11 settembre 2023 - Articolo di Jtk88

Hi, I'm Jimmy Caroli. You might remember me from such magic article series as Sondaggissimo, Building on a Budget and several other reports. I'm here today to tell you a story about another event that happened not long ago, in the cold northern lands of Sweden.

It's been a long time since last article I wrote for this site, and lots of things happened in the meantime: I moved to Denmark for work, met an amazing person and recently became a dad of a beautiful, screaming, farting little lady. You may also note that this article is being written in English. That’s right, and the only reason for this is not to empower and showcase the fact that I’m able to write in a different language (hello typos), but to flex with my friends here in Denmark. Joking. Or not. Who knows?

Anyhow, while most of you all guys were competing in the 4Seasons in Bologna the past weekend, with hundreds of nerds crammed in that marvelous space of PolisportivaBenassi (God I miss that place), me and the Copenhageners were involved in a mythical quest to conquer the north in Malmö, Sweden, in the Nordic Masters event hosted by Mindstage during the Malmö Game Week.

The big Modern Main Event was designed to really hype up and challenge the northern magic scene: 2 days event in a GP-like style, 8 rounds Day 1 with 6-2 cut to make Day 2, which would feature 3 rounds of swiss and then Top8. Pretty tough challenge to be fair, and not something you can tackle without having hours and hours of playtest on your back, or a deep knowledge of the expected Metagame of the event, or a thorough, intimate connection with your deck and latest tweaked decklist.

Given these premises, you already know what to expect. That’s why I’m gonna start from the very beginning, introducing the “Heroes” of this story, then I will digress into the state of Modern post PT Lord of the Rings and what we expected to face in Malmö, and only at last will reveal how I got 10th place facing 10 bad matchups in 11 rounds of swiss. Are you ready for this ride?

Spoiler: I played Amulet Titan. I know, that’s a cliché now. I’m not going to explain anything about the deck, since Dom Harvey made a pretty extensive Bible of the archetype. Go check it out here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qOGLSrY00VgTABkKQTF1bP-Prp-49k8l5lux6ESH_mw/edit. At the end I will provide my list, sb guide and what I would have played if I was not a coward.

Chapter 1: The heroes of Copenhagen

When you move to a different country, it’s very complex to start new friendships. That becomes even more challenging during Covid, or if you are in your thirties and totally introvert. However, thanks to Magic, you just need to find the Local Game Store and you will suddenly be in touch with a plethora of other game addicted like you in no time. Thanks Richard Garfield for letting nerds be nerds everywhere in the world, and find other nerds so we don’t feel alone. Among the amazing peeps met here in Copenhagen, several stands out, and I really want you to meet them:

• - Khalil, the hype guy from Lebanon. Plays only cheesy decks, always ready to hug and cheer for you, doesn’t understand combo deck but he is happy for you if you are enjoying it;
• - Garret, the Canadian menace. Has all the cards, plays all the decks, takes thousands of pictures at the event but has immovable dogmas that can’t be discussed. Like Poutine;
• - Jeppe, the Danish Bling Man. Danish Economy had a bit of a downfall in 2018, but quickly recovered when Jeppe started playing Magic, and decided that he liked only the shiniest of the cards. Sunglasses are a must when he enters the LGS;
• - Mads, the Hero of the event. Tests 4c Omnath for a month prior the event, decides that it’s not the best deck to play, ask for Rhinos on the eve of the tournament. Starts the event with 0 playtest and gets a Bye round 1. The winning horse has a name;
• - Sebastian, the Organizer. Plans all the abroad trips, plays only BR decks and has a deep love for Foils. He secretly plots to dethrone Jeppe as the Bling Man of Copenhagen;
• - Victor, the Big Friendly Giant. 20 years old, 2 meter tall, 47 of foot. Love shiny things, red monkeys, and blue dragons. Always eager to learn and improve his playstyle, but don’t ask him to put more lands in his deck. That’s just no feasible;
• - Joan, the Catalan Grinder. Also known as MrSeri online, plays only (or mostly) Hardened Scales, has no fear of throwing KEKWs at you and will always speak with reason. His reason;
• - Christoffer, the Honest Man. Plays Burn because it’s a fair deck and enjoys the playstyle. Will advocate that Modern needs Price of Progress and that Burn has received no love in the past 5 years from the R&D. Let’s hope this trend continues;
• - Kjartan, the Icelandic Brewer. Doesn’t like to play stock decklist, loves Death’s Shadow and UB shells, will discuss for hours about optimization and his infinite brews in all Magic formats.

