Magic the Gathering in Ontario - Cube Pro Tour

Welcome to MTG Ontario’s Live (well maybe not so live but we are writing this as events happen) Coverage of the CUBE PRO TOUR! 8 of Toronto and surrounding area’s finest cube drafters have gathered in Mark Zajdner’s basement at a chance at $80 cash (big stakes eh?), bragging rights and most importantly the opportunity to create their own Magic Card to be put in the cube for the next session of play. With out further ado, let’s begin our coverage.

What Exactly Is Cube?
Before we get into the actual PT, many of you are probably thinking “What the heck is cube?” Cube is what many people, myself included, consider to be the greatest Magic format ever created. The cube consists of one copy of each of the best Magic cards ever printed. Everything from the Power 9, to Lightning Bolt, to Mana Drain, to Blastoderm. It is just under 400 cards in total. The cards are shuffled and then packs of 15 cards are made at random. The cards are then drafted just like you would in a regular draft and then the matches are played out. Unlike regular limited formats the decks in this format look and play more like Extended/Type 1 constructed decks. When was the last time you got infinite mana or took 5 to 7 turns in a row in a regular draft? These occurrences are not unheard of in cube. The cube we will be using for the Pro Tour belongs to Mark Zajdner and is one of the nicest collections of cards I have ever seen. Almost the entire cube is either black bordered or foiled. We have been constantly making cuts and additions to the cube over the past couple years to make it what it is today. Whenever a new set comes out, new additions are made and every so often the weaker and unplayed cards get axed. To get a better idea of what cards are actually in the cube take a look at the draft and match coverage that will take place later in this report.

Cube Erratas
In the interest of good times the following cards have been errata'ed for cube play. These changes really up the value of all the following cards which where all slightly underpowered using current card rulings.

1) The Wishes - Living, Cunning and Burning Wish have all found their way into the cube. Due to the fact that you want to be running all your good cards anyway in any limited format, we had to make these cards slightly better in cube. As far as cube play is concerned, the Wishes allow you to search both your sideboard and your opponent’s sideboard. This just adds a fun interesting little twist and makes it so that a hate draft can still hurt you in the long run.

2) Rukh Egg and Su-Chi - Both these cards have abilities that read when this card goes to the graveyard something happens, either you get 4 colourless mana (Su Chi) in your pool or a 4/4 flyer (Rukh Egg). Wizards have erratta'ed these cards to include the words “from play”. For our purposes the cards will trigger if they go to the graveyard from anywhere. Yes, you can discard your egg if you draw first and have a turn 1 4/4 flyer in play at your end step.

3) Mishra’s Workshop - The mana produced from this land maybe used to both cast and activate abilities on artifacts. This card now becomes nuts with other cards such as Disrupting Sceptre and Jayemdae Tome.

4) Mana Crypt - Again we took this one back to an older ruling. There was once a time where if you tapped Mana Crypt at upkeep, its upkeep ability would be turned off. As it was, Mana Crypt seemed a little underpowered. People were dying far to quickly to it, so we decided to make it a little stronger by playing it this way again.

5) Chaos Orb - This card has received the biggest errata of the bunch, after all we can’t have people tearing up a Beta Chaos Orb could we? The card now reads, 1, tap sac, destroy a permanent in play, it cannot be regenerated. This ability does not target (i.e. you can kill a Blastoderm).

Who Gets To Play?
8 people will be bidding for the 2 winning positions. Yes, we did decide to have 2 winners. We will get into the explanation for this later on. This is how one could qualify for the tour. The slots are passed down.

1) Special Invitation: Mark Zajdner - His house, his PT, his Cube, yeah good luck telling him that he’s not going to play.
2) Winner of Grand Prix PontyPol: Christian Antonescu (Christian was actually defeated in the finals by Mark however the slot was passed down to the finalist due to Mark already being Q’d).
3) Winner of Grand Prix Mark’s Basement: Steve Cassell.
4) Highest Ranked Player (+/-): Justin Butler (Passed Down).
5) Most Wins Against Lee (Explanation will follow): Colin McCann (Passed down).
6) Special Invitation - Best Magic Player in Toronto: Gab Tsang, What’s a PT without the best? Gab couldn’t make the PT due to Magic Online’s August Championships (Obviously Gab’s priorities are out of whack!) so his spot will be added to the last chance qualifier.
7) Last chance Qualifier Slot 1.
Cool

Last chance Qualifier Slot 2.

