Redmond RQ, 10/18/08

Due to worlds going on at the same time and the fact that a lot of people in our playgroup already qualified, there wasn’t a large turnout for this event. Either way, I decided to put together a tournament report. We had a whopping 6 people show up, including me. Unfortunately, one of the players had an illegal deck (non block), which reduced the player count to 5. Besides RJ, there really wasn’t anyone there that I recognized. Decks played was as follows:

1 Red desecrator aggro
2 Red traitor mage card denial
1 Blue marksman hunter
1 Blue pally aggro, a variation of Matt Ilon’s deck, that I piloted.

We did 3 rounds of swiss with a cut to the top 2, I ended up going 3-0 and RJ and I secured the invitations.

Round 1: Traitor Vor’na
I don’t quite remember the name of the player, only that he was one of the local Redmond players and came with a friend with identical decks. When I first saw the hero I immediately thought it was a variation of the Vor’na control decks that eventually morphs into Illidan. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t, and turned out to be a card denial deck based around Brainlocks, Astral Grief and Voidfire Wand. Game one I hold back playing allies fearing a Tidal Burst, however, a turn 5 Quantum blade and a constant stream of allies to replace the ones he Doshura’d resulted in a very dead mage with only 1 damage on my hero. Game 2 was mostly identical to game 1 except this time I went all out with my allies, since I didn’t see a single Tidal Burst or More the Scarier, I decided to take the risk and attempt to rush him out. He manages to pop 2 Terokk’s on me but it was mostly ineffective since I just gave him a Zandar and Quigley. To add insult to injury one of my Sayges removed a Nether Fracture.

Round 2: RJ with Desecrator rush.
Instead of the Desecrator that tries to control the board and pop down big allies, RJ piloted the version that attempts to rush down with Goras, Broks and Ras’faris. Game 1 was the only loss I had in the tournament, but not because he beat me, allow me to explain: For the most part the game was rather even, as we were trading back and forth with blows, I would get a few swings in with Q blade and he would Natural Order it, while my Holy Shock 2for1’s helped keep his board clear. After a while I’m sitting at 15damage with RJ at 23, I have a fresh Q-blade online but only a Sayge in hand and no quests while he has a 5/5 protector and 3 cards in hand. Due to all the blade action my library consists of only 12 cards, I figured that I would strike with the blade by removing 10 to take out the protector, play Sayge (didn’t have the mana for a manual strike and Sayge) and hope he doesn’t have an answer for both before I deck myself. Unfortunately for me I failed to realize that over the course of the game I only removed one Bimble Blackout and when I paid the strike cost I revealed the remaining 3, decking myself in the process … oops.

Game 2 he mulligans into a bad hand and I overwhelm him with a ton of allies and he never stabilizes. Game 3 the MVP was definitely Instructor Campbell, I played something like 3 holy shocks in a row for 2for1 trades. He tries to stabilize with a typhoon but I rip Scared Purification and swing in for the win.

Round 3: Sharpshooter Nally
The guy piloting this deck was a Redmond local who just got into the game, as a result his deck was full of rather janky cards, regardless he put up quite a fight. Game 1 I draw a good ally curve and rush him out. Game 2 he scrappers my Q-blades and gets a 3for1 with King Khan, ouch! His board got a little crazy, with a Doublebarrel, Trueshot Aura and 2 Wrathtide bows on the field. At this point any ally I play gets immediately wiped out and I have no way to get rid of his bows. We were both at 20 damage but I manage to topdeck 2 holy shocks in a row to seal the win.

The Top2 match was not played out, RJ decided to just give the Bearlady to me, woot…

So who's qualified now? I know there's:

Tumwater Qualifier: Gavin Price and Luke Chen
Redmond Qualifier: Jonathan Loucks and ?
Portland Qualifier: Me and Seth
Redmond Qualifier: Alex Kim and RJ

Matt Ilon is the other one from Redmond I'm pretty sure.