Phase 4 - Final Battle ENTROPY (Trials 2)

[Dragoon]

Looks like it was a great match.  Congratulations Zeru on keeping your title.  Seems like you played well.

Amilir, you almost had him.  Great job on making it so far.  I'm sure you had him sweating by the end.  Do you mind showing your decks?

[Corrum]

Congrats Zeru, looks like some tough fought battles.
corrum

[xdude]

Gratz Zeru. Nice mindgames. Tough luck, Amilir, seems like he got you. Better luck next time.

[GG]

gratz for retaining the title, zeru.

and consolations to amilir who lost by a misclick

[ddevans96]

Congrats Zeru. That must have been a really close match at the end.

[Zeru]

Congrats Zeru. That must have been a really close match at the end.

It was extremely close. Just look at my screenshot.

[MrBlonde]

Congrats Zeru. That must have been a really close match at the end.

It was extremely close. Just look at my screenshot.

Wow.... basically that's the only combination of creature attacks (if 50% of them were to miss) you could have had and survived. Congrats Zeru and what a matchup.

[glennert]

damn, that's one epic fog shield steal!

[Dragoon]

I've been asking everyone else, would you both like to explain your ban choices and how it affected your deck-building?

[Zeru]

I've been asking everyone else, would you both like to explain your ban choices and how it affected your deck-building?

Discord, Quake, Black Hole - I decided that I will use decks that need a lot of quanta to work, I couldn't allow a single method of quanta denial.
Phase Shield - I intended not to use any kind of permanent control, so this card could defeat me.
Steal, Explosion - Eliminating easy ways of permanent control, I could use whatever permanent I desired.

My main plan was to trick Amilir into thinking that I would use heavy permanent decks, like Phase Shield stall. That would leave with with only one choice. Supernova rush with Pulverizer in it. However, in reality, he blocked black hole, thus making a counter got hard. I did a nice deck with heavy creature control and no permaments, which would crush supernova rush (see what I did here), but it would be destroyed by poison stall, so I ended up without a strategy.
In total I prepared 10 decks, but used only 5. Amilir built his decks between our duels. The randomness of his strategy is impressive

[Amilir]

SoG/nova
These were their own trick.  Together they leave no casual defense against poison.  Dedicated healing or purify could still defend against it, but at the cost of being junk versus any of my other decks.  Also, if zeru didn't ban discord it would have been extra powerful.
EQ/BH
I did not want to get quanta screwed this way.  At all.
Poison/quintessence
The idea was to prevent alternate damage.  Zeru only had creature and weapon to hurt me with this way, so CC would handle most of his decks.  I did make a stupid mistake in forgetting about dune scorp.  I assumed it would take a trio with unstoppable to use correctly, totally forgetting about chaos power.  As it turned out, zeru didn't ban SoG so these bans were nearly useless for me.

1st game:  Poison stall vs. fractal abom.  I chose antimatter and had no novas this game.  Didn't stand a chance.
2nd game:  SoG poison stall vs. mindgate.  I never EVER thought of mindgate.  I got lucky though.  I drew almost all of my damage early, so he couldn't duplicate much.  I also went first, so he decked before me.  Pure luck.
3rd game:  I used my wildcard here.  A wings deck.  It didn't work.
4th game:  Creature rush vs. creature rush.  Mine was better, but I misclicked.  So painful.
5th game:  Creature rush vs. creature rush with purple nymphs.  Precog lied to me.  I didn't see purple nymphs or I'd have waited with the lightning and won.  Alternatively, a bit of luck with fog shield and I could have won anyway.  Oh well.
6th game:  I chose a poison stall.  This one worked beautifully against his mindgate deck.
7th game:  My creature rush smashed him here.
8th game:  Yet another poison stall.  It worked better than his dune scorp deck.
9th game:  Back to supernova rush vs. creature rush with steals.  Precog lied.  AGAIN.  I made a mistake and lost my fog shield to steal.  I still had better than even odds, but zeru was blessed with luck.

Decks: 
Poison stall with SoGs/antimatter/pandemonium/whatever.  This was my main deck.  Very useful.
Wings stall.  Didn't work.  Something of a bad idea in general, but it countered the decks I'd seen well.
Supernova rush with graboids.  My cards varied a lot here.  Graboids because they're resistant to CC.  I took towers instead of pendulums because I was worried about discord.  I shouldn't have been.  Lost three out of four games with this one, all due to my bad play.  Urrrgh.

In short, I made WAY too many mistakes here.

[Dragoon]

So exactly what happened with those Precogs then?  It show you one hand, but he had another?  Or it showed that he drew one card, but he really drew a different card?  That seems a little odd.  And I totally understand about being dissed by Lady Luck.  It sucks . . . a lot.