And the Grind continues.
The grind to reach 100 competitive Planeswalker points by April 1st. What a joke right? 100 points is easy! FNM here and there, a PTQ and a few GPT’s and boom you are there. Sure that may be true if you lived in the United States and there was a PTQ less than a day’s drive each weekend. But, sadly, I live in South Africa; here our FNMs reach 40 players and the distributor talks about it on Facebook. My entire country most likely moves less stock than most internet retailers pre order to open for singles. But enough about my #thirdworldproblems.

Thursday evening I sleeve one of my favourite archetypes of all time, Elves! This was for the modern GPT I was planning to attend on Sunday, thinking the deck was not viable in the format. I mean really, what can Elves do that Storm can’t do, right? And when it comes to beat down decks, Zoo is just better right?

In my testing I ran my concoction against Storm, Zoo, Affinity and RDW. Two hours later, I am 14 and 0. Something is wrong here. The list is on the Decks lists tab under Modern Elves!
Satisfied with my testing we move to EDH and Olivia holds her own for a good three hours against a hostile board. Eventually I get killed in one giant sweep.

Friday on the train home I realise I do not have a deck for FNM, having spent all of Thursday focussed on modern. So, I decide to brew a standard mono green deck. Awesome, I don’t need to sleeve too many cards in the half an hour I have to prepare. You can find the list under decks named MonoGreenWTF.
Round one:
Illusions.
He wins the die roll and starts bear, lord, ponder, image, dragon. Not a bad start right? He died the turn after he cast the dragon. Here is my start:
Llanowar, Archdruid, Copperhorn Scout, Archdruid, Ezuri, and Copperhorn. That is when he played the Dragon. Awkward when you have a 7/7, two 4/4s and a 2/2 and you cannot attack for the win. I untapped, played a land and attacked for roughly 109 damage. I was on 14.
At this point I was pretty happy. After that start who wouldn’t be? Game two, I transformed into Hexproof blade dot deck and smashed with a Dungrove Elder until my opponent died. I flooded but at least I had the Dungrove, a Batterskull and a sword of war and peace. I felt kind of dirty…

Round Two:
RB vampires.
Game one was long and drawn out. He had some removal, I had some elves then I had a Dungrove and a hunter’s insight. He took 7, I drew 7 and played some more guys and then he died.
Game two he curved out very nicely and had the right cards. It was very beautiful to see a deck do that.
Game 3 I resolved a Dungrove and a Batterskull. He did not find anything and died.

Round Three:
RDW.
I sit down across from Abigail and she comments, “I hope you are not playing your disgusting Elves”. I smile and say that “Elves are not viable” and I have exactly the same opening as I had in round one. She died with two lands in play and a few small goblins.
Game two I play bird, sword of war and peace and I pray. She does not kill the bird. I do not draw a land for the rest of the game. And she did empty her hand onto the board very quickly but there is not much she could do after that. I did not play another card for the rest of the game as I wanted to gain as much per swing as possible,

Round Four:
GW tokens.
Game one we get into an interesting race, Mirran Crusader vs. Ezuri and his friends…. I drew 4 lands off the top and die with him on one. My final draw could have been a gut shot and I would have still won as I was on 6. There was a Hero going to town with the crusader.
Game two I bash him to oblivion with Dungrove and a sword of war and peace.
Game three I draw only land. Not a single non land card was drawn after my opening hand.

Round Five:
GW tokens.
This was really awkward as it was pretty much the same as the previous round. Too much land and close races while a crusader goes to town on my life.

What I took away from the tournament is that I like Dungrove elder, sword of any kind and hunters insight. I honestly feel like I can improve on this concept a lot and have a lot of fun with this same deck idea again on Friday

Originally I intended to give a rundown of the GPT that I attended on Sunday as well here but I feel this post is already too long winded. I will post that tomorrow night.

As a side note, my “evil plan” (as the love of my life calls it) actually worked. I convinced her to help me test the theory that a player can reach 100 points by April 1st only getting points for participation and event multipliers. The point of the whole exercise was to play every event and concede matches. What I was actually trying to prove was that 1) she is actually really good at the game, 2) she actually likes playing and 3) she really does care about winning. Points all proven. Success.