Here's a tournament report from the Magic Online monthly championship, which I played today. It's basically a live blog that I'm updating round by round.

     The Context

I qualified by Top 8'ing two 10E sealed deck events plus winning 15 drafts over the course of the last month. The format was Alara Block Constructed, which sets it up as a potentially very interesting preview of what will happen next weekend at Pro Tour Honolulu. 243 other runners joined me, which was about 100 less than last month, presumably because those hundred folks are competing in person at Grand Prix Seattle this weekend.

(Speaking of attendance figures - holy shit! - 1127 players made the trip to Tacoma to play in the Grand Prix. The T.O. had been planning for 650 with a hopeful goal around 800, which would have been more than double the most recent GP Seattle.)

I built the obvious Jund Hackblade deck while trying to learn the format. Borderposts, Bloodhall Ooze, Putrid Leech, Hackblade, Bloodbraid, Terminate, Maelstrom Pulse, etc. It's good, but the mana is really frustrating. You need a bunch of basic lands to support the Borderposts and you have to mulligan a lot because you're only actually happy with both a basic and a 'Post and you pretty much always need all 3 colors right away as well. Anyway, it can be blisteringly fast, but it's definitely not good enough to win consistently now that it has a target on its head and 2/2 pro-red dorks and Thrinaxes have invaded everyone else's lists.

The thing is, Jund still has really powerful cards. And I think Cascade is the best card advantage in the format. Before Reborn came out I was running the closest you can get to 5-color control: 4 Courier's Capsule, 4 Esper Charm, Cruel Ultimatum, a bunch of removal, a smattering of permission, and 4 Broodmate Dragons. I love to play that style of deck, but post-Reborn blue decks simply can't keep up with the card advantage that comes from Cascade. They'd have a fighting shot if permission worked against cascade, but you aren't allowed to play enough Double Negatives to make that a fair fight.

Anyway, what I wound up doing was to take out all the balls-out aggro elements from my Jund deck and instead to go for maximum cascade card advantage and plan to win in the late game. This meant splashing white for Enlisted Wurm, but I kind of wanted to play Trace of Abundance just for the mana acceleration anyway (so I don't get run over by the aggro decks before I can get Bituminous blast online). the final touch is Uril, the Miststalker. 5/5 untargetable for 5 is awesome in a format where the average deck seems to have a dozen targeted removal spells.

     The Deck

3 Enlisted Wurm
1 Brooadmate Dragon
2 Uril, the Miststalker
4 Bloodbraid Elf
4 Sprouting Thrinax
4 Putrid Leech

4 Bituminous Blast
4 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Blightning
4 Terminate

4 Trace of Abundance

4 Savage Lands
4 Jungle Shrine
4 Exotic Orchard
4 Forest
4 Mountain
3 Swamp

I'm not very confident in the sideboard. The last two cards I cut were Magma Spray and Jund Charm, which I cut because all they amount to is incrementally better removal spells versus the appropriate deck. I want my sideboard cards to be more impactful than that so I went with hosers versus less popular strategies (aka Renegades and Outlanders). I should probably have the 4th Blightning in the board, but to be honest when I was finalizing the sideboard I forget I had gone down to 3 in the main. :/ The main decks seems pretty tight to me. I'm not sure what the right numbers of Enlisted Wurms or Broodmate Dragons is, but I think a mix is better than all of either. I also worry about the number of Swamps I have since you can't use them to cast Trace, but I need so much black mana for my other spells that I think I'm stuck with them. Meanwhile it's possible that the metagame will go in a direction where you don't want this much (targeted) removal, but I don't think we're in that space so all in all I feel pretty good about the main deck.

     The Matches

Round 1 - vs Caiano

Caiano seemed to have somewhat similar control-ish Cascade-ish deck, but maybe a bit less focused. In game 1 he was mana screwed and we didn't have much of a game. My Blightning showed me Ajani so i sideboard in Celestial Purge, which worked out great versus his early game 2 Thrinax. We also trade Blightnings and I get off 2 to his 1 before both our hands are empty, but when my Bloodbraid Elf flips a removal spell on an empty board and he then top-decks a second Thrinax my edge is down to 2 in-play lands. The game goes a while, which I thought would favor me (thanks to all my Cascade plus my collection of fatties) and it does. He draws a lot of individually powerful cards (including both Ajani and Scepter of Fugue), but I'm able to trade cards until I draw a Broodmate Dragon, which he can only kill half of.

