We had 16 show up for the Deal Me In Games April event including 2 players visiting the store for the first time - Welcome Marc Frias and Troy Sands. Hope you guys had a good time and can make it back in June.

Our top 8 played out to the the finals - no splits this time and we crowned Dan Miller as the Champion yet again.

The top 8 saw:
Zach Dobbin beat Dean Harris 2-1
Dan Miller beat Matt Buck 2-0
Joe Brennan beat Nick DiJohn 2-0
Dan Barkon beat Troy Sands 2-1

This gave us a top 4 which shook out as follows:
Dan Miller beats Zach Dobbin 2-0
Dan Barkon beats Joe Brennan 2-1

For a finals of:
Dan Miller beats Dan Barkon 2-0

I do not have full decklists or a full meta breakdown however Dan Miller was on a u/b deck that featured back to basics, Dan Barkon was on shops, Zach Dobbin was playing paradoxical oath, Matt Buck was on Oath, Troy Sands was on mono-red goblins, Nick DiJohn was was shops, Dean Harris on lands and I didn't get to see what Joe was on.

In addition we had a good mix among the remaining 8 decks of dredge, shops, bomberman, oath and pyro.

And as always, we have point totals and current store championship standings below:

Decklist submitted by Dan Miller who took 1st place. Thanks Dan. It was a unique one:

Thank you Dan for the list. If anybody else has a list they wish to submit PM here or on facebook.

I'm missing the unique angle here. -3 Pyro, +3 titi. If this is what constitutes unique deckbuilding we're in a rough patch.

@nedleeds I assume there are 2 Back to Basics in the deck since it says 2 Enchantments and otherwise the deck comes to 59 cards (the numbers and the formatting could use some cleaning up if you have the time @Khahan - posting the list is very appreciated of course)

If so, the interaction between Thing and B2B is cool as it forces the opponent to recast their robots or other creatures, which B2B complicates. I think that qualifies as somewhat novel and unique, but I know that's not the point you are trying to make...

Congrats to Dan on the win.

@chubbyrain Thank you and yes, there are 2 B2B in the list.

@nedleeds I wasn't aware this was an established approach. Most of the raka lists I see are either small delver/pyromancer xerox or large walker drain decks. This list is substantially larger than the former and smaller than the latter. Or in other words, taking the xerox shell you reference, swapping snapcaster and thing for delver and pyromancer, upsizing a counterspell to mana drain, and replacing other spells for a sol ring, more (basic) lands, 2 back to basics.

So 2 Back to Basics is certainly a differentiator. Makes sense that's the missing card.

Updated Dan's list to reflect the 2nd back to basics. I watched some of his top 8 games and just simply having B2B out changed the flow of every game I saw.

Also, we have another top 8 deck - Troy Sands Mono-red Goblins (and actually I wouldnt even call this goblins as it features multiple other creature types for control. Gobbos is just the aggro win-con).