Steve Guillerm
7/4/2012 9:20:00 AM
“Zero Griselbrand in the Top 8.”
I should have been thrilled to hear that.
“It looks like Griselbrand decks didn't do too well on Day One.”
Small consolation.
My name is Steve, I play Elves in Legacy, and apparently I'm a magnet for
Griselbrand decks. Despite having access to just about any deck I wanted, I chose to play Elves. “Why Elves, you ask?” It's got a pretty great matchup against nearly anything out there, and most people have no idea how to play against it. First, a list:
The deck's power is deceptive; the best it can ever muster on turn 1 is “Forest,
Llanowar Elves, go.” The best it can do on turn 2 is “... Emrakul, end the turn, discard down to 7, pay for
Summoner's Pact, kill you.”
Really.
While the turn 2 kill doesn't happen that often, it's very possible with the right hands. The core of the deck is the mana engine of
Nettle Sentinel and
Heritage Druid or Birchlore Ranger. Both abilities allow the elves tapped to them to be summoning sick, and
Nettle Sentinel untaps whenever you cast a green spell. When you have 2 Sentinels, tapping along with a freshly cast elf for 3 mana, you can chain creatures: spend one mana for an elf, untap the Sentinels, continue. If you cast
Glimpse of Nature this turn, each elf becomes a
Dark Ritual that draws you a card!
Even without
Glimpse of Nature, a timely
Regal Force will refill your hand and let you keep comboing. It's hardly fair, but I essentially get to play 10 of them; I can naturally draw it, or find it via the 4 Pacts, 3 Wishes, and 2 Zeniths.
Of course, you don't have to combo off. Here's a game I played against Burn in the GP:
Turn 1:
Misty Rainforest, fetch Forest,
Nettle Sentinel.
Opponent:
Arid Mesa, fetch Mountain,
Spark Elemental, attack.
Turn 2: Attack with
Nettle Sentinel.
Forest,
Quirion Ranger,
Sentinel untaps,
Heritage Druid, tap all Elves for GGG.
Wirewood Symbiote,
Sentinel untaps, GG floating.
Using Symbiote, return Ranger to hand to untap Druid, cast Ranger, G floating.
Tap all elves for GGG, cast
Elvish Archdruid,
Sentinel untaps, G floating.
Using Ranger, return Forest to untap Druid, tap
Sentinel, Archdruid, Druid, GGGG floating.
Cast second
Elvish Archdruid,
Sentinel untaps.
When I passed the turn back to my opponent, I had 17 power on the board. It was perhaps a bit too hasty, but he scooped it up. After all, before burning any elf, he has to kill the Symbiote first. Returning an elf is the cost of the ability, so the first targeted elf will always be safe if a Symbiote is on board. This “Little Insect that Could” is definitely the all-star of this deck:
Umezawa's Jitte won't connect as long as “block with an elf, bounce before damage” is an option.
Batterskull is just as embarrassing. A pair of Elvish Visionaries and one Symbiote will have you out-drawing even blue decks (bounce one on your turn, and one on their turn). All this without even accounting for the mana usually generated by the untap effect!
Game two wasn't any better for my opponent. Lesson learned, he appeared to have resolved to kill off problematic elves wherever possible, but I just went on the “attack for 2” plan instead of trying to get fancy. With more dudes than he could handle, I hit for 2 or 3 damage per turn even though he killed
Elvish Archdruids on sight. His
Sulfuric Vortex did some of the work for me, and I'm sure he wished he'd packed
Pyrostatic Pillar instead.
Whenever you play a combo deck in Legacy, it's nice to have a plan B, but “beat down with elves” is so far away from “hard-cast an Emrakul on turn 2-4” that it's crazy. Compare that to Reanimator's sideboard plan B of
Show and Tell: either way, both plans are to cheat in a fatty, both are weak to
Humility, and both require resolving one important spell. Elves does have some spells that are more important than others, but if we “whiff” on the combo, we're still left with a huge army of elves. If
Ad Nauseam Tendrils or
Hive Mind get their key spell countered, they're left with an embarrassing nothing.
