This Saturday there was an EDH tournament held in Najada. I did not plan to go so we made a deal. If I would manage to get my hands on Dragonlord Ojutai before the tournament I would participate in it (thus meaning I would have to build a deck). After the Pro Tour it was almost impossible to get the card anywhere. Not only the price skyrocketed but no one was willing to let the card go. On Friday afternoon I went to Najada. I brought my laptop with me and decided to play a draft on MODO. It started pretty well - my first pick was Ojutai Exemplars. I drafted primarily white cards with some red ones. Douse in Gloom, Harsh Sustenance and Foul Renewal made it into the deck but I was usually siding out the black rare. I went 2-0 fast but there was one table that was still playing. After 30 minutes they finally finished game 1. At that time a Friday Night Magic draft was about to start. It was decided that I would play in it if they would be one player short. They needed the player in the end so I joined the event while still playing the online draft. I managed to win my online game 2-1 (should have been 2-0, but once I skipped my combat and lost because of that) and in the meantime pick some GW cards. Seriously I felt like a total idiot^_^. My paper deck was worse than the one I had online, it seemed pretty weak actually but I managed to win the first game somehow. My opponent had certainly better cards but not so much card advantage so I managed to achieve one through combat mostly and win even the second game. Next, I encountered more or less an anti-deck for my deck. It was a deck full of 2/4s, flyers and life gain. Hopefully for me I did not encounter too many of those 2/4s and I managed to get through those that hit the table thanks to Artful Maneuvers and Tread Upon. In the last round I played against Ondra who paid for my draft and who played UWg with 'small' Ojutai (I was on GWu with small Ojutai). Anyway I terribly died in game one and in game two I could beat him terribly but I couldn't draw a second source of white for a long time and the game wasn't looking good. It was either me or him drawing and playing Ojutai and the first one to play it would win.
After the event we got our rewards - 6 packs in total (4 for me, 2 for him). We took the packs and went to fetch something to eat. In the restaurant we met another Magic player so each of us opened 2 packs. I'm not sure what the first rare I opened was but the second one was UW card and with power and toughness 5/4. It was Dragonlord Ojutai which meant that the next day I'd have to participate in the EDH event. I keep my promises so a long night awaited me.
After that we still wanted to play some Magic so we played few games of Modern on MODO. I encountered mostly Tron decks but also played against Cruel Ultimatum deck (the end result was a draw). It seems that monoU Tron decks don't have a good matchup with Grixis Delver^_^.
After that I went home to build the Ojutai deck but it had to be postponed for quite some time. In the flat I found my flatmate looking horrible (seriously scared me to death). We agreed that calling an ambulance was the right thing to do. A bit later he was taken to nearby hospital (he looks better now). After they took care of my flatmate I returned back to my room and wondered what to do with the Ojutai deck. I haven't slept for several days probably because of my worries for my flatmate. He certainly did not look good and I hoped he would get better but that did not really happen, it just got worse. Things should be better though now, so hope he gets better soon. At almost 3 am I decided to put the deck together and not to think about bad things. I partly succeeded in both 'activities'. There were several cards I was missing and there were thoughts in my mind that were not really pleasant.
I went to sleep for a while before the tournament. The 'Red Alert' sound tried to wake me up some time later. I realized that I set the alarm on the latest time I should be getting up - meaning I should really just get up and run for the metro. I got up grabbed my deck and ran out of the flat. I managed to get in the store on time.
As for the tournament I went 3-1 somehow and I actually enjoyed playing with the deck a lot. I learned that no one really cared about Ojutai's Hexproof since my general was most of the time on the other side of the table or dead (in the command zone). In the end I decided not to even try to cast the card. The deck itself could win in other ways (thankfully).
The loss was against Tasigur High Tide. I hoped that Rest in Peace would help with Tasigur matchups. In my opinion Tasigur is broken and should be banned as soon as possible. Anyway I won one match against Tasigur deck because of RIP but I lost the Tasigur High Tide match. I did not plan on writing a report from this tournament but I can say this. Dragonlord Ojutai is a really great card and a perfect general for my deck. It is (supposedly) a win condition. It draws cards and blocks well and it is a threat which is quite important when playing against other control decks. Some decks don't really have a way how to deal with it. I added Helm of Obedience and Rest in Peace in the deck as a win condition. Mostly because I expected many Tasigurs and secondly because it allowed me to win in one turn and this actually happened more often than not (even with only three tutors in the deck).
The reason why I started writing this post is completely different though. Now you know the story behind how I got to play Dragonlord Ojutai EDH deck. The real story I wanted to share is the following.
For quite some time I wanted to shoot a Magic video. It was supposed to be a series of deck techs + actual games between the decks. The decks were supposed to be Mimeoplasm vs Karn and Grand Arbiter Augustin IV vs Marath, Will of the Wild. (One of the decks can be seen in action in one of my youtube videos)
So I tried setting up my table in a way so I could shoot a video showing my Dragonlord Ojutai (previously GAA) deck. The camera records in full HD and it drains the battery very fast and fills the memory card also very fast. When looking at the video I also noticed that it is hard to see or read the cards anyway (majority of them is in Japanese anyway). So I decided to try something different. I turned on a web camera and tried using that. The video itself was ok, a bit blurry and 'low-res' but the cards were seen more or less the same way. The audio though was horrible. So I put my deck aside grabbed my computer and imported the deck into MODO. I did the very same what I did with my deck earlier that evening/morning - I created piles of cards and placed them on the screen somewhere so I could talk about it (and not forget about it)
I set Camstudio to record audio from the microphone. I gave Dragonlord Ojutai yet another try. When exporting the file I lost the whole audio track due to (most probably because it reached over 2GB) some error. So I tried once again. This time I was recording the audio in another software. But in this attempt both the video and audio failed to save. I was quite frustrated because I already lost few hours of time and since that evening the screen capture worked fine (I was recording some games on MODO and those are saved with sound, 2 or 3 games in full HD). I decided to record ten minutes parts and put those together but that did not work out well either. So after few more attemps I set the video quality to something that was supposed to be only HD and record it once again.
The video quality is nowhere near HD or anything pretending to be HD...but it managed to save the file with both video and audio. So I just uploaded that. So anyway...the video itself is in Czech language so if you understand that language and you are not afraid of listening to me you can watch it. It is my first attempt of doing something like this and it is probably the longest speech I gave in the last few years. It was very difficult for me to express myself so there are sentences that hardly make sense. But I think I managed to introduce the deck a bit and you can see the decklist at least. So here's the video. If I ever try to do a new one..I will try to fix the video quality somehow (and make more sense as well^_^)
For those who do not understand czech language here's the decklist in a text form at least. It's an updated version of this (includes some explanation and card choices) -> http://stsu.blogspot.cz/2015/02/blue-white-control-in-french-edh.html
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Dragonlord Ojutai
by stsung
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