Competitive Magic- with Paul ‘Frodo’ Muller
Happy Thursday to all my insane magic friends!
This weekend is SCG New Jersey featuring the invitational. It will be three days of insane magic fun, but if you're like me it's really only two days because someone here couldn't grind out those last few points (that would be me!!). However, who cares, we have an insane local tournament with standard on Saturday and legacy on Sunday. Thanks to the invitational these tournaments will be insane due to all the magic players who traveled for the invitational and had a run of bad luck on Friday. This is going to raise the level of competition in the open series even more! So, what should I play on Friday, if I'm in the invitational? Well, to start, let's address the idea that the standard metagame in an invitational is different than your average tournament.
There is usually a higher than average number of control and mono black and blue because these decks have a high amount of play to them. This meta, however, opens the door for burn, so honestly for the first time in my life I'm going to suggest burn, Will O'Neil you're welcome. In addition to burn being well positioned against these controlling decks, it has the most insane matchup vs. rabble red, thanks to cards like Searing Blood. If however you don't feel like you can play a deck like this to its fullest, I would suggest you play the deck that you know the best. The math suggests this will give you 4.7% higher win rate against an open field. So, now with standard out of the way, you still need jam legacy for four rounds. While everyone owns a standard deck, very few own legacy.
The invitational will have a higher than average number of players playing the cheapest deck in the format, i.e. burn, thus making many of the traditional grindy decks(jund, death blade,miracles, death and taxes) a slightly worse choice than normal. If you are planning on playing one of these, prepare for a higher than average numbers of both combo (unfair) decks and, of course, burn. I would suggest editing your sideboard accordingly, with more fluster storm and spell pierce type effects. If you're feeling really scared of the red decks and you're in blue, maybe you want to play chill. It worked last week and I see no reason for it to be a poor choice this week. This being said, I would still be playing Shardless this weekend. The deck has better than average match ups across the board due to the ability to play both discard and force of will. This causes it to be a powerful strategy even in the face of poor match ups like sneak and show.
This is sure to see an uptick in numbers this weekend. Shardless creates card advantage and allows strong players to have a reasonable shot of winning almost every matchup in the format.
Let's move on to the open series Saturday and standard. Time to jam some walkers or a mono-black variant. My picks for the open series differ in that over a 10+ round tournament the burn decks tend to lose to themselves to often too make them a viable choice. Just remember, we all are not Jared Boetthcer.
So if you are playing these decks, make sure to remember that rabble red is an actual threat. This means you are going to want cards such as anger of the gods, drown in sorrow, and golgari charm. With that said, let's move on to Sunday. I'll be focusing on the legacy portion and once again my pick will be shardless. The deck is insane and I will continue to sing it's praises for the foreseeable future.
I don't know about all of you, but I am beyond excited to jam some magic all weekend. Win or lose, it's going to be awesome to see everyone. If anyone wants to, come up and say hi! You guys are the best!
-Paul
You can contact Paul via Gmail and Facebook:
Paul is a local tournament player in the NY area.. Frequents many stores and a good player with good insight to the game.
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