Robot Claw

The other weekend I played in the MTG Origins prerelease agent. I’ve been going to these regularly now, and either I’m getting better or my opponents are getting worse because for the last few times I’ve won prizes. This time was no different.

I decided even before attending – and not knowing anything about the set – that I was going to choose black if given a choice. And so I was, and so I did. In events like these it’s virtually impossible to make a monocoloured deck and it was quickly apparent after opening my additional boosters (that came in the box with a pack of all black cards) that white would be my second colour.

The deck virtually made itself since I had a low of low cost white creatures with the new mechanic Renown (including 3 Topan Freeblades and 2 War Oracles) in addition to 3 each of these two cards:

More than a quarter of my entire deck consisted of copies of the above four cards! This would serve me well, and I easily dispatched almost all my opponents (most of whom chose blue as their colour). Of the 9 matches I played, I won 7. This was enough to get me 2nd place and a prize of 3 booster packs.

But let’s talk about my third opponent, the guy that beat me 2-1. Let’s talk about him…

Firstly, he had a playmat and sleeved cards. The sleeves are not at all unusual (I use sleeves for instance) but he made a point of telling me – even before introducing himself – that both came from a tournament he played in. He was very serious about everything (which is unusual at such events) and I could tell he very much wanted to win. I was tired and chilling out and bemused by his approach.

He insisted on rolling the dice to see who starts himself (typically each player rolls individually) and shuffling my entire deck rather than cutting. He kept a sheet of paper on which he recorded life that he had obviously printed himself since it had separate columns for sources of damage (so he was recording things like ‘-4 combat’, ‘-2 sorcery’ etc). After my first use of mana he reached across the table and turned my lands so they were exactly 90 degrees when tapped! It was surreal.

But then it got worse. I leisurely picked up my graveyard to flip through it and he actually said “Pause game. Are you looking through your graveyard?” He actually said the words ‘pause game’ out loud! And then when I confirmed (obviously) that I was, he called for a judge, to which he asked if it was against the rules for him to ask me what colour I chose at the start of the tournament.

The judge said yes it was and he shouldn’t ask me but by then it was irrelevant. I was irked. I was irked. So I ignored the judge and said “I chose black, but my deck is mostly white. It has 16 land, 14 creatures and ten spells, and is mostly based around fast white renowned creatures. Would you like to know anything else?”

I could tell this irritated him, but I didn’t care. He was taking a casual event far too seriously. The rest of our games were mostly silent 🙂

He ended up beating me. I won the first game easily (which made him icy) but the second was very close. I should have won convincingly except for the fact I misread the above card, thinking it was destroyed when the second ability was used (and therefore I didn’t use it every turn as I should). Although he beat me, he had only 2 life left at the end. We were therefore even going into the third match, in which I was mana-screwed and soundly defeated. These things happen.

I’ve gone to many of these events and never come even close to playing someone this irritating (did I mention he announced out loud every phase change like “Entering post combat phase”). It’s guys like him that give MTG a bad name.

Good thing there’s guys like me there to keep it cool  😉