I believe I did...and so did others. The problem as you say is that it is fundamentally a broken format with no real solution other than changing it.

Nothing can solve those problems, not without fundamentally warping the format. Combo will always be a problem due to the lack of sideboards, and the lack of sideboards are a consequence of the unique restriction on the format. Bear in mind I had been asking for the changes we got today for years, ever since the launch of Kamigawa back in 2004 made Unnatural Selection no longer a winnow effect. That's almost 6 years to get one card off the banned list, the effort culminating in a detailed article back in May last year. I strongly recommend you write up an article detailing the solutions to the shoe-in problem.

I very much enjoyed the swiss this week, apart from being the person who went 0-3, but what do you expect when you bring a green monks deck no has had little to no testing, damn my work commitments at present :(. But look forward to future weeks.

The point I was trying to make was not only "don't conceed" but also don't play with a defeatist attitude. While this particular game with those particular draws was clearly within reach for me with proper play, it was also close enough to be lost by playing badly. One could fall into the same trap on a cheerful day after a lot of won matches, running into this guy and thinking "Oh he plays badly and his deck is poor, so I don't have to play my best, this will be an easy win."

You should always play your best, and treat even the weakest opponent as if they might suddenly make some very strong plays and put you in danger, because sometimes they will. Also you'll develop your skills faster if you try to play your best every turn of every game, even though there are some games you could win on auto-pilot.

Sometimes the weaker player will have two cobra traps and a global pump spell, and careless play can get you killed by a sudden swarm attack. As it was, the fact that I managed to coax out his best combat trick while only losing a 1/1 guy made a significant difference. If I'd held back and hadn't made that early attack, the game might have turned out quite differently.

Knowing basics like "when you're behind, play as the control deck till you catch up" are really what guided me to correct play that most in this particular game. But sometimes the devil is in the details too, like whether to make that one attack with the 1/1 or not, that in this case led to him making a costly blunder. I was offering him a chance to make a different costly blunder (trading frontier guides with me is bad for him when mana-flooded). But I'll take any mistake I can get.

My apologies if the tone came across as harsher than intended. I did blank out the person's name in all the screenshots, which I don't usually do. I did want to cover the idea of "don't just learn how to spot your own mistakes and analyze them, learn how to spot and analyze your opponent's misplays too". That's all I was trying to get across there.

I would have considered more forests if I didn't also have two Living Tsunami. Getting more consistency for the single Nissa's Chosen I didn't feel was as important as making sure the Tsunamis are usually castable too. This is a long-game deck rather than a quick aggro deck, so with a balance of lands hopefully all the trickier casting costs will get covered eventually. When siding in the double-green cost traps, they're high enough mana cost I should have them covered by the time they're ready to be cast.

I agree that it's best to be operating on a total mental list of what outs your opponent could have in the form of real actual cards for the current format. That's why I put the qualifier "if there's plays that win even then" for my excercise of playing around imaginary, overly good cards (or maybe from extended cards or vintage class cards that would wreck me when I'm playing standard or block, etc.) I feel that the stronger a card I can find a way to play around, the more I'm taxing my mental resources, my deck, and my overall ability to deal with a situation that's really that tough when I run into it in some future game - maybe when I really AM playing extended.

That said, when I see no play that could get around a topdecked Profane Command or whatever, I try to get back down to business and go through what the other guy might actually have (like Day of Judgement, which is one reason I had a couple creatures held back as well as mana held open). I'm still proud that I won a game at my Zendikar pre-release by sending three creatures to attack a white opponent instead of four. I'd read the spoilers the night before and memorized the instant speed combat tricks. Sure enough, he had Arrow Volley Trap, and I kept him from using it until he had 5 land, by which point it was too late.

Admittedly what happened here was a form of "snow-blindness" or something brought on by this practice of mine. Seeing myself in a situation where I felt I could play around almost any card in Magic next turn, I decided I had the game sewn up (which was probably true) and that my plan was therefore "good enough". When in fact ways to win that same turn rather than the next turn were available to me.

It would have served me right if he had a Day of Judgement, topdecked it, fetched the last plains needed to bring Emeria active, wiped the board and then started trying to stall me with recurring hookmasters. Not sure there's a line of play there that survives for him (or that he'd find it if there were), but I suppose I'd have learned my lesson there from a beating more strongly than from "I made a mistake but I won anyway"!

I think the key pick for considering white here would be pick 4. I was happy going blue with all three of the first picks, since they were three strong cards and let me keep my second color options till 4. (Yes, you could have gone white weenie starting from pick 1 if that's your preference, but there's few things I'd pick over the Sea Gate Loremaster pick 1, since he's a game-winning bomb.)

Pick 4 I have a nice Kor Aeronaut to go for blue/white flyers, which is a deck archetype I like. The ground-bear could be a better card if Allies are wide open, which we don't know yet, or clearly a weaker card if the deck gets few allies.

