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GP Brisbane Summary.
Richard Grace.

Well, it's been a little while. I've been pretty busy trying to sort out work since I finished university exams, lots of job interviews and the like, but now that things have started to settle down, I can get back to the important job of writing articles about Magic!

GP Brisbane has come and gone, and Will Copeman schooled everyone on how to play Champions limited, both leading the swiss and taking down the top 8. So what can we learn from his achievements on the battlefield?

For starters, this result gives me faith in the strength of the sealed deck format. Will went 6-1 in the sealed portion of the event, then followed that up with a 5-0-1 draft portion to secure the top spot. In fact, 4 of the top 8 players after the sealed deck portion of the event made it into the top 8, another positive. But what was it that made these players better than the rest?

Lets start with a look at Wills top 8 decklist. The most important cards in this WHOLE decklist are the FOUR Order of the Sacred Bells. What a house, from turn four Will is going to be putting on pressure hard and fast. Any limited deck that will start constantly spitting out 4 power creatures from turn 4 onwards is going to be difficult to deal with. I've heard from a number of players that green isn't up to speed in this format, and whilst I didn't totally believe them, this result will surely iron out a few critics. Will was probably aware of this fact and made it a point to try to signal green early on in the draft, knowing that he was going to get the goods later on in the draft. Oh and having a dragon to fall back on when things start getting down is always a good thing.

I think Will's greatest advantage here is that one can only assume with such an incredible draft record that he simply knew the format better than others, and this includes a number of things. Rochester draft is an incredibly difficult format to master, and requires a large number of skills that need to be mastered. The number one skill on that list is diplomacy, and friendship. Alliances can be formed very early on in a rochester draft, and a lot of this has to do with shipping cards to your neighbors. If you can pass your neighbours good cards and have them passed back to you, obviously this is a good thing, but the difficult part is getting the relationship to be more of a give than a get. You pass them a 6th pick, they ship you back a 3rd. you let them wheel 2 reasonable cards, they let you wheel two good ones. Rochester draft is by far my favourite format, and definitely one of my better ones (standard being my best), and I have done a lot of work on the psychology of it.

For example, how good does a card that you pass have to be to fix your downstream neighbours into a particular colour? This was particularly difficult in Mirrodin block, but also it was one of the most important concepts. You couldn't just ship someone a Predator's Strike and hope that they would stay in green, but if you passed them a Tel-Jilad Archers you were probably going to make it hard for them to get away. If you later ship them a Tel-Jilad Exile it will secure them to green, and now you don't have to worry about them attacking your coloured cards as much later on. Rochester draft 101 at its finest.

What else can we learn from the top tables?

Well Anatoli's deck was also chock-full of creatures, showing us that playing guys and turning them sideways as always is strong in any limited format, but I think if Ibamoto had played against Anatoli in the semi-final, he would have made it through. His 2 copies of Rend Spirit would have been much more useful in this matchup than against will, even though the spell can kill dragons. But as they say, you can't always get the matchups you want, and the top 8 was fated to have 2 Aussies playing off for the top spot.

So what of my fellow Kiwi boys?

Scott Richards followed the fine kiwi tradition of missing the top 8 on resistance (I did exactly the same thing last year, finishing tenth no less), and Roger Miller also made the money finishing 18th. There were less travellers this year, with the GP falling right near the end of the end of year examination period for universities in New Zealand, and since so many magic players are poor students, this meant that it was going to be doubly difficult for them to attend. Nonetheless, this wasn't a bad showing for the kiwis, and as the always say, there's always next year.

I hope to see those players who qualified via the GP attending the pro tour, as there is an incredible amount of talent in that top 8. Andrew Grain showed his by almost repeating his feat of last year, and anyone who can make back to back top 8's has talent in my books.

Australia and New Zealand are fast catching up to the strength of the Japanese players, the only real thing holding us back from being as good as the Japanese is our location. I think the next stage for Australasian magic is corporate sponsorship, and although it can be a difficult thing to achieve, it is mostly about showing that the game is a game of intelligent, motivated individuals that companies will be proud to have their name associated with. One of the first things that needs to be achieved is a players organization, separate from the DCI, that separates us from another corporate entity. This has been achieved in other sports, and can quite easily be achieved it this one. If anyone has any ideas about how to get started up, please post them in the forums and I will do my best to gather them and put something forward.

Well that's all from me for now, I know I promised you a Champions limited review but a lot of my comments have since been proven wrong, so I will adjust what I have written and get that one up shortly. Until then, happy gaming and congratulations Will, you showed them all mate.

Ciao,

Gracey.