GP San Jose Report

The team:

Will Lowry

Ty Thomason

Haibing Hu

Will has never done team sealed before, so Bing and I did the preliminary theory crafting. We wanted to split the colors RB, UW, Gx, with me on Rakdos, Bing on Azorius, and Will on the durdle deck. I was going to be seat B as more or less the team leader, but I have complete faith in my partners. In fact, they are both better at limited than me, that's why I chose them.

I hadn't done any real practice sealeds, but I did look at probably 25 or so pools on the website that let you generate them over and over. It seemed like the commons and uncommons were usually pretty close, so the biggest factor to the pool being good or not was what rares you opened. Since the last time team sealed was a thing, the rares have gotten much better. Also, they stopped making tournament packs and instead give you 12 boosters, which really leads to some crazy multiples of cards that couldn't really happen before. So I think team sealed is higher variance now that it used to be, but it's still a lot of fun.

Our actual pool was pretty week. I had a solid RB deck with 7 removals and a low curve, but it was nothing special. I built it pretty quickly then started helping Bing with the UW, but there just wasn't any. Will had thrown together a solid GW aggro deck, and the green cards weren't really there to support a 4-color build. I decided to give Bing the GW deck, since it was the second best deck and the goal was to give Will the worst deck, since he has some unnatural gift for winning with jank. So with the rest of the cards, we put together a UWr deck with multiple Hussar Patrols that could board into a Lobber Crew deck if needed. Will didn't have many win conditions other than Teleportal.

The tournament was 11 rounds. They weren't really prepared for 571 teams, and I'm not sure why. GP sizes have basically tripled in 10 years, why wouldn't team GP also triple? The biggest problem with the structure of the tournament in actuality was the cut to only top 2. Since it wasn't top 8, they couldn't have people make day 2 that couldn't get to the finals (though the two teams that snuck in at X-2-1 we out of contention the whole time). If they could have had top 4 or top 8 cut, we might have seen more people make day 2 and less rounds on day 1. 

We only had one bye, because I didn't realize Silver level pros would only get 1 at this GP until it was too late to do anything about it. Oh well, it was going to be a lot of winning to do in order to make it to day 2 anyway. We got some lunch during the bye, and came back for round 2.

It was a long day, so my memory is pretty blurry. This is the best I can do.

Round 2 we played a father and his two sons. Bing won early and Will looked like he was going to win, so Bing told me I should lose so the kids would like their dad better. I didn't do anything intentionally bad, but I didn't play the best in game 3 and lost after Will had locked up the match.

2-0

Round 3 I don't remember. I think it came down to my match and I got there with the Phyrexian Arena enchant land. 

3-0

Round 4 we played against Saito, Yasooka, and Satou. I destroyed Yasooka in two very short games, then watched Will make some silly plays against Saito and lose a game. Bing won game 1, lost game 2, and third game was looking interesting. Saito and Will were locked in a epic control mirror, and Bing was clogging the board with centaurs against Satou's aura deck. There was a judge call when Bing's opponent tried to stack some triggers in a certain order, but they were controlled by two different players so what he did was illegal. I don't think he was trying to cheat, but i'm not sure about the way the judge remedied the situation either. Will and Saito drew on time, and Bing need to top deck an answer to a flier to win so we could win the match, and he did. 

4-0

Round 5 is still a blur. We won

5-0

Round 6 we played against the French Canadian team Alexander Hayne, Pascal Maynard, and some other guy. Will won, Bing lost, but I won game 3 when Hayne got stuck on lands. 

6-0

Round 7 we got swept, their decks were much better than ours.

6-1

Round 8 I played my first rakdos mirror all day, and it was interesting. I was very tired and things were foggy, but my opponent made some interesting plays that allowed me to steal the match . I think this was the only match where we swept the other team.

7-1

Round 9 was against Christian Calcano, Tom Ma, and Aaron Schwartz. I played terribly against Calcano like I always seem to do, but Bing and Will got there.

8-1

With two rounds to go, we were in 11th, but it didn't look like X-3 was going to have a shot, so we needed one win. Well, it didn't happen. Both the pools we go up against in the next rounds were just better than ours, and we get swept both times.

8-3

Losing round 11 to not make it to day 2 was pretty awful. I think we way overperformed for our pool, Will especially. This ended my GP money streak at 4 and GP day 2 streak 6.

Sunday was relaxed. I played 4 rounds of states before dropping at 2-2, then did a cube draft and a 2v2 before going out for a nice dinner and watched the Texans game. As for the GP, I'm really happy the way our team worked together, and I think we got the most we could out of our decks, and it just wasn't enough. Hopefully we can team together again next time.