As you can see, the Fellowship of Copenhageners is incredibly vast and complex. To top this, the “game experience” between the heroes can vastly differ, and not just because someone has started playing before or after the others, but also because of dogmas, play patterns carved into the soul, personal deck preferences, zodiac signs, you name it.

Introduced the (many) heroes of this story, it’s time to tell about the tournament preparation, how we handled the shake of the metagame brought by PT Lord of the Rings and the Team Handshake (with the very own Simon Nielsen who basically lives close by my place), and the new last minute additions of Wilds of Eldraine (yes, people were playing cards of WOE in Malmö, more of it later).

Chapter 2: Crossing the Øresundståg

With PT LOTR in the books, it became quite easy to understand how the metagame was shaped and polarized: Scam was still the best deck in the format, Orcish Bowmaster the best card and after that the power ranking were solid, but not carved in stone. The One Ring is a card to always keep in consideration, but the overall power level of the format is now squeezed in the first 2-3 turns of the game: if you are not able to either win or slow down your opponent enough at the beginning of the game, you’re in for not a good time. On top of this, the results from a Pro Tour needs always to be taken as a grain of salt. PT metas are inbred metas, where almost everyone knows what the other is playing and is teching out to have edge on them. In real life this strategy doesn’t really work, and you need to be a little more flexible.

Given these premises, we started testing out some decks for the event. I was almost locked on some version of UW Control (which I also won a Store Championship with), with Chalice of the Void and Blood Moon to just hate out the format and win through sheer boredom. But then Wizards decided to just give a shake to the format unbanning Preordain, one of the best cantrip available right now. This pumped blood back in UR Murktide, which took quite a hit thanks to LoTR. Now the meta prediction changed again.

If before the Preordain unban my expectation were, in order:

• - Scam
• - Tron
• - Cascade (Rhinos and Living End)
• - Hammer
• - 4c Omnath
• - Everything else

Now Murktide tremendously came back, placing results after results in challenges online. Hammer became even more appealing, since it has a natural good matchup against the rise of Murktide, it salivates when it sees a Tron land and also Scam is not that bad. The power rankings changed drastically, and knowing the “blue lovers” of the north, the predicted meta changed as follow:

• - Scam
• - Murktide
• - Hammer
• - Cascade
• - Tron
• - Everything else

Tron started to lose track in these power ranking. Murktide laughs at Tron, Hammer predates on both Tron (established after the PT) and Murktide (on the rise) so it felt like a good meta call, Scam is simply Scam and can do Scam things which you can’t recover and lastly, Cascade is still a decent strategy (if not secretly the best). In this pictured environment, playing UW Control felt good, and the list I tweaked gave me confidence to just sit, open my seven, relax and pilot the game on my own tempo till the end.

Then I asked friends what to play. Which most of the times is a good thing to do. Most of the times. Seeing Dom Harvey piloting Amulet to the Top8 of the PT was a breath of fresh air. I stopped playing Amulet before LoTR came out and never played it, even though I bought all the cards to keep the list up to date. I always thought that The One Ring was a truly Control card, that had little to no reason to be played in anything else since you can’t actually sustain the life bleed of it. Even playing 4c Greed Pile (the Omnath decks) is just drawing cards for the sake of drawing. That deck is a value pile, but I personally don’t think it’s a good deck. There is no real plan, no cohesive strategy. Just good cards. And in 2023, in this modern, this strategy is sadly not good enough. Then a thought crept in my head: what about playing Amulet in Sweden?

