In this new interview, we will discover for the first time a player from the Dutch community of Groningen: Hennink.
Zombie33 : Hi Hennink, it's a pleasure for me to interview a Dutch player for the first time. Can you briefly introduce yourself ?
Hennink : Hi, I'm long time Magic player Hennink from the Netherlands. I started playing Magic and Dungeons & Dragons during my university years, long ago, and still enjoy playing both. I would say D&D is my main hobby, but I enjoy brewing Magic decks, be it in cube, Commander, or Peasant. Other hobbies include listening to music, playing video games (Blue Prince is currently robbing me of my free time, what a great game!), and playing squash.
Z33 : How long you've been playing Magic ?
H : I started in 1999, when a friend introduced me to Magic during my first year in university. Invasion was the new set, and I remember missing my first victory because I didn't realize the activated ability on Hooded Kavu would have made it effectively unblockable. My friend didn't believe in freebies, so he only pointed it out after the game. I had to work hard for my first victory, and finally achieved it with a Temporal Distortion deck. The killing blow was deliverd by a Charging Troll enchanted with Armadillo Cloak. I didn't realize my humble beginnings were so Peasant-adjacent :)
Z33 : How did you discover the peasant format ?
H : My own memory of that time is hazy, we're talking about 2007 or 2008 here, but I reached out to one of the pillars (if not *the* pillar) of our community, Jasper, and he remembered we started playing Peasant as part of a once per month "exotic" format. People were scouring the internet for weird formats, like Pauper, Castle Magic, Silent Auction, and others, and we had quite a variety of fun tournaments. Peasant stuck around though, people really enjoyed it, and somewhere in 2008 we started playing it monthly, resulting in our first Season Finals in March of 2009.
Z33 : For years, Groningen was the city with the largest gaming community, with weekly five-round tournaments in 2010/2011, among other things. Were the same 20 players always coming to the tournaments, or did you have a lot of new players each month? How do you explain this success?
H : I believe Peasant has always been a monthly event for us. There was a small core of regular players, that did fluctuate a bit over the years, and lots of irregular players. A lot of the data from that time is lost, but I did find the numbers for season 3, and we had 41 unique players that year! Only 6 of those players attended 9 or more tournaments (with one player attending all 12!), while while a whopping 15 of them played in just 1 or 2 tournaments.
Z33 : Do you have any anecdotes to tell us about these tournaments?
H : I think one of my favorite memories of then is playing a Karma deck, and actually getting a positive win record with it. Mono Black Control was an important deck back then, but the funny thing is, my opponent didn't need to play black for Karma to be effective. My deck was basically a mana denial deck, color screwing opponents by turning their lands into Swamps, then turning their lands into life loss with Karma. I played a bunch of lifegain to stabilize, and lo and behold, a deck was born! If I recall correctly, I only lost to a mono green infect deck that was too fast for me to bleed to death.
Z33 : What decks did you like to play back then? And now?
H : Personally I loved showing up with wild brews each month. Never let them guess your next move and all that. Magic sparks the greatest joy for me when you can build a cool deck and see it work, at least a little bit. I have played a lot of homebrew decks. From the original WeeBee featuring Shrieking Grotesque to the aforementioned Karma deck and a Dreams of the Dead deck. I've played mono green Tron decks, mono black Engineered Plague Aggro, Eldrazi Reanimator, Arcane Tide (which I copied from the French scene), and more. The goal was always to win at least one match, but I'm surprised how often I managed a winning record, though I seldomly came out on top. In short, I can't really be pinned down to one strategy, I like to play something new each time! My new brew this year was a Haunt the Network deck, which performed admirable, even though it didn't show in the final standings. It was, unfortunately, unable to do anything against the new WeeBee deck, but it had game against all of the other opponents. Being able to do a 32 life point swing out of nothing is just scary.
Z33 : Years ago, we French people came across your blog and we copied and pasted the entire decklists from the Groningen tournaments on mtg-peasant to have the most complete database possible of the decks in the format. There were some differences in the ban list, but beyond that, there were very significant differences in the metagames, and I think it's an excellent example of how two small communities that have no contact can independently achieve different balanced metagames. Were you aware of the French metagame at that time?
H : Definitely, I regularly visited the Magicville forum, both to look at your meta, and to share ours. I think the slight differences in the banlist might account for a lot of the differences, but maybe there's more reasons. Whatever the case, we were aware of France!
Z33 : In total, I've referenced nine successive ban lists that were used in Groningen. Who made the decisions regarding bans and unbans at the time?
H : We had a three person committee keeping track of the metagame. As players voiced concerns over cards, or by our own volition, we would discuss potentially problematic card and decide on what to do with