(forgot to post about this here yesterday, so i'm doing a longer write up than i did on bird site)
2-0 sultai control
2-0 gw counters
i uh... kinda hated playing in this event, haha. i think the idea of playing a tournament where everyone gets the same sealed pool is interesting, but when thousands of people are playing in this event and are sharing information, Best Decks start to emerge.
the pool itself was like... kinda curated cube cards? they definitely tried to have archetypes set up (signpost cards like conclave mentor and feather, the redeemed, for example), but also didn't include standard cards you'd expect to see in cube, like the closest thing to a wrath was taste of death. not a bad card by any means, but a lot of the best decks made tokens or had mana dorks that limited its efficiency.
i started off with sultai control cause, well... koma seems really hard to beat lol. this is not my favorite kind of deck to play, especially in limited, but i played with koma in kaldheim and know how much of a house it can be. and it was such a house that i feel like deckbuilding kinda warped around it? the removal in the pool was going to be good and played either way, but instant speed answers and exile based removal were definitely prioritized in no small part due to koma. i played a couple of mirror matches on saturday and just... really disliked it, haha. it's a deck and a matchup that makes me think about things that i don't like to think about in limited. i kinda hate playing counterspells in limited, and this was a deck that only had negate and essence scatter, but really needed to use them effectively to win.
i decided to swap decks and change to the gw counters list for my last two matches on sunday. this deck feels like it was trying to beat koma decks, with prioritizing exile based removal and generally Big Beefy Creatures to beat down before the koma deck would get established. this is much more my type of deck, and i would have LOVED to play this against 2 koma decks for my last two rounds. (navigating removal and counterspells with combat tricks and tight play, my beloved) so of course i got paired into a mirror match and a... mardu reanimator list? (the pool had some decent reanimation options, like priest of fell rites as an enabler and drakuseth as a payoff, but the pool also had scavenging ooze so.........)
but... yeah. i got the 4 wins, i get one of every card in the new set, some wildcards, some draft tokens, and some cosmetics. yay :tada:
i really hope they go back to doing like... a cube draft or something similar next time they do this event. i'm sure some people loved this kind of event (and tbh it probably favored me more than the average player considering how little i play on arena and how little i know the cube) but there were moments where i was like "wow i kinda hope i lose this match so i don't have to play any more" and holy shit am i glad i did not push myself to get the second qualification, cause i cannot imagine playing up to 4 matches more of this (and needing 2 wins for it to count for anything)
and i think that's another reason why going back to the cube could be a good idea. getting 2 attempts at the finals... hardly means anything. it's just... "okay you lost one match, here's the exact same 126 cards again, good luck" whereas with the cube you can have a bad draft and wind up with a bad deck and get a meaningful retry.
idk! i'm happy i got the 4 wins, but also would have been happy just getting the draft tokens so i can jam some free drafts of ONE next month. i'd like to see some changes to the overall event structure, but at the end of the day this was Fine and about what i expected from an arena event