Posted in: Card Games, Games, Magic: The Gathering, Tabletop, Wizards of the Coast | Tagged: card game, delver of secrets, magic, Magic: The Gathering, MTG, Star City Games, Tabletop, tournament, urzatron, wizards of the coast, WotC, wrenn and six

Aiden Brier Takes Star City Games Syracuse – "Magic: The Gathering"

I wrote an article just before this which explains how Magic: The Gathering is a global phenomenon, and how the MagicFest events allow players to break national boundaries and attain greatness within the game's parameters. When the Spanish team called "Team Blasco de Garay 15 & Ronda de Sant Pere 44" took MagicFest Ghent this weekend, the Team Modern event saw a perfect example of this.

Besides just being a global sensation, Magic: the Gathering is a local one too. Being based in the United States, it is primarily an American game. The professional circuit known as the Star City Games Tour is not expressly sponsored by Wizards of the Coast but is run by a popular gaming venue by the same name. The tour is generally conducted along the east coast of the United States, as far as the midwest in Ohio or Wisconsin.

This past weekend, alongside MagicFest Ghent, the Star City Games Tour saw a plethora of players in Syracuse, New York. Their two main tournament types, the Legacy Open and Modern Open, took place over the two days of September 14th and 15th, while the Legacy Classic took place on Sunday, September 15th.

In the end, Aiden Brier won the Legacy Open with a four-color control deck, only missing white. The deck aims to win primarily through planeswalkers – namely, the three copies of Jace, the Mind Sculptor in the mainboard, and control the board until they can manage out a win. Oddly enough, while he runs Wrenn and Six as well as Arcum's Astrolabe, Aiden has gone on the record as saying that Legacy has been made worse by the additions of these cards, calling them "too broken."

Anderson LeClair took the Modern Open in the meantime, winning through a tried-and-true build of Mono-Green Tron. His deck runs a great number of threats, all easily thrown out onto the battlefield through the Tron lands of Urza's Power Plant, Mine, and Tower.

Finally, Rich Cali (a friend of mine from college, who I wrote about in passing fairly recently) won the Legacy Classic with a blue-red-green Delver deck. The deck aims to win through controlling the board, all the while attacking his opponent with Delver of Secrets and its flipside, Insectile Aberration. Incidentally, the Top Eight decks in that tournament were primarily Delver decks, with two outliers rounding out seventh and eighth place. All six of the Top Six were Delver decks which ran red and blue, and four of which (including the Top Three, with the fifth-place slot as the fourth) also used green. Ultimately the win for Rich here comes down to a testament of his skill as a deck builder and a player.

Congratulations to the winners of Star City Games Syracuse!

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