Once more into the breach, dear friends.

Oh, Descartes. You were such a badass.

Well it wasn't pretty. On Tuesday night I attended a Grand Prix Tour qualifier at Ancient Wonders. The nice thing about Grand Prix qualifiers is that the Planeswalker points are tripled, much like an FNM. In other words, each win at a GPT counts as three wins at a normal tournament. Unfortunately, to receive the points you first have to win the match, and I apparently couldn't win a match to save my deck.

I once again wielded R/G Wolf Run, which was probably a mistake. Although the deck has brought me success in the past, I have recently grown tired of it, and I am in need of a change. After filling out my decklist, the pairings were posted. I was not surprised to find that out of the 20 possible opponents, I was paired against Ryan Engbrecht, who was running U/B/W Solar Flare. Solar Flare was a deck that was popular about 6 months ago, when Innistrad just came out, and the deck has slowly fallen out of favor since. Ryan and I intentionally drew---apparently neither of us felt the taste for battle this particular tournament.

Right before the second round, the judge approached me and told me there was a problem with my decklist. Apparently I wrote down my sideboard wrong, and had forgotten to write in two cards. For my clerical error, I was penalized with an immediate game loss in round 2. In other words, my next opponent would only have to win one of the following two games to win the match. Unfortunately, my opponent was playing U/B Control, one of my deck's worst matchups, and I lost the match 0-2.

In round three, I was paired against Charlie running R/G Wolf Run. His version was slightly different from mine, in that it ran more copies of Huntmaster of the Fells (I run none) and less copies of Inferno Titan. My version has yet to lose in this "mirror match," and I quickly won, 2-0.

Round four was probably the most disappointing of the tournament. I was paired against Steve Empey, who I have played before with mixed results. This time, Steve was playing B/W tokens, utilizing cards such as Sphere of the Suns, Grave Titan, Elspeth, and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad. The match needed a third game to decide it. I ended up mulliganing (on the draw) a hand with 2 Karn, Liberated, 1 Sphere of the Suns, 1 Mountain, 1 Kessig Wolf Run, 1 Inferno Titan, and 1 Beast Within. I wasn't sure if mulliganing this hand was the right decision, and I'm still not sure. I was forced to keep the next hand, which was 5 lands and a Beast Within, so I guess in hindsight I can say I should have kept the first hand; but....you can't really reason like that. I lost the third game quickly, as I saw no ramp spells and was unable to cast a Titan until turn 6, which my opponent simply killed with his Oblivion Ring. 1-2.

Having gone 1-2-1 over four rounds and basically realizing I had no chance to finish in the top 8, or receive any prize, I withdrew from the tournament. I asked Adam Brown to do me a favor and give Ryan a ride home so I could leave early. A rather poor tournament, and one that I'm trying quickly to forget. See you next time....