Rachel's Road to Atlanta! Day 12
Today is Monday which means another weekend of tournament results and more decks (or variations of the same ones) to test against.
Today we started testing Bo3 again in preparation for the Set Tournaments this weekend and next. There was a 300+ tournament on Pixelborn this weekend so Josh put together the top list and I played Jafar v2.5!
The top list was Pawpsicle, and I’ll attach an image of the deck list below. We have played against Pawpsicle before, and last time found it was a match that was in Jafar’s favour. This time though, a combination of me being a bit off from a headache from a long drive, allergies, and just being tired caused me to play more cautiously than I had before, and that caution lost me the first couple games.
Lesson learned. Don’t be cautious.
Josh and I discussed our strategy for this matchup with Josh pointing out that I was doing much better when I approached the match with confidence. There is nothing in Pawpsicle that can take cards from my hand like there is in Singers or Ursula which means my Jafar combo pieces are safe until I go for the combo. In Pawpsicle, there are few early game aggressive plays meaning I have time to position my combo before I go off. Pawpsicle does have a lot of late game removal, most noteably Be Prepared’s, which means that once they get there card advantage engine running it’s hard to keep characters in play. With that in mind I started to make decisions that prioritized the Jafar + A Whole New World combo as Plan A, and Castles as Plan B.
Thoughts
I am getting better at remembering my triggers, especially when I play slow. Playing open hand often has me talking through so many different options that when I eventually decide what I am going to do I forget about the other cards on the field. I also think more games and more triggers has helped. I find Jafar a little complicated to play with a couple different How To Win strategies in it. In the past when I played these kind of decks in Magic or Pokemon, this play style would not have worked for me. The pressure of knowing which out of the variety of options was the best in the moment would have driven me mad and given me a migraine. Things change and I like Jafar a lot. The fact that there is more than one way to win with the deck is nice and the options are making me learn how to be better player. I am really appreciative of all the help Josh is giving me to get me ready for my first big tournament.
The deck also plays like one of Josh’s favourite Magic decks (Storm!). The fact that this is a play style that he loves too really helps. I can now see why he loves it so much.
Anyways… onto how to play, how to win, and how the first couple of matches went.
How To Play and How to Win
First thing to ask is “How Do I Win This Game?”. I wanted to start this section with how to Mulligan, because that’s the first thing you do, but knowing how you plan on winning informs all the decisions leading up to it.
The best way that Jafar wins against Pawpsicle is the combo. Pawpsicle is slow to set up, it has board sweepers and removal that Jafar has to recover from, but it goes through a lot of their deck and will have answers in the late game. Pawpsicle is the better late game deck, so Jafar has to win before it gets there.
Next step is know what you need to win, which is Jafar - Striking Illusionist and A Whole New World. It would be nice to have Jafar - Dreadnaught, Blue Fairy and another singer, but the big Jafar and A Whole New World are key.
Finally, we can move onto mulligan decisions. Since we know we need Jafar and A Whole New World to win, we mulligan away everything that is not that (if we have a Dreadnaught in the hand I’d keep that too).
After that we ink things to get up to the combo. Little Cinderella can be inked early game, so can Little Robin Hood if we do not have Big Robin Hood. The ideal order of operations here is:
T1: Nothing or Little Robin Hood
T2: Blue Fairy
T3: Big Robin Hood or another Blue Fairy
T4: Jafar - Dreadnaught
T5: Big Jafar and A Whole New World or Robin Hood
T6: Big Jafar and sing A Whole New World once or twice!
That ideal set up did not happen, and Be Prepared can happen early in this match, so it’s important to not unload your hand and be cardless. Maui and anyone else can answer a Queen’s Castle, so playing Queen’s Castle after the Be Prepared destroys every character is the back up plan here.
Match 1: I lost both games. It was a mixture of playing too conservatively, second guessing myself, and a lack of card draw that did me in here. I was feeling tired and headachy which was making me play too meekly. The lack of card draw made me feel stuck and that nothing was coming together. So though in the moment I felt it was a bad hand and not being able to bounce back from the Be Prepared that did me in, I realize now that I might have lost the game then, but I had not set myself up to win before it got to that point.
Match 2: I won the first and last game, and lost the second. The first game I played castle after castle after castle after Josh played Be Prepared and that was a hard thing for Josh to deal with. The second game just went too late. Pawpsicle is a great late game deck and has many, many answers. Most of those answers are high costed cards, but after the Be Prepared my hand had a number of night costed cards in it and I was unable to get two cards out a turn. This meant that any piece of Ruby removal could remove my one character and I was always behind. Game three I went into the combo and won.
Match 3: Match 3 went the opposite of Match 1. I won both games here because of the Jafar Combo and a more assertive/aggressive play style on my part. I stopped asking “How Do I Not Loose?” and started asking “How Do I Win/How Do I win this turn?”. This worked much better. The last game I got a little too excited though and I tried to combo off too fast. Luckily, I still won, but I had the win in my hand in the form of Jafar singing Friends on the other side, which would have put me to 14 Lore, and then have Beast sing A Whole New World. But, I had already declared Jafar would sing A Whole New World and I did not draw any other card draw! I survived and quested the next turn. At least I saw it myself, and hopefully I will look for it in the future when I am playing!
Match Results: I won 4/7 games, which, based on the Bo3 game rules, would put me at 6 points.
We are streaming these testing games on Twitch when we do them, and I’m sure they will go on YouTube if you are interested in checking them out! They are less tournament style, and more lets go through all the thought process and possibilities and figure out how to play the decks the best. I’m finding it very helpful talking through everything, and if you’re interested in learning how to be a better deck pilot there might be some helpful tips in these videos for you too!
Anyways, that’s it for now!