Tourney started at 2am local time. Around 11 I'm dozing off at the comp, so I decide to take a short nap. "Short" meant I woke up at like 2:20, but the tourney hadn't started yet as they had just gotten 16 together, so I got in at the last second with no decks even built, keeping it at 16 since then jippy, the host, didn't have to play to keep it going. In the 3 seconds of prep time I had, I saw that monoaether looked pretty darned good, and that the only real counters to it were procrastination and skull shield, so I slapped that together for the first match, and reused it for the 2nd game of round 1 since I didn't have any other decks built.
The other deck that looked really good to me was monotime. There weren't really any fast decks, so I figured a deck like that with a lot of mid-late game potential (scarab spam) would do well, plus procrastination seemed OP with the slow environment. There was no PC at all, no momentum, only 1 weapon (lobo) and no way to win via spells (well, not reliably; didn't think monofire could cut it without fahren and with dragons being rather easily CCed by lightning, etc) and definitely no way to make a good stall. So I threw that together pretty quickly as well, and played game 1 of round 2 with that, and game 2 with the same deck but grav mark and all factories instead of a split.
Round 3 I went with monotime again because I figured monoaether would lose to procrastination. I'd also been considering earth for decks, but I felt like it didn't quite pack enough punch, as the only good creature was graboid, and lightnings would've held that off fairly well, blocking the evolve until the end. Stoneskins would've helped stall a long time, but even then I didn't want to try it. I could've tried a duo with time, and many people did, but I didn't like the quanta base for that; you needed earth quick for graboid/EQ, but you also needed a lot of time for any of the good time cards, which left the deck more prone to quantafailing than I would've liked, so I decided not to go with earth at all today.
Round 4 I was against deuce in the finals. Knowing I'd get a mark, and knowing how I like to take a mark for my deck with the best record, and knowing that I already owned a time mark and that I really wanted an aether mark next, and knowing how absolutely cool it would be to beat the grandmaster of aether with monoaether, I played monoaether all 3 times in the final. The one loss it had was also to monoaether, so it doesn't even really count :p Also, for the record, deuce looked really pimp with his five standalone marks that game; if I'd been playing EQ, I'd have been screwed, as he didn't draw a pillar/pend until like turn 6 and I think he only had 1 pend out along with his marks. So yay, +1 aether mark today!
Moral of the story: Take a nap before playing, show up (almost) too late, take speedbuilding to the extreme, and play the grandmaster's favourite element against him every time, then take a mark in his element. Gangnam style.