Elves crushes the “fair” decks, but in turn loses to the “unfair” ones.
Griselbrand decks are by far the worst; they can disrupt just long enough to live, and then stabilize with either a 7/7 lifelink creature and a full grip, or just drop Elesh Norn into play. I liked it better when they were main-decking
Blazing Archon; instead of just flat-out dead, I have 3-4 turns to find an answer such as
Living Wish for Ulamog. Dredge is the other big “unfair” deck, but unless they're able to get a crazy amount of zombies on turn one, you can stall long enough to go off before they can. They basically need critical mass, or else a single chump-block on your part will take out their
Bridge from Below.
Most of the cards in my deck's sideboard are targets for
Living Wish, with only the
Grafdigger's Cage,
Krosan Grip, and Thorn being un-findable. The main-deck is pretty tight as it is, so you're unlikely to want too many cards to come in.
Living Wish allows you to run a ton of 1-ofs as a sort of toolbox, without having the awkwardness of drawing them too early. You simply don't want to see Emrakul in your opening hand, but a premature
Living Wish can become a
Gaea's Cradle.
As I said at the beginning, though, I was just a magnet for
Griselbrand decks. After three byes, I faced two of them in my first four rounds. I managed to steal game one from Conley Woods playing Reanimator. Despite rarely playing Legacy, he didn't forget how to play Magic, and in games two and three, I was crushed. My other match was over in two games. If you'd asked me to estimate what percentage of the room would be on
Griselbrand, I'd have probably said 10-15%, or about one match in six. Just my luck, eh?
I battled back to 6-2, defeating a UR Delver deck in two tight games. The first hinged on my
Phyrexian Revoker stopping two Grim Lavamancers. One
Lightning Bolt would have sealed my fate. Game two, he dropped a turn one Lavamancer, but was never able to mount any real pressure. It became a huge grinding game of attrition, as he mustered only 1/1s against mine, and eventually I'd gotten him to 1 life with an empty board. Who could draw more 1/1s? Well, clearly it's the elf player!
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Round 9 was a heartbreaker. Playing against Deadguy Ale (BW disruption aggro), I lost a game one that I almost certainly should have won. I passed the turn with a fairly established board, and a hand of 2
Summoner's Pact and 1 Forest. He cast
Hymn to Tourach, and luck failed me. Hitting both Pacts, I was left with about 10 mana and no way to spend it. He mopped up the game from there. Looking back, I could have returned a forest to my hand with a
Quirion Ranger, but at the time, the difference between 25% and 33% to hit both Pacts seemed small.
I very quickly destroyed him game two, and then game three became a huge slog. An early
AEther Vial into
Ethersworn Canonist slowed the game to a crawl, and
Tidehollow Scullers kept cards out of my hand. He wasn't able to mount much of an offense, though, and a late Thalia taxed his mana much more than mine.
His sloppy play was counteracted by the most incredible luck I've seen in a while. Before stabilizing with Thalia, I'd managed to get him down to about 6 life between
Nettle Sentinel beats, and
Dark Confidant triggers. He didn't block because
Tidehollow Sculler and
Ethersworn Canonist needed to keep me locked down, but they couldn't really attack into my Sentinels, which I managed to untap with a post-combat spell. Within 3 turns or so, he forgot 2
Dark Confidant triggers, earned a warning for each, and managed to forget to search for an equipment with his
Stoneforge Mystic after dropping it into play during my end step with
AEther Vial. With both missed triggers, the judge asked if I wanted them to occur (that's how lapsing triggers work), and I chose “yes,” as he was so very close to death. By some miracle, he hit a land five turns in a row, but could not seal the deal as we went through turns.
