Rage Extractor huh?

I played in another Standard Tournament at Rivals this evening. Rivals is a bit far from my house, but I learned about half way through the day Alec and Ryan would be going to the tournament. Since Alec "owed" me a ride, I asked to tag along.  Alec played his traditional B/W/G Birthing Pod deck, and Ryan played U/W Delver, widely considered the strongest deck in the format current. I ran R/G Wolf Run, as usual. Considering the new set Dark Ascension is will be released next weekend, I figured this was one of my last chances to run my favorite deck in the format.

The tournament started off quite nicely for me. I went 2-0 against my first opponent, who was running some type of mono-red deck. I never saw a Koth of the Hammer, nor a Chandra's Pheonix. He appeared to be running the more Goblin-based version with cards like  Goblin Fireslinger, Goblin Wardriver, and Goblin Grenade. The four Slagstorms in my maindeck worked wonders, often giving me 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 situations. I even brought in a couple Whipflares from my sideboard to help. The Whipflares are there to deal with the prevalence of Geist of Saint Traft, but they also work well against most types of weenie decks.

The second round of the tournament did not go as well. I got paired against an opponent running Rage Extractors combined with Phyrexian Metamorph, Norn's Annex, and Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas. The basic idea of the deck was toplay a copy of Rage Extractor and then play as many spells with phyrexian mana as you could. The Phyrexian Metamorph was particularly annoying against me because he could copy a titan so easily. I had not seen such a deck before tonight, but I felt like my chances were good because I run so many copies of Ancient Grudge in my sideboard. Strangely, I won game 2, where I had to mulligan down to 5, but I lost games 1 and 3, where I simply got land screwed.

The last round of the tournament was my favorite. I was paired against Alec, who beat me in our previous encounter at FNM. This wasn't quite a rematch, because I was playing R/G Wolf Run instead of B/G. The games were very close. In Game 1, Alec made a terrible mistake and blundered a won position. It reminded me of chess in a way. In game 2, Alec had his back to the ropes and was going to lose next turn. He topdecked an Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, which is honestly one of the best white creatures alive. Elesh made it so I couldn't activate my Inkmoth Nexii and kill Alec with poison counters. From that point onward, Alec had control of the game and he eventually won. Game 3 was close, but 2-for-1 situations with both Ancient Grudge and Slagstorm seized the victory. Redemption!

I'm happy with my result this tournament, but I'm a little upset there were only three rounds. That hardly seems like enough rounds to truly separate out the good decks from the bad. There were at least 4 other people who finished 2-1 and I ended up placing almost last among them, 6th overall. The ride home was interesting, as Alec and I engaged in philosophical discussion about the merits of Cartesian epistemology. Until next time readers!