Real Judging

I helped judge the Melbourne Prerelease this weekend just gone. It was lots of fun, I turned up later than requested on the Saturday morning due to the train I was meant to catch being canceled. Maybe not actually checking which venue we were using also excabated my tardiness but I was still there only 20 minutes late.

After getting handed a nice navy blue Guildpact prerelease shirt and a short briefing on how the day was going to be run and a few pointers on how to judge at a larger event I helped one of the experienced Melbourne judges, Wrobbie, register players for one of the first flights. After the first set of flights was running, Paari and I had to do the sign ups for the next flights (which ended up at around 70 players). Neither of us had all that much experience so we ended up being a little bit slow on signing them all up and got things underway not too much later than expected.

During deck construction it was decided that we needed to squeeze 5 games onto each pair of tables instead of just 2 per table. So after deck construction we had to move all the tables around and this caused some extra delay. After all of this everything went quiet well, with no further hickups.

After those flights had ended I played in the final flight of the day and went a miserable 1-2-1 (ID in the last round to get home earlier). This is my proof that Judging makes you a bad player, not the other way around.

Sunday I got to run the Two Headed Giant which was plenty of fun. But more about that later.

Gruul Themed Decks Are Easy To Build

Building Gruul themed decks is easy, take this list that i'm making up on the spot:

20x Creatures
4x Llanowar Elves
4x Wild Cantor
4x Scab-Clan Mauler
4x Giant Solifuge
4x Dryad Sophisticate


4x Enchantments
4x Moldervine Cloak

4x Artifacts
4x Umezama's Jitte

12x Spells
4x Pyroclasm
4x Savage Twister
4x Lightning Helix

20x Land
4x Stomping Ground
4x Sacred Foundry
4x Temple Garden
2x Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
4x Forest
2x Mountain

And your done, I'd like to find the room to put the Burning Tree Shaman in and probably replace the Cantors with Birds, but I'm thinking the deck doesn't realy need any mana accelerators at all.

Mark of Eviction + Nightmare Void

This pair of cards seams to be a fairly hellish combo for your opponents. Obviously the idea is to continually bounce your opponents creatures and force them to be discarded. Filling the deck with more discard would seam like a decent idea to try and deal with more troublesome permanents, and to give you something to force the discarding of when they didn't top deck a creature. Drain life for the win would probably be the play as well