Pro Tour Amonkhet Finals: Gerry Thompson vs. (22) Yuuya Watanabe 

BlackDragonWave Yuuya is the man

plz don't spoil the result in the comments

@@simoo1 Don't read the comments before watching the video lol

A huge win not just for Gerry, but also for the MTG community. Imagine if someone who turned out to be a *cheat* had won the Pro Tour. 😖

Played him at the star ciry game store hes actually a colassal dick with a huge ego

@@ziegfeld4131 Lol. Gerry is one of the nicest people on the planet.

Bro, condering Yuuya turned out to be a *cheat* and has been expelled from the Hall of Fame, I gotta say your comment has aged like a fine wine! Gerry was indeed the best recipient of the trophy. 🙏

lol?

Jose Maria Luis Partosa same

I agree on many points, just adding that the editing still sucks. You miss so many plays because they cut to a camera on someones face, they don't know how to do picture in picture?:s

Daniel Nadeau Also pretty nice the award ceremony is in the same video as the finals, as duration of the video is not a spoiler anymore

The corporate behaviour of WOTC has always bothered me but I guess it is what it is... In fact, I'm always bothered by corporate behaviour (those damned top 0.01%! *shakes fist*) I remember Pro Tour BFZ, there was ZERO cards from that set in Standard (just Gideon, Ally of Zendikar) and the coverage team was trying their best to be as insightful as possible at all times, YET no one dared to make a comment on the OBVIOUS, which was that BFZ had zero impact on standard and that allies and eldrazi were a Limited gimmick.

You do have to keep in mind that the Pro Tour is basically just a giant advertisement, especially for the newest set. That's going to affect the coverage.

That's true, all the staff and equipment is a high investment from their part to promote the new set. But as a fan who is going to play the new set anyway, I watch it for entertainment only. It's how the world works, it's like watching your favorite film on TV, you have to put up with ads.

"you once an RB"

Is that Yuuya's name? lol

Gondwana XD yep

Ulama, geese of hunger

almond cat

I'm fairly certain those are Legion Double Matte sleeves, hopefully you've found them in the 4 years since you left this comment. Cheers

Not casting censor I think was also pretty bad

Andres Gonzalez you can block with as many creatures as you want on any numbers of creatures you want, even more than one on one attacker. But the thing to remember is that your opponent decides where they want the damage to go on your blocking creatures.

They're Legion sleeves if I'm correct. Go to their site and look under either matte or gloss sleeves. They should be there.

Awesome, thanks a ton.

Joseph Ginnett Geeez, when were they $4 ?

They were 5-6$ late eldritch moon, early kaladesh.

Standard decks don’t perform that badly against fair modern decks

Some people will shuffle their sideboards into their decks then take out 15 cards to conceal how much they are siding in.

I've seen a lot of people attribute the dominance of Mardu vehicles solely to its strong matchup against Saheeli-cat combo decks. There's certainly some truth to this assessment, as Heart of Kiran is pretty much a stone-cold answer to Saheeli and is difficult to deal with to boot. If you look at the tournament statistics, Mardu was the most represented deck on day one - I'm sure a lot of people brought winning lists from the last pro tour and jammed Glorybringer. Pros assumed this sort of thing would happen and built their sideboards accordingly. That being said, I still think that Mardu can be a really strong deck - it just needs a bit of tuning for the current meta. RBW has some great answers for Ulamog/Marvel (Statis Snare, Cast Out, Quarantine Field, even Angel of Sanctions) as well as a very powerful creature removal suite. Radiant Flames and Sweltering Suns are good against zombies as well as low to the ground GB decks. Gideon will always be good. Heart of Kiran will always be good. They're certainly not as well positioned as they were a few months ago (thanks turn four Ulamog) but if you invested in Mardu I still think you're in good shape.

A lot of the problem that Mardu has is that it's weak to Marvel. Last format that was fine; Marvel's problem was that it auto-lost to CopyCat. But now Cat's gone, that means Marvel can come back, that means Mardu has it much rougher than it did before. It can certainly adapt to this, but a lot of the Aether Revolt meta was the way it was because Cat protected Mardu from some of its worst matchups.

Joseph Sedita the big problem mardu has was everyone was expecting it and ready for it. zombies did really well because it was new. graveyard hate will definitely be a sideboard inclusion going forward. but zombies could easily switch to a plague belcher style to counter.

