So my rant today is about seeing your mistakes while playing and admitting to them later. Over the last four weeks I have been looking at how I play the game and what I can do to improve. In my local gaming group I have to say that I am given more respect than I deserve. Many of the locals don’t like getting paired up against me because they think it can be a auto loss. I am not a great player and I know this. I want to be better so I try to recognize my mistakes and overcome those mistakes. In the last two weeks I really started playing a lot of games and got my local team to start testing more aggressively. What I realized right away and is the heart of this rant is that we make a lot of mistakes and don’t see it. One of the things that I do when I am playing is to take notes during the match and make sure to write down when I make a mistake that I recognize. Just as a side note I played a Ptq this weekend and had 15 mistakes on my notes. Now I don’t think that everyone should do this. Only the people who actively want to get better should set down and take notes so that they can see their mistakes later. For those of you that have huge egos and say they play there matches perfect you really don’t want to do this.

Okay so I told you what I do when I see myself make a mistake. It is a simple system, see a mistake write it down. Now the hard part is when people are too stubborn to admit that they made a mistake. A prime example is one of my team mates thinks that his deck from the Ptq was built as best it could be made and the three of us that looked at his card pool believed it could have been built better. Now he is convinced that he is right and cant be convinced otherwise. This is where many of us have our problem of stubbornness. I am sure many of you out there have been playing and made a play or two and then had your friends say “Why didn’t you do this instead?” and then they tell you what they would have done. Of course normally we respond with our reasoning not realizing they have seen a mistake and we stubbornly refuse to see it. Maybe my team mate is right and he has the right build, but maybe he is wrong and is being to stubborn to recognize it. What I am ranting to you my wonderful reader about is that we should try to make sure that we don’t get to stubborn in our arguments to not see our mistakes. If you want to get better listen to your friends when they see a mistake, write down your mistakes, ask your opponent if you made any mistakes that they saw and most importantly don’t get stubborn and think that you didn’t make mistakes or that will be the biggest one of all. Now on to the Mirrodin Sealed deck fix.

This is the product that I got to use in the Pro Tour Qualifier that I attended this weekend. For that of you that have never attended a sealed Qualifier, here is a small breakdown of what this happens at a Sealed event. First you get the product that you will be registering for the event. When you get the product you note all the cards on decklist sheets and turn it back in so that no one brings their own cards. You are then issued a set of cards to build your deck with that someone else has registered. This system allows usually no more than 10% of the participants to get back the product that they register, insuring that no one can cheat very easily. The product changes depending on what the current sets are. For this event it was a Mirrodin Tournament Pack and two Darksteel booster for a total of 75 cards plus 30 basic land. You take the product and build a deck that has a minimum of 40 cards in the deck. After building the deck you will use that deck to play a certain amount of rounds dependant on the amount of people in the tournament followed by the top eight players drafting and then playing out the finals for determination of the winner. What follows is the product that I was issued and what I decided to build with it.

Lands

Seat of Synod

Artifacts

Altar of Shadows

Arcane Spyglass

Arcbound Worker

Bottle Gnomes

Clockwork Beetle

Copper Myr

Drill Skimmer

Drill Skimmer

Elf Replica

Genesis Chamber

Goblin Replica

Jinxed Choker

Leonin Bladetrap

Leonin Scimitar

Mask of Memory

Myr Enforcer

Myr Mindservant

Necrogen Spellbomb

Razor Golem

Serum Tank

Spellbinder

Spire Golem

Steel Wall

Talisman of Indulgence

Talon of Pain

Tangle Bloom

Titanium Golem

Ur-Golem’s Eye

Viridian Longbow

Voltaic Construct

Vulshok Morningstar

Welding Jar

Wizard Replica

White

Auriok Glaivemaster

Leonin Den-Guard

Luminous Angel

Metal Fatigue

Pteron Ghost

Razor Barrier

Ritual of Restoration

Skyhunter Patrol

Sphere of Purity

Taj-Nar Swordsmith

Red

Electrostatic Bolt

Fireball

Fist of the Anvil

Goblin Striker

Inflame

Rustmouth Ogre

Spikeshot Goblin

Unforge

Journey of Discovery

Pulse of the Tangle

Reap and Sow

Tel-Jilad Chosen

Tel-Jilad Wolf

Viridian Acolyte

Viridian Joiner

Black

Burden of Greed

Consume Spirit

Contaminated Bond

Nim Shambler

Relic Bane

Scavenging Scarab

Wail of the Nim

Blue

Annul

Carry Away

Dream’s Grip

Hoverguard Observer

Lumengrid Warden

Magnetic Flux

Quicksilver Behemoth

Thoughtcast

Vedalken Engineer

I started off buy looking at each color individually and chose what colors I believed could be used and which could not.

Black was out because it only really had two creatures and not enough removal other than if I had played the alter of shadows to go with it. Unfortunately I didn’t think about using the Alter of Shadows main deck and had to sideboard it in several matches. See I admit my mistakes.

Blue was also limited by the fact that it also was low on quality creature and the one big fat creature was a Quicksilver Behemoth and he has to be cast over and over and that makes him less than stellar. Blue did have some of the better artifact creatures but the supplemental spell in blue didn’t really impress me.

