First of all, I want to say thank you to all the people that came up to me and said hello, complementing me on my articles. As a writer, I put myself out there a lot, and get a decent amount of haters, but the people who support me, and complement me, are the people that make it all worth while.

So today I’m going to regale you with my adventures at Canadian Nationals this year, my preparation for Nationals, my drafts at Nationals, and the Standard deck I chose to play.

Preparation

My preparation was much more rigorous going into Nationals this year than it had been in previous years. I really wanted a strong finish, so I put in the time. I spent a lot of time testing both constructed and limited, as well as reading a lot of material online on Standard.

For limited, I felt like I was really prepared. I can safely say that I’ve drafted M12 more than I’ve drafted any other limited format. During, as well as after, the M12 pre-release, I was drafting a ton of M12 live with the local players here in Calgary. Once M12 was available online I drafted 2+ times a day whenever possible. for a span of time I would literally wake up, do a draft or two, go to work, and then come home and draft the rest of the night. Maybe there was a bit of food eating in there somewhere. In the past I have been, generally, known for being a stronger constructed player, and a weak limited player, but going into Nationals this year I definitely felt like limited was by far my stronger format.

When I first started drafting online I would force BR aggro every time. It was a strategy I discovered while drafting before M12 came online, and it served me well live. I wrote about it here. At first, it was excellent online. I would just force it every draft, and it worked almost every time. Most people didn’t really realize how nuts it was, and a large number of people would even actually draw against me. I quickly over-tripled my initial investment of $20 drafting M12. After US Nationals, however, this jig was up, and everyone knew how insane BR aggro was. I took a big hit from that because all I really knew how to draft well was BR. Before I got down to $0 I realized forcing BR every time was no longer legit, and started drafting whatever color was open, avoiding green like the plague. Since then, I’ve been able to continue to draft and increase my winnings.

As for standard. I spent a lot of time testing (20+ hours), but I felt like I wasn’t really playing the right decks, and could have used my time better. Had I went straight to the decks I knew were solid, rather than testing brews, I feel like I would have had a much more stronger performance. The first deck I started with was Bant Pod. I had a great CawBlade matchup, but the manabase was sketchy and a lot of the cards were underpowered without Birthing Pod. The Valakut matchup was almost un-winnable, Mono Red was almost un-winnable maindeck, but salvageable post board, and RUG Pod was almost un-winnable as well. The rest of the matchups I was happy about, but sometimes the deck could just lose to itself.

I moved on to Valakut next. One thing that I like a lot about Bant Pod was the [card]Memoricide[/card] out of the board, but the mana was so sketchy that you couldn’t reliably cast it in Bant Pod a lot of the time, so that was something I wanted to carry over to Valakut. Valakut has a lot of raw power, and can easily win against a lot of the random decks, which is something I was looking for in a deck. It has a good CawBlade matchup which is what I was expecting a lot of at Nationals, but not a very strong matchup against Splinter Twin and Pyromancer’s Ascension, which isn’t a deck I was expecting a lot of. In testing, Valakut was great. The mana felt right, and the deck felt consistent enough. I felt like I was going to get carried somewhat by my limited this year, so I felt I just wanted something consistent for constructed.

Here is the list I ended up playing:

[deck title=Valakut by Francis Toussaint]
[Creatures]
4 Oracle of Mul Daya
4 Primeval Titan
4 Inferno Titan
1 Avenger of Zendikar
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
2 Nature’s Claim
4 Explore
4 Rampant Growth
3 Khalni Heart Expedition
2 Cultivate
4 Summoning Trap
[/Spells]
[Land]
4 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle
4 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Evolving Wilds
3 Raging Ravine
2 Verdant Catacomb
11 Mountain
3 Forest
[/Land]
[Sideboard]
2 Nature’s Claim
4 Obstinate Baloth
3 Pyroclasm
3 Memoricide
1 Swamp
2 Combust
[/Sideboard]
[/Deck]

The Trip

I flew out to Nationals Friday morning with my good friend and roommate, Mich Maes. We arrived at 1 and went straight to the tournament site. It was great to see all my friends out East, as well as meet a lot of new friends. A lot of handshakes occurred Friday.

