Italy Vault Tour: LordJudo’s Perspective

Deck Selection & Pre-Tournament Thoughts:

Coming off the high of winning two national titles at Dutch Nationals (Archon and Alliance), I had to scramble to select new decks for both formats. I was caught between two conflicting goals: having fun with off-meta, non-PV decks, while still wanting to perform at the highest competitive level.

Archon Choice — "The Sisterly Loner Doc of Georgekin":

The night before the Archon tournament, I made my call. Rather than bringing a mirror of the dominant PV meta decks, I locked in "The Sisterly Loner Doc of Georgekin".

While I had meta decks in my collection, they were comparatively weaker than other tier-1 builds of that same archetype. Rather than playing an uphill mirror match, I chose to play a completely different game plan.

Alliance Choice — The 2x Drake Brobnar Build:

For Alliance, I brought my trusted Drake build featuring 2 Drakes in a single Brobnar pod that I had opened myself.

Day 1 — Sealed:

Sealed is sealed — you never know what you are going to get. And I got... not that much. My strategy was building a wide board, capturing onto creatures to send over using Freelancer, and then dropping Crepuscular Rays for a massive swing turn. It worked a couple of times, but the overall deck quality just came up short.

In a super tight match against DonkeyForge (eventual finalist), the game went to time. DonkeyForge took the win on time — if I had just one more turn, I would have taken it. From there it went downhill, and I was unable to claim a Top 8 spot in Sealed.

Day 2 — Archon & The Clashes with Harmed & DonkeyForge:

Archon started off strong with a 3-0 run. In Round 4, I faced Harmed; an unfortunate Wild Wormhole into Hoodwink ended any chance of that game going well.

To secure a Top 8 spot, I had to face teammate DonkeyForge piloting the infamous "Pastor Ass". Pastor Ass is famous for leveraging massive Mars turns and deep archives to set up Key Abduction for explosive wins.

In my opening hand, I had both Gone Pear Shaped and Untrum's Serenity — both absolutely crucial for disrupting Ass's game plan. DonkeyForge made me have the cards in order to win, and fortunately for me, I did. Defeating one of the best decks in the game and its owner was no small feat (albeit with a deck packing lots of counter cards!), punching my ticket to the Top 8 cut.

Unfortunately, the quarterfinals matched me right back against Harmed. Harmed started off fast with a Logos board. I had an answer in Unstable Dale under Ask Again, but it did not trigger, allowing Harmed to go back into Logos and leverage his board advantage.

With Borrow sitting in Harmed's discard pile and Harmed only redrawing 2 cards, I decided to play Drosera Relic (Action: destroy lowest power creature, steal 2), only for Harmed to have drawn Borrow again and steal the relic right back on the very next turn (with both my prophecies blocked at that point). There was not much I could do after that, and the win went to Harmed.

Day 3 — Alliance & The Drakes:

My Drakes did fairly well in Alliance, ending with a 3-2 record. I lost to an incredibly scary deck packing 3x Rage Reset in Logos, 2x Feldaar's Plan, Hoodwink and Lateral Shift in Shadows, and nasty Dis pods.

The second loss was against a Ceaseforge deck running Talent Scout, Be Our Geist, and 2 Near Future Lenses. Because we were both so focused on remembering all the cards entering my opponent's hand from Near Future Lens, we both forgot for 2 consecutive turns that Venom-awk should have capped my opponent's hand size at 5 cards.

Trying to resolve this 2 turns later resulted in Boo ending up on top of the draw pile (making it playable via Near Future Lens), which completely altered the game state. My opponent went into Star Alliance, used Retrotechnician Lee and Boo to play Zavel, and got the full Ceaseforge engine online. It was an unfortunate turn of events, and after going to time, I lost the match along with my shot at making Top 8 on strength of schedule.

Reflections:

All in all, I had a fantastic time in Florence. The luck wasn't always with me this weekend, but coming off such a fortunate run at Dutch Nationals, it was bound to balance out at some point!