(Before anyone tries to make a female-oriented joke, please - reconsider for the sake of our younger readers *grin*).

4:30am and the buzzer goes off. Time to drag myself out of bed, drive down to the meeting point and *then* drive 3 1/2 hours to offer myself as a sacrifice to the god of Good Magic Players. Yep, I had a taste of the "good life" at the last PTQ in Madison, and I just couldn't resist punishing myself again in this one.

Thsi PTQ was, once again, run by the guys and gals at The Legion (big Hi! to all of you). Held in the Days Inn hotel in Green Bay and occupying a large portion of one of their suites, 87 players turned up with their MBC decks with the chance to be invited to the Chicago PTQ - oh, and the prospect of beating in this newbie's head

First, a run-down of the decks present, as provided by Nick H - head judge.

Big Head - 21
BIG Beats - 8
Waters - 5
Rebel - 11
Dry Waters/Blue Waters - 10
U/W Control - 3
W/G Break - 6
Mercenary - 2
Pirates - 3
Green Beats - 2
White Control - 6
Land Desruct - 1
G/R Beats - 4
Jolt Cola - 1

No idea if this is a final list - it's just the one that was given to me

As for my deck? I won't even bother to list it here as it's now been ripped apart, but it was a version of RoShamBo with Trellis and Tutors, plus some Coffin Puppets and Blasties to make it interesting. Or so I thought.

Round One - Chris Schaefer (AKA Froggy) - U/W Control

Here's a good one for you that I'm sure has happened to many players out there. I drove down to Green Bay with two of my friends (well, I slept most of the way down) and guess what - yep, I get paired with one of them in the first dan round. Even worse is that Frog is probably the *best* player in my hometown and I can never beat him.

First game I get beaten around by Mageta - not something that I found amusing. I was on the verge of quitting there and then - I just know Frog stands so far over me in this game my self-confidence took a massive nosedive for the worse. During the shuffleup for round two, he told me to just "Pretend we're playing at home and killing some time". What the hell; here goes...

Second Game I draw 4 Ritual, 2 DPO and one swamp. Play first, draw a coffin puppets and proceed to ritual out all of them and beat him down with the 7/7 puppets. All I heard from Frog was "Owch!". Made me feel a bit better.

Third game was impressive - we went back and forth. I forced marched twice to kill of magetas, barriers and blinding angels, but in the end I fell victim to the other mageta lurking in his hand. Not a nice way to go.

Games 1-2
Rounds 0-1

Round 2 Eric Saat - Land Destruct

First game I didn't do to badly, managing to get him down to 6 life with a Wumpus beating. A ritualed 2nd turn Wumpus is not bad going for me, but his Evincar was cast soon after he perished and I was in big trouble.

Game two went the other way. I sideboard in Spidersilks and Natural Affinity and drop a 3rd turn Blasty and proceed to drop him to 5 life where wumpus finishes him off.

Game three went more or less exactly the same way as game two. Blasty, Wumpus, Spidersilk, lots of pinging.

Wow - I won one. It actually took a while to sink in - I'd won my first PTQ match - YAY!

Games 3-3
Round 1-1

Lunchtime was at McDonalds, where everyone was discussing decks, games and bad plays. (I'm sorry, but bad play of the day has to go to my buddy Tim Wells for adding damage to the stack with his wumpus, getting carried away and killing himself! lol).

It was at this point I started to feel a little better, but the next five rounds were just plain horrible. My deck cannot really stand up to any kind of control deck, and I seemed to play all of them. I didn't win another game, yet alone another match, but stayed in to play the entire seven rounds to:

(a) Get my two boobie prizes packs for finishing all the rounds.
(b) Waiting for Frog.

Froggy was having a hell of a day - he went 5-1 in the main event, drew the last to make top 8 and then proceeded to play one of the most exciting (and definately the longest) matches I have ever watched. More on this some other time when I can get him to make some notes for me, but I will have to call it a day for now. It's 3am and apart from the nap on the way home, I haven't slept at all.

Shouts

Frog and Tim - Team Fountain of Youth T-Shirts needed! lol
The Legion (Steve and Marci)
Nick H for the deck lists

Pouts
The photo sticker machine in the mall next door for stealing Tim's money.
The sad few players who, yet again, couldn't understand why I ever wanted to play in the first place.

Till next time