Ed Note: This article uses a few specific bits of terminology related playing limited Magic: The Gathering, mostly the acronym B.R.E.A.D. If you’re not familiar with the term/acronym, a brief read of this Stack overflow paragraph defines them well.
I participated in the first Regional Championship Qualifier at The Fourth Place over the weekend. As this is one of the more competitive events I’ve ever done, I thought I’d talk about the experience.
This was a Limited RCQ, starting with 5 rounds of sealed, and then cutting to Top 8 for a draft. The set for both was Foundations. But before I get into the event, let’s talk about prep!
Prep
I…. did not prep much. I prepped more than I have for most other sealed events I’ve done, but much less than I could have. I reviewed a fair number of sealed pools, I looked at some articles, and I did two drafts of the set prior. The first draft was on Arena, and I lost every single match quite badly. The second was a smaller in-person event where I won.
I do think the prep made a difference, but I also think especially in the draft, I could have done much better with my picks. More on that later.
Sealed
For the sealed portion of the event, this was the deck I ended up building.
After opening all my packs I was pretty confident I would end up in green. I had bombs in Scavenging Ooze, Mossborn Hydra, Sylvan Scavenging, and Ghalta, Primal Hunger. I also had removal in Bushwhack and Bite Down, and and a few giant growths.
My secondary color wasn’t as clear.
Looking at the rest of the pool, I scratched off white and blue as secondaries. They didn’t offer the bombs of red or black, and had limited amounts of mediocre removal.
Red had two big bombs in Shivan Dragon and Twinflame Tyrant, but it didn’t have any targeted removal before 5 mana, and even then, it wasn’t instant speed.
Black won out as a secondary color on the strength of its removal (Eaten Alive, and 2x Bake Into A Pie), and the fact that it still provided a very solid bomb in High-Society Hunter. My read at the time was that I had plenty of bombs in green, and more removal would serve me better in the sealed Environment.
Looking back at the pool now, I do think there was a strong argument for green/red, but that wasn’t choice I made at the time.
Deck
1 Ambush Wolf
1 Apothecary Stomper
2 Bake into a Pie
1 Beast-Kin Ranger
1 Bite Down
1 Burglar Rat
1 Bushwhack
1 Cackling Prowler
1 Campus Guide
1 Eaten Alive
3 Evolving Wilds
7 Forest
1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger
1 Giant Growth
1 High-Society Hunter
1 Mossborn Hydra
1 Revenge of the Rats
1 Scavenging Ooze
7 Swamp
1 Sylvan Scavenging
1 Tragic Banshee
1 Vampire Gourmand
1 Wary Thespian
1 Fake Your Own Death
1 Crypt Feaster
Sideboard
1 Crypt Feaster
1 Aegis Turtle
1 Armasaur Guide
2 Axgard Cavalry
1 Banishing Light
1 Blanchwood Armor
2 Brazen Scourge
1 Cat Collector
1 Claws Out
1 Clinquant Skymage
1 Crystal Barricade
1 Drake Hatcher
1 Dreadwing Scavenger
1 Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen
1 Erudite Wizard
1 Essence Scatter
1 Exemplar of Light
1 Firebrand Archer
1 Fishing Pole
1 Fleeting Distraction
1 Fleeting Flight
1 Giant Growth
1 Gleaming Barrier
1 Goldvein Pick
1 Guarded Heir
1 Healer's Hawk
1 Imprisoned in the Moon
2 Incinerating Blast
2 Mocking Sprite
1 Needletooth Pack
1 Quick-Draw Katana
1 Refute
1 Rogue's Passage
1 Ruby, Daring Tracker
1 Seeker's Folly
2 Seismic Rupture
1 Self-Reflection
1 Shivan Dragon
1 Sower of Chaos
1 Spectral Sailor
1 Spitfire Lagac
1 Strix Lookout
1 Sun-Blessed Healer
1 Sure Strike
1 Think Twice
1 Twinflame Tyrant
1 Vanguard SeraphCritiques of the Deck
I made two spicy decisions in the deckbuilding. The first was not splashing for Twinflame Tyrant, despite having a Campus Guide and three Evolving Wilds.
I think this was the right choice. Twinflame is two red pips, and my deck has 8~ (more on this in a moment) double pip cards. It was much more important to fix my base so that I could drop my double pip bombs, than it was to enable a single additional bomb at the cost of less consistency.
The second decision was including Cackling Prowler over Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen. This was a mistake, and it was a mistake that I would proceed to fix the entire night, swapping the two after pretty much every game 1. I thought that the ward 2 on Prowler was more important than reach on Dwynen. I was very wrong. There are a lot of flyers in this set, and something that can deal with the birds was more important than something that took an extra two mana to blow up.
Matches
Generally speaking, this is where I would talk about matches. Unfortunately, after playing 9 hours of magic in a row, I don’t remember my opponents’ decks, and I did not take notes.
So instead, here are a few fun moments!
