We’re up against a solid player – BC Faeries. Interestingly enough, Ol’ BC has chosen to eschew the trusty Fae for this tournament and is running UR storm combo. We’re running Life from the Loam Death Cloud, so this isn’t a great matchup for us, but we win the roll, and have a sweet opening seven which includes Raven’s Crime and LftL. We start the discard happening, 1 on turn 1, 2 more on turn 2, 1 more + LftL on turn 3. BC has opened with a suspended Lotus Bloom, but by turn 4 he’s down to 1 card in hand, and 2 lands in play.

We slowly wake up at about 7:30am. T-Robs and I check out the Free Breakfast room, they have some muffins, other baked stuff, juices, cereal, etc. Grab some of that. Miller is watching Wild West Tech on TV…We watch that for a bit, get together our stuff and roll to the event. We get there, lots of people. We sign up. I scout a bit. Lots of Mono Red, Affinity, and Faeries. First round starts.

Like a billion pictures that Albert took during the tournament.

Now a few short words about my project. The volunteer experience I am fundraising for is for a 6 week trip to Sri Lanka where i will be building a Carpentry training facility in order to help rebuild the countries infrastructure after the Tsunamis of 2004.

The original plan here was to cover all of our daily Japanese adventures, culminating in the PT. However, that is seeming a little daunting right now and I’m kinda guess you guys are most interested in the magical bits anyways. Really, the most noteworthy story I have is the day that Tambo got sick and ducked out of the bamboo forest for some shut eye.

So I lay here at 6:30 am listening to the lovely sound of nelson snoring, and im not gonna lie, I am second guessing my deck choice. The deck did pretty well in testing on modo, but a less than spectacular 10 game split against red deck wins, and storm last night has me thinking I need to do some tweaking.

So following the smash success “Shadowmoor limited so far” in which I caught a lot of flack for repping Helm of the Ghastlord, I have decided to write the followup article Shards of Alara limited so far! I have done more sealed deck tournaments than drafts so some of what I’m telling you may be a little off point but please bear with me.

My PTQ Kyoto experience is likely a unique one that I figure would be somewhat wasted if not recorded in the tomes of history. In light of this, the following article will attempt to relate the events that transpired on October 11, 2008.

After Dave Herder trounced me in a couple games of Chess a few weeks ago, we’ve had continuing communications on various topics that I’ve been ruminating over for the past while.

This tournament trip started out in the aftermath off Gavin Verhey’s win in Vancouver. We had been considering it since it was posted early in the summer, but we had to ride out our first post-Josh Layne metagame PTQ in Van to decide if we wanted to go.