Stu Takes on Eternal Weekend!

It is that time of the year again: leaves are changing colors, the weather is getting frightful, and Eternal Weekend just rocked the city of Pittsburgh. Having Eternal Weekend (or any other major event) in Pittsburgh is one of my favorite parts of magic. I get to see all of my friends from out of town and still sleep in my own bed. It also made it super easy to have a booth with Tales of Adventure and Black Magic Gaming since I already know most of the people in town, so it gives me a big advantage when it comes to foot traffic and players being comfortable with the vendors. However, we are not here to talk about that, we are here to see how I did in an event I did little to prep for!

I spent 2 weeks preparing for Nationals only to have a sudden death in the family put my plans in a shredder. So, I decided to do what any reasonable Magic player would do when preparing to play in a tournament with a $20,000 prize: Play 2 leagues and call it a day! With very little time to prepare, I decided to play the deck that got to have 5 Black Lotus (Loti?). Mishra’s Workshop is one of the most fundamentally broken cards in the game, I would even argue it is more so than Ancestral Recall or Black Lotus. Getting to use 3 mana every turn out of 1 land is absurd. I played the list below after the pair of leagues I played and forgetting what my last 2 Sideboard cards were about 5 minutes before the tournament started.

With the restrictions of Thorn of Amethyst, Lodestone Golem, and Chalice of the Void, Shops has transformed into more of a Delver-esque tempo deck. You play some creatures and then a few Sphere effects plus mana denial to tempo people out of the game. While a lot of people went with Percursor Golem/Hangarback Walker/Steel Overseer as their flex creature spots I choose to go with Chief of the Foundry and Tangle Wire. I expected Shops to be between 17-20% of the overall metagame and upwards of 35% of the top tables. This means I had to hedge a bit and decided I rather lean toward beating blue decks instead of worrying about the Mirror as much. Chief of the Foundry lets you have a lot more explosive draws since you do need to wait to activate it like you do Steel Overseer. It is also a lot less susceptible to Walking Ballista.

I went 7-3 in the main event, I lost in round 2 or 3 to a quasi-mirror match where he had blue for the usually suspects plus he had Myr Battlesphere. If I had more time testing I think I could have navigated that match better. I was 7-1 going into round 9 with a shot at a win and in. I lost to essentially to a 4-outer Arcbound Ravager while still having something like 20 redraws over 2 turns but failed to get there and then I just lost the last round since I was kind of drained from that. I had a split with my friend I lost to, so I was still able to walk away from the weekend up which felt good.

As for the Legacy portion of the weekend, I played the following Turbo Dark Depths deck:

Not much to say with this deck, you just try to jam a combo as fast as possible and you never sideboard more than a few cards. I lost to a Junk deck that had Chalice, Karakas, and Wasteland so winning was going to be difficult. I then lost to a MUD deck in Legacy that I had set-up to win on turn 3, so they had only a turn window to hit 4-6 outs and they hit. It was an 11-round tournament, so I called it a day at 3-2. I think Turbo Depths is actually in a very good spot in the metagame and I am going to be running it for a while. I do have one fun story with the deck. My round 3 opponent was on Show and Tell, a rather poor matchup for me. After a weird game 1 I won, I was on the draw and kept a hand that a Vampire Hexmage and Dark Depths. He led on Ancient Tomb and passed. The alarm in my head immediately went off saying that he had Show and Tell and a threat in hand and was looking for a blue mana source. I decided to lead on Dark Depths. He then draws Lotus Petal to cast Show and Tell. He puts Sneak Attack into play and I put Vampire Hexmage. And that is how I won a game on the draw with only playing 1 mana source the entire game.

In two weeks I will go over what I think the metagame will be for PT Ixalan. Until then, I hope you take down a tournament or discover a new combo that breaks the world in half!

-Stu

@Ssomers on Twitter