My second World Magic Cup has come and gone and boy it was a mixed bag. Team Ireland made day two for a second time but my teammate Dave Wolfe was very controversially Disqualified in Round 6. I have a lot to say about this but I don’t want to get too much into it here. If you’re interested in the ins and outs of the situation, I’ve gone over it in detail on the Cardhoarder podcast this week which you can find here – https://www.cardhoarder.com/podcast . This report is going to try and stay positive and focus on the other aspects of team Ireland’s trip to Nice, France.

Let’s start with how the team came together. Michele Gravina was our captain this year; he won the race by beating me by a single point, even travelling to Grand Prix Vegas to get those precious Pro Points. We were on last year’s team together and got along really well. I was always happy to lose the captaincy to someone like him, he really earned it and I felt he was always going to try his best come World Magic Cup time. I, as you may already know from my previous articles, won Nationals and Dave Wolfe came second. I was excited Dave was on the team for two main reasons; Firstly he is honestly a really nice guy, I know him from our local game store and he’s super easy to get on with and talk to about Magic. Secondly I think he’s a very good up and coming player in the country, and being in a smaller Magic nation, without RPTQS and GPs, it can be hard to get guys like him competitive magic experience. Another big bonus for this team is that we were all Dublin based and lived reasonably close to the local gaming shop, so it was easy for us all to come in a few times in the run up for full days of testing.

Testing itself was relatively uneventful. Like most teams we figured a pretty common configuration would be Sultai, Red and an UW deck, either a control variant or God Pharaoh’s Gift. So this became our base line and we took some time to learn these decks while testing out some other combinations. We were always very set on Dave Wolfe being on UW GPG, as he had played the deck before and with abrade only being able to be played by 1 of 3 decks we were confident that it was a good choice. Michele was our resident midrange specialist so he went about trying a bunch of different non-Temur energy based decks. I tried a few aggro variants to try let us play Temur in our line up, most notable being mono black which I ended up not liking. We never really came close to changing the lineup, the only real change we were considering was playing Verdurous Gearhulks in the Sultai deck. With less Temur floating around it felt like this could have been a good choice, it makes the deck more aggressive and you’re less likely to come up against Abrade or Whirler Virtuoso. We ended up erring on the side of caution and went with the more traditional Scarab God. Of note, the Northern Irish team did play Gearhulks in their Sultai build and were very happy with the results. Being so sure about our standard decks early gave us a lot of time to play and discuss the limited format, but as it happened we didn’t really need it. We built sealed pools every time we met up but not many of them were challenging. It’s a tribal set and decks like Vampires, Merfolk and Pirates have strong commons and uncommons pulling you into their archetypes. The only pools that ended up interesting were the bad ones where it was hard to salvage 3 decent decks or even 2 strong ones and then try to figure out how your remaining terrible deck wins games. We locked in our decks, confident we were unable to find anything substantially better than our base line decks and confident in limited.

We traveled over on the Thursday morning, choosing not to go to the GP the week before (Dave couldn’t get time off and I preferred to go to a QOTSA gig). We had a transfer in Amsterdam but it was a short trip that I slept most of. Nice itself was beautiful, there was a picturesque view of the mountains around the city. The city was really unique and stunning, while I didn’t get to see too much of it, it seems like one of the nicer cities that magic has brought me to. If you follow me on twitter you would have seen that I think that our accommodation was something right out of a Wes Anderson movie. It was on top of a big hill (which was a killer coming back up every night), it was a hotel from the 1940’s, with old timey elevators and high ceilings with big white columns. Joking aside it was lovely and had a stunning view of the city and sea. We headed to the venue to have our pictures taken and sign in. I was outspoken last year about how bad the venue was but I couldn’t be happier about the venue this time around. Easy to get to, pleasant, spacious and close to food, we couldn’t ask for more. We chilled out for a while, chatting to staff and other competitors before hunting for some dinner. Not having done our homework before hand, we didn’t know that most restaurants don’t open until around 7:30 in France so we settled for some street food which ended up being pretty excellent. Overall our spirits were high and we were ready to battle on Friday.

