Sigh... the Magic tournament tonight was pretty depressing. I won one round, lost three, and didn't bother to stay for the fifth. Losing's never fun, obviously, but this tournament felt worse than the last few of this format, even though my win/loss record was pretty similar. It seems like this may be as good as my deck will get.

The types of decks other people come with don't help, either. I mean, I've come up with a quirky, original deck that evolved over the course of more than a year* and I go to a game night and half the people there are playing several-hundred-dollar decks based closely on the winning pros. So what happens? I get squished, of course.

The bright side is, I think I came away from tonight with quite a few good ideas, or at least, quite a few things to try. Is Compulsive Research just a "win more" card for me? Do I need more beatdown? More Leyline interaction? Better counterspells? More counterspells, or more ways to get rid of permanents?**

But if I make changes along those lines and they don't pan out in the next tournament or two, then I'll probably bow to the inevitable and put together a version of a net deck***, or just go to Constructed**** tournaments less often. Note that I came in sixth at a recent draft tournament out of 24, if I remember correctly, which was pretty damn cool. If every Constructed tournament is going to go like the past few have, then to hell with it, I can find better things to do with my time. The game is fun for its own sake of course, but the negatives have been adding up...

* Not to be dramatic. Except for tournaments I've only spent two hours or so working on it in as many months, but still, I have invested some creativity in it.

** I'm leaning towards "yes", "yes", "no", "maybe" and "permanent removal". As always, I'll have to wait and see. That's another annoying thing: I have few chances to play outside tournaments, so my playtesting is at the events themselves.

*** As in, based on a template found online, the way to see what the pros are doing.

**** That just means the format where people bring their own pre-made decks. As opposed to Limited, where you get a random bunch of cards at the event to make a deck from, or Draft, where everyone chooses their cards from the same pool of cards.

* Wow, that's a lot of parentheticals. This is a blog entry, not a dissertation. But, well, I don't know who reads this after updates became so spotty, so I shouldn't assume that it's my friends who play Magic: the Gathering.