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The Reality of Regionals and the Insanity of Reality
Man, it wasn't long ago, I
was here writing for you all talking about how to
prepare for Regionals. Now it's just a couple of
weeks before we put all this to the test. Be prepared
for some craziness though.
I know that most regions
are going to be charging $25 for entry fee. I know
that some of you guys are looking at the $25 price tag
and are having an issue of sticker shot. But you
should really. It's a pretty good deal. Regionals
should take eight to ten hours depending on your
turnout.
But lets say that your
regionals day event takes about ten hours. That's
about $2.27 per hour for entertainment. It's hard to
match that.
Compare that to other
items you spend money on.
Movie - $6.50 average
prices for 2.5 hours = $2.60/hour.
Dinner Date - $20 for two
hours = $10/hour
Game of Bowling (with
shoes) - about $7.00 per game for an hour = $7.00/hour
You get the idea. No
reason that you should complain about the price. It's
just the reality of the situation. It's fun. Enjoy
the day.
I do mean that. You
should seriously try to enjoy the day. Most of you
will spend time on the road traveling to get there.
You will be your entry fee. You will have done a ton
of testing. You will be under heavy pressure and
thought all day. There's no reason to do all of that
to leave upset.
To make things a bit
lighter for you on the day, you might want to try and
set some small goals. These goals can serve as a good
diversion to the stressful part of your day. But
think outside the box a little bit here. Set some
goals that are outside of actual game play. Sure,
it's cool to set some competitive goals.
Trying to win at least 50%
of your matches is a neat goal. Even trying to earn
30 or more DCI points is a good one. There are a lot
of other goals to reach for though. It's not every
day that you can get so many good players in your area
under one roof.
Try to meet people. Talk
to as many people as you can. Make a bunch of new
acquaintances. Truthfully, some of the best people in
our local Magic community are people that I first met
at regionals. Maybe exchange e-mail addresses or
something. I have a saying for people in my store,
"Don't go to a social place to be antisocial." Being
a wall flower is a waste of time and money.
Do some trading.
Honestly, card values are so diverse from one place to
another. Take advantage of this. Bring a bunch of
cards that you have extras of. Trade them away. If
nothing else, sell your crap rares for a few cents
each and use the case to stock up on new sleeves and
supplies.
That bring me to another
point. Be sure to check out your dealers tables.
They will usually have some sleeves or deck boxes that
you can't get at your local store. They might even
have some neat life counters or something. Consider
the dealer tables to be something akin to a gift shop
at a hotel. It allows you tot take something home
from the event that's useful and give you a few
memories to boot.
And before we go on, print
a copy of this check this. It would be neat to hear
about people that do all of these things. I'm not sur
how many really would, but it would definitely be
neat.
If possible, order up a
neat meal from a place you don't normally go to, or go
out to a decent local place to eat. Part of the fun
of my trips is stopping to eat at places I don't get
to eat at very often. It's also a good way to relax
an unwind from a long, busy day.
Find out where people
play. If you are even thinking about playing in
regionals, you have some competitive blood in you. It
also means that you like playing the game and meeting
new players. If you don't, you're in the wrong
place. But seriously, ask EVERY player where they
play at. You might find out about some new places
that aren't that far from you. You might find out
about that five color magic tournament you were
looking to play in. With players coming from
everywhere and with so many shops being out there, you
never know where the good places to play might be
hiding.
Well, that about covers
the ins and outs of things to try for outside of your
competitive play the weekend of regionals.
We've covered the reality
of regionals. Now I want to share some funny stories
of reality related to the Magic community.
I have a personal fond
memory of a r/g deck I built so many years ago. It
was not long after Ice Age had come out. My deck had
Elves, Bird of Paradise, Jeweled Amulets, Tinder
Walls, and Orcish Lumberjacks. It obviously made a
ton of mana. I used the mana to play big green
fatties and some amazingly large red creatures
(usually dragons). My problem was that at the end of
each game I was finishing with a ton of mana on the
table. So after a few games, I would take out a
couple of land and replace them with a few spells.
Well, one day my buddies wanted to see what was in my
deck.
The punchline here is that
I only had seven lands in my deck when we laid it out:
four forest and three mountains. I had been keeping
one land and two land hands and going nuts with them.
Seems pretty ridiculous. The real kicker though is
that after I showed everyone I started having trouble
drawing lands. I guess that this just goes to show
that sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
I have one more
interesting and fun personal anecdote to share with
you all this week. This one is a little more
recent. It happened on the day of the last prerelease
event that I played it. It was the event for Urza's
Destiny. I got there a bit late so I was rushing to
register. This was also back when we ran one big
tournament with lots of swiss rounds. Those were the
good ol' days. Anyway, I hadn't looked at the
spoiler. I made it a point at that time to not look
at it. Well, I'm working on my deck and getting close
to filling it out, but I end up one card short. So
I'm scanning through my creatures and I see this thing
called a Masticore. I'm a bit hesitant to put it in,
because discarding a card every turn seems like a
really bad thing. And honestly, paying two mana to
deal one damage doesn't seem that good to me either.