Green had some solid creatures for playing in this event. It gave me a pro artifact guy and what we call a bomb in the Pulse of the tangle. But again it is also a color that was missing a lot of extras in not enough creatures.

White had some good creature in it but none of the white removal spells that you really need. It also was missing just about all of the combat trick spell that you really tend to need if you are going to play white.

Red was the only color that I immediately decided that I could play. It had Spikeshot Goblin which is amazing, a fireball, electrostatic bolt, and a Rustmouth Ogre which were just a few of the spells that made red easy to pick as my primary color.

I want to start off by saying that I do not believe that what I built is the perfect build of the deck so don’t laugh to hard when you see mistakes.

My Deck for the Pro Tour Qualifier.

Creatures

Tel-Jilad Wolf

Tel-Jilad Chosen

Spikeshot Goblin

Rustmouth Ogre

Goblin Striker

Razor Golem

Leonin Den-Guard

Auriok Glaivemaster

Titanium Golem

Steel Wall

Myr Enforcer

Goblin Replica

Elf Replica

Copper Myr

Clockwork Beetle

Spells

Pulse of the Tangle

Fist of the Anvil

Fireball

Electrostatic Bolt

Vulshok Morningstar

Viridian Longbow

Talon of Pain

Mask of Memory

Leonin Scimitar

Looking back on it I should have bit my lip and left the green out and played Red/white. I just couldn’t resist the urge to play the Pulse of the Tangle and TeliJad chosen. I probably would have also done better because that would have given me a better chance at using the white bomb of Luminous Angel.

So here is a small tourney report of what happened at the Pro Tour Qualifier where I played the deck from this article.

Pro Tour Qualifier San Diego

Round One- Chad Koss

Funny thing about traveling 100 miles to a tournament is that you can end up playing someone who lives 10 miles from your own house. This really stinks because you end up hurting the chances of someone you know and I know Chad very well. Chad and I talk while I mulligan down to 5 cards and I manage to draw into several lands and post up a little offence managing to get him to 13 before he pays one of his bombs Sundering Titan and destroys one of my mountains, plains, and forest. That pretty much seals up game one and it only took 8 minutes. Game two I get a fair start as Chad just plays land after land and I watch as I only get to three land and a Myr and he gets to 8 mana and plays the Sundering Titan again killing all my lands and follows it up with killing me. The total time on the round was 12 minutes. Chad informs me that he didn’t really draw his good just because he also has Molderslug and a loxadon war hammer. I look at his deck and inform him that he cant come home unless he top eights and this pretty much gives him the kiss of death for the tournament. Things do not look like they are going to be good for me.

Round 2- Dave Stadley from Louisiana

I chat with Dave for a while as we get ready to play and find out he is a store owner from Louisiana. He has made the 4 hour trek so that he can better serve his customers and find out what an event like this is like. I have to say that I really liked his attitude and wish him well for his store GAME FU. He also runs a website for his store and players called Gamefu.net Unfortunately for Dave he gets hit a lot from creatures equipped with Mask of Memory and the card advatage pretty much does him in. I did get to get really happy when I killed him with a Fireball. The second game he uses his shatter early for a Leonin Scimitar and I was able to keep the board clear with the help of a Talon of Pain. Then I got to finish him of with the fireball. Wow wouldn’t it be cool if I could kill all my opponents today with the fireball. If Dave reads this it was a pleasure playing with you.

Round 3-Mutumbo

Okay Mutumbo actually has a full name but I have never learned it and anyone that knows Mutumbo just know who Mutumbo is instinctively.

I make some mistakes over and over but a Spikeshot Goblin teamed up with artifacts like Talon of Pain take it home. In game two I draw a lot of land and the Talon of Pain hit’s the board again till finally I can hide behind my Pulse of the Tangle and build up my lands for a 13 point fireball to the dome. As a side note to this game Mutumbo is a very fun opponent and I felt bad that he actually had dropped after round two but convinced the judges to let him continue playing. But if you ever meet him he a great guy.

Round Four-Kip Antene

Kip another good friend and both of us have won two matches and lost one match. Pretty much the guy that loses has to win out and have good tiebreakers to get into the top eight. My games are both same and can be summed up like this. I play guys and beat him down until he plays Glissa The Artifact Killing Elf Witch From where all Evil Come from and beats me. I made several mistakes but the mistakes that cost me most were not killing Glissa early in game one and trying to kill Kip early in game two that allowed him to play his Glissa The Artifact Killing Elf Witch From where all Evil Come from and win game two.

After round four I check on what was happening with my previous opponents and as I expected they had all dropped from the tournament. This pretty much insured that if I stayed in the tournament I wouldn’t have good tiebreakers and would miss the top eight so I dropped out of the tournament.

Best Quote of the Tournament

Chad Koss yelling loudly

“I got scrubbed out. I got scrubbed out by some guy that kept talking about how much he likes playing in group games.”

Nothing bothers a tournament player more than being beaten by a casual player.

Worst Quote of the Tournament

Owner of Establishment

“There is no buying or selling in the store, anyone caught buying or selling singles will be told to get their @#$% and leave the store.”

The expletive deleted was the other word for poo that your mother would wash your mouth out for saying it.This was said to the 70 plus customers that were in the store during player meeting portion of the tournament.

All in all it was a good time and I hope that you enjoyed this little extra.