What is the Deal with MTG tiebreakers??

Played in a Standard MTG tournament today at Guardian Games ("GG"). I ran Tempered Steel because the crowd at GG is pretty legit and you can't just bring any chump deck. I ended up scoring 4-1, which was good enough for second place, but I placed 4th after tiebreakers. I find this occurence odd, considering I went 2-0 in every match I won and 1-2 in the match I lost. Simply put, I hate the way MTG calculates tiebreakers. If two players are tied for a particular place the system looks at your "opponents' match win percentage" rather than your individual game win percentage. In other words, you have to play harder opponents to place higher. It doesn't matter how badly you crush your foes. I guess I just don't like this system because it always seems to screw me. I can control how badly I beat an opponent. I can't control how my opponents fare against other players.

Now that I've vented, on to the games. The first round I played U/B control and I won easily. He just didn't have enough Black Sun's Zenith or Steel Sabotage in the sideboard. The second round was much more memorable because I got smashed by a MonoRed deck. MonoRed may or may not be a viable deck in today's metagame, but against Tempered Steel it just owns. The combination of cards like Arc Trail, Manic Vandal, and Slagstorm puts Tempered Steel in an awkward situation. Should the T-steel player dump his hand, and play into a possible 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 situation? Or should the T-steel player save his creatures in his hand until after he has played a Tempered Steel? The only problem with this latter strategy is that MonoRed tends to put T-Steel under pressure immediately with creatures like Stromkirk Noble and Stormblood Berserker, and if you don't have blockers you can easily find yourself at 10 life facing a 4/4 Stromkirk Noble by turn 5. MonoRed also has more than enough answers for T-steel creatures, like Galvanic Blast. I guess I would sum all this up by just saying MonoRed was a bad matchup for me, and I lost handily.

I won my next three matches against B/G/W Birthing Pod, Haunted Humans (see previous entry), and some chump deck which wasn't even sleeved. The Birthing Pod deck was my favorite matchup because the first game I basically drew the nuts (first turn Plains, Mox Opal, Glint Hawk, Memnite, Signal Pest, go.), and the second game my anti-Birthing Pod sideboard tech came down on turn 2. gg.

I used my prize store credit to pick up a third Sword of Feast and Famine with the idea of sometime playing this cool Mono-Black deck I found online. Perhaps Tuesday or Friday. See you next time!