But it was a 4/4 creature for four mana. It had
regeneration too. That's seemed fine to me.
Masticore ended up winning me two matches.
Technically, it won me a third match, because my first
round opponent scooped to me. To my astonishment, I
found out later that he scooped, because he thought
that I could shoot HIM with the Masticore and I
couldn't. Sometimes you just get lucky. Not to say
that I didn't play well, but luck played a large part
in that day. I ended up finishing 7th overall.
Well, let me start to
finish things up by handling weekly business.
Card of the day this week
is a host of things. That's just highlight ANY cards
in the format that kills artifacts. Naturalize,
Shatter, Echoing Ruin, Altar's Light, Creeping Mold,
Oxidize, or whatever else you can come up with to kill
artifacts. You're going to need a fistful of these to
kill lots of Skullclamp, Arcbound Ravager, and even
Platinum Angels come the big day of regionals. I
would try to have at least four to six cards dedicated
to artifact removal. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Maybe I'm not. You do the research and get back to
me.
And let's get to the bad
play of the week. This first one is from Stefan:
Hello. My name is
Stefan. Let me start by saying I love your articles,
as they allow the below average player to get a
glimpse at the tournament experience. Well, here is
my bad play:
I was playing my
sister's UW hybrid flying/artifact deck using my
under construction R dragon deck. At any rate, I had
sweet field advantage with my Shivan Dragon, 9
mountains, Triassic Egg, about 7 artifact
creatures and another strong creature facing against
her glory seeker (ugh, vanilla), mistform seaswift,
and mistform skyreaver. I sac the egg to summon
Furnace Dragon from the graveyard, and are both too
tired to realize that the effect doesn't go off, so,
I lose my robot army, and she loses a tooth of chiss
goria. I'm really not worried at all, so I just go
and slam her with a pumped up shivan. She blocks
with the seaswift. Her turn, she gives her glory
seeker flight, and proceeds to attack with the glory
seeker and skyreaver. Thinking this a funny way for
her to lose, I give her grace by blocking the glory
seeker. She then proceeds to tell me that I lost.
Puzzled, I told her I had six life, and her reaver
only hit me for 3. Laughing, she hands me the reaver.
I MIXED UP HER SEASWIFT WITH HER SKYREAVER.
Yeah, it's cheesy,
but I'll let you decide whether or not it makes the
cut.
Well guess what Stefan,
your little paly did make the cut.
Here is another one fore
your reading pleasure. This one comes to us from
Derek Stouder:
I'm a big fan of
Pojo.com and all your/ everyone elses articles. After
looking at some of the bad plays of the week, I
figured I'd send in a play that I was lucky enough to
witness yesterday at a casual M:tG tournament.
Basically, my opponent was playing a Ravager/Affinity
deck. He had out a ravager, genesis chamber,
skullclamp, 4 lands and some other random things.
After his 4th turn, he had me down to 2 life from his
ravager and token generating Chamber. I was playing a
wierd combo deck based around Aether vial and
coretapper (that i'd made in about 10 minutes earlier
that day). I hadn't had success all night, and I was
in topdeck mode for my 4th land. On the field, i had
an Aether vial with 4 counters, an untapped coretapper,
2 vault of whispers and a darksteel citadel and a
Diabolic tutor in my hand. I drew... and got a land.
Plopped the land, searched for Platnum Angel, tapped/
sac'ed my coretapper to put a total of 7 counters on
my Aether vial, and got out my angel. He was kinda
stunned, at this, and was a little shaken when I
ended. I expected him to be bluffing, as most decks
have multiple ways around this strategy... and yet, he
apparently wansn't one. He drew, got a land and
started going through his deck. He was able to get
out the creature that reduces equip costs by one, so
he just kept using skullclamp, killing creatures,
plopping affinity creatures, and digging through his
entire deck. He ended up decking himself on turn 5.
Anyway, just thought it was a little amusing and wanted to send it in. thanks!
OK, with that, I'm out.
Keeping sending me your good and bad plays and I'll
keep sending out prizes! I like hearing form my
readers, so feel free to e-mail me.
Until next time,
DeQuan Watson
a.k.a. PowrDragn
PowrDragn on IRC
PowrDragn on MODO
PowrDragn pretty much
everywhere :)
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