I then thrown together a list of Amulet but I quickly realized that I’m a dad now, and I don’t have that much time to spare to test and/or play online. So I switched to the Twitter Hive Mind, posted a couple of lists, harassed a bunch of streamers, and concocted these 75:

Highlights of the 75:

• - Bojuka Bog maindeck: Murktide is on the rise. Even though now they are much more consistent in enabling delirium, you can sometimes snatch them out and ride a Titan through the Heat;
• - 3 Cavern of Souls between main and side: yes, another concession to Murktide and Counterspell being back in the format in full force;
• - 2 Cityscape Leveler in the sideboard: a small gem against both Scam and Murktide, since its cast trigger doesn’t care if it gets counter, and the Unearth allows to do damage even if it gets discarded;
• - DragonlordDromoka: I think it’s clear that I wanted to fix the Murktide matchup now, right?
• - Radiant Fountain in the sideboard: cute land, it helps mitigate some damage from early beats and helps the land count when you remove 5-7 lands post board.

As you can see, nothing crazy. The list is geared to fight Murktide, struggles against Scam, doesn’t like to face any Violent Outburst deck but for the rest behaves like a classic Amulet deck: you cast 6 mana 6/6 and cross your fingers. Seems like a decent strategy in paper.

Amulet was NOT a good deck into the predicted meta. I want to stress this. I played 11 rounds in two days and faced 9 bad matchups, 1 good matchup and 1 matchup close. I would not recommend bringing this deck to a big event any day now. UNLESS you played the deck for like ten years and can see the lines of up to three turns ahead. Then the deck is still bad, but you can overcome a little bit of the hurdles the format throws at you.

As you can easily understand, I was not really thrilled to play Amulet. But also, I did not have enough confidence in playing a new Control list without having the time to put in the reps to see how it performed in the meta. I was able to play 2 online leagues in between my daughter sleeps, in which I faced 4 Burn decks, 2 Dredge, 1 Lonis Combo, 2 Heliod Company and 1 Tron, losing a lot of play points and years of life. Pro Tip: don’t play MTGO leagues in the timeframe between midnight and 3 AM. It’s basically a Russian Roulette. With a fully loaded gun. Given this refreshing time of testing against total jank and not competitive decks, and getting my ass completely beaten, I decided to stick to my guns and sleeve the good old Amulet, now with a shiny new toy in The One Ring. 0 games played with this version, I felt confident in going 0-3 drop and crash into alcoholic dreams. I was wrong. OH BOY I WAS SO WRONG.

Chapter 3: The battle at Malmö deep

With the 75 locked one day before the event, all the other Heroes of Copenhagen were mostly set and what to play. Basically, everyone was playing a different deck, which was cool and speak for the variety of the format. Since Malmö is basically 40 minutes of train ride away from Copenhagen, I decided together with other two heroes to stay the night in Malmö because I’m old and also because my mother-in-law was visiting, so it was a no brainer to get two birds with a stone. Most of the other companions would just go back home in the evening and wake up at the dawn of the next day to play Day 2. Ready set go I jump on the wrong train and ride to Sweden together with Holger, then walk from the train station to the location for likely 20 minutes that, in normal condition would have felt like a breeze, but on coffee deprivation felt like years. Everything according to plan, and I’m already regretting all my life choices leading to this moment. Classic feeling pre-event.

We arrive at the location and jokingly I say “oh nice, there’s a lot of stuff here. Hope they will sell beers. I can use some boost during the rounds” and here the horror happens. Holger informs me that the Swedish law prevents from selling beer in public places. My world collapses. Now I have not only to play 8 rounds of magic in the enemy land, BUT ALSO WITHOUT ANY ALCOHOLIC RELIEF, I cannot.

