THE RED STATE WINS WITH RED

   

Fort Worth/Dallas Texas held the largest Grand Prix in the history of Magic: The Gathering events; 2,019 players have shown up with their Modern format decks to play their way into one of  the top 8 spots.

    

Corey Burkhart has made a name for himself in the past using his Grixis control deck, which helped him to go undefeated with a 14 win and 0 loss standing: pretty impressive! Corey even took down Michael Mei's Infect deck in the semifinals. One more win and he would have beaten every single deck with no loss in one weekend. He made it to the finals and faced one more player in his attempt to take home the trophy and prizes.

Kevin Mackie, a native Texan, made a surprising appearance in the top 8. He brought with him his mono-red “Skred red” deck, an aggressive powerhouse featuring Infect and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.

As the final game drew to a close, Corey Burkhart was left facing a pretty powerful planeswalker: Koth of the Hammer. Corey tried to find a counter spell for Koth but it failed. Next, Corey looked to his “Ancestral Vision”, which also failed and just gave him three lands instead of something useful to keep alive. The only thing left to do was put out Tasigur, the Golden Fang, which was quickly taken out by Skred. Then Kevin made Koth go ultimate. His ultimate ability, if you’re not familiar is:

• −5: You get an emblem with "Mountains you control have ‘: This land deals 1 damage to target creature or player.'"

While the judges and players looked around the feature table for an emblem to represent Koths ultimate, Corey Burkhart had a better idea. He grabbed the trophy with a smile on his face and handed it to Kevin saying “Congratulations”.

Here are their decks, in case you are interested in what cards they used.

Kevin Mackie’s deck:

Planeswalker (5)

4 Koth of the Hammer

1 Chandra, Torch of Defiance

Creature (8)

3 Pia and Kiran Nalaar

3 Stormbreath Dragon

2 Eternal Scourge

Witchcraft (3)

3 Anger of the Gods

Instant (9)

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Skred

1 Magma Jet

Artifact (10)

1 Pyrite Spellbomb

4 Relic of Progenitus

4 Mind Stone

1 Batterskull

Enchantment (3)

3 Blood Moon

Terra (22)

20 Snow-Covered Mountain

2 Scrying Sheets

Corey Burkhart’s deck:

Creature (7)

4 Snapcaster Mage

3 Tasigur, the Golden Fang

Sorcery (8)

4 Ancestral Vision

4 Serum Visions

Instant (22)

2 Countersquall

4 Cryptic Command

3 Kolaghan's Command

4 Lightning Bolt

2 Spell Snare

3 Terminate

4 Thought Scour

Artifact (1)

1 Engineered Explosives

Terra (22)

1 Blood Crypt

2 Creeping Tar Pit

3 Island1 Mountain

4 Polluted Delta

4 Scalding Tarn

1 Spirebluff Canal

2 Steam Vents

1 Sulfur Falls

1 Swamp

2 Watery Grave

As always, thanks for reading my blog!

Modern Flashbacks

Hi fellow readers, I am back and refreshed from my vacation. I had a wonderful time hanging out with my family and playing magic with some of them.

I never knew about this before, but there is a flashback Modern tournament for the online community of Magic the Gathering players. The idea behind the year of Modern flashback is to give players, who haven't played Magic as long as some of the most experienced ones, a chance to play with sets they haven't played before. They started off with the oldest Modern legal set (8th edition) and moved forward each week with a different set, except for when pre-release and new standard sets are released.

As of right now they're on break for the Eldritch Moon set and will kick off again on August 17th, 2016 with Zendikar. All of the formats are draft, so event  tickets and play points are required to enter. Also note that instead of 14 Event Tickets or 140 Play Points like current drafts, these will allow you to enter with just 10 Event Tickets or 100 Play Points. If you have booster packs in your online collection for the particular set they are doing for that week, they will let you enter with those booster packs and 2 event tickets, only if you have 3 booster packs of that set.

The rounds are single elimination of 3 rounds with a 10 minute deck building time, each round being 50 minutes long. The prizes for each week are as follows: 1st place will get 200 play points, 2nd place will get 100 plays points and 3rd-4th place will get 50 play points.

As always, thanks for reading my blog!