Hurricane 2024 – 2nd Place

Friday night starts at a bar called 93 ‘Til, yes named after the song:

We make it just in time for a little bit of happy hour, pretty sure the waiter is super high because he gets 50% of our order wrong. But the Shishito peppers are on point and we get some other drinks in.

From there we float over to one of my favourite Tiki bars/restaurants and get some good food and cocktails. I also eat some Key Lime pie because its delicious (no pics of that cus I am a greedy piggy).

Rocking the MTG shirt (nerd)

Next up is an Irish Pub where we get a giant table outside and post up for some beta draft. I have been crushing the beta draft for the last two years and spoilers I get around to doing so again this year.

Unintentional MTG

P1P1 – I first pick Balance passing Sol Ring and end up drafting a mono white deck splashing Mind Twist off a Scrubland and a couple of Swamps. All the usual suspects – Benalish Hero, Samite Healer, Mesa Pegasus, STP, Crusade, Serra Angel. I also manage to blow out quite a few people with healing salve. At the end of it I am the only undefeated. Time for one more drink and then to head home. It wasn’t super late but I had been drinking since 5pm, so it was definitely time to call it a night.

Deep in the tank drafting.

45 players for Hurricane 2024 OS! We had 3 guys who flew in from out of state, 2 from CO and one from OK. There were also a couple of returning characters who drove in from OK. After a few glitches at the start we set off on our journey into OS. A kind soul got my day started with a Bloody Mary which is my preferred hair of the dog to start my OS journey. My day was a bit of a blur between signing folks in, taking payments, selling raffle tickets, dealing with some Tolaria reporting issues, etc. I will be looking to streamline some of this next year to make this a bit smoother, so apologies for the slightly slow start and slow turnaround time in between rounds this year. Overall I think everyone enjoyed themselves and we raised a chunk of cash for charity (see our main overview here for more on this).

R1 – Reanimator

2-0

Not much to report here, I constrain his mana and manage to kill him in G2 just before he is about to All hallows’ Eve a ton of dudes.

R2 – Mono Green

2-1

G1 I mulligan to 1, I don’t win that one. Not the best but the only hand that was close to keepable was the 7 but it was very marginal – other hands were terrible – like 4 lands + 3 copy type of hands which are risky anyway but would have been particularly bad in this matchup. Noting that I had no idea as to what he would be jamming so good thing I didn’t try and get there with 3 Copy against Mono Green.

G2 or G3 – I don’t remember which I cast Falling Star against his five creatures and hit four out of five which is pretty solid.

R3-UR

2-0

I win a game where my opponent plays t1 Library of Alexandria and I never manage to destroy it.

R4- Reanimator

2-0

I win a game purely off the splash damage of City in a Bottle.

R5 – Robots

2-0

I mull to 5 but keep this absolute banger, Copy Artifact is a Sol Ring…But then my opponent draws mind twist off twister and twists me for 5…I somehow manage to win this game. This really showed the power of Relic Barrier, which I almost didn’t play t1 so that I could potentially play other stuff I drew and/or draw an extra card off of LOA.

So I only lost one game all day and that game I did mulligan to 1…so there is that.

We are running up against our finishing time and so we call the event at 5 rounds instead of the 6 we should have played. The slight delays in the start put us just a little behind the eight ball, thankfully there are only two 5-0’s and the person that could be upset about being undefeated but being 2nd is me which is fine. Though I will say I really wanted to win the first prize Hurricane because its from my collection lol.

One of our more drunk attendees almost knocked over this vending machine…a couple of times.

I knew the deck was good since it was cribbed directly from Wheel (Will Magrann) but was pretty happy with how it played out all day. I almost never play a deck without changing the sideboard but I didn’t have enough bandwidth pre-tournament to mess with it too much and it was probably for the better to prevent me over boarding. Probably the best part of the deck was honestly jamming Armageddon which won me every game where it resolved.