After a GP weekend last week, I had some time to make up at work. That meant working late and no weekly store events for me. I played a bit of standard online to practice for a local PPTQ at Nex-Gen on Sunday. I’ve stuck with GB Delirium Aggro, making tweaks and adjustments since GP Providence. The deck is OK, but I’m not thrilled with playing it – I don’t think it has any big edge on the field and I’m still trying to find a way to improve the UW matchup but without success so far.
Record-Breaking Stream
On Saturday evening I noticed that there was a Standard PPTQ online so on a whim I decided to stream it. I posted the link on FB and on my Twitter account as usual. But this time something weird happened. At first I had 10-15 viewers, which is good but average sized crowd. But as the stream went on I was up to 40, then 65 and then over 100 viewers. This was almost 3x my previous peak viewer count. It was exciting but also made me a little nervous – not in my play, but in my commentary.
I went from 0-1 start in the event to 3-1. This gave us a win and in to the PTQ where we got a pairing against Mardu vehicles. This is typically a great matchup for me but we lost the die roll and had suboptimal draws. I was disappointed to end on a loss there after making the comeback and having so many folks watching, but it was still a really fun stream.
We also did a draft in between rounds. The draft leagues are great at filling time between rounds of scheduled events. I would get my PPTQ round done in about 20 minutes and then have 30 minutes before the next round. This was the perfect amount of time for the draft, and then playing one round at each 30 minute break. There was only one constructed round for us that went to time and the whole stream flowed really smoothly between the constructed and limited games without any overlap or much down time.
Standard PPTQ at Nex-Gen
I built the deck in paper and took it down the street to Nex-Gen on Sunday. I sat for 10-15 minutes trying to figure out how to improve the UW matchup and was almost late to the event because of it. I still couldn’t come up with an answer but added a Sky Sovereign, Consul’s Flagship back to the board at the last minute.
I got paired against UW in 3 out of 4 rounds and quickly dropped at 1-3. I decided to stick around to watch the rest of the tournament and I’ll have a write-up of the event coming out this week.
The invite was won by Jt DiMaio, so congrats to him! I’m excited that he’ll have a writeup coming to the website soon!
GP Milwaukee
It’s going to be great to go to another limited GP and I’ll be prepping for that over the next couple of weeks. I opened a sealed pool online and am working on completing that league now. There will be many more to come, and I’ll probably be streaming sealed and draft a lot over the next couple of weeks to practice. I hope to see some returning viewers in the chat!
And that was my week in Magic.
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