השתתפות באליפות העולם - Worlds 2013 (ניב שמואלי)

שלום לכולם !
למי שלא מכיר אותי שמי ניב שמואלי, בן 23 מהוד השרון.
כרגע עושה פסיכומטרי והולך ללמוד משהו בחיים (לא סגור, וגם לא כזה קריטי באמת).

הנה הדיווח שלי מאליפות העולם 2013 (כנציג בנבחרת ישראל)

הדיווח באנגלית מכמה סיבות-

1. בגלל שאני רוצה שחברים מחו"ל יוכלו לקרוא אותו.
2. בגלל שכתבתי את הדיווח בהתחלה לאתר מסויים שבסוף זה לא יצא לפועל.

תהנו!

Hey everyone

This is my Gp Rimini\Worlds report and man… it was one hell of a week and a half, I don't think I've ever learned so much about magic like I did in this trip.

So first thing first - GP Rimini:

I didn't play too much M14 limited, I played at one prerelease and maybe 3-4 drafts, the format seems slower then M13 and "Scroll Thief" is way better due to cards like "Trained Condor" and "Time Ebb" which is sweet since it's a card I really like.

2x Air Servant

2x Pitchburn Devils

Marauding Maulhorn

Phantom Warrior

Coral Merfolk

Scroll Thief

Seacoast Drake

Dragon Egg

Archeomancer

Shock

Ratchet Bomb

Essence Scatter

Clastrophobia

2x Divination

Chandra's Outrage

Time Ebb

Shiv's Embrace

Frost Breath

Opportunity

I'm not sure if the Frost Breath was maindeck or sideboard.

The tournament did not go too well for me, I finished x-4 scooping last round after beating my opponent because he needed the pp.

The deck is easily a day 2 deck, it was very very good, I punted badly 1 match and just lost the other 2 to fast beats deck with my 5 drops in hand… happens.

But in Rimini the most amazing thing ever happened to me at the tournament, and here is the story - a local kid from a store that I play at came also to Rimini, he's a pretty good up comer for sure, t8ing some ptq's and always in to learn, he always comes up to me and asks for advise,  it was his first big tournament outside the country. So I walked up to him before the player meeting and he was thrilled, totally excited and reminded me going to my first GP (was at GP malmo 2006 I think, maybe earlier) anyway fast forward so I'm at 4-2 after an awkward loss and he comes up to me and asked what my record was and I asked him so he was also sitting at 4-2 and with a huge excited smile he's like "well we still have a chance just need to 3-0!". I mean the kid has a point I've had good runs before, anyway I won my next round then afterwards lost badly to a very aggressive r\g deck and got my mind back on the real thing - Worlds.

After the tournament I came up to him again and asked how he finished and he said 6-3 and was really excited he said that he learned a lot and had fun got some cards and can't wait for the next time he gets to battle.

So the bottom line of this long story is that he got lit my fire back, I put my entire mind into Worlds that was next weekend at Amsterdam, even my gf got pissed off at me…I surely owe her for this.

After Rimini I was training with my good old friend on the national team Niv Danieli and also with Shahar Shenhar which I'm sure you all know , the plan was basically to meet up with Ben Stark at the train station take a train to Milan and then a flight to Amsterdam… apparently Ben took an earlier train and we were off.

During the train ride\flight I was basically trying to figure out which Sphinx's Revelation deck I want to play because we pretty much agreed that I would play the control deck since that's basically all I play ever on magic online\during sleep\while eating etc… My decisions were pretty much settled between UWR or just straight up UW, esper came up in thoughts for sure but I really think that if you play a 3 color control deck then red is better than black because "Pillar of Flame" is that good (I guess you could compare "Warleader's Helix" to "Far/Away")

When we got to Amsterdam Shahar was doing his thing aka getting to the t4 of the player's championship, another experience that I got was to both be at the player's dinner before the player's championship (each player got to bring 1 guest) which was sweet since we got free drafts (drafting with Brian Kibler\LSV\Reide Duke is pretty sweet), watching the player's championship was nice, I did not get to watch it all since I wanted to check out the city a bit as well (basically meaning walking around the city clearing my head and thinking about what decks we should run).

