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UPCON 2009: A crashing disaster

I played in the Pretoria Regionals at UPCON today and once again came away with one win and five rounds of losses. I came so close so many times… my deck could get me 75% of the way there almost every time but it just couldn’t push through for the win.

The deck was based around Windborn Muse and Memory Erosion.

(Hey look, linking to the images in the new version of Gatherer includes the black borders. Cool.)

Anyway, Windborn Muse just didn’t do her job. Most of the time she was simply the target of removal and even when I brought her back a few times with Reveillark, she really only saved me from a few minor attacks. Most of my match ups were against five colour control decks and they inherently have loads of land and they could either cope with her ability or remove her.

So these two cards don’t actually have any synergy with each other. Its two completely unrelated strategies in the same deck and unfortunately it didn’t work. Memory Erosion was actually fairly potent and it got me extremely close to the end of many games but, by itself it couldn’t take me to the win.

Which brings me to my other friend, Reveillark, which for the first time, I now own four of…

I never saw it. After all the effort to get the two copies I was missing, it spent most of the time hiding in my deck doing nothing. When it did come out it was an immediate target for removal and it rarely got to do any damage. Unfortunately it was also my only big hitter. I don’t think that having Reveillark in the deck was a bad idea but I do thing that it wasn’t properly supported by the rest of the deck. Cryptic Command was surprisingly not the bomb it should have been and even though I only had one it often proved tricky to play. The jury is out on this one. I will leave it in for now and see what happens.

Oddly enough, my opponents and even one of the judges made very favourable comments about my deck, even saying that they liked it, so maybe all is not lost. Some significant work and play testing is however required in order to make it competitive. Windborn Muse has to go but Memory Erosion can stay.

The idea of using Faerie Trickery in the main and Cancel and Flashfreeze in the side board actually worked very well. Only one of my   was fairies for which I side boarded my Cancels in game two and of which I then never saw hide nor hair!

I love the flavour text on Cancel as printed in Shards of Alara. Interestingly enough, the guy who came second also had Flashfreeze in his sideboard so my ideas don’t seem to be too far out.

The functionality of my Goldenglow Moth was mostly ok and so until I can think of anything better for that slot I think I will keep it there. My Sage Owl was pretty useless on the whole and so that can definitely be replaced appropriately. I think that Sage Owl’s slot should probably be used for something that will provide a better win condition (It shouldn’t be too difficult to think of a better win condition than I have now (which basically amounted to: hit them for 2 ten times…)).

Titanic Ultimatum was going to be my bomb but it turned out to be a damp (read soggy, dripping, soaked…) squib. Despite having all five colours of land all the time, I only got close to having the mana for the ultimatum once and then I didn’t have any creatures.

My mana base worked surprisingly well and I could quite easily have played cards of all five colours. This leads me to two ideas for additions to the deck:

I could quite easily have played the dragon in all of my games and what is more, she fits in with the flying theme of the deck. I own one copy of Elspeth and she is just simply awesome so she would be the ideal replacement for the Titanic Ultimatum. This deck can survive long enough to deploy her ultimate ability or she could provide a decoy while my other flying creatures do the work. Either way it would put more pressure on my opponent.

Of course, it will probably be another year until I play in a serious constructed tournament again so for now I will try and test some of these ideas online. Maybe one day when I have finished studying I can start playing Saturday morning Magic and I will get to test ideas like this with paper cards.

Until next time, may your life always be filled with magic.