Yet despite this, their results have been exemplary. Of the twenty players still in contention for Top 8 after round 15, five of them are MOCS competitors. Considering that they are merely 18 in a sea of over 300, their performance has been nothing short of staggering. It isn’t that I’m surprised that they can compete with the competition at Worlds. There are multiple Grand Prix and Pro Tour Top 8s in the group. I mean, the game isn’t any different. It’s simply that they’ve just been so consistent as a group. The only other demographic to show such consistency and strength here at Worlds has been the Danish National team. And their path hasn’t been easy. Look at the names surrounding them:

1 Conley Woods

2 David Caplan

3 Raphael Levy

4 Luis Scott-Vargas

5 Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa

6 Yuki Yoshioka

7 Ian Wood

8 Richard Bland

9 Craig Wescoe

10 Jun’ya Iyanaga

11 Ruben Snijdewind

12 Thoralf Severin

13 Akira Asahara

14 Florian Pils

15 Nico Bohny

16 Chikara Nakajima

17 Janus Kofoed

18 Allan Christensen

19 Ben Stark

20 Owen Turtenwald

That list is absurd. Every single person on that list is a known Magic player, if for nothing more than being a member of their National team. There are six players in contention for Player of the Year. It is a murderer’s row of the best players in the game, and the five MOCS competitors are smack in the middle of it. There are a couple more players sitting just outside, with Andrew Cuneo and Bing Luke sitting in Top 64. It’s been an absolute pleasure to watch them doing so well, and under such adverse circumstances. They play more games of Magic this weekend than the National teams do! I just think that with all they’ve been going through, and how well they’ve persevered through it, that they deserved a nice shoutout, so here it is. Now it’s time for me to scoot on over to the MOCS area to prepare for the Modern portion of the Finals.

So, who are you rooting for?

To recap, twelve players came in with a mathematical shot to take home the coveted POY trophy. Owen Turtenwald led the field, but could be overtaken if he falls short of the finals. Anything less and one of these other 11 Pros could step in and swipe the prize out from under him.

So, without further ado, here's how the POY hopefuls stand after 12 rounds of Standard and Draft, along with the pro points they had coming in.

• Josh Utter-Leyton, 40 Points
  9-3, 16th place
• David Sharfman, 40 Points
  6-6, 150th place
• Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, 41 Points
  10-2, 5th place
• Paul Rietzl, 41 Points
  5-7, 255th place
• David Ochoa, 35 points (U.S. team member)
  7-5, 117th place
  Team USA: 76, 4th place
• Vincent Lemoine, 38 points (Belgian team member)
  5-6-1, 231st place
  Team Belgium: 46, 38th place
• Shuuhei Nakamura, 45 points
  7-5, 98th place
• Shouta Yasooka, 47 points
  8-4, 32nd place
• Ben Stark, 48 points
  9-3, 23rd place
• Luis Scott-Vargas, 49 points
  10-2, 4th place
• Martin Juza, 52 points
  6-5-1, 143rd place
• Owen Turtenwald, 59 points
  9-3, 27th place

The lessons to take away at this point?  

Turtenwald still controls his own destiny. He can very easily make the Top 8 from where he currently sits. He's tied with a slew of people at 27 for 9th place, but he has the worst breakers of the bunch.

Scott-Vargas and da Rosa at 10-2 are both within shouting distance of the Top 8. With their track records as two of the very best in the world, it would be pretty foolish to bet against them. Scott-Vargas controls his own fate if Owen doesn't Top 8, but he still has to win the whole thing. Da Rosa will need some help from several other contenders plus Owen to take the title.

(Note: if you haven’t been, you should. Nate’s a fabulously dashing, lightly-bearded gentleman, and funny!)

Naturally, after boasting to the rest of the coverage team about his prediction, I pointed out that he was going up against none other than Team Channel Fireball, who had identified a Tempered Steel shaped niche in the metagame, and were once again going to be hurling robots at their unsuspecting opponents. Not a man to back down, Nate stood fast by his claim.

Now, this is a fine thing for a man to do, to stand by his convictions, but when beaten, that man must admit his failure!

Nate did not do this.

Like the Black Knight he channelled for the title of his latest blog entry, Nate is indeed stubborn, and if I may say so myself, has more than just a flesh wound in this debate. Nate was correct in that one of each deck went 6-0 yesterday, but what he did not tell you was everything else.

50 people played Mono Red on day one, but only 19 people played Tempered Steel. That means while just over 5% of the Tempered Steel decks went undefeated, only 2% of the Mono Red decks did. 12% of the Mono Red decks went 5-1, while nearly 16% of the Tempered Steel decks picked up a single loss. No Tempered Steel deck scored worse than 2-4, while several Mono Red decks were seen sniffing about the bottom of the standings.

All said and done, Mono Red averaged 9.3 points on day one, while Tempered Steel averaged 11.05 points.

Sure, some other deck may have done better than Tempered Steel, I won’t dispute that, but Mono Red was not that deck. It was most certainly not a draw, sir.

