So, I’ve been tinkering with Merfolk as a standard deck for the last month or so. I was having a fair amount of success with my U/W/B Reveillark deck prior to the M10 rotation until the deck lost Wrath of God, Windborn Muse and a couple of other cards. It was really having trouble beating aggro decks when the Wrath-like effect had to be a turn later. I liked the idea of Merfolk because it could play an aggro game backed up by counter magic, thereby making it a seemingly better choice than say Kithkin. Basically Merfolk gives more opportunity to out-play the opponent than most aggressive decks. Anyway, Steve Tuck and I have been working on the deck and playtesting it intermittently over the last few weeks, concluding with some testing on Friday evening.

Saturday morning saw Damien and I driving into the city to try our chances at winning an invite to the next Pro Tour. The tournament was at Good Games in Melbourne and 80 hopeful players turned up. Below is the final list I played on the day. It’s slightly different even to the final version we had on Friday — for some reason I made a snap decision while registering my deck to replace Ethersworn Canonist and Sleep in my sideboard with Meddling Mage and Glen Elendra Archmage. This turned out to be lucky as both of these were useful sideboard cards on the day.

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I finally decided on this version of the Ranger Zoo deck for the Extended PTQ:

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Last Sunday was Victorian States. Around 65 players battling it out in a standard tournament at Melbourne High School. I ended up playing the Kithkin deck I’ve been tweaking over the last year (it only gets better with Path to Exiles!). I had spent the week before working on a couple of new deck ideas with Steve. We ended up with a pretty great black/red Rogues and Goblins deck that I played on the Saturday at the store in Frankston. This didn’t have quite the reach or aggression of the Kithkin deck though (due in large part to Windbrisk Heights), so I went with Kithkin instead.

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Last Saturday was the Melbourne Pro Tour Qualifier for PT Berlin. So, along with 76 other hopeful players from around Victoria (and Tasmania and Adelaide), I braved the early morning cold for a 9am start at Card Heaven in Windsor. The format was Block Constructed (Lorwyn and Shadowmoor block). I was playing the Kithkin deck I’d been playing and tweaking for the last few months. I’d played it to win a Standard tourney at the store in Frankston 2 months ago, before Eventide. That was fun, because noone thought Kithkin mono white was strong enough at that time. I’d also played it and won another small standard tournament, again at the store in Frankston last week, so I was quietly confident. I knew the deck was strong and I was very comfortable playing it.

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