For Thanksgiving week I decided to take a bit of a break from tournament Magic and just enjoy a long weekend of seeing family followed by some time relaxing at home. That’s not to say that I didn’t play tons of Magic though – I just decided not to attend any events over the weekend.
Attendance for draft on Wednesday was light on the eve of Thanksgiving. We only had 5 players, so instead of draft we all agreed to play sealed. That was awesome since I’m trying to get prepped for GP Milwaukee coming up in a couple of weeks.
My sealed practice continued in marathon style online all week and weekend. I’ve been having really disappointing results in the sealed format lately and I’m not sure how to explain it. I’ve done 10 sealeds in the last week and I felt like I had a losing record in a lot of them. Looking back over my results, I went a total of 28-19 (59.6%) with 6 winning record pools and 4 losing record pools. This is better than I would have guessed. I should go back and review the pools and records to see if I can identify any useful patterns.
I’ve been sharing pools with others going to the GP on Facebook. Preparing with a group has been fun, but I’m unsure how much learning is really happening in our current process. We post the pool and suggested builds, then others will offer an opinion with what build they prefer. It’s helpful to see more pools, but at the same time I feel like we could do more to maximize our potential for learning. I’m not sure what would work better, but I feel like we aren’t making the most of the opportunity. A lot of the comments are kept at a high level ‘I like RG, but I’d play this 23rd card over this other card.’ I think it’d be useful if we went a little deeper on card specific or format specific impressions rather than just evaluating the pools in a vacuum, but we don’t have a leader or a structure to frame that discussion.
The only decided to playing so much limited is that I’ve burned through a decent amount of my bankroll online. I’m going to have to jump into some standard queues again to try and build up play points. As soon as I do, I’ll be jumping right back into many more sealed events ahead of the GP.
And that was my week in Magic!
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