My LGS has a store champions league thing they do on a regular basis where you can qualify based on points earned or by winning a qualifying event in constructed or limited. Because I spiked a lot of FNM Ravnica Allegiance drafts this season (for whatever reason I was very proficient with Orzhov Aggro) I found myself in contention to qualify for this thing on points so against my better judgement I went back to my old grinder days and participated in the limited qualifying event which was War of the Spark sealed.
During deck registration I sorted all of my cards by color, quantity, and alphabetically so it would be easy for the person I was paired with during deck building to check that I had reported my pool correctly. They handed me a pile of cards. congratulations you just played yourself.gif
My round 1 opponent went deep in the tank during game 1 several times and won after ~30 minutes of excruciating play. In game 2 I actually drew one of my win conditions early (Ashiok, Dream Render) and proceeded to savage their deck. I later played a Sarkhan the Masterless, used his +1 loyalty ability to turn Ashiok, Dream Render into a dragon, swung in for a good chunk of damage, then stated that I'd be activating Ashiok, Dream Render's -1 loyalty ability in my second main. My opponent refuses to believe that my dragon can use loyalty abilities and we have to wait for a judge to explain that I can do something that's plainly stated in Gatherer (iirc). I win that game and we have maybe 8 or 9 minutes left in the round. In game 3 we both do a whole lot of nothing until my opponent finally draws into gas at the end of the round. We go to turns and apparently it was mildly entertaining for people to watch me go digging with Tamiyo's Epiphany twice. My opponent doesn't get over the hump by turn 5 but would have won if we hadn't gone to turns. My opponent then asks if I would be willing to concede which I wasn't. (Normally I would entertain such a request
because I try not to be the person I used to be but I felt like my opponent angle shot a lot that game and / or thought they were Seth Manfield.)
I finally took a loss in round 3 to a fellow #TaxPro who I draft with regularly, then conceded to another person I draft with regularly so that they could make top 8. They qualified and I'm probably going to be their Modern player because the champions league thing is a Team Trios constructed event and the limited crew doesn't interact with the constructed crew outside of prereleases so they don't know any Modern or Type 1.5 players.
