Pocket Jaces 
Doping with Dolphins I
The year of magic ended earlier this month when the Jews and Swiss took time out from taking our money and using it to make very precise watches to destroy us at Worlds in New York. And let me tell you, the snow outside didn’t stop the event from being hotter than a beach in Brazil. The finals came down to Uri Peleg, who once upon a time provided Nick Eisel with a rough list which Eisel fine-tuned into a killing machine that we look back on as Food Chain Goblins, defeating Patrick Chapin, the grouchy American boasting a decade of mediocrity, by a very prominent nose.
Peleg piloted an innovative black-green-white deck which stood with history on its side as it vividly recreated the trope of a black caddy carrying a white man’s clubs on a golf course. Let’s take a look at the list:
India 2.0
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As you can see the deck runs the time-tested white:other proportion used by the British throughout their empire. Cards like Doran, Oblivion Ring, and Riftsweeper can provide guidance for the other, more powerful but less organized cards, as well as providing specialized services to pull the most possible out of an economy burgeoning with slave labor. Apparently Peleg went to the forest so that he could test deliberately prior to the tournament, and I’m going to give 10:1 odds that he did it on a raft in the Congo.
Now let’s take a look at the deck he beat. Chapin showed up with the buzz of the tournament, a 75-card number with a plummeting neck-line bringing attention to mountains that could kill at a moment’s notice. Here she is, in all her glory:
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Chapin said that he based the deck on his ex-girlfriend, which is probably the best explanation for the snow-covered lands. And let me tell you, it made from some awkward chit-chat when he met Gabriel Nassif, who he had been quite close to leading up to the tournament, in the semi-finals only to find that Nassif was running the same deck with an up-to-date sideboard, although his maindeck looked like it’d put on a few pounds. The tension escalated further as Nassif made it evident that he’d been fucking all night with his abysmal play.
The deck seeks to lure you into complacency with slow foreplay using the game’s most sexually enticing manabase, and then freak the hell out on you, throw your favorite models at the wall, and put four dragons into play. Unfortunately for Chapin, he returned home in the finals to find that Uri had had his friends over and they’d killed the cat with a shotgun.
It was a great tournament, with plenty of celebrities attending and no crashes. But it was the exception for the year. MODO has gotten worse and one of the PTs was hosted in Spain.
Take a moment to look back and be thankful for what we’ve had, and what we’re promised. Version 3.0 will probably be out sometime next year, and the next PT is in Kuala Lumpur.
I mean, what could go wrong?