Luckily friendly comfort is worth more than beers. We start pouring into the location and everyone from the Fellowship arrives. Suddenly the room goes black, a thunder blast through the speaker, a video starts and we are all in the mood for playing cards. A beer would have been a cherry on top, but I guess Swedish people don’t like fun. 170ish people starting, 8 rounds Day 1 with adjusted cut to 5-3 to make Day 2. We wish good luck to each other and hope to not have friendly fire when it matters the most.

I won’t go in detail on the matches. This is a quick recap and then I will provide some Day 1 highlights.

• R1 Elves: WW
• R2 Scam: WW
• R3 Yawgmoth: WW
• R4: Temur Rhinos: WLL
• R5: Murktide: WW
• R6: Scam: WLL
• R7: Scam: WLW
• R8: Coffers LWW

So, overall 8 bad matchups for Amulet out of 8 rounds. Pretty neat and great deck choice for the event. Of note, 0 decks playing The One Ring on Day 1, which is crazy if you think about people advocating for a ban of this card entering PT Lord of the Rings. Quick highlights of the games:

My elves opponent Round 1 greeted me saying “This is my first big tournament” and I already knew that it would have ended pretty bad. Luckily, deck was in good mood, hit Ring into Ring into Valakut kill while facing 7 million elves on board. Good Ring.
I faced 3 Scam opponents and they were 3 different people: an actual good player with nice decision making pattern, a complete noob that didn’t know what his cards or my cards were doing, and a regular opponent which argued that Tolaria West can’t fetch Boseiju, Who Endures because reasons. Of these 8 matches played, 5 started with Grief scammed turn 1. Fun.

Fun fact in the Murktide match: we both got a game loss after deck check because some sleeves were older than the other, thus more played and easy to spot. But since both got a match loss, they canceled each other and got to play 3 games.

I end Day 1 with a 6-2 record, losing against Scam and against Rhinos after punting a very complex line involving a very precise sequencing of events that I totally missed. Life sucks, but I get to play Day 1. Most of the Copenhageners get there, with Joan topping all of us at 7-1.

So, I know you all are asking yourself: why making a 2 day event with only 170 people playing, when the 4Seasons does a single 10 round event with more than 400 people in the same day? That’s a pretty good question. After asking the same question to the organizers, the answer I got was “because playing 9-11 rounds would not be fun for anyone”. Welcome to Scandinavia, where feelings matter.

Anyway, going out of the location meant we can find the closest fast food and then crash in the hotel bar, finally drinking the well-deserved beer(s) and go to bed to sleep more than 4 hours for the first time in months. Pretty solid perspective if you tell me.

Day 2 starts with most of us in the starting blocks. 3 rounds and cut to Top8, which means going 2-0 and then ID into Top8 is a real option. And if you are Joan, you just need to win 1 game between round 1 and 2 and ID into Top8. Even easier.

Obviously we will end up 9th and 10th because why winning when you can lose so hard?

Day 2 recap:

• R9: Jund Saga WLL
• R10: 5c Creativity WLW
• R11: Burn LWW

In Day 2 I lose the starting game to Jund Saga (which eventually will go winning the whole event) due to a bad mulligan decision in Game 2 that will leave me open to Ragavan hitting all the goodies from the top of my deck, as it usually does. Game 3 is another gamble lost and just like this we are out of Top8 contention.

This is me having fun in Game 3:

The Creativity game was actually fun. Game 3 was decided by a line that heavily relied on my opponent’s greed. After he resolved an Indomitable Creativity for 2, presenting me a couple of friendly Archons of Cruelty, I had to untap, pact for Azusa, use the three total land drops to cast a Titan, haste it and HOPE IT CONNECTS, bringing my opponent to only 11 life. Then, I can fetch 2 new bouncelands and Time Walk thanks to a The One Ring, which would lead to another turn where I can cast a second Titan and bash for 28. If my opponents block the Titan and doesn’t take 8, I don’t have enough damage the turn after to kill him the turn after. Luckily, my opponent doesn’t do math and didn’t see it coming. He was not happy to sign the slip in defeat with two Archons in board. Guess my 6/6 are better than yours.