1-0 (2-0)

Round 2 - vs Monkeywrenched85

He has to mulligan to 4 in game 1, but my hand is all removal and all he plays is a Wall of Denial. I eventually draw a Thrinax and then Cascade Wurm into a second one. He uses Maelstrom Pulse to turn my Thrinaxes into 6 1/1's, but I made sure to leave up Bituminous Blast mana to fizzle the second Pulse and defend my other 5 tokens, which were enough to win with even though my blast cascaded into a blank.

In game 2 I drew and/or cascaded into all 3 of my Blightnings. He was actually able to defend his hand a bit thanks to Esper Charm and 2 x Kiss of the Amesha, but while he was spending all that mana I was able to accumulate a giant horde of creatures in play. Martial coup would have been devastating but he only had 1 white mana (and no green for potential Pulses). Has Standard tricked everyone into thinking you can build a reliable 5-color control mana base? The mana in block seems to me to only support 2-color aggro or 3-color control. Of course, I may be just as guilty of this as I've convinced myself that Trace of Abundance lets me splash a bit of a 4th color into my control deck.

2-0 (4-0)

Round 3 - vs migacz

I recognize his name from my research on Top 8's of daily events so I know I'm in for a tough one. He turns out to be playing a similar deck to mine - Jund-splash-white Cascade Control - but he's using Naya Panorama and Sylvan Bounty to make the mana work and he showed me one copy each of Lavalanche, Behemoth Sledge, Ajani Vengeant, and Soul's Majesty (!) in game one. I'm not sure what he's not running other than I never saw Enlisted Wurm. At some point in the match I think I saw every other spell from my list ... maybe his Blightnings were in the board to open up that room?

In game 1 I mulligan a hand with 4 black spells and 3 lands that don't make black. We trade Putrid Leeches and Blightnings and I think I'm doomed when he plays Soul's Majesty to draw 3 on turn 5, but my second Leech is playing really good D - holding off two Thrinaxes and a Bloodbraid Elf. Luckily for me the Elf had flipped a Lavalanche (this is precisely why I'm not running Lavalanche, btw, and why i don't think you can run Martial Coup in a more white version either). Ajani makes my life annoying and then Behemoth Sledge makes it super annoying. I really needed to draw a Pulse at some point, but never did. He adds a Broodmate and I get to Bituminous Blast one dragon, but the other picks up the Sledge before I can blast it.

In game 2 I opened with two Blightnings and they were awesome. I stumbled for two turns waiting for white mana and for 6 mana but once I got there Enlisted Wurm brought Bloodbraid Elf and Putrid Leech to the party and we were off to game 3.

g3
The game was pretty quick and pretty bloody. We traded leeches and removal spells and then he played Uril. I died while holding Celestial Purge and Maelstrom Pulse. Uril continues to seem really good, especially in this metagame.

2-1 (5-2)

Round 4 - vs ElRamuuusa

Another mirror match except this guy has yet a third take on how to fix the mana: Rupture Spire.

In game 1 our Uril's implode thanks to the legend rule and then after that I draw more spells than he does. I''d love to claim credit, but he played an awful lot of land and I didn't do anything particularly clever.

Game 2 was all about Uril. He played one early and it help off my attacks forever. He got to 6 mana first and his Enlisted Wurm cascaded out Thought Hermmorage (a card I also sideboard in, planning to name Uril). He named Broodmate Dragon, which is a 1-of in my deck, and of course I was holding it in my hand. Later this game I got to Bituminous Blast my own guy for the third time — this time it was in response to a Slave of Bolas that wanted to steal my Thrinax. (#2 was last round when I Blasted a Thrinax in response to a Celestial Purge.) I do finally get to six and play out my own Enlisted Wurm (cascadeing merely Putrid Leech). I'm actually starting to be able to attack through Uril, but he draws a ton of random damage and kills me with Blightning and Anathemancer.

Game 3 was really frustrating. He didn't play a single spell that I'm not also running ... all he did was go straight to six and summon Enlisted Wurms on 3 consecutive turns, triggering cascade an additional 4 times thanks to 2 Bloodbraids and 2 Bituminous Blasts. he also had the Pulse for my Behemoth Sledge and I just drowned under a flood of the very same card advantage my deck was designed to generate.

2-2 (6-4)

Round 5 vs Orgg Ascetic

I mulligan to 5 and my  opponent curves out wall of denial, wall of denial, bituminous blast, cruel ultimatum.

In game two my Renegade nails his armillary sphere, just like I drew it up when I sideboarded out my removal spells versus his essentially creatureless deck. However, despite this he was able to cast Cruel Ultimatum on turn 7. his Wall of Denial plus my 8 lands / 6 spell ratio meant i couldn't kill him before then. Plus one of my spells was a Maelstrom Pulse that had no targets. I took out 4 x Terminate and 4 x Bituminous Blast but maybe I was supposed to take out Pulse too? Anyway, I hoped my Thought Hemmorage might be able to strip him of victory conditions, but he Swerved it and eventually killed me with Martial Coup.

I'm kind of curious what the top of the swiss is going to look like. The view from the middle is all Jund control and decks that have gone out of their way to remove all targets for Maelstrom Pulse / Terminate. Maybe I was supposed to predict this and run a bunch of Edict effects? Fleshbag Marauder would have been super sick versus my last three opponents ...

2-3 (6-6)

Round 6 vs Mizuchi

He shows up 24 seconds before timing out. I kill 3 Noble Heirarchs with a Maelstrom Pulse in game 1 and he just sits and does nothing with 3 mountains and 2 Jungle Shrines in play. Color-screwed?

Yep - color-screwed Jund player, I learn in game 2 (which I'm playing pretty much unsideboarded). The sideboarding probably didn't matter as I draw 13 lands and 8 spells and am well on my way toward tilting.

I keep forest, exotic orchard, trace in game 3 and my opponent plays forest, forest, jund panorama, exotic orchard and refuses to activate the panorama until after I'm forced to discard. Ajani then comes down and pins me on 3 mana until turn 9, by which point I've killed both halves of a Broodmate Dragon despite my screw but can't deal with Obelisk of Alara. This game can be really frustrating sometimes. 13 lands in game 2 and 3 in game 3 ... clearly I need a more "in between" amount of mana in my deck.

2-4 (7-8)

Round 7 vs Kapahala

Apparently the bottom of the swiss is where the Noble Heirarchs live as I pulse away 2 of them in game 1 on my way to a blow-out in win thanks to cascade shenanigans. His deck is

Game 2 I have mana issues and he has Elspeth. I manage kill to Elspeth, clear his hand, kill all of his creatures, and summon 10-power worth of my own but I go down to one life in the process. He top-decks Lavalanche and has enough mana to play it for 2. There was a Putrid Leech pump involved in me taking control of the game that I might have been able to do without, so I'm kicking myself a bit.

Game 3 goes accordingly to play - land (but not too much), removal, and cascade spells for card advantage. I finally win my first round since the second. :/

3-4 (9-9)

Round 8 vs AthosTheMusketeer

An honest to goodness Jund Hackblade deck. I was starting to think they'd gone extinct, but here one is - Borderposts, Bloodhall Oozes, and all. Of course, before I knew that I had decided to mulligan a 2 land, 5 spell draw where the lands were a forest and an Exotic Orchard. No Trace so I pretty much need my opponent to give me red and especially black mana or that draw is garbage. Maybe there's enough Jund in the field that I should keep it, but I didn't. My six card hand includes a Savage Lands and a forest, which is much better, but I don't have a third mana until turn 4 and that pretty much sinks me versus Hackblades.

Game 2 I pretty quickly establish control of the ground, but he's got a pair of Hell's Thunders that get through for 12 damage and a removal spell, but it's not enough. This is pretty much the deck my deck was designed to beat.

Game 3 I draw Sledge and Uril. He lines up a bunch of blockers in front of it, knowing that he loses to any removal spell but forced to hope against hope. I Purge his Leech and the blowout is on.

4-4 (11-10)

Round 9 vs ... no one

I decided to keep the Forest, Orchard, 5 spell hand this time, but my opponent never showed up. 10 minutes later he timed out and I got a free win.

5-4 (13-10)

     The Wrap

All in all I think I got a bit unlucky along the way to only go 5-4 (missing top 64 and 3 booster packs on tiebrekaers), but I also don't think I had the right decklist. I anticipated a field full of Hackblades, but instead got a field of anti-Hackblade decks like my own. If I'd shown up packing answers to untargetable creatures I would have done a lot better, I think. It's also possible that an entirely different archetype (anti-anti-hackblade, whatever that is (maybe we'll find out when the Top 8 decklists are posted)) would have been the better call.