You are: Home
-> Articles -> Feature
Article | 
Editor:Staff 11th June 2008
Murdoch Monthly
By Fox Murdoch So readers, welcome once again to my column! No longer regular as it once was, I've had jobs and lost jobs and moved a few times since, which explains the delay. Today I'm going over my Regionals experience, for which I went down to Tasmania. I've always wanted to see all of Australia, and when the Co. offered the chance to stay at his place I bought a ticket and flew on down. First thing I noticed - the place smells like cookie dough. Very nice at first, but eventually unsettling. Picturesque like the Blue Mountains, no train system. The Co. told me that everyone had had their second head surgically removed for my visit, but I couldn't see scars on anyones neck so I assume they had all been airbrushed. Enough preamble, what deck did I play? Loving the biggest, heartiest treefolk of them all, I decided I'd take Doran by the hand for this Magic event.
Now that's a fun looking little thing, it's got a ridiculous midrange but unfortunately not a great deal of focus. To win with this deck you hope to get Doran out fast, (turn 2 please) bash their heads in a bit and either stall with Primal Command (gain 7, fetch up Terror-on-a-3-power-stick & poster-child-for-Evoke Shriekmaw?) or finish them off with a big Profane Command. (do you for 6, return Shriekmaw to play?) Atleast that was the plan. Not having played the deck at all I had a few crash course games with the Co. before he got to sleep early and I stayed up another fifty million hours watching every channel on Foxtel. In short - don't bother channel surfing, just leave it on the Comedy channel. The Co. himself was playing Wolves! He's gonna make some Wolves! A "hopefully" quick green deck that gets Howl of the Night Pack to go off turn 4. Here's the deck followed by the how: Wolves!!.dec 3 Cloudthresher 2 Mosswort Bridge 1 Grim Poppet 3 Mouth of Ronom 1 Oversoul of Dusk 2 Sapseep Forest 1 Razormane Masticore 15 Snow-Covered Forest 1 Triskelavus 2 Treetop Village 1 Vigor --- 4 Wall of Roots 24 Lands 1 Woodfall Primus --- 3 Riftsweeper 13 Creatures 4 Spike Feeder 2 Krosan Grip 2 Squall Line 4 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss 4 Harmonize 2 Lignify 3 Howl of the Night Pack --- 4 Hunting Wilds 15 sideboard 3 Into the North 4 Primal Command 3 Garruk Wildspeaker --- 23 Others
Turn 1: Forest 1.
God draws required of course, and something like Damnation and Wrath of God or Pyroclasm could wipe clean away all the effort you put into turns 1 to 4, but if not 14 power isn't that easy to deal with. Enough technical babble, onto the games! Round 1 : Merfolk Mobs Oh joy, I thought, Merfolk. They're easy to deal with, right? Turns out the "cute" Merfolk who come into play turns 1 2 and 3 are easy to look at and none threatening. It's when their princely Reejerey's show up that you suddenly find yourself starring down some giant 5/5 Fish People, with a legendary Sygg ready to give them Protection at a moments notice. Game 1 I believe I won through sheer effort and absolute ignorance of the power of Merfolk. I took gambits that managed to some how pay off. Game 2 I lose as the Merfolk do their "cute entrance" for the first few turns, then turn into the 5/5 giants I was talking about, with counter magic screwing me out of any semblance of dignity. Game 3 draws as the round runs outta time and we couldn't see a game starting and finishing in only 5 turns. This Merfolk deck went on to be the top deck after 6 rounds of Tassy Regional's with a record of 4-1-1. See that draw? That was me ^_^ ! 0-0-1 Round 2 - Explosive Elementals Being the polite jerk I am, I forget my opponents name the instant I finished playing him, which was a shame because he was a good fellow. Playing a casual looking black/red Elemental mix his game plan was to get a turn 1 Flamekin Harbinger, turn 2 "Elemental flavoured Neurok Engineer" Smokebraider, turn 3 Nova Chaser for much pain. Go ahead and block, he'll just trample through for damage then fetch up another NC when his championed Smokebraider returns to play. Despite his intentions and good draws, I had my kill-o-matic Shreikmaw in my opening grip and kept it that way for games 1 and 2, taking out the Smokebraider both times. He managed to hold off Doran's advances quite persistently ("No really, I only wanna hold hands!" - Doran) but eventually packed it in when his Kulrath Knight showed up to the party and took Profane Command in the chest. Ouch. We play a