Other than drift around and chat with people about decks, trading, and testing, I was able to get one 8-man money draft in. Unfortunately, it was an all-Alberta draft, so I had to settle for playing against people I see all the time.   My deck was a BW abomination with terrible mana, 18 lands, and some questionable cards, but it had some evasion, and cards to muck up the ground. I ended up finishing 3-1, beating two great aggressive BR decks with hits such as [card]Pride Guardian[/card] and [card]Brink of Disaster[/card], and lost one match to [card]Pentavus[/card] both games because I had no reasonable answer, and was completely cold to it.

After a day of lounging around the tournament site, Dave Caplan, Mich, Glen, Tyler and myself went Lonestar, a Texan steakhouse, for dinner. The first time we went there everyone agreed that the food great. Personally, I had a 7 (ounce?) steak for $15, which was a really good deal, and felt like I was getting my money’s worth. We then went back to David Caplan’s place for the night with the same crew. They ended up drafting Glen’s cube at around 11 or so. It looked really awesome, but I felt like it would be morally wrong to write an article about having your body prepared for a tournament, and then go and cube until 1AM.

The next morning the tournament began. In the first 3 rounds of Standard I faced 3 CawBlade decks in a row. Sounds good right? Wrong. I went 1-2. In those first three matches I mulliganed every game except for 2, and I hit 1 out of 3 [card]Summoning Trap[/card]s. I had multiple times where I would stall out at 5 lands, have a hand full of Titans and Traps, and never make it to 6 lands. In testing I never really had this problem of stalling on 5, but after talking with Pascal, I was told that while playing the 8 titan, 4 Summoning Trap version of the deck he also had problems with stalling out at 5. He said that he felt the deck needed 29 lands, and after my experience in the first three rounds I agreed, and proceeded to sideboard in to the Swamp in my sideboard even if I wasn’t putting in [card]Memoricide[/card].

For the first draft I started out mono white for the first two packs. I really would like to have been red, but it was completely cut. My draft was shaping up to be fairly aggressive with 3 [card]Benalish Veteran[/card],  but in the third pack I had to make a change of plans. No joke, my first 5 picks for the third pack, in order, went [card]Serra Angel[/card], [card]Day of Judgement[/card], [card]Pentavus[/card], [card]Mind Control[/card], [card]Djinn of Wishes[/card]. After that, my deck became a little awkward because I was drafting a lot of aggressive cards pack 1 and 2, and after pack 3 I wanted to be more defensive to be able to get to my bombs. Another awkward thing my deck had going was it was quite clunky and full of 5-drops, which is a problem UW tends to have. In the 5-drop slot I had 3 [card]Peregrine Griffin[/card], 2 [card]Serra Angel[/card], 1 [card]Djinn of Wishes[/card], and 1 [card]Mind Control[/card]. Awkward.

The first round of the draft I played against Pascal Maynard. Before we started we speculated on what the other was playing, and Pascal admitted that he didn’t think his draft was very good. During our games, my deck’s weakness of being clunky was exploited with cards like maindeck [card]Distress[/card], [card]Mana Leak[/card], and [card]Cancel[/card]. I wasn’t able to put on much early pressure, and my great late game was picked apart by the cards I previously mentioned. I ended up losing in 2 games.

At this point I was 1-3, and feeling terrible. I knew that I didn’t realistically have a shot at top 8 anymore. I felt like all of my preparation wasn’t really showing through. I decided at this point to play out the day at the very least.

I ended up 2-0’ing the last 2 matches of that pod to finish 2-1.

My second draft went well. I ended up with a deck that featured 6 2-drops, and 6 3-drops. My all-stars being triple [card]Merfolk Looter[/card] and Triple [card]Sidewinder Drake[/card]. My deck featured zero rares, and I have a sneaking suspicion that there may have been 1 or 2 people rare-drafting since I didn’t see too many rares during the draft. I managed to save that draft so here’s what it looked like:

[deck title=Nationals Draft #2 by Francis Toussaint]
[Creatures]
1 Phantasmal Bear
3 Merfolk Looter
1 Coral Merfolk
1 Blood Seeker
1 Duskhunter Bat
1 Bloodrage Vampire
1 Aether Adept
4 Sidewinder Drake
2 Phantasmal Dragon
1 Gravedigger
1 Vampire Outcasts
1 Chasm Drake
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
1 Deathmark
1 Sorin’s Thirst
1 Ice Cage
1 Frost Breath
1 Cancel
[/Spells]
[Land]
10 Island
7 Swamp
[/Land]
[/deck]

Sideboard cards of note:

3 [card]Brink of Disaster[/card]
1 [card]Mind Rot[/card] (Should have cut Cancel for this)
1 [card]Distress[/card]

I won my first round of the pod to finish the day 4-3.

