[easybox]Be sure to come back on Monday as Sam Stoddard kicks off his new day of the week! As Fridays have become rather crowded, we're moving him to Monday![/easybox]

The PTQ this weekend in Lexington didn't go so well. It could have been worse for sure, but 3-2 isn't a record I am proud of. I take some solace knowing that two people I play with both made top 8, but I know that I didn't play well. One mistake, in particular, when I was 2-0, bothered me because it wasn't a misclick (where you have a timing error or mistap), or a blunder (when you miss some on-board information, or just aren't paying attention and throw a card away). This was a full blown punt, and one that I did with complete knowledge of what I was doing.

Playing Jund againt Naya in game 3, I kept a seven card hand on the play with Doom Blade, Baslisk Collar, Consuming Vapors, Maelstrom Pulse, Bloodbraid Elf, a Savage Lands and a Lavaclaw Reaches. I only had two lands, but all my colors, and my list was running 27. You have to take risks somewhere. Assuming I do draw lands, I have a hand full of removal. Even if I don't, I still have a Doom blade to keep my opponent at bay. I was thinking I had Terminates too, because my last list was playing 2 main. I'd forgotten my exact removal count. Of course it didn't play out the way I'd imagined in my head, and by turn 3, I hadn't drawn my third land. My opponent has played two comes into play tapped lands in a row. I pass on my turn 3, and my opponent plays a Cobra. He then plays a fetch land and adds a white. He saced the fetch land, and I Doom Blade the cobra, leaving him one mana short of casting the card I knew it would be - Knight of the Reliquary. I Missed my third land drop again, and he played the Knight of the Reliquary and a Noble Hiearch. I finally drew a land but it entered the battle field tapped, and he attacked with Knight, then played an Elspeth and made a token (Presumably playing around a Terminate blowout). I was at sixteen, but fearing Steppe blanking the rest of my removal, I pulsed the Knight. Bloodbraid Elf came down and with a nice jump and exalted trigger took me to nine. Even though I drew another land, I was too far behind to deal with both his board of creatures and Elspeth and died.

When I was doing it, I knew that Doom blade-ing the Cobra was a mistake. I knew it in my gut, but my head told me that I needed to prevent him from any cobra shenanigans, espcally with my slower hand. The mistake didn't start that turn, though, or even at the beginning of the game or match. A long series of events starting weeks before the tournament led me to make this mistake.

A month before before, at a PTQ, I made an ill-fated attempt to go rogue and play Allies. Turns out that Allies has little to no game against UWr, Mythic Conscription, or basically anything else in the format. I swore after that to play good solid net decks and stop trying to be cute. The next week, for US Nationals Qualifiers, I decided to play Geopede Jund. This was the breakout week for Naya, but almost nobody in Ohio was running it, so I didn't even hear about it until the twitter and facebook heralded GerryT's list as the savior of humanity. Instead, I faced down a hoarde of Lotus Cobra in a much more frightening matchup - Mythic Conscription.

I'd pretty much written off the Conscription deck as a joke list until I saw it do very well at the PTQ the week before. Now it was in my gauntlet, and I found out just how bad my Geopede list was against it - removing Terminate for faster creatures doesn't help against a Baneslayer or turn 4 Sovereigns. In testing, we found that the only way to win the matchup was to kill every mana producing creature on sight. If a Lotus Cobra lived, that was pretty much the end of the game. I'd developed Lotus Cobra-phobia. I managed to go 1-1 against in in the tournament, but felt pretty lucky to win the 2nd one.

Cut to another two weeks later and testing for this PTQ. I'd been really busy in the preceding two weeks and hadn't put in much testing, so I decided to stick with Jund. Unfortunately, the Geopede version had lost a lot of traction due to UW moving back up to 3-4 Baneslayers main. I needed a new list. Kelly Reid sent me a Jund list that played four Lotus Cobra and four Nest Invader to pump out some trully helacious turn 3 and 4s. The Spike in me was all about playing Jund, but the Timmy in me wanted to do nothing more than turn 4 Sarkhan, turn 5 Broodmate, take 18. I proxied up what in the deck I didn't already have and started testing the night before the PTQ. The real life results were not living up to the deck on paper. I won virtually every game a Cobra stuck, and lost literally every one where he didn't. I lost to Jund, Elves, UW, you name it. People knew to kill my Cobra, and it diminished the value of the deck significantly.

Going back to the drawing board with a few hours to spare, I decided to take the last Jund list that had done well, Joerg Unfried's LCQ-winning deck, and make a few changes. -2 Bituminous Blast +2 Sarkhan the Mad in the main deck, and -1 Thought Hemorrhage in the sideboard for +1 Vengevine.