One opponent got out Extravagant Replication. This didn’t worry me, until suddenly they had four copies of Spitfire Lagac.
In another game, I was forced to burn 3 cards in Ambush Wolf, Giant Growth, and Bushwhack and seven life just to deal with Sire of Seven Deaths. I still lost somehow. Maybe it was the 3 for 1 and 14 life differential. Who can say.
Finally, in my last set of games, despite mostly being deadweight every other match, Revenge of the Rats finally did some work, giving me enough fodder to sac into Vampire Gourmand to push through, and get enough cards to recover from an incredibly bad situations.
Ultimately, I finished with a record of 3 – 1 -2, which was enough to put me into the top 8.
Top 8 Draft
And now for the moment of truth.
Deck
1 Authority of the Consuls
1 Bake into a Pie
1 Day of Judgment
1 Exsanguinate
1 Felidar Savior
1 Healer's Hawk
1 Infestation Sage
1 Macabre Waltz
3 Make Your Move
2 Marauding Blight-Priest
2 Midnight Snack
9 Plains
1 Sanguine Syphoner
1 Skyknight Squire
1 Stromkirk Bloodthief
8 Swamp
1 Vampire Soulcaller
3 Vanguard Seraph
1 Youthful Valkyrie
Sideboard
2 Aegis Turtle
1 Archmage of Runes
1 Ashroot Animist
1 Bigfin Bouncer
1 Cackling Prowler
1 Consuming Aberration
1 Fleeting Distraction
1 Good-Fortune Unicorn
1 Grappling Kraken
1 Lightshell Duo
1 Mossborn Hydra
2 Run Away Together
1 Slumbering Cerberus
1 Sure StrikeIf you are looking at this list with some level of confusion and profanity, I promise you. There is an explanation for why there is so much blue, when I am not even in the color. It is not a good explanation, because it was not made via good decisions. But there is an explanation, and it’s Consuming Aberration.
I have a bad habit, one that I may now be cured of purely as a result of how horrible this draft went. If the rare in the first pack looks like a bomb, I will take it. And then I will continue to try to pick into those colors, even if I really, really shouldn’t.
As a result, there are a lot of blue cards in this pool, instead of anything remotely useful or good.
There is a second card in this pack that tells a story, and it’s this.
This was not a first pick. It was a much later pick. And should probably have been a sign to me that not a single person at the table was going green/red. Did I listen to this sign? Did I pick the two Mossborn Hydras that were passed me to me, and the other strong red cards?
No. Of course I didn’t.
Instead, after, picking up a Day of Judgment and an Authority of Consuls, and proceeded to try to force Black/White as hard as possible in packs 2-3 to salvage the situation.
Top 8 Matches
I don’t know if the universe took pity on me, or if everyone at the table was having a rough time, but I did in fact manage to squeak through round one before being eliminated handily in round 2.
For round 1, I had an incredible stroke of luck, getting Authority of Consuls early into a blue/white go-wide deck in both games. This was an incredible bit of bad fortune for them, as it pretty much single-handedly turned off their deck’s ability to flash in Resolute Reinforcements to stall me. It also allowed me to get extra turns of ping in, as even when they got their larger flyers, they came in tapped.
Round 2, however, was the buck finally stopped. My opponent was playing midrange Grixis, with a fair amount of threshold dependent cards, and I just got stomped. While the games were slogs, they managed to both get board presence with a bunch of fairly useful cards, and even Day of Judgement couldn’t save me from Sphinx of Forgotten Lore, and Kioara, the Rising Tide, resulting in me going down in two consecutive losses.
While I didn’t stick around to watch finals, it did look like both players were playing three color decks, something I thought was interesting.
Tone and Overall Thoughts
My goal for the event was to get into the Top 8. This might sound intimidating, until you realize it was capped at 20 entries, meaning it was really more of a “Finish in the top 40%”.
I made a lot of mistakes. By my count, I’d put it at something like 4-5 misplays, and that’s not even counting missed triggers. Arena has made me very good at spotting play options, and outs. But it’s made me very bad at keeping track of my own triggers, and asking to hold priority at turn end.
My prep did help. I don’t know how much, but it did make a difference in some of the deck building, and knowing that certain cards I would have otherwise written off were actually bombs.
My draft was terrible. I had exactly 23 cards in my colors, and no fixing.
Generally speaking, this was a pretty chill and polite event, and I hope even the more competitive events at The Fourth Place stay this way. There was no shouting, and no real issues/conflicts, with players generally being polite but firm on various rulings.
This was a good event, and I wish I was more excited about the top 4 finish, but as I’m me, anything other than complete victory will always feel like a bit of a wash. I do think I’d try another Sealed RCQ though, as long as the set was good.
PS.
The counts on this sealed pool look wonky at first, but this pool does not include 6 lands I opened, and the also the system doesn’t seem to like to count lands. But was 84 cards, as I’ve spent all morning double checking to make sure I got it right. It’s a similar case for the draft pool, as I didn’t include the lands.