After that, we headed to Lonestar again because there was a huge mass of Magic players going there. At one point, I think there may have been close to 40 Magic players in that room. This time the service was much slower than the first time, which is understandable since we had a lot of people there, but it was still really slow all things considered. I went with the super value steak sandwich again (which was great again) but decided to go with chilli as a side. Caplan also went with Chili, and we both agreed that it was cold and tasted terrible, and neither of us came close to finishing it.

We went back to Caplan’s again, and this time I stayed up fairly late. I felt pretty shitty from  the day’s performance, so I decided to do some 8-4 drafts online to cheer me up.

The first draft I had this really sick RU aggro deck with like 8 2-drops. It’s like people in my draft didn’t get the memo that [card]Coral Merfolk[/card] and [card]Goblin Piker[/card] are nuts. The end of the curve featured [card]Frost Titan[/card] and [card]Flameblast Dragon[/card]. Didn’t lose a single game, and ended up no siring the guy’s split offer in the finals for max value.

The second draft was this UW abomination. Its curve ended at 4, yet it featured 18 lands due to a lack of playables. It features maindeck hits such as 2 [card]Griffin Riders[/card], and only 1 [card]Assault Griffin[/card] for support, and [card]Divine Favor[/card]. First round, my opponent’s internet didn’t work, so I got a bye. Second round, my opponent got color screwed to some degree in both games and I was able to take it down with my rag tag army. I was then able to split the finals. Mise!

For day 2 of Nationals, I had my Legacy deck on hand in case I decided to drop and play the Legacy tournament, but I didn’t want to have to come to that. I felt really great for day 2. I knew I’d have to pull of a miracle to top 8, but I felt like it was possible.

I ended up winning the last 2 matches of my second pod on the back of [card]Sidewinder Drake[/card], with [card]Phantasmal Dragon[/card] and [card]Merfolk Looter[/card] playing a supporting role. I ended up siding in [card]Brink of Disaster[/card] multiple times, and it was really great for me. For me, Brink read “target ground fattie has defender,” which was great because I was on [card]Sidewinder Drake[/card]s back flying over for game.

I then won with Valakut against a RUG Pod deck. I ended up doing a lot of durdling because I wasn’t sure whether he was on the Splinter Twin plan or not, but better safe than sorry.

At this point I was 7-3, and needed to 2-0 the last 2 rounds for an outside chance at making top 8.

My opponent next round, Ben Moir, had written on his deck box “Standard Valakut.” I didn’t know who he was at the time, and he didn’t look like he could be older than 16. I was very suspicious of what he had written on his box, but ended up putting him on Valakut anyhow. Due to having him on Valakut, and being on the draw, I decided to keep a hand of 3 Mountain, Rampant Growth, Explore, Cultivate, and Summoning Trap. I felt like on the draw against Valakut if I would be able to draw a green source, I would most likely win since the mirror is just a race. He turned out to be UR Splinter Twin, though, and I didn’t draw a green source until I drew a [card]Raging Ravine[/card] 8 turns later, and it was much too late. For game two, I had a reasonable hand. At one point I played an [card]Oracle of Mul Daya[/card], which got countered, and then played a [card]Summoning Trap[/card] which resolved, just to have it whiff for the 3rd time during the tournament. I was still able to put up a fight with an [card]Oracle of Mul Daya[/card] and naturally-drawn Valakuts, and had him down to 5, but my last hope – a [card]Cultivate[/card], got [card]Negate[/card]d, and he won the match the next turn with the combo.

I didn’t feel too bad losing to Ben. He had the best tie breakers at X-3, and at least he had a legitimate shot at making top 8 if he won out, where as if I won out, I probably would have missed top 8. Also, Splinter Twin is my worst matchup, so I wasn’t too surprised to have lost.

