Hi,
I decided to write a post about my hero and deck choices for American Regionals.
First, a little background on myself. I am new to SE (started in Sept/Oct of this year), but I have been playing MTG for a long time (including high level tournaments). Regionals was my second SE tournament. Before it, the only tournament I played in was Tournament for players NEW to tournaments. Btw, I very highly recommend T4PN2T tournaments to new players, I think it’s an amazing way to getting started with SE tournaments.
So, I was very inexperienced with SE tournaments, but from MTG tournaments I knew that for big tourneys I want to play a deck that I played a lot and am very comfortable with. Going with a brand new deck would yield worse results even if it was a better deck just because I would make more mistakes. At that point, I only played with 3 decks: Feedbomb, Mejira burn (no portal), and Amber. I decided to play a bunch of games with these deck in QM. If they all did bad, I would search for a new deck, otherwise, I would pick one that did best. My rating at that time was around 330 so I assumed QMs would be a good representation of decks I would run into at regionals (I didn’t have any other choice to playtest anyway).
After about 100 games, the results were: Zaladar 25-10-1, Mejira 26-10, Amber 17-10. I stopped playing Amber after 27 games because I noticed that I tend to lose whenever my opponent has severs. Since regionals was a SB tournament, I assumed most people would have severs and weapon destruction in their SB and I didn’t want to play a deck that was a big underdog post SB (2 out of 3 are played with SB!). I was very happy with both Mejira and Feedbomb results. 72% game win means about 81% chance to win 2 out of 3 match. I finally choose Feedbomb over Mejira just because it was a lot more fun to play
The feedbomb deck had several other advantages. It looks like a normal Zaladar deck, so people often don’t suspect ER or SR. Even when they know its feedbomb, they often don’t play and SB correctly because it’s not a popular deck and they don’t have much practice against it. Also, there aren’t many good SB cards against Feedbomb, while I have very good SB options.
I continued playing Feedbomb in QMs, trying out different cards and recording results. Here are the final results:
Zaladar WIN LOSS DRAW PER TOTAL
Boris 5 2 71.43% 7
Amber 11 18 37.93% 29
Ter Adin 1 0 100.00% 1
Logan 0 0 #DIV/0! 0
Eldrawen 28 17 2 62.22% 47
Nishaven 2 1 66.67% 3
Mejiya 22 7 2 75.86% 31
Graveborn 2 0 100.00% 2
Victor 0 1 0.00% 1
Gwen 2 7 22.22% 9
Banebow 1 3 25.00% 4
Baladru 0 0 #DIV/0! 0
Zhanna 3 2 60.00% 5
Jericho 2 0 100.00% 2
Lance 15 5 75.00% 20
Serena 3 2 60.00% 5
Zaladar 13 7 65.00% 20
Elementalist 0 1 0.00% 1
Monstalker 12 1 92.31% 13
Darkclaw 1 1 50.00% 2
TOTAL 123 75 4 62.12% 202
Zaladar.jpg Views: 40 Size: 80.3 KB">Zaladar.jpg
I was very happy with these numbers since I was a favorite in 5 out 6 most popular decks. Amber was a problem, but I was hoping that people would avoid it for the same reason as I did. I also had 3 severs and a shriek in SB which would help (with so much card draw and ER, I could cast each one multiple times).
The most important thing is that I learned how to play every matchup. It is very important to know when you can’t cast you bazaars or when to save ER/LLN/Feedbacks etc. Millstaker and Lance are pretty much autowins once I learned to play the matchup. Zaladar is very good if they don’t have SR, but it’s a little luck dependant on DR draws. Still SR/Feedback/ER give me an edge. Mejira is very good unless your SR is in the bottom 6-8 cards. Eldrawen gets a little tougher the more aggressive they get (I can’t beat a kirs/puwen/aldon draw), but feedbomb is still favorite. Amber is really bad since their weapon gives them damage and extra resources and I can’t get rid of it. Rampage/Enrage buys them extra time. I just had to hope my SB holds up games 2 and 3.
Overall, I was happy with my deck choice before and after the tournament.
I will make another post with my card choices for the Feedbomb deck.
Edit: Ok, Screenshot seems to work. Thanks for the advice!
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