third game for fun where both decks seem to flop over, exhausted, not doing anything worth mentioning. My Birds managed to come out and get some serious beat down going for 1 point a turn, which always puts a smile on my face. 1-0-1 Round 3 - Rogue tendancies My opponent this round was Matt what's-his-face. I'm sure remembering peoples last names is nicer to do but then again not being properly named on the internet does have it's merits. I'd met Matt the previous day as he drove The Co. and I somewhere before we crashed at Pip's place for some serious play testing. (If you can call me watching Dr Who play testing) Playing a very aggressive Rogues deck he played the assumable progression of evasive one drop, hit you and Prowl out my hand. The overwhelming speed of this deck wasn't helped by his Bitterblossom, especially when coupled with my own. Not playing Faeries I didn't have a way to turn off the 1 point life loss from my Faerie-maker 3000 and wound up losing games, I believe, thanks to it. That and "5/5" Treefolk don't really matter when bumblocked by 1/1 tokens coming out Matt's wazhoo. Yes he has a wazhoo, just ask him. 1-1-1 Round 4 - He's Makin' Wolves!! Ha! Round 4, Fox Murdoch of NSW pitted against the egomaniacal The Co. of TAS! One of them has judged for years, the other has competed in high level Magic for even longer, who will win? Turns out I win, because the Co. conceeds to me. He figured I had a better chance of winning Regionals (wink) and seeing I had quit my job to fly down to Tas and play in Tassie's Regionals he really didn't want to be the one to piss out my happy little fire of accomplishment. 2-1-1 Round 5 - B/R jerks ahoy! He left that job to my next opponent, Insert Name Here, who was playing a B/R concoction that used Korlash, Heir to Blackblade and Demigod of Revenge for simply massive hits that kept acomin'. This round I felt I should have won, but ya know what? With a 2 win lead I admit to feeling cocky and as a result screwing up. Korlash, 4/4, is charging down your Doran. He's tapped out, and your guy's bigger, yeah? 5/5 beats 4/4, easy. Block! you declare in triumph, then notice the OTHER Korlash he discards to go get two more Swamps. Idiot. Demigod did its thing the next game, and usefull as those Bitterblossom tokens are, 1 a turn isn't quick enough to deal with one, two and then three Demigods. Sigh. 2-2-1 Now heading into Round 6 I was in that twilight "fairy princess" zone where I wished to my fairy godmother for a good match up, and that enough people would drop from the top 8 so I could qualify for Nats. I needed, NEEDED to win this round however, so I was interested to see what would happen when seated opposite... Round 6 - Elves, kicking ass and taking names! ELVES just won PT Hollywood, so they're an obvious powerhouse. Having said that, not all builds are the same and indeed not all plays are ideal. I believe my opponent was Jesse, who I'd also met the previous night while watching Dr Who. Her plan was to play some Elves early, put some more into play via Premonade & Perfect, while simultaenously pumping then with Perfect and Paragon. This was looking like the Merfolk fight all over again, where I had until turn 7, maybe, to bash face hard enough to finish off with a Profane to the dome. As luck would have it though Faerie tokens get ridiculously big when your opponent plays a Coat of Arms. Yeah, seven 7/7 flyers is a nice way to win a game. I win the round, thank my opponent and breath a sigh of relief at my 3-2-1 result for the day.
I head back to The Co's with Pip and French Kid and Matt What's-his-face and a great big host of other Tasmanian's whos name I can't recall, but who faces I'm sure to recognise next time I see them. Then hide away from them because I don't want to admit that I'm shite at names. My flight back to NSW was at 5.30am sunday morning so we decided to stay up drinking and watching Foxtel til then. You try making polite conversation with a Newsagency clerk in an airport at 5.30am after a day of Magic, night of drinking and knowing you're going home without a job. Fun times. Thanks for reading, promise more after Nats, Fox Murdoch. |
The How:
So what did I come? 12th outta 31ish. And I'm happy with that result, considering I'd only met my deck the night before and was put off by the cookie dough smell which seemed to now be haunting my every step. Needing four players to drop from the Top 8, my fairy godmother didn't manage to deliver the goods twice as only 1 player dropped.