I really don't understand why it's Flames instead of Sweltering Suns. I guess the RR is scary versus having RX1 as a pyroclasm, but yeah with Marvel and just added upside of having Cycling as an out you'd think it'd be stronger.

there was plenty on times he would only have 1 red source for most of the game. Chandra Flamecaller would have been much better.

The issue is that Radiant Flames is not a relevant hit off Marvel whereas Suns is. Sure, when you're on one red and you need to hardcast it it is problematic, but it seems somewhat likely you can hard cast it in this deck and you get added flexibility of it being live off Marvel and being a cycler.

Yeah there are definitely corner cases for both. I guess it just comes down to what he thought was more relevant

*invocation

Natural Super he should've mulliganed. his own fault.

Ty for the spoiler xD

luke kamella ,,,, Not 100% but I thought it was translation. Not sure if they both speak English. P

The announcers are talking about both players and their hands, and it can be heard by everyone, so the players wear the headsets, so they can't hear the announcers, but can still communicate with each other.

Franz Nagy agreed!

Franz Nagy its also banned

Franz Nagy it is now banned.

He's even got those classy sleves

It usually tweaks out casual observers which is one of the reasons they do it: a legal way to fuck w the opponent. It adds a layer of deception, masking if u are paying attention to a particular card or the order of your cards. The other half is just nervous anxious energy and keeping the brain engaged.

Guess Exile and Graveyard hate just became a lot more standard viable...

I agree. He made egregious misplays. I hope he learned his lesson, ALWAYS kill Cryptbreaker at the earliest opportunity. That said, congrats to Gerry Thompson for his ProTour win.

Totally. I mean, card draw PLUS aditional zombies and potentially getting something like Scrounger in the graveyard? Busted. And only 1 energy and two mana to kill. I think that was a huge misplay

Well he already made it into the hall of fame. I think magic is a lot less important to him now as he can easily get a stream of cash for simply showing up

I'll defend Yuuya a little bit, or at least give my version of why he didn't kill the Crypt Breaker and killed the Lord of the Acursed instead: I think Yuuya was pretty traumatized from game 2 when Lord of the Acursed made Gerry's 2/2s huge and unmanageable. So Yuuya made a judgment call: do I let him have some card advantage or do I let him go tall with his zombies and out of range of my harnessed lightning? Yuuya decided that he was able to get better card advantage than Gerry based on his Shielded Aether Thief and Glimmer of Genius. At the end it proved to be the wrong decision, specially because Gerry was drawing so many swamps that he would have had a hard time developing his board anyway, but i don't think you are expected to reach this conclusion with the limited info Yuuya had at the time.

+Gondwana. Valid argument you have here. Though, through my 17 years of playing magic, the two best things you can do in Magic to secure a win is generate mana and card advantage. While Aetherworks Marvel generates mana advantage my cheating mana costs, I feel that Cryptbreaker is a tad better in the case that it generates board advantage and card advantage for little investment cost in the bigger scheme of things. Yuuya was in a damn is he does damned if he doesn't moment as you pointed out. But I feel that even with Lord of the Accused, a T1 Cryptbreaker is far more threatening in the bigger scheme of things than a possible t3 Lord. I also didn't really care for Yuuya's Marvel list. I liked the Chandra and Sweltering Suns in other lists far better, as those decks had more outs to zombies. Though, I will give Yuuya the benefit that he did fight and claw his way to 2nd place, and that is a hell of an achievement in an of itself since I am sure that both of them were suffering from players fatigue.

Zombies were definitely meta here. Three in top eight, remember?

i mean before this. no meta comes meta. not like yugioh, meta always win.

That doesn't make sense. We knew about the Zombies deck already, in both its variations. We knew it was good. It was already part of the meta.

buy you're shamble back's now for the zombie mirror match before they quadruple in price.

Shamble back is bad and also a common.

You're right getting to exile a relentless dead or cryptbreaker and making a zombie token against the mirror is horrible

Let's see. Pro tour Amonkhet top 8. No shambleback. I'll bet it isn't in any deck in top 8 of PT Hour either. It's a bad card. Relentless dead is rarely in the graveyard. Requires too much set up for too little payoff. Not worth a slot in the 75.

>marvel deck loses 1-3 >BAN IT

The zombie guy was quit lucky as you can see.This is magic after all,but if they played another 9 matches after that one, Watanabe would've won the 7 easily...