Hello Despair Crew!
When I said I wasn’t going to play any Limited PTQs this season, I really meant it. My winning era in Magic is long gone and in the past few weeks even MTGO isn’t working very well so, I decided to take a break. This way I could get back in shape for the Teams GP here in Sao Paulo.
However I had some friends that wanted a ride to the PTQ (Sao Jose dos Campos, the city of the PTQ is 110kms from where I live) and then 2 days before the PTQ I had one friend in Campinas that had no way to get to the PTQ in time on Sunday (first bus would get him too late to event place) and another that decided to come from Brasilia on the last possible moment.
In the end one of them lost his flight, but at that moment I was already commited into bringing other 3 with me to the PTQ, so let’s go. At least prizes would go down to Top64 and I was expecting around 128 players, I guess I can at least top64 even with almost 0 practice with BNG, right? I played only 4 Sealed Events on Magic Online and 0 Drafts before the PTQ, as I was really set on skipping them.
The pool I opened before the swap was great, had a bunch of great tools for a good UG deck. The pool I got was good but wasn’t easy to build as the one I opened, so it took me some time to sort things up before setting on playing BW.
I started the PTQ 5-0 and then double ID into the Top8. I lost only a single game during swiss rounds eventhough I was facing a bunch of great PTQ players. I mulliganed way less times than my opponents and had some of them getting either mana screwed or flooded.
During the ID Rounds I tried to read something about drafting BNG but I knew It was just too late. I thought I could at least save something as I had drafted a lot of Triple THS before the Pro Tour.
I started with some green picks (Courser of Kruphix p1p1) but it quickly dried out and I had a bunch of Blue cards. I was ready to abandon green if I opened something good in some other color but I got two Horizon Chimeras at the start of the second pack and stayed Ug. I knew Green wasn’t coming from the right but somehow It wasn’t coming from the left either. I know I had some not so easy picks and probably made a bunch of mistakes. Eventhough I had a bunch of THS drafts before, they were 5 months ago, so I didn’t remember much by now.
I lost 2-1 in the Top8 against the eventual winner and I can’t even complain. My lack of knowledge on the format doomed me. I didn’t even knew Pheres-Band Tromper would put a +1/+1 COUNTER and not +1/+1 until EOT, that could have cost me the game I won in the Top8.
At the beggining of 2013 I felt renewed after a bad second semester in 2012 as I started it out with a Top8 on an Online Modern PTQ. A format I was playtesting a lot. Now in 2014 I have two Top8s : MOCS Cube Limited and a THS/BNG Limited PTQ. Both formats that I didn’t test at all… It’s always nice to be fighting for the top spots and since April last year I had 0 IRL PTQ Top8s but still… Now it’s time to relax and wait for the Teams GP.
That’s it for now
Cya