The grind continues. There are only a few weeks left in the current Standard "season," with the release of Gatecrash just around the corner. People have basically stopped innovating, choosing instead to focus on the upcoming Modern PTQs. I played in a couple of Standard events this week, hoping to increase the win percentage of my Junk Angel deck before being forced to shelve it post-Gatecrash.

However, it was not to be. In the first round of the FNM at Guardian Games, I lost to Henry Freedman, who will forever be known on this blog as "formerly one of the strongest Magic players in Portland." Henry beat me in game three of our mirror-ish match, but mostly because I made a huge play mistake. Henry had two Deathrite Shamans and I had one, but Henry had tapped all of his lands on his turn. During my main phase, I cast Grisly Salvage, revealing Angel of Serenity, Unburial Rites, a land, and 2 other cards. I tapped 4 lands, flashed back the Unburial Rites, and targetted my Angel. Henry quickly tapped one Deathrite Shaman, removing the land in my graveyard to activate the other Deathrite Shaman, removing my Angel of Serenity. It wasn't until after I placed my Angel in the RFG pile and added two life to Henry's total that I realized I could have tapped my own Deathrite Shaman in response, removing the land from my own graveyard and depriving him of the needed mana. That's the second time I've made a play mistake with Deathrite Shaman that has (assumedly) cost me a match.

In round 2 of the FNM I played Oliver Garcia, running Omnidoor Thragfire, originally created by Travis Woo (see the published article here). I lost game one as I usually do against Omnidoor, but I won game two pretty quickly. In game 3, I managed to gain infinite life but still lost when he resolved Omniscience into Door to Nothingness and Temporal Mastery. Lame. :-P

So I dropped from the FNM. I probably should have stuck it out, gangam-style, whatever the fuck that means, but I was already feeling under the weather and the two close losses didn't help. I bought a foil Pact of Negation from the shop to make myself feel better.

I played again on Sunday with hopes of redeeming my FNM performance. I scored 2-1-1 after an unusual loss to Boros Humans. Although Junk Angel mulligans well, against aggro you have to be very careful what hands you keep. With 6 cards on the draw, I had Sunpetal Grove, Woodland Cemetery, Avacyn's Pilgrim, Grisly Salvage, Fiend Hunter, Angel of Serenity. This hand simply proved too slow without a play to make on turn 1, and only a Pilgrim turn 2.

I played against an Esper deck in a later round, run by Gabriel Carleton-Barnes. Gabrield's deck was based around Nepahlia Drownyard, Tamiyo the Moon Sage, etc. etc.---a deck very similar to Reid Duke's Dark Bant list (but without the green cards, of course). I won game two with two cards left in my library, and we only had a minute left for game 3, so we drew the match.

So, in all, it wasn't a winning weekend. Junk Angel is now 42-14-2 in its current version, and 64-31-11 overall. Until next time.