2016 Rally takes out the top seed, 2011 CawBlade

This is the first tournament that 4-color Rally has entered, so we didn’t know how it would stack up against the great decks. Cawblade had some bad luck, but Rally took advantage and crushed it.

G1: I’m playing CawBlade and right off the bat my first hand has no Stoneforge Mystic and no equipment. It has 2 lands, Jace, 3 hawks and a spell pierce. I shouldn’t keep this hand, but I find it hard to be picky about my 7 card hand in the very first game of a new matchup… it’s hard to know how the matchup will play out! So I keep. I play hawks and struggle to get the lands I need for Jace. I tech-edge his only green source but he bounces back quickly. By turn 7 he is attacking with weenies (elves) and has Grim Haruspex. I bounce the Grim back to his hand and block with hawks to kill some elves, but I’m down to 9 life. I finally find my 2nd island, by which time I have 2 Jace in hand so I play a Jace #1 which he promptly kills. Buys me a turn. But Jace #2 doesn’t do anything for me either, I can’t find anything to turn the tide. The attacking Nantuko Husk and Catacomb Sifters beat me down since I really wasn’t doing anything other than playing hawks. Both decks kind of felt like they were malfunctioning, but his guys were bigger. Spell Pierce was useless against all his creature spells.

G2: A game I lost because of outrageous luck. I keep a weird hand with swords but no creatures. Turn 3 I hard cast a sword. Turn 4 I hard cast the other sword. Later he gets a cutthroat out and tries to play a 2nd one, but I have mana leak for the 2nd one. Turn 7 I finally draw a hawk and immediately equip it with protection from red and white. On his turn he untaps and plays Collected Company which finds 2x Reflector Mage, but the Hawk is safe with the sword. Later I get 2 swords on a hawk and I’m untapping lands after combat and gaining life and having a swell time, he has very few outs. I’m at 16 life after gaining 6. There are some scenarios where he can do 15 damage to me, and I ponder them but I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine with 3 other hawks left to block. Well, he draws a cutthroat, then plays it and collected company, and finds another cutthroat and the husk he needs to sac creatures with 3 cutthroats out! He found all 4 cutthroats in one game. The extraordinary luck of getting all 3 of those cards on the final turn astounds me, or at least it would’ve astounded me, if I hadn’t been on my back staring lifeless at the sky.

G3: I finally see my first Stoneforge Mystic, but it’s a 1 land hand. Still, I have preordain so I decide to keep. Things go well, I get the mystic out on turn 2 but reflector mage bounces it. T4 I play sword. T5 I can play Mystic again to get the other sword. (The reflector mages make Batterskull less reliable.) But when he plays CoCo, he finds a Husk and a Cutthroat. Ugh. I’m at 8 life and haven’t even equipped a sword yet. Stuck on 3 land. I finally equip the mystic but I can’t afford to attack with my only creature. He plays another Husk and another Cutthroat and I die to Zulaport triggers. Rally wins 3-0.

I probably would win this matchup every time I got to T3 with a Mystic in play. But that never happened. The bad mulligan decision game 1 really haunted me, but I certainly didn’t expect a 0-3 loss. I think the thing is, CawBlade can be a bit slow (when it doesn’t have T4 attacking Batterskull) and that just gives Rally time to find combo pieces. The namesake card, Rally the Ancestors, was never even cast.

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