I still had an outside shot at top 16, so I decided to play out my last match for pride, and a shot at a pro point or two if I could top 16.

For my last match, I was paired up against Alexander Hayne with UR Pyromancer’s Ascension. This was definitely the most awkward match of the tournament. Game 1 he played a ton of [card]Ponder[/card]s and [card]Preodain[/card]s, and countered almost all of my acceleration and a few of my Titans. He then got his [card]Pyromancer’s Ascension[/card] online later in the game. I then drew a [card]Primeval Titan[/card], played it, and he had nothing. At the end of the game, he showed me his hand of all lands, and even though he had 2 active [card]Pyromancer’s Ascension[/card], he wasn’t able to get anything going. Second game I went for a turn 2 [card]Rampant Growth[/card], and he then hit me with a double [card]Archive Trap[/card].  Again, he was able to deal with a lot of my early threats, but then my [card]Inferno Titan[/card] got countered, and I [card]Summoning Trap[/card]’d into a [card]Primeval Titan[/card]. He had no answer for the Titan, and had run out of gas again. [card]Primeval Titan[/card] was the able to get there as pretty much just a vanilla 6/6 for 6. I haven’t played the matchup before, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s suppose to play out.

In the end, I finished 20th with a record of 8-4, which is a record that could top 16, but my tie breakers were bad from starting 1-3. I was happy with my finish considering I started the tournament 1-3, and most likely would have missed the top 8 even if I won out due to my tiebreakers.

After the tournament I decided to sell a bunch of cards that I’d picked up for modern. I had a lot of cards excess of a set, and I didn’t feel bad selling them. The plan was to get enough money be able to afford a flight to GP Montreal. I hit the dealer’s tables with my pile of modern cards, and all the knowledge I had gained from watching Pawnstars, Storage Wars, and American Pickers. At the end of the day I was able to haggle, barter, and dangle my way to $380 for a pile containing 2 [card]Tarmogoyf[/card], 1 [card]Dark Confidant[/card], 2 [card]Vendilion Clique[/card], 3 [card]Thoughtseize[/card], 3 [card]Sacred Foundry[/card], 1 [card]Steam Vents[/card], and 1 [card]Stomping Grounds[/card]. It doesn’t seem like the greatest deal considering those are some great cards, but you have to remember that the dealers can’t buy cards for too much to guarantee they make a profit.

By the end of the day, after selling that pile of cards, as well as a few other cards throughout the weekend, I had put together a total of $500 towards my flight to Montreal.

Overall, I ended up having a great time at Nationals this year. I didn’t achieve my main goal, a top 4 at Nationals, but I was happy with my finish, and happy that I had the funds to be able to afford GP Montreal.

And now for the best part, the props and slops

PROPS:

– Huge thanks to David Caplan and his family for giving Mich and I a place to stay over the weekend
– Huge thanks to Sean Hetherington, Sean Gifford, Mich Maes, and all the others who helped me test for Nationals
– ManaDeprived.com for providing additional coverage of Nationals this year
– Tournament organizer Jason Ness, Head Judge Gavin Duggan, and all the other judges, for running a smooth tournament despite the tiny tournament space
– Marcel Zafra, provincial end-boss and Canadian all-star, for making top 4 and Q’ing for worlds
– Paul MacKinnon, local quarterfinal exit specialist, for making top 8
– Dan Lanthier for offering me a place to stay and a ride for GP Pittsburgh
– Shawarma place near the tournament site for having amazing Shawarmas
– Brian Ziemba for teaching me to open a banana properly
– Taylor Putnam for thinking 9-3 wouldn’t make top 8
– Various people who bought my cards for funding my addiction to Magic cards

SLOPS:

– Magic pairing gods for pairing Marcel Zafra and Shaun McLaren, provincial end-bosses, together in the win-and-in round for top 8
– Tiny tournament hall making me feel like a sardine
– Lonestar for having worst chilli I’ve ever tasted
– Valakut for being the worst
– Me for bailing on Lanthier and potential hotel roommates (wont happen again!)

Congrats to our Canadian National team Marc Anderson, Noah Long, and Dan Lanthier. Make us proud at worlds! Thanks for reading, and see you at GP Montreal!

Francis Toussaint