Sunday, January 10, 2010

The quality of today's MTG

Minor complaints after watching today's matches on GGSlive, who did an excellent job again with coverage. (Keep it up, you guys.)

1. When watching a Top 8, I really DO expect to witness the highest levels of Magic play. It's kind of a shame that I felt so taken aback by the quality of play as I watched the players make decisions in real time. Maybe they really were that nervous or tired. I've seen mistakes at Top 8s of GPs, but there was some VERY sloppy play up there in Dallas. Which was just surprising, I felt. At the very least I expected mostly perfect play. But that is not what I saw...

2. The Jund player in the finals, Brian Tidwell, didn't fully randomize his deck. He pile shuffled it only and then presented it to his opponent. Although there was an uproar in the chatroom, no one called a judge, and the judge presumably watching didn't notice or let it pass. This seems unacceptable. He was probably doing that throughout the day and throughout the Top 8. But in the end it didn't matter since he lost the finals. Still, it would be nice to have some consistency with these kinds of rulings. Especially at tournaments with stakes involved.

3. Justin Corbett probably had the tightest play out of the players I watched and ran Valakut. Clearly, in order to do so well with such a deck, you HAVE to have tight play. So I applaud him for making it to the Top 8. I honestly thought he could take it all, but he lost to the Jund player in the semis.

4. As much as I favor Jund because I feel it IS a very powerful deck, I dislike the fact players can play poorly with it and still do well. I want Magic to stop being this way. It should never reward players for making the wrong play, but Jund let's them get away with it. It makes for less exciting Top 8s, in my opinion. I don't think anyone can legitimately cheer for a Jund wielder, since it's no mean feat to make good placement with it.

5. That being said, I still wield it because I want to win, not because I want praise for my uber-Magic skills. (On top of that, Jund players CAN lose to their own mistakes, and sometimes when matches are close, there are real decisions to make, but I know I've lost to some terrible players before in Jund mirrors.) But as a spectator, it is a bit of a downer.

6. I think the average quality of Magic Joes has gone up, not down. It's possible that because of huge turnouts, tournaments run too long, and players just run out of steam once they're in the Top 8. That is a true shame because I enjoy watching players at their best.

7. To tie in with today's quality of blue decks, I really, really enjoyed watching Faeries mirrors or Faeries versus 5cc. Actually, watching any good Faeries player is really thrilling. If for no other reason than for me to watch some excellent Magic, I want a deck that involves a lot of decision-making and a lot of "tricks" to be viable again. RWU is certainly skill intensive, but I have found that since a lot of decisions are sorcery speed in the deck, it's really not that complex what you have to do. Grixis is mostly the same. Magic games need more instant-speed interactions. Now all the instants are removal or cracking fetchlands. I don't think watching spells getting countered is that entertaining either; but certainly a deck like Faeries just had way more going on at every turn in the game than most decks in Standarad today.