Still doing single-elim, but now best-of 5, with sideboarding starting game 3. This is also the beginning of my new approach to seeds and challengers: I research decklists and put together a queue of decks from different years, so that there will almost always be a deck for each past year of magic entering the first round. (I couldn’t make up my mind on a few decks so I added a preliminary round as well.) Round one matches were randomly assigned, with the exception of not allowing any decks within a year of each other to battle. Then they moved on to the seeded decks. So, it’s random and unfair who those decks play in round two – could be the top seed, could be the 16th seed – but the idea is we have no way of ranking these new challengers, so we don’t. We just throw them to the wolves.

The third seed was Bargain, which lost to the discard spells of Solar Flare. Solar Flare, Angelfire, and Temur Marvel were the big surprises of the tournament, making it to the quarterfinals.

Winner: 2012 Delver
Runner-Up: 2011 CawBlade

Delver gets retired to the Hall of Fame now that it has won TWO tournaments that I participated in.