The final list looked like this:

[cardlist]2 Dragonskull Summit

4 Forest

2 Lavaclaw Reaches

3 Mountain

4 Raging Ravine

1 Rootbound Crag

4 Savage Lands

3 Swamp

4 Verdant Catacombs

4 Bloodbraid Elf

1 Broodmate Dragon

4 Putrid Leech

4 Siege-Gang Commander

4 Sprouting Thrinax

2 Sarkhan the Mad

4 Blightning

2 Consuming Vapors

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Maelstrom Pulse

Sideboard

3 Basilisk Collar

4 Cunning Sparkmage

3 Doom Blade

2 Prophetic Prism

3 Vengevine[/cardlist]

Once again, my inner Timmy was overpowered with the thought of boarding in Collar/Sparkmage. With the lack of time to do any testing, I borrowed a good third of the deck (mostly rares, ofcourse) and went home to get some sleep before the PTQ.

Rounds 1 went pretty smooth with a Jund mirror where my opponent stalled on 4 land.

Round 2, I played against a Cobra-Jund list. I felt really good bolting his Cobras and keeping him off of mana. His deck didn't have Sarkhan, Siege-gang or Broodmate, so simply staying in the game until turns 5 or 6 was enough to give my deck a huge advantage.

Round 3, I was paired against the Naya deck in question. I won game 1 by killing my opponent's mana creatures, and having him stalling on land. I boarded in 4 Cunning Sparkmage, 3 Collars and 2 Doom blade for the Bolts, the leeches, a Sarkhan and a Siege-Gang.

I thought i had game 2 in the bag. He played a turn 2 Cobra into a turn 3 Knight of the Reliquary. I played my Sparkmage, and killed the Cobra. He attacked me down to 13, and I brought out the Collar. Three turns later I was dead to a pair of Bloodbraids hitting relevant spells. My theoretical unstoppable combo hadn't done anything for me. My confidence was shaken.

In game 3, kept a hand that could have won me the game. Instead I allowed the weight of all my earlier experiance take over for a solid thought process. If I had really thought about it, I would have realized that the standard Naya list after board only has one card of any that I had to worry about right there -Knight of the Reliquary - which is a problem card for my deck. Sure, he could have had Sledge, but the odds were low being that it is a 1 of, and I could have timewalked him the next turn if he tried to equip and attack. I decided my avenue to victory right there was to slow down his production, but unlike Mythic, his deck isn't that concerned about turboing out 6 mana. He wants to get to 4 and 5 as quickly as possible, and if he had another land in hand, I wasn't slowing that down at all. There was no way for him to produce 8 mana next turn to get a Bloodbraid/Vengevine turn. My Doom blade was largely wasted.

Beyond that - there are a few cards that are really important in the late game. Behemoth Sledge, Vengevine, Gideon Jura and Elspeth. Pulse doesn't do much against the Vine, but it deals with the rest of them. I needed to conserve my pulses and use them against these cards, not use it for a Knight of the Reliquary when I already had a good answer for it in my hand. My game plan was to play for the long game, and I wasn't.

It would have been easy to blame it all on missing a few land drops. If I had runner-runner'd lands that didn't come into play tapped, Vapors and Bloodbraid might have earned me enough card advantage to steal the game. If I'd topdecked a Doom Blade, then I might have even looked smart. But without actually testing my deck, or knowing what my sideboarding strategies really were, and without playing a single match against Naya with any deck, I'd set myself up for failure.

To compound that, because of their card similarities, I was playing the Naya matchup in a similar manner that I would've the Mythic matchup. When playing Geopede Jund, I learned that I needed to become the Control Deck against mythic. That works when your opponent's deck is full of 5 and 6 mana cards that give you problems, not when it is full of 3s and 4s. I boarded out my early creatures and planned on winning the long game with plenty of removal for their accelerators and 4 Consuming Vapors, which I no longer had access to. In short, through lack of testing I was trying to play my deck from two weeks ago against a deck my opponent wasn't even playing.

That wasn't the only mistake I made that tournament, but this was the one that really stuck with me. I forgot that cards don't always have the same value at every moment, and I relied too heavily on testing decks I assumed were very similar. I had won a number of games earlier in the tournament by slowing down my opponent's mana development on turns 1 and 2, so I automatically went for that startegy again without even considering just saving my removal for his creatures with high-value, or that we were already entering turn 3. I'd set myself up for the mistake without even realizing it.

I have found that working down to the root of this mistake has been important to me. It highlights issues with my game that are so much deeper than a single bad choice - it was the entire way I was approaching constructed magic. I've been relying too heavily on playtesting to dictate how games should finish, and it is something I am going to work on fixing in the future.

In my next article, I am going to follow up on this subject and talk about the nature of mistakes in games, and how to find the root of what is causing them.