More (Red) Rocks?

I actually had to look back to see if I had already posted about 2009’s Vegas V:TES qualifier.  So, 2010’s is coming up, weekend after DunDraCon, and I am not clear on whether I should plan on going or not.

If I did go, though, what would I imagine the metagame to be like?  As stated in my March 1, 2009 post, the miniqualifier was vote heavy and the qualifier was bleedier.  Come back to this in a moment.

The first thing I can do is dispense with set impact.  Far as I’m aware, Heirs won’t be legal.  Ebony Kingdoms is too specific a set to have meaningful impact.  So, that leaves the last meaningful set being KoT, which I’m sure people are still digesting.  Some cards from it that might finally get some stage time might include:  Horseshoes, Loki’s Gift, Old Friends, serious use of Rego Motus.  I could say that three out of four of those are cards that I would have played much more often back in the day when I built a high volume of decks.  Well, maybe not Horseshoes.  I wonder why I don’t hear more about Loki’s Gift, the evil zen robot of V:TES (assuming you ignore ultrarare weapon hosers).

So, it should be a pretty well defined metagame.  Well, it would be if there was such a thing with V:TES that mattered.

Bleed, vote, or combat?

I would imagine it might be fairly similar this time around.  Of course, it could just as easily flip, with bleed being the miniqualifier threat and vote trying to take the qualifier as people try to outthink … well, nothing really.  With only one qualifier in the first event, I expect the same sort of experimentation that cropped up in 2009.  I could see more combo decks and more questionable strategies, like rush, in the miniqualifier.

With the love for Parity Shift these days, there needs to be some answer for vote even if the qualifier ends up being well-suited for copious amounts of bounce.

Weenies?

How much do I fear weenie Auspex or Animalism?  Too much.  Especially the former produces such horrid matchups.  Still, I can’t see any sort of deck I would want to play being able to beat weenie Auspex, so I should probably just ignore it and look at ways to improve the weenie Animalism matchup while having some thought for surviving a weenie bleed predator.

Mesagaming

That’s not misspelled.  If metagaming is looking at the environment, I’m going to pretend mesagaming means looking within.  If I go, I would imagine I’d play something to my tastes, which likely means something that doesn’t stand up well to any particular focused archetype.

The reality is that I just like hanging around with other gamers and being in the crossregional milieu, whether I’m relevant to it or not.  It doesn’t hurt, though, to get more tournament play in, especially outside of the region.  And, lots of ideas always come from events like these, not that I followed up much, if at all, on the ideas that came out of last year’s trip.