How Did The Rating System Come To Be?
We have been playing cube for a couple of years now without keeping track of records and it was fine. Then one day Lee Kestenburg decided to stick his foot in his mouth by telling people that he felt he was just as good if not better then I am at Magic. I got a little upset at his allegation and decided to start keeping track of our records to find out just how good Lee actually is. Below is a list of how the regular season standings ended up. We decided to use a plus/minus rating system. Unfortunately this system does somewhat favour players that play more then others, but it was the fairest way we could figure out to do it.

Final End of Session Standings Cube Season 1 (15 Match Min)

Name:	Wins:	Loses:	+/-
1) Mark Zajdner	217	150	+67
2) Christian Antonescu	154	104	+50
3) Steve Cassell	135	105	+30
4) Justin Butler	75	55	+20
5) Josh Rider	48	38	+10
5) Steve Wolfman	23	13	+10
7) Lukasz Dunarski	13	4	+9
Colin McCann	58	60	-2
9) Jamie Mulkin	38	41	-3
10) J Gary Wise	17	25	-8
11) Mike Fernyhough	15	30	-15
11) Dan Cassell	12	27	-15
13) Shawn Anquetil	17	38	-21
14) Bradley Richardson	16	40	-24
15) Lee Kestenberg	68	108	-40
16) Ari Goodman	35	105	-70

We’d like Lee to note that all the MTG Ontario readers know the truth! Razz

Mark decided to add a slot for most wins against Lee to honour/mock him for being the inspiration for our ratings system. On another side note, Josh broke out to a huge lead at the beginning of the season, then for no apparent reason other then “It’s getting too competitive” Josh stopped marking his victories for about a month. This could very well have cost Josh his PT slot. Stupid Josh.

What Is The Format For The PT?
The grinder will be 3 rounds of Swiss draft with a playoff for the third and final slot.

The actual PT will consist of three drafts starting with a 3 round Rochester draft with random pairings round one followed by Swiss pairings rounds 2 and 3.

The 2nd draft will be a regular booster draft, again random pairings round one, and Swiss pairings based on this draft only rounds 2 and 3.

After the 2nd draft the top 4 players will advance to a 2/2 teams draft to end the night. The winning team will split the $80 prize money and will be the lucky ones who get to create the only non-real magic cards in the cube. Wow!!!!

Okay enough with the rambling, its time to start the Grinder coverage!

Grinder Draft
So for 8 PT hopefuls it’s all down to this, the last chance qualifier, where 8 people will battle it out for the last three spots on the inaugural Cube Pro Tour. Seating has been announced and the participants are seated in the following order:

Seat/Player:
1-Richard Hoaen
2-Jamie Malkin
3-Josh Rider
4-Lee Kestenberg
5-Mike Ferneyhough
6-Steve Wolfman
7-Kyle Reid
8-Shawn Anquetil

The favourites in the grinder, in my opinion, have be Veteran Pro Tour players Richard Hoaen (Top 8 Canadian Nationals), Steve Wolfman and Kyle Reid along with PTQ Winner and Boy Wonder Josh Rider. I fully expect the three names to come out of this group of 4, but who the odd man out will be I have no idea.

Grinder Draft: Josh Rider
For the first draft I chose to cover Josh Rider. Josh has a lot of Cube experience and usually drafts a blue heavy counter magic deck or the good ol’ 5 colour bag of tricks where he drafts every non basic he sees through the first two packs and then takes all the overpowered spells in the last pack. How he actually gets it to work consistently is beyond me.

