Magic Tournament
June 30th 2004 -
Walking to work
I haven’t walked to work in a while, so I gave it a go this morning. Enjoyable, as usual, though once again I got several blisters. I listened to a lot of new music: Ev’s new Crop Circles album (just superb), a sampler of Lindsay Buckingham courtesy of Jon (which I liked a lot: a bit like Simon & Garfunkel or Elliot Smith), and the Styx symphony which was RUINED BY FUCKING TRAFFIC. Though I have to admit some culpability in that one.
Magic Tournament
Today was the first day of our Magic: The Gathering tournament, and I played against Andrew K. and won 2-0. I was pretty lucky, I think.
We had the draft yesterday. I started drafting white creatures and equipment (we were drafting Mirrodin only) in the first pack, and got a couple of good picks. I also started drafting green when I was handed a fairly late One Dozen Eyes.
With the second pack, though, the people to my left were obviously drafting white as well, because I wasn’t getting much, so I started drafting more artifacts and combat tricks. My first pick, though, was a happy one: Empyrial Armour. Super-sweet. Then I got a bonesplitter and an isochron scepter, and was very happy indeed. Good white creatures, some mediocre artifact creatures, and scepter abusiveness. In the last pack I concentrated on black, almost by default because it wasn’t being drafted much, and got some fairly decent creatures and removal. I made up a white-black-green equipment-based deck, and later cut back the green component so it was mostly white-black.
Andrew K. had drafted red and white, and had some fairly formidable cards of his own: spikeshot goblin, isochron scepter, loxidan war-hammer, and lots of those red two-casting-cost direct damage spells, perfect for imprinting on the scepter.
Both my games were fairly lucky. I had Alter’s Light when he brought out the warhammer; I’d imprinted terror on my own scepter to kill his white flier and the spikeshot goblin. Even so, he’d done me a ton of damage before I started hitting him with an empyrially armoured flyer and won. Very close, very tense.
The second game was just as close. I started the game with the scepter and Raise the Alarm in my hand, and the Leonin Abunas: I knew he had a lot of artifact destruction, so I played the Abunas first. I didn’t even need the scepter this time though, despite his scepter imprinted with Razor Barrier – I got the empyrial armour onto a flyer and killed him in three turns.
The deciding difference between the decks (besides that he didn’t draw much of his plentiful creature and artifact destruction) was that I had a whole bunch of flyers and he didn’t. We had a third game for fun; I couldn’t answer the warhammer except by exchanging creatures, and my flying armoured dude didn’t get through fast enough.
I went in very confident of my deck: in retrospect, I was lucky enough to get good draws. One interesting feature of the draft is that there is guaranteed not to be more than two of a given card, because of the way we put the packs together (two full sets of commons, randomly and separately shuffled and assigned into booster packs, the same for the uncommons for as many as we had, and a common set of as many rares as we could dig up). So by drafting both terrors, I know that I won’t have to face any myself.
dri Says:
July 1st, 2004 at 12:30 pm
Lindsey Buckingham!
*squeal* *growl*
Ahem. *squeal* I spent a good many years worshipping Lindsey Buckingham. ((and if your memory is very very good, you might recall the guy in my NaNovel is called Lindsey and looks a helluva lot like him when he was young and pretty, cough))
Point being. I have almost everything Lindsey Buckingham put out. He’s like Elliott Smith?? I’ve been wanting to get into Elliott Smith for the longest time now … this gives me much hope.
So if you’d like anything, give us a holler.
Just don’t ask me what the Fleetwood Mac concert experience was like. *growl*
Andrew Says:
July 1st, 2004 at 5:38 pm
Ooooh, I see. I know almost nothing about him, except that I rather like the sampler that my friend burned for me – from "Out of the Cradle", "Say You Will", "The Dance" and "Tusk". His classical pieces were particularly interesting – do you know if he wrote them himself?
I can lend you the Elliot Smith albums, though I don’t know how close you’ll find the sound – Buckingham’s stuff goes across a couple of styles. Smith’s music is gentle acoustic harmony and melody based rock. A little like a softer Cat Stevens, to pick another data point.
Noswonky Says:
July 4th, 2004 at 2:55 am
I guess Eliot Smith must be Robert Smith’s brother.
Andrew Says:
July 4th, 2004 at 11:47 am
They were all in a band together called "The Smiths", of course. Their manager is Dick Smith.
dri Says:
July 4th, 2004 at 3:17 pm
do you know if he wrote them himself? …
I’m fairly certain he wrote all the stuff you’ve got … it’s only on the second album, Go Insane, that he heavily heavily Heavily borrows from Loch Lomond.
Actually in a wonderful coincidence, my friend Z lent me xoxo a couple of days ago. I plan to introduce myself to Mr Smith today … with quiet expectations.