After 11 rounds, 9 bad matchups, 1 good matchup in Burn and 1 decent match up in Jund Saga, the standings are up and me and Joan are looking at the Top8 players getting pictures, while we drink water and laugh so hard thinking that we were so close, yet so far. “We are the first and second loser of the event. Nice”. We laugh, hug each other, go meet the other peeps, everyone laughs and pats our back. We did good, not the best but we tried. Everyone smiles while we head out of the venue, grab our bikes/cars/legs and reach home. We didn’t conquer Sweden, but we had a long weekend together, which is something to not scoff at.

Here below the Sideboard guide of the 75 I played:

Overall, deck performed ok and the games lost were mostly due to the pilot, not the deck itself. Scam is really a hard matchup, and you just need a good amount of luck and try to push the game to go long. If this happens, most of the times you can get there. Murktide is a fun one when you know how to pilot it, and these 75 are mostly geared to win post board games, while having good traction game 1 with 2 Cavern of Souls. Other than that, Amulet is always Amulet: when is good positioned in the meta, it does powerful things and when is not, it doesn’t care and still push through.

Chapter 4: The Return of the King(s)

As I mentioned earlier, If I was sure that I could play the cards that I wanted from Wilds of Eldraine, I would have registered the following 75:

Up the Beanstalk is a crazy card and now everyone is realizing it. Every streamer is throwing 4C Greed piles left and right and drown the opponents in card advantage. This green enchantment is slowly taking the spot of The One Ring, which is crazy if you think about it. Sadly, I was not 100% sure to be able to get my hands on these new cards in time for the event, and was also missing a couple of Terminus to close the 75. Shit happens, but I’m gonna run these through the LGS gauntlet in the next weeks.

Another pile I want to try is the following one:

Ah, the nostalgia vibes with those Miracle cards, so many memories from the good old days.

Anyway, I think I took enough of your time. We are in the closing remarks and I want end with a blast from the past: Props and Slops

PROPS:

- to Khalil and Garret, throwing hugs to my grumpy face all weekend long
- to Joan and his robots, for sharing sad laughs together
- to my Creativity opponent for not blocking
- to the Arcade room for having a DDR machine
- to my girlfriend that lets me take the weekend with a 3 months old at home
- to Mads, who borrows a deck, gets a Bye round 1 and hypes all the crew
- to my Round 2 Scam opponent, who takes a topdecked Dismember to the face with philosophy and doesn’t tilt
- to the location and the coverage team, despite the technical difficulties
- to the hotel bar for having beers
- to the Swedish Pro Team that plays a 4C brew with Up the Beanstalk and calls it “Swedish 4c”

SLOPS:

- to the Swedish law for not allowing alcohol in public places
- to the event structure of two days which was not necessary
- to Melee randomly crashing down on Day 2
- to Grief Scammed turn 1
- to Mads, that after hyping us all, goes 2-4
- to the Amulet player that went on stream and took 6 minutes to play a 15 sec turn
- to Garret that on round 3, after being offered a friendly draw, replies saying “but I can beat you”
- to the Swedish Pro Team for not putting any Up the Beanstalk copy in the Top8
- to the greed of the people

It was a long and fun ride guys, hope to meet you again. Hope you had fun reading a lot of blabbering from a washed up player, who enjoys weekend with friends and occasionally still plays some card board. I wish one day to be able to jump back on the winner bandwagon. But until then, keep playing. Maybe we can meet somewhere in Europe. After all, there is an upcoming Modern season, and the Fellowship of Copenhageners is all abuzz.

Bonus: follow me on twitter for weekly banter, bad decklists and not really humble opinions.