I purchased four immediately after it came out and have hung on to the same four copies ever since. I love Gifts Ungiven so much, a chat on Wizard’s fancy new live chat coverage feature turned into me being asked to make Gifts Ungiven piles out of cupcakes. I would pour Gifts Ungiven on my cereal every morning if I could.

So you can imagine my pure, unadulterated, Christmas-morning-like joy when I walked by the U.S.A. team playing last night and Aintrazi was unwrapping some gifts his opponent certainly did not want him to have.

Aintrazi had taken on Modern for the U.S. team with the latest update of the classic UW Gifts Tron, which uses the Urza Tron (Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Mine, and Urza’s Power Plant) to make a ton of mana and Gifts Ungiven to dig up missing Tron pieces or find the late game Mindslaver, Sundering Titan or Batterskull.

I was thrilled to see the Tron pieces return, since Tron was big mana before Cloudpost ever met Vesuva. And with Cloudpost banned from the format, the Urza lands are poised to fill the niche left open by the Loci menace.

Aintrazi said the bannings crippled combo enough to create an opening for control to creep back into the format. He and Shaheen Soorani brewed up the list together, and so far he’s been happy with it.

“I has answers for everything,” Aintrazi said. Gifts Ungiven itself, he said was “pretty slow, but it’s just so powerful in this deck.”

Aintrazi said he had strong matchups against beatdown decks thanks to four Path to Exile and a number of sweepers that included Martial Coup, Engineered Explosives, Hallowed Burial and more.

Besides Gifts Ungiven itself, the deck has a lot of card draw and filtering. Thirst for Knowledge works well with the deck’s plethora of artifacts and pair of Academy Ruins, and Condescend lets Aintrazi protect himself early while filtering through the top of his library.

Finally, the Gifts piles, which are always interesting to see. Aintrazi has chosen to go with Mindslaver, Sundering Titan and two Batterskulls as ways to close the game, plus the two Academy Ruins, Crucible of Worlds and Tolaria West as ways to get exactly what he wants no matter how his opponent chooses.

For example, if he’s missing a piece of the Tron puzzle, he can get Crucible of Worlds, Academy Ruins, Tolaria West and the missing Urza land. From there, any combination of cards given to him will eventually result in the full set of Urza lands making it into play. It can be slow, but the rewards are often worth it.

His sideboard is 11 one-ofs and 4 Timely Reinforcements. The Reinforcements shore up his game against aggressive decks while the one-ofs provide redundant answers to a multitude of the format’s problems.

With such a deep card pool available in Modern, Aintrazi was able to set up a sideboard full of cards with different names that do essentially the same thing. For example, against Splinter Twin he has cards such as Damping Matrix, Torpor Orb and Ghostly Prison that all make comboing virtually impossible while in play. Against storm decks he has Rule of Law and Ethersworn Cannonist.

He even had the spicy Phyrexian Unlife, which can gain him a virtual 10 life or more. One trick Aintrazi pointed out was that if an attack drops him to zero or less, none of the creatures get Infect until after the damage has been dealt. Then he can cast Timely Reinforcements and they have to work again to get him back to zero.

And because they’re all slightly different, they have applications in other matches. For example, against blue-black Faeries yesterday Aintrazi brought in Torpor Orb and Ghostly Prison to gum up Faeries’ ability to play with a bunch of Flash creatures with comes into play abilities.

Aintrazi went on to ride his mana advantage to a win against Faeries (technically they drew, but Aintrazi had his opponent locked under Mindslaver as time was called), then beat Affinity the second round of team play. He said he’s enjoying the deck and could see himself playing it on Saturday with a few tweaks.

And since I'm sure many of you will want a decklist, I'll let you know we're going to hold off on that in case Aintrazi decides to play the deck on Saturday. Look for a list to go up once all is said and done.

While the individual scenarios for taking the POY title are long and complicated, the long and the short of it is that if none of the players on this list make the Top 8, Owen Turtenwald will be crowned Player of the Year.

If Turtenwald makes the finals, he also wins the crown no matter what anyone else does. If he makes the Top 8 without winning his first match, Martin Juza, Luis-Scott Vargas, Ben Stark and Shouta Yasooka can all catch him by winning the whole tournament.

And if Turtenwald doesn't make the Top 8? Basically, chaos breaks loose, the system collapses, and Purple becomes the 6th color of Magic.

Kidding, of course. Mostly anyway. If Turtenwald doesn't Top 8, it just means that all of these players have a shot if they do.

