tigertoy

Armored Gopher Games, my friendly local game store where I've been spending my Friday nights playing magic for the last 5 years or so, is closed. Dave the owner was burned out. Things were supposed to be arranged to sell to the original owners, but the wheels came off the deal at the last minute. Right now we don't know if it can be salvaged, and I don't really know the details but it doesn't look very good.

I went to FNM at the other game store in town, Titan Games, for the first time yesterday. Titan's not a bad place but it didn't feel like home. I don't know if it can become that for me, or if I'm going to drop out of magic again. Playing magic helped me get through some tough times, but I haven't felt as much into it the past few months as I used to. But not having it in my life feels scary.

Thanks for all the good times, Dave. I hope things work out for you. I hope things work out for me.

After spending the week fiddling with my EDH decks, I took the same standard deck to FNM. We had 10 people. I came in 3rd, after losing in the first round to the winner.

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After FNM we actually had a chaos draft. Eddie (whose last name I don't know) had 28 unique packs. We got to first draft the packs and then draft the cards. It was fun, but I was up way too late.

Standard didn't fire last week, and it looked like it would fail again this week, but 8 people were there when rush of people who showed up at 6:30 finished. I went 3-0, with the same Hardened Scales list as two weeks ago.

It's time for me to go to bed, so I won't put in the details now. If I find myself motivated, I'll add them tomorrow.

I played my Hardened Scales deck again at FNM. Came in 3rd out of 8 players.

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A couple of tweaks to the deck, and I did well until the last round when my deck pooped out, so I had a second place finish.

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I only changed a few cards from last week. Some crummy hands got me to 4th place out of 8 players.

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Another Magic set is coming out, and the prerelease was this weekend. I did the two daytime ones at Armored Gopher. Saturday, I ended up running a white/green/blue deck featuring Emeria Shepherd and Kiora. It was kinda mediocre. After round 2, I decided that I would have been better off with black than white, because the Shepherd is a bomb but I only had a couple of other white cards worth running. But my opponents played too slowly, so I never had 10 minutes to do that level of surgery on it. I ended up just barely above 50%, got 1 pack, and two Russian Dragon's Maze packs as my door prize. Today, I thought my pool was fantastic. I had two Emeria Shepherds and several white removal spells, so I was definitely playing white. I got Ob Nixilis Reignited, so my first impulse was to play black, but as I built it I realized that I didn't have any cheap black creatures and my deck was just going to be too slow, so I went with red and white instead, getting to run my Resolute Blademaster with several allies. And my curse kicked in -- I thought I had a great deck, so I got mana screwed for my first two matches. I won, drew, and won, but my tiebreaks were dreadful with the two initial losses and I finished 1 place out of packs. Then I pulled my door prize, and hit the jackpot with the Zendikar Expeditions Flooded Strand -- a $300 card.

I did play at FNM on Friday. I didn't write it up yesterday because I went to EFRC. I lost the first 4 games. One of those games was interesting and the other three were just me not drawing the cards I needed. After going 0-2, I won the next one and should have won the last one but went to time.

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Next week will be the last hurrah for Standard with Theros block cards. It's spoiler season, and so far I'm hugely disappointed. Siege Rhino will still be a card, but I don't think the mana will be there for my luck to support 3 colors. I really need Sylvan Caryatid to smooth me out -- a card none of the pros have been running for months. I don't know what I'll be playing at FNM a month from now.

Standard fired again at FNM. I played my Abzan deck again, with a few fiddles. Didn't go well.

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Standard didn't happen this week, and I'm trying to be good and not spend the money on draft, so I tried my Modern deck. The problem with modern is that good decks require many hundreds of dollars worth of cards I don't have, so if I play I'm always running a less good deck that has to compensate by being a bit lucky, and I'm just not. Of course, I seldom play modern because my deck sucks, so I don't have experience playing the format, which gives me a little more disadvantage. Oh well.

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