My deck of choice for the Gentleman Swedish format that we played in November was my previously successful Swedish 5c LionBurn and I start to understand the deck better and better. Be ready for [scrylink]lions:2ed[/scrylink] jumping and [scrylink]lightning-bolt:leb[/scrylink]s flashing at my opponents!
My deck: 5 color LionBurn adapted for Gentleman Swedish
([scrylink]ancestral-recall:2ed[/scrylink], [scrylink]library-of-alexandria:arn[/scrylink] and [scrylink]mind-twist:2ed[/scrylink] are banned).
In the Swiss group I played rather mediocre and was not very lucky with my draws except versus Kai, against whom I managed to play 3 draw 7s in one game. 🙂 In the end I was the 2nd in my group with the 1st place achieved by Mario (the organizer of our league).
Some of my average plays were for example against Flippi. He is a player who very often plays [scrylink]blood-moon:drk[/scrylink]. I asked him if he play the Moons again, he told me that he doesn’t, but I was not sure if he was joking or speaking the truth. So I still played as if he would have some – Blood Moons are killing me 90% of the time. Now it’s even the Moons that don’t exist!
In the play-offs I started recording so please feel free to watch them yourself. My first opponent was Chris who played some sort of robot control.
Then came Julian with KarmaTomb.
Unfortunately for Chris he didn’t draw much Mana in the third game and I was allowed to continue in this otherwise pretty close match.
The semi-final against Julian was a very interesting match as he played [scrylink]cyclopean-tomb:leb[/scrylink] – a 4 Mana artifact that converts lands to Swamps – in combination with [scrylink]karma:leb[/scrylink] and a control shell.
Before reading on, I propose to watch the final that was professionally moderated by Phil and Hendrik and is available on my YouTube channel.
Summary from my point of view: After a Mulligan to 5 (max 1 mana in both hands before) I did actually quite well. Only a small mistake attacking with my [scrylink]mishras-factory:atq[/scrylink] into his [scrylink]rukh-egg:arn[/scrylink] cost me the first game. I attacked as I thought he might do some weird reaction tapping his mana and giving me way for my burn spells. I was clearly not expecting more than one counter. Unfortunately this allowed him to send back the [scrylink]chain-lightning:leg[/scrylink] at my Mishra, which wouldn’t have been a creature otherwise. Killing my Mishra then enabled him to sac his Egg just after and to attack me with the Rukh token. I drew more burn but he had a total of 4 counter in hand.
In the second game I kept a hand that wasn’t bad against anything he could have played in the first turns, except for 2 [scrylink]sedge-troll:leb[/scrylink]s with regeneration back-up. I had control magic in hand, but never drew my second blue and I must say he got the perfect start versus my hand. Maybe if I would have killed his first Troll directly after he played it with 2 spells… but it would have still meant the clock with the second troll would have been ticking and I never drew my second blue Mana anyway, even with the [scrylink]wheel-of-fortune:leb[/scrylink] that was countered with [scrylink]blue-elemental-blast:leb[/scrylink]. I went for the win draws and lost.
I learned a lot about my deck this month. Maybe I would have needed to mulligan even more, though I’m often just doing so to even have more than 1 Mana in the starting hand. I definitely need to adjust my play against TrollDisco and against the Blood Moon decks.
The surprising thing about my 5 color lion + counter burn deck is that it actually plays quite complex and therefore you might see this deck again. 🙂
My opponent’s decks in the semi-final and final:
Join us in the D A CH league: https://www.facebook.com/groups/431622253688351/
The video of the final on Phil’s twitch page:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1222106895 – final
Streams Dach von Phil mit TwiddleVault
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1212979331 gegen Seppi Hubi
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1213021794 gegen Julius Suff
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1213813184 gegen Meddling Maxe
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1214107460 gegen Buddy Jonkers