Here's where the contenders stand after Day 1 along with their Pro Point Totals coming into Worlds:

• Josh Utter-Leyton, 40 Points
  5-1, 20th place
• David Sharfman, 40 Points
  4-2, 48th place
• Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, 41 Points
  4-2, 55th place
• Paul Rietzl, 41 Points
  3-3, 182nd place
• David Ochoa, 35 points (U.S. team member)
  2-4, 250th place
  Team USA: 25 points, 23rd (of 41) place
• Vincent Lemoine, 38 points (Belgian team member)
  2-4, 272nd place
  Team Belgium: 18 points, 37th (of 41) place
• Shuuhei Nakamura, 45 points
  4-2, 68th place
• Shouta Yasooka, 47 points
  5-1, 26th place
• Ben Stark, 48 points
  4-2, 125th place
• Luis Scott-Vargas, 49 points
  5-1, 12th place
• Martin Juza, 52 points
  4-2, 72nd place
• Owen Turtenwald, 59 points
  4-2, 120th place 

At 4-2, Turtenwald is in strong position to make a run at the Top 8, but he has several players nipping at his heels. His teammate Scott-Vargas is all the way up in 12th place after Day 1 and is a constant threat to make the Top 8. Shouta Yasooka and Josh Utter-Leyton are also 5-1 and primed for a strong draft today.

Meanwhile, Ochoa and Lemoine look to likely be out of the running, as they both needed strong individual and team performances, but have not found their footing on either front yet. There's still time, but it would take a run of historic proportions for one of them to claw their way back into the race. 

And any one of the 4-2 players can easily Top 8 at this point, and if any one of those players goes undefeated today or even 5-1, there's a strong possibility we'll be seeing them on Sunday. 

In 2006 (while I was covering my second ever Grand Prix) Jeremy battled his way to 4th place in Time Spiral limited, eventually losing to Anatoli Lightfoot, who in turn lost in the finals to James Zhang. That year, James became the first ever back to back Australian Grand Prix champion, having taken down Melbourne the year before, playing Extended.

(I mention this because, if you’ve been paying attention, Jeremy has now also gone back to back, winning GP Sydney last year playing Scars of Mirrodin limited, and GP Brisbane this year, in Standard.)

Jeremy also has not been shy about the secret of his success. In the same way James Bond gets his gadgets from Agent Q, Jeremy has been almost exclusively playing decks built by Australia’s Dan Unwin.

“I was playing aggro decks for a while after GP Sydney ‘06. When I tried control decks, I’d lose to aggro, so I played aggro instead.” Jeremy explained. “In 2008, Dan finally convinced me to try playing one of his decks,” he admitted with a smile, alluding to his first Australian National Champs top 8, and his first outing on the Pro Tour, where he finished 44th in Hollywood.

“I started 6-0 in Hollywood, but I’ve never managed to match that since then,” he laughed.

The following year, Jeremy made top 4 at Australian Nats, and last year, lost in the finals to eventual winner, Adam Witton. The real highlight for Neeman in 2010 however, was his top 8 finish at Pro Tour San Juan, where he once again credited Dan Unwin for his constructed deck, describing him as the “Resident genius deckbuilder”.

At the World Champs in Chiba last year, Jeremy and his team mates made it all the way to the team finals, before finally succumbing to the Slovak Republic. This time, Dan built all three constructed decks played by the Australian National Team.

This weekend, Jeremy is off to another fantastic start, finishing day one at 5-1, with yet another Dan Unwin creation.   

Jeremy Neeman
World Championships 2011 – Standard 5-1
3 Snapcaster Mage
1 Gideon Jura
2 Consecrated Sphinx
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
2 White Sun’s Zenith
 
4 Mana Leak
4 Doom Blade
4 Think Twice
4 Forbidden Alchemy
3 Dissipate
2 Oblivion Ring
3 Day of Judgment

4 Seachrome Coast
2 Darkslick Shores
4 Glacial Fortress
3 Drowned Catacombs
2 Isolated Chapel
4 Island
4 Plains
1 Swamp
3 Ghost Quarter

Sideboard:
4 Timely Reinforcements
1 Day of Judgment
2 Ratchet Bomb
3 Phantasmal Image
3 Surgical Extraction
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Negate

For the red/green Kessig Wolf Run decks, it is a no brainer to have an Ancient Grudge or two in the sideboard. Tempered Steel has proven to be a powerful choice, so being able to take down a few artifacts at negligible cost is a very natural fit. 


For blue/black, Forbidden Alchemy is a very powerful way of searching up the cards that you need, especially if they themselves have flashback, or are instants/sorceries that can be given flashback by Snapcaster Mage.


In red/blue, Deperate Ravings can fill a similar purpose to Forbidden Alchemy, getting you to the spells you need when you need them, and flashing back for a much more affordable cost.


So what happens when you start piecing these all together. For those who are able to get to the correct mana to do so (and we've seen everything from Sphere of the Suns, to Traveller's Amulet to get there), it is possible to piece together a great deal of card advantage with the flashback mechanic. Some decks will have Silent Departure or Think Twice, while others are running Devil's Play for a massive finisher.

The really wily players out there are running Purify the Graves and Dissipate. This Standard format is not slow enough to allow for huge amounts of dedicated graveyard hate, but having a little is certainly an attractive option, as getting stuck on the wrong side of a flashback barrage is not where you want to be.