The thing is, starting from the first pick, we're tending more towards a blue/x control deck, rather than a blue/x fast aggro deck. Granted, the Windrider Eel and Living Tsunami can go in either control or aggro comfortably. But they have us starting a concentration on "big flyers" rather than "small cheap flyers".

I could start rounding that out with "small flyers and other good early drops", but that makes the deck a little more one dimensional. Either you win the race, or you don't. I like the archetype of "green gums the ground, blue wins in the air", because if you make the deck about buying time and making the game go longer, your late game bombs and/or card advantage spells are more likely to matter, rather than sitting in your hand dead after you lost a 5-8 turn racing oriented game.

Loremaster is a card that only shines in the longer games. But if you can make them happen, he's great. So tough ground blockers make him go up in value.

I was reasonably happy with how green flowed. Looking back I see a little dry patch for white in pack 1, though there was an Aeronaut tabled in pick 10 - that shouldn't have still been there. Of course by that point, I was comitted to green.

I didn't pick any more allies in pack 1 after pick 4. They were a bit speculative when I started taking them in pack 2, but I got enough to be kinda "ok". I could have left the Aerialists out for the Baloth Traps, but then if I'd drawn my Raptors more often (and hadn't had most of my allies buried in the bottom half of my deck so often) they would have given me a bit more performance in the games I played.

Overall I think I'm fairly happy with the deck quality of the blue/green I ended up with, not so much for the allies but just for the overall quality and curve of the deck. I'm not sure if it would have turned out quite as well with blue/white, though blue was definitely my most important color in what I had.

White weenie from pick one is a totally different deck, could possibly have done well but that's a different story for a different time. Mono-white is solid in ZZZ, like most archetypes it gets a little slower/weaker in ZZW but I think it'll still be viable and win some drafts. Overall I think Zendikar is more mono-color friendly than most sets, it brings back memories of Shadowmoor/Eventide (though that set was even more mono-friendly). Timbermaw Larva, Spire Barrage, and "lots of vampires" all encourage mono-color decks in the format, so does the abundance of solid 2 drops and tricks in white.

I know a few of the participants of this event, including "Filegot" (actually spelled "filegott" of CerealKillaz Ninjaz, and as much as CK is disliked by many in the community, I'm not sure why filegott is considered independent/unaffiliated when my clanmates aren't). And although some of them are practical and bent on winning, they are not short on creativity, and don't simply netdeck. I've helped one of them playtest his Oath of Druids, Spirit tribal deck using my own Tribal knight deck. I've also seen filegott and talked to him as he tuned his reanimator human tribal deck, which he talked about wanting to break the format with, with as many degenerate combos as possible. I thought both were creative and put a lot of effort into their designs.

While neither won (I'm assuming, since merfolk won), one of them came close, and netdecked merfolk did, I don't think merfolk is necessarily a format breaker. I've regularly been able to beat top tiered merfolk decks with knights in the TP room. It's definitely a powerhouse in the classic format, but it's not the exact same situation/meta in tribal. One obvious difference is that Classic competitive allows for a sideboard, and the tribal format does not. I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that one of the main reasons merfolk seems so powerful is because it's a decktype that has been tuned and thought through by many people, many times in different formats. The tribal format hasn't been played nearly as often, and not nearly as much time has been spent in thought by competitive/inventive players on what might work better in the environment. Many classic viable decks cease to thrive outside their little domain. Take Tempo Thresh and put it in Standard, a different meta, put it up against a player who knows how it works and its mana curve, and you often get a defeated classic deck and a victorious Std deck.

I'm actually reasonably confident that a zombie deck or a sliver deck with a couple Umezawa's Jittes and vials could easily challenge a merfolk deck in tribal. I think effort, luck, and money (admittedly) all weigh more heavily than netdecks.

You should ball with a tech'D out Orc deck. Orcish Librarian is your star ... setting up large Erratic Explosions (using Draco or that GW Wurm) and maybe some Timesifter action (Fireblast & Pyrokinesis are good adds).

Maybe not competitive ... but it would be fun ... and get accross your message ...

What about a Hound deck. Something like the pauper dead dog deck?

thats fine we can all be cute with Immortal Coil.

Don't forget Ricochet Trap from Worldwake as another excellent anti-blue sideboard option!

Ive been messing around with imperial painter and trinket painter (legacy versions) over the past several days. So far my heart leans towards trinket. Often times I can ride Tarmo for the win if I am struggling to assemble the needed pieces. I have tested imperial without moxes or traitors, just using simians, so maybe that is part of the problem. Either way the UGB trinket painter deck just seems better so far.

Good Article Whiffy, doesn't look like WWK offers much for us, although it looks like it might be a fun set to tinker around with.