On Thursday our 4th team member came in, Eviatar. Eviatar is an old dinosaur player in Israel that has tons of experience and is very calm due to that and was a huge addition to our team, we talked with him a bit on what he preferred to play(since he was going to play the aggressive deck in the constructed portion because that's his play style) and he said that he thinks mono red now is really good with Burning Earth and we all totally agreed on that one.

The night before the WMC we consulted with the USA team about decks, I was talking with Josh Utter Leyton about the UW deck while Shahar was talking with Reid Duke about the jund list.

We were basically expecting most of the teams to play out like this:

UW\R

Jund

mono green\some burning earth deck(probably mono red)

To be honest we weren't wrong at all, we predicted the meta game pretty nicely.

I chose to play UW instead of UW\R for 2 reasons, the first one which is also the big one is Burning Earth, in the UW list I had 15 basic lands which lets me ignore the card easily which is a nice bonus.

The second reason was that so that our mono red list and jund can both split the Pillar of Flame making them complete.

2 Cavern of Souls

4 Glacial Fortress

4 Hallowed Fountain

8 Island

7 Plains

1 Moorland Haunt

2 Ætherling

4 Augur of Bolas

4 Restoration Angel

4 Sphinx's Revelation

4 Azorius Charm

4 Supreme Verdict

4 Think Twice

2 Detention Sphere

3 Syncopate

2 Dissipate

1 Jace, Architect of Thought

2 Dispel

2 Negate

2 Planar Cleansing

1 Clone

2 Terminus

1 Cavern of Souls

1 Jace, Architect of Thought

4 Precinct Captain

So I went 5-2 in total with the deck losing only to 2x UW\r decks which I'm pretty sure I played them both poorly (one match I'm positive that I punted) since I don’t think the match is bad or anything like that (I played the deck on modo when getting back and so far 4-0 against uw\r)

I was really impressed with the deck that's for sure, if you want to play a control deck that doesn't get burned down by "Burning Earth" then this is a top contender.

Anyway back to the tournament - in case you guys don’t know\didn't see the coverage then first of all you should go watch the coverage because it's very good (I actually watched it myself when getting back home) and second thing is that the tournament started with M14 Team sealed.

Our team didn't test too much on Team sealed, Shahar played at 2 GP's and I played a local event (all 3 events were DGR) but we were confidant as we all played a lot on both formats so we knew the cards very well.

Our pool in M14 sealed was pretty bad, we had some mediocre rares and only 1 good deck that was an RG deck that had 4 "Predatory Sliver" and more goodies.

The deck I played in the M14 team sealed portion was a u\w control\mill deck, Niv Danieli played the very good RG deck and Shahar played the UB deck, this is the list that I played:

2x Divination

Seacoast Drake

Sensory Deprivation

Disperse

Griffin Sentinel

Trading Post

Serra Angel

Millstone

Planar Cleansing

Siege Mastodon

Congregate

Steelform Sliver

Wall of Frost

Elixir of Immortality

2x Claustrophobia

Clone

3x Archeomancer

2x Angelic Wall

Some relevant sideboard cards-

3x Charging Griffin

Millstone

2x Solemn Offering

2x Auramancer

2x Sentinel Sliver

The game plan of this deck was basically to slow down the game with the walls\phobias and then go "infi" with the 3 mancers +  Congregate although I did manage to win a game with cloning my  Serra Angel  but yea…

Round 1 up against team Cyprus -

I was up against a very very good UB deck featuring plenty of removals in 2  Doom Blade  2  Claustrophobia  with  Blightcaster  and a good stream of flyers. I took down g1 with my flying walls stopping his air force and milling him slowly out but g2+3 he curved out very well with his flyers and I  did not draw my walls nor my  Griffin Sentinel  so he rolled me over pretty quickly.

Round 2- Iceland -

I was up against the U\W deck of Iceland that didn't feature too many good cards it seemed and he was very slow which the perfect match up for my deck , in game 1 I milled him out pretty easily and in g2 he was mana skrewed and I cloned a  Serra Angel  and won.

Niv and Shahar lost…so we were starting off very poorly with an 0-2 record

So once again I'm up against the control deck, hey don't see me complaining…

Basically once again like round 2 he was very slow and I milled him out very easily while divinationing drawing me 6cards while gaining tons of life from Congregate Like last year at the WMC Uruguay came with a sweet team uniform, only this time it didn't really help them as we easily 3-0'd them and finally got a match win!

