I think I broke it.

Last time I played The Deck, I got into some serious issues with the format, having fun, playing to win, and the like. Apparently, the solution was to drink beer in Denmark and not care.

A month ago, I played the following deck at the Danish Old School 3.0 in Copenhagen:

It’s a standard The Deck, but with a couple of City in a Bottle main. This leads to playing only 2 City of Brass, so green was cut entirely; the mana base is slightly worse, but cutting another basic and in the end also the 4th Mishra’s Factory and replacing them with duals somewhat made up for this. The bottles took the place of the Stone Rain and Regrowth, basically; it was the fact that I could cut Stone Rain and still have more ways to handle Library that originally sent me down this path, I think.

The tournament started at 11 a.m., so even though it for some reason was 7 rounds of swiss before the top 8, the finals started at maybe 9 p.m.; so when I say it felt late, it kind of was, but not the customary Swedish 3 a.m. late. Still, we wanted to grab some dinner. It was me against my good friend Olle Råde, with whom I was staying in Malmö for the weekend. I did start with Library on the play, the rest of my hand being Scrubland, Pearl, 2 Disenchant and some random blue cards (I think). Then Olle dropped these:



So I just conceded. We had also decided to play the match best of 1, because why the hell not, we had played it enough over the past couple of days, including a fierce 3-game set before breakfast that day.

Well, I did get a prize. The ramen were good.

What did I face? A smattering of different decks. Something like this:

R1: Lauter, although I thought it was The Deck after game 1 as he never played any creatures. 2-0, I think

R2: don’t remember a thing, but I won

R3: troll disco/beast, 2-1

R4: dib/su-chi/atog, 2-1

R5: Olle with dibatog, 0-2

R6: Jesper Ejsing with UW robots, 1-2

R7: Mourad Krid with UB land destruction (4 md flux, blights, sinkhole), 2-1

QF: unpowered mono white weenie/prison, 2-0

SF: BW juzam, 2-1

Finals: Olle with dibatog, 0-1

The list was pretty good. Might need some small changes, probably keeping the angels in the board, but bottle main could be the real deal. Probably a tiny bit worse than the list Martin Lindström used to take his second shark at N00bCon, but not strictly so, meaning there are certain metagames where this list might be advantaged.

So I was 7-3, 7-1 discounting my matches against Olle, whereas he went 10-0. Final score: Sweden — Denmark 17-1, as we were the lone Swedes in attendance. Must count as a success, right.

All in all, it was an awesome weekend. The venue was fine, the location good, there were cheap beer and nice pulled pork sandwiches for sale, the company was fantastic even though both me and Olle knew very few people there in advance. I’m sure to try to come back next time. I had a lot of fun, even though I played pretty horribly. Should have lost a game and thus a match against troll disco/beast hybrid, likewise against BW in the semis, but my deck and my opponents bailed me out. I need to tighten up, think before I play. But The Deck is a whole lot of fun to play, still. I know that now, I’ve come back around. Those books. You know, just end of turn, draw a card.