrap Up

Even if I didn’t do well in the Invitational itself, I still had a lot of fun on the weekend. I am determined now to make sure I qualify again because I would like to go to the Invitational in Indianapolis in October. I only need 5 more open points to do that which shouldn’t be too difficult since there are a couple of Opens close by between now and then.

If any of you have never been to major Magic event like an Open or a Grand Prix I strongly recommend it. They are some of the most awesome memories I have playing this game. Even if you don’t play in the main event, there are always plenty of awesome things to do.

Join me next time when we dive into the Dragon’s Maze spoilers that have just started and we look toward a new Standard format just in time for PTQ season. And as always, if you have questions or comments (for Magic, Ascension, or Solforge) you can reach me here, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Eddie Walker
@praethus