So we got 1 win out of the M14 sealed, definitely expected to go 2-1 in this portion but our pool was below average and I'm positive that we totally misbuilt it because Shahar's deck was just terrible even though he did have  Shadowborn Demon  which is obv a nut bomb card but the rest of his deck was not too good.

So we were off to the constructed rounds, basically needing a 3-1 to day 2 so hoping for the best-

So up against the home team, and I was up against Mono red which was sweet since it was the main reason why I played UW in the first place (to dodge  Burning Earth )

So game 1 I got control of the game really early since my opponent kept a 1lander so I just played augur eventually wrathed the board away and he didn't draw his lands in time to come back.

So I sided out my big  Morphling  and some  Dissipate  and sided in some more wrath effects in the form of  Terminus  and the captains as early drops that block well.

In game 2 he had a slow start with no 1drop but a lot of burn +chandra's pheonix, I did get to stabilize and revelation for a bunch eventually and win my match.

Shahar played Jund loosing and Eviatar running Mono red won his match so we were off to a 2-2 record.

Round 5- Colombia (GW  good stuff) -

This match was really really easy as my opponent really didn't really play anything relevant other than some turn 3  Loxodon Smiter  which I easily wrathed away, countered his  Archangel of Thune  and  Aetherling  won it easily.

Shahar and Eviatar also won so we were at a good start in std and sitting at 3-2 total record needing 1more win for day 2.

Round 6- South Africa (UW\r Control) -

So this was a very long match, game 1 got down to me landing an  Aetherling  and him trying to race me with burn spells\random creatures and doing so pretty nicely, I made a huge mistake when tapping down too low on the end of my turn during a complicated turn of him casting a revelation me being at a pretty low life total but not calculating well and on his turn he just casted a wrath and in respond of me blinking out my dude he casted a  Turn/Burn  and I lost my  Aetherling  and the game.

In game 2 though he did the same and tapped out and lost his  Aetherling  and I won that game but I would of won either way probably this just made it easier, but both Niv and Shahar lost so we did not continue to game 3 and we would of drew probably anyway since there was barely anytime left.

So here we were at 3-3 needed to win the last round and hope for the ties since 1 team at 4-3 would not make it.

Round 7 - Bolivia (RWB Aristocrats) -

So game 1 my opponent flooded really badly, I wrathed his board away played a  Detention Sphere  on his Sorin and  Aetherling  rode this one to victory…(It does that often…)

In game 2 my opponent mulliganed and kept a very slow hand without much action, he had  Lingering Souls  but my Jace kept that under check so all his stuff weren't that impressive, I sphered a  Falkenrath Aristocrat ,  eventually I found a  Sphinx's Revelation  that found another one and you know how it goes from there… (hint I won)

Shahar and Eviatar+Niv(they were basically a mini team through the entire tournament and it worked out nicely) also won, aka day 2!

So there was about 20minutes until everyone finished then another 10 minutes until they posted final standings for the day, basically 30minutes of my heart pounding nonstop and me going wild drinking water\going to the bathroom to wash my face and cool out, yea this is how much this tournament meant to me…and I have tons of experience on the PT but this one was huge since I had a good feeling we could go big.

So standings posted and we were 30th place, Sweden got 33d (the only team that didn't make it with a 4-3 record) which was sad since they had probably the best team on paper.

Once we got through that, Eviatar, his wife, Niv and I went out for dinner and then for a good night sleep.

We were basically talking nonstop about how we hope to open a better pool at the DGR Team sealed to make up for the M14 that we got, although again I'm pretty sure we could of built it better but doesn't matter anymore, we got to day 2, now we have 1goal and that's to get to the top 16 and so on and so on…one step at a time.

That's it for now, next time I'll talk about day 2 of the tournament and trust me, it was a huge one, heartbreaking moments, insane games, Shahar being the better rat, everything happened, I'll also give an update on the U\W deck since I think it's a real contender in the normal std environment (since this one was team unified which is a bit different)

Hope you enjoyed this part and stay tuned for the next one!

Until next time people.

Niv Shmuely