Additional sloppy play included trying to play a second spell through
Ethersworn Canonist multiple times, but I don't think he was ever trying to cheat me; just really tired or inexperienced.
With a draw knocking us both out of contention for Day 2, we had to do that very awkward “will you concede?” negotiation that's unpleasant for both. I'd hoped that he might concede to me on the basis of
Fatigue or that he'd managed to stay alive through stupendous luck. He said something along the lines of, “I could have killed you if it hadn't been for
Ethersworn Canonist,” and I somewhat incredulously pointed out that I could have killed him on turn 3 if it hadn't been for that same Canonist. With a judge pressuring us to complete the match slip, he grabbed it and filled it out with a win for himself and a draw, but left my win total blank. I filled in my win, and signed the slip.
I'm still unable to fully articulate my frustration, because it wasn't just that I missed Day 2 by a hair, or that he got lucky. I feel like I could have made better plays in game one, or otherwise played better throughout the day to defy the odds and win those bad matchups. I'm not exactly sure how, but I don't think there's such a thing as an “unwinnable” matchup, and I'll eventually figure out how to shore up the odds.
On Sunday, I played in a Legacy side event; seven rounds, prize only to the top 8. Of course, I took my first loss to Reanimator in round 3, and a second pairing of Reanimator in round 5. Just my luck. I played one more round for fun before dropping in favor of dinner.
The cherry on that sundae came in round 2: I'm playing the Elves semi-mirror, as he's playing a white-splash version with
Mirror Entity. I've won the roll, played out a few dudes, but have to pass the turn, and hope he doesn't kill me on turn 2. He musters up about 20 guys, but eventually fizzles on Glimpse, and grants me a turn 3. It's going to take all of my concentration and skill to manage the kill this turn. Elves is kind of strange in how it gets going. Once the combo's rolling, it's easy. You have 15 cards in hand, and all the mana you could need. However, just starting out, every mana counts, and you have to tap your creatures optimally to make sure you don't screw up.
Just as I've gotten rolling, with a
Glimpse of Nature resolved, and a single mana floating, some dude interrupts my match to accuse me of being a thief. Apparently his binder was stolen, and I tell him that I didn't take it, and I'll show him the inside of my backpack to prove it. Well, it wasn't me, he says, it was my friend. I ask him which friend, and he says, “your Asian friend.”
At this point, I'm utterly baffled. The people I've been hanging out with that weekend didn't include an “Asian friend,” and I ask him what the hell he's talking about. Eventually it comes out that he means a guy with whom I'd been chatting, and trading between rounds. I tell him that I was just trading, and I don't know who he's talking about. I really had no clue, I'd traded with a lot of people that day. Angry Guy was unrelenting, and finally I had to call a judge and complain that he was harassing me. Long story short, the “stolen binder” was brought to the judges' station because Angry Guy had stupidly left it on a table, and an honest person had done the right thing.
I never got my apology, as I think Angry Guy left the venue in shame right after recovering his binder. Throughout the entire ordeal, my opponent Elliot helpfully kept track of the game state, rather than trying to take advantage of the distraction. It's really nice that the majority of the Magic community is honest and helpful rather than angry, cheaty, or thieving.
Despite my frustrations with my performances, the tournament venue was great. Held in a ballroom in the lower levels of the Hyatt in downtown Atlanta, it was spacious, comfortable, and within walking distance of affordable food. The highs last weekend were 105 degrees, but I was rarely uncomfortable, as the mall food court, Hyatt, Marriott, and the Hilton are all connected. The hotels were surprisingly affordable, with a block at the Hyatt reserved at $99/night, and our room at the Hilton only $95/night. I'm not sure that July's the right time of year for an Atlanta Grand Prix, but with affordable hotels, a good venue, and a reliable subway system, Atlanta is high on my list for great cities to host a tournament. Or as they say on eBay, “A++++ Would tournament again.”
Steve Guillerm
@SteveExplosion on Twitter and MTGO
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