Josh first picked a Stroke of Genius, Obviously not the power he was looking to open but a decent pick either way. 2nd he takes a Time Spiral and then follows that up with a third pick Mongrel. Josh seemed to be settling into a blue/green beat down tempo deck with his third pick Erhnam. Next he takes a Tangle Wire and then is fed a very late 5th pick Ruhk Egg. Because of the errata mentioned above, Rukh Egg is extremely broken and combos well with a lot of other cube cards such as Survival and Genesis. 6th Josh is fed another gift, an extremely late Stormbind. 7th he gets Skyshroud Elf. 8th Ice Storm. 9th he takes a Beast Attack. 10th pick he gets an unbelievably late Llanowar Elf, a staple in cube where acceleration is key. Many even first pick the Elf in this format. 11th he gets a Ravenous Baboons and his last picks are Ancient Hydra, Plow Under and last pick Stone Rain. So much for my prediction on the archetypes he might play. You know a draft is going your way when you can happily play your 3rd to 15th picks - NUTS!

Josh opens on colour Mox Emerald in his 2nd pack. Lee, on Josh’s left looks very content with his pack, he’s all smiles. Lee definitely opened power as Josh is fed a 2nd pick Wheel of Fortune. Josh's deck is looking very, very good at this point. His land destruction could prove to be too much for the rest of the field to overcome. 3rd pick Josh has a choice of Smoke Stack, Genesis and Call of the Herd. Josh opts to take the Smoke Stack, the same decision I would have made, however it really hurts to see the other two go by as Josh would have loved all three for his deck. His next pick was a Volcanic Hammer and 4th he takes a Aeolipile. 5th he jacks the always aggressive Jackal Pup. 6th pick Arc Lightning and 7th a personal favourite of both Josh and I, Kamahl, Pit Fighter. The 8th pick Josh made was a Restock. Josh’s deck is really coming together. He doesn’t really even need to see the last pack. 9th he takes Rishidan Port. 10th pick he takes the Creeping Mold over a Harvester Druid and Land Grant. 11th he happily takes a City of Solitude. 12th pick sees a Su-Chi. Another card that had been errata'ed for cube play, though this one isn’t nearly as broken as the first. Bottle Gnomes and Wrath of God fill out his picks.

Screams of “wow” and “gas” come from Josh’s right hand side when Jamie opens his third pack. It’s going to be interesting to see the contents of that pack. This could be another extremely good 2nd pick for Mr. Rider. Josh’s first pick in the third pack was Fork. To Josh’s dismay, Jamie’s pack was nuts but contained nothing for Josh. Force of Will, Treachery, Mana Drain, Forbid, Yagmoth’s Will, Prophetic Bolt, headline the pack. The pack is extremely deep with plenty of other strong picks. Jamie’s pick turned out to be Time Walk. Josh shrugs and hates the Force of Will. 3rd pick Josh takes a Seedtime, 4th pick Wasteland, 5th Josh takes Kaervek’s Torch, over a Skizzik and Rancor, 6th takes a Rofellos over an Urza’s Rage. Next he takes a River Boa. With Josh’s 8th pick of the third pack he takes a Rampant Growth, 9th out of the Mox pack he gets really late Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary , and then 10th a Taiga. 11th he takes a Hull Breach, 12th Artifact Mutation, 13th Karplusan Forest (so late!) 14th Earthquake and 15th pick Fires of Yavamaya. Josh can definitely win with this deck. Let’s just see if he can keep it TIGHT!

Josh’s Deck List:
Some Forests
Taiga
Karplusan Forest
Rishadan Port
Wasteland
Mox Emerald
Jackal Pup
Llanowar Elves
Wild Mongrel
River Boa
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
Skyshroud Elf
Erhnam Djinn
Ravenous Baboons
Rukh Egg
Some Mountains
Kamahl, Pit Fighter
Kaervek’s Torch
Ancient Hydra
Beast Attack
Artifact Mutation
Fork
Plow Under
Arc lightning
Ice Storm
Stone Rain
Smoke Stack
Tangle Wire
Wheel of Fortune
Stone Rain

This installment by Christian Antonescu. Up next round one match coverage!