What did we do at the GameSStop Championship ?

We gathered at the Nijikon Festival expecting a great tournament, considering the prizes and the dual-format bent on stimulating the players to perform at their best at different levels of gameplay. Sure there were fewer players than this sort of tournament had deserved, but that didn't stop the players that made it there to play some of their best Magic in a while and I believe the overall event played out as a great experience for every player.

After the event began, all the players sat down facing a widely varied field consisting of a Red Green Aggro, a White Weenie Holy Relic, a Mono Green Eldrazi, a Red Blue Green  without and one with Destructive Force, a Vampires Deck, a Mono Green Aggro, an Elves! Deck, a couple Mono Black Control, a couple Blue White Control, 3 Blue Black Control, 4 Red Deck Wins, 3 Red White Aggro decks. It reminded me of Nationals a few years back when the metagame was infested with Demigod Red ( Mono Red Aggro ) and Blue Black Faeries, when they would play a love-hate relationship where the Red deck would love to play against a Faerie player because it had a great match-up against it, whereas the Faerie Deck, despite hating the Red deck, loved that the Red Deck had some tough time against white-based decks that ran Burrenton Forge-Tenders, which folded to Faeries.

Regardless of how many copies of a certain archetype might have shown at the event, the players that made the top 8 draft the next day were slightly more control oriented, as their decks numbered 3 Blue Black, 1 Mono Red, 1 Blue-White, 1 Red Blue Green Destructive Force, 1 Mono Green Eldrazi and 1 Mono White Holy Relic.

Little did that matter, as their affinity for a certain archetype in constructed would count close to zero when engaging the draft that took place on Sunday morning. The draft ended with Alex Stefanescu playing Mono Red ( he seems to enjoy that strategy in limited lately ), Adi Teodorescu going U/xx ( as he likes to include Blue even in limited decks ), Dragos Patlageanu went Blue White aggro to go along with his constructed colored deck, Andrei Baku played a BG Infect Deck ( infectly, one might say, as he won the draft despite making beginner mistakes like casting instants solely at sorcery speed ), Ionut Zabulica went for RG/w for tons of (artefact)removal and a few bombs, Vlad Osiac played a Blue Green deck, Toma Putere played a BW infect deck with white removal and Toma Iosifescu played a Mono White aggro deck.

After the draft rounds came to an end and  Baku winning the draft on the back of insane draws and a well placed Tainted Strike against Zabulica's Rust Tick ( which would have tapped down his opponent's Vector Asp well until Zabu could play Engulfing Slagwurm and take over the game ), the top 4 players were Baku sitting at 7 points and  Zabu, Stefanescu and Iosifescu all sitting at 6 points each. After the well-deserved break, the four sat down at the tables with their opponent's decklist and prepping for the semi-finals.

Zabulica's Blue Red Green Destructive Force faced Iosifescu's Mono Green Eldrazi Ramp, which as Zabu admitted as hopefully close to fifty percent in favor of the Eldrazi deck. Truth be told Zabu did put up a fair fight, and his Frost Titans and Destructive Force did kick Toma's deck in its teeth in one game. Unfortunately, the Ramp deck's speed and the lack of interaction from the opposing deck ( outside Mana Leak, Jace, the Mind Sculptor's Bounce ability and the occasional Volition Reins ) made it easy for Toma to win 3 games out of five. Final score 3-1.

The other semifinals match was the UB Trinket ( Stefanescu ) versus UB Permission ( Baku ) pseudo-mirror. Most control players say that the mirror match is more about skill than about tech and needless to say, Stefanescu had both in his favor as he dispatched Baku in three games to none. As much as I could tell, aside from the luck aspect of drawing Tectonic Edge and screwing the opponent and killing his man-lands as much as possible, Stefanescu also made it so he resolved Sadistic Sacraments and/or Memoricides against a deck with already few wincons.

So the finals went on between Stefanescu with UB against Iosifescu with Mono Green Eldrazi. The game went to an epic match that ended with 3-2 in Alex's favor. I remember seeing, as I walked by their table, Frost Titans tapping down tempo-lost Khalni Gardens ( which came into play tapped and impeded Toma to power out titans ) and Doom Blades and Smothers flying around against Overgrown Battlements and Joraga Treespeakers. But I do remember that, on the play, the Mono Green deck lost by having the 6th mana source come onto the battlefield tapped and thus losing enough tempo to allow a mulligan-to-1-land-hand UB control to crawl back to victory by repeatedly destroying opposing nonbasics and green accelerators. This is what the top 8 looked like:

1st Stefanescu Alexandru

2nd Iosifescu Toma

3rd Zabulica Ionut

4th Baku Andrei

5th – 8th Osiac Vlad

5th – 8th Teodorescu Adrian

5th – 8th Putere Toma

5th – 8th Patlageanu Dragos

Overall, I believe it was a great tournament, even if just to watch as people did their best to drive their decks to victory. I was impressed at the variety of the top 8 deck, even if the 3 UB Control decks were an interesting sight. The archetype does show promise and will probably rise during the next few months leading to Worlds. But I guess that's a talk for another time.

Pricopoaea Cosmin, GS Team.