Well, game day went very poorly for me, but at least there were some cool stories. I went 2-2 in standard on the first day with Esper Control. I swapped four cards around for Sunday's games and went 1-3. Control is just too hard to build right now, at least that how i'm finding it. In limited I drafted black/white both times - making a total of four black/white decks in five drafts. Both my decks seemed really good: Saturday had two Lingering Souls, Sunday had a Sorin.
Anyway, enough wound licking, more story-telling. In the third round of Sunday's standard event, i was tied at 1-1 against a homebrew Grixis Heartless deck. The game was largely stalled out and he was beating me down with a Perilous Myr, ignoring my Karn who was ready to restart at any time. My confusion was cleared when he hit me down to five and cast a Devil's Play, neatly playing around my Mana Leak. With Devil's on the stack, i cast a think twice and naturally drew a second Leak. Oh, incidentally, i only play two total Mana Leaks, but i was due some luck. It doesn't end there, though. I -14'ed Karn and, amusingly, villain didn't scoop. I got to play a turn one Gideon and, unsurprisingly, won in no time.
In the draft, I was watching two other people play after my game. Player 1 cast a Tree of Redemption, passes the turn. Player 2 made a dude and passed. Played 1 draws, looks at the board, pauses, and giggles to himself. He casts Travel Preperations and flashes it back, putting two counters on his tree. If you don't instantly see why that's a funny story, i'll spell it out: tap the tree, go to 15, the tree becomes a 0/20 with two counters on it. Next turn, untap, tap the tree, go up to 22 and the tree becomes a 15/15 with +2/+2. The first game ended with just three minutes on the round, meaning the ridiculous Tree "combo" player won 1-0.
In my own third round game, i managed to resolve Sorin and started ticking him up. I felt fairly stable, until villain cast a Markov Blademaster and hit me down to three. Sorin was on six, though, so i felt okay, despite him having a Skirksdag Cultist. I ultimated Sorin, targetting Cultist, Blademaster and a Manor Skeleton, leaving him with a Zombie token and a One-eyed Scarecrow. Except... he sacrificed the blademaster to shoot the cultist, giving me a pathetic looking skeleton and a pair of vampire tokens. I lost, but i still think it was the right play, although maybe i should've taken the more defensive scarecrow.
Overall, a deeply disappointing weekend, but one full of incident and amusing anecdotes. And, hey, a Sorin! Maybe i can trade towards a new standard deck, because Esper Control really isn't working out for me.