Day 1:

Our pool was awesome. We ended up with good removal, bombs in the shape or Charging Monstrosaur, Rivers Rebuke and Sanctum Seeker. We also had three distinct and very typical archetypes. I was on Vampires with a pretty perfect curve, double deacon and the seeker. Dave Wolfe was given UB Pirates, splashing the Monstrosaur which also had triple Pirates Cutlass. Finally Michele was on UG Merfolk which was missing some of the better 2 drops but had double Vineshaper Mystic and River Heralds Boon. Michele’s deck was also a bit short on removal but he did have Rebuke and Tempest Caller to make up for it. We were happy and confident but that, of course, means  we got crushed in the first round. Dave Wolfe mulliganed to oblivion in his games and I got ground out by some big dinos that matched up well against my creatures. I also think that I could have played game two way better but, that said, I’m not sure I could have won anyway. We were brought back down to reality in round 1 but managed to get extremely lucky in round 2 and get the coveted bye. Teams only needed 4 wins to progress to day two so having one fourth of your wins fall into your lap like that is just as sweet as it sounds. We managed a close win in round 3. Wolfe didn’t really get to play Magic because of mulligans and floods again, I won a fairly uninteresting affair where vampires did what they do. So it came down to Michele winning his game three against a mono black removal deck. He played very well and set up exactly lethal off a Rivers Rebuke when an opponent tapped out. We went to lunch happy enough with a 2-1 but did think our pool could have easily went 3-0.

Back from lunch we lost our first match of standard to Australia (Who also got us last year!). I went down to mono black with a little subpar play by me, Wolfe beat mono red without much of a fuss but Michele lost a close one to four colour energy. We needed to win 2 of the next 3 rounds which is a big ask and we didn’t want to leave it up to tiebreakers in the last round. We quickly bounced back with a win next round but I cannot remember for the life of me what the match ups were. Then came the dreaded round 6 against Argentina, Michele and I went down a game quickly and at the same time we went down an entire player – Dave Wolfe got DQed (again, check out the podcast if you want the full details on that story). The only thing I’ll say here is that the DQ was incredibly harsh and I still stand by Dave and think that he was not intentionally cheating. So both me and Michele were incredible angry and behind a game, we both ended up rallying back to win 2-1 each, Michele against UW Cycling and me against Mono Black. This was an incredible but awful feeling, both me and Michele managed to take both boarded games against bad match ups to progress, but we knew day 2 would be nearly impossible and Dave just went through something horrible that I know I wouldn’t be able to recover well from. I’m still taking it badly and I’m not even the one that received the DQ. We went straight home without looking for food, we were all still very mad and just wanted the next day to start. While the atmosphere was now (way) down we were determined to show the world and still make a top 8 run.

Day 2:

Our defiant anger didn’t last that long. We went down 2-1 vs. America in the first round, not the kind of team you want to give the head start to. Then we lost our elimination round to Guatemala. There isn’t too much to be said about either rounds, I’m not sure if there was any way we could have turned the losses into wins and we were always going be way behind going into these rounds. The other guys understandably went back to the apartment to hang out and de-stress, I stayed at the venue to play some side drafts and eat an unreasonable amount of pizza as my “being sad at a magic event” ritual calls for. We went for a nice dinner after (we were now getting how French restaurants work) with DJ, one of the members of the Northern Irish team, and it felt great to be able to talk trash about magic and enjoy the city a little.

Day 3:

This was the most important part of the trip by far. We crushed Northern Ireland in our traditional North vs. South WMC team draft! It wasn’t even close to being close. The highlight of these games was Dean Covery drawing 7 off an Overflowing Insight and our Captain Michele still cruising to a win with Dinos beatdowns. There wasn’t much to do after this, we brought some of the Northern team to get some of the great street food we’d had on Thursday and we all parted ways for different flights home. Unfortunately Michele and Dave got their flights cancelled for weather reasons and man that would have killed me, when a Magic event is done I just want to be home instantly.

I’m proud of how we did under the circumstances and how we prepared. It feels like we could have made a solid run at day two but its something we just have to put behind us now. With Dave losing out on his pro points and Michele getting less than I did out of the event because he was captain, I’m in a decent position to make captain next year. We have had 2 strong teams and as yet have failed to make it as far as we wanted so hopefully we can push even further next year. With the changes to Nationals and the really amazing location and venue this year I am extremely excited for the prospect of next year and another chance to help the Irish shine!