Welcome to a very special edition of our Quick Questions. This time, I asked our video crew what matches they enjoyed the most during the ten hours of streaming they did yesterday. Without further ado, here are their highlights:
Matej Zatlkaj: "The most interesting match was Reid Duke against Jasper Grimmer; it was super intense. It's easily the best one we saw yesterday!"
Simon Görtzen: "I'm with Matej on this one. The match of Reid against Jasper was a great watch. Nothing came close in my opinion."
Frank Karsten: "We saw Lukas Blohon with a turn five Dragonlord Atarka, he killed three creatures with it and it was the biggest blowout I've seen in a long time! That happened in the last round and he locked up Day 2 for his team with it."
Tim Willoughby: "Matteo [Orsini Jones] hosts a weekly podcast about Magic (tbepodcast.com). His brother Marco and their friend Daniel Gardner haven't been playing for around three years. All three of them have Pro Tour experience, so they aren't bad players, they are just not very experienced in the format.
Left to right: Frank Karsten, Matej Zatlkaj
"Basically, Matteo sat in the middle, trying desperately to keep the other two on track. They had a match against Ben Stark, Huey Jensen, and Reid Duke. Matteo wins, but he had around four or five turns where he forgot that his creature had flying and he could have finished the game much earlier. So that was quite something to watch."
Here is a quote from the team that Tim shared: "If it reaches the draft stages, we don't quite know what's going to happen. Dan might be forced to play Blue-Black, simply because he knows the most cards from those colors as he played them yesterday."
A funny bonus story courtesy of Tim: "Both Marco and Matteo speak fluent Italian. They had a match against an Italian team and their opponents freely discussed a lot of their play decisions, apparently thinking no one would understand a word. So throughout the game, the Italians casually discussed their plays and Marco and Matteo had to chuckle quite a few times and try not to give away that they were understanding what their opponents were saying.
"The match got to a point where one Italian player drew a card and his friend immediately said: 'You can't cast that card.'
"So combat happens and Matteo assigns blockers, feeling good about his decisions, and then post combat, the Italians drop a land and cast the spell they just drew. Which immediately wins them the game. So they had actually leveled the Orsini Joneses. For the entire duration of the match, they tricked the British team into thinking that they revealed information when, in fact, they only fed them misinformation."
Talk about mindgaming your opponent!
Steven Leeming: "As a proud Brit myself, I was also very happy to see Daniel Gardner and Matteo and Marco Orsini Jones doing well.
I'm afraid we can't link to this particular match just yet, but you can check it out later once Day 2 becomes available in the Twitch archive.