Weekend Review: August 9 - 10
Tags: #Legacy, #News, #OpenSeries, #Standard
posted 2014-08-11 by Nick Miller
Freshly minted Rookie of the Year Jared Boettcher continued his dominance of New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts based StarCityGames.com Open Series events this weekend by winning the Standard Open in Syracuse on Sunday. He followed up his win with a Top-4 finish in the Legacy Open later that night, marking his sixth Open Series Top 8 this year (nine lifetime), including both 2014 Invitationals.
Boettcher piloted Mono-Black Devotion, this time splashing blue for sideboard options like Negate and Notion Thief, past a Top 8 field reflecting the results from last week’s Standard Pro Tour. Two copies of U/W Control, G/W Aggro, and Rabblemaster Red deck made the elimination rounds with the final slot going to Mono-White Aggro. Joining Boettcher in the Top 8 was six-time Open Series Top 8er Bryant Cook, who has a Legacy win with Storm in Washington DC, in 2013.
In Legacy, Boettcher took U/W/R Delver to the semifinals before bowing out to Kale Thompson and RUG Delver. In a Top 8 full of Delver variants, Miracles would claim its second straight Legacy Open, this time in the hands of Sam Roukas, who dispatched three-time Open Series Top 8er John Wiley in the other semifinals match. The Legacy Top 8 consisted of five Delver decks (three U/W/R, one BUG, and one RUG), Burn, Shardless BUG, and Miracles.
Boettcher hasn’t played the same deck twice in his four Legacy Open Top 8s and two Invitational Top 8s. To go with U/W/R Delver, he has also played Sneak and Show, R/W and Grixis Painter, 4-Color Delver, and U/W/R Stoneblade to top finishes. The 30 points Boettcher earned this weekend will launch him into the Top 5 on the Season Three points leaderboard and puts him in a great position to earn an at-large berth to the StarCityGames.com Players’ Championship by the end of Season Four.
On the Grand Prix circuit, the trio of William “Huey” Jensen, Owen Turtenwald, and Reid Duke captured the Magic 2015 Team Sealed GP in Portland and Oliver Polak-Rottmann won the Standard GP in Utrecht.
Jensen, Turtenwald, and Duke won the first Grand Prix of the season just a week after Jensen and Turtenwald made the Top 8 of Pro Tour Magic 2015, also in Portland. They had to defeat the team of Luis Scott-Vargas, Eric Froehlich, and Paul Cheon in the Top 4 before beating Eric Severson, Benjamin Weitz, and Josiah Skallerup in the finals.
Complete coverage of Grand Prix Portland
In the Netherlands, Polak-Rottmann piloted Mono-Blue Devotion to the GP Utrecht win, showing that despite its absence from the Top 8 of the Pro Tour, the deck is still a force to be reckoned with. Polak-Rottmann defeated Elliot Boussaud in the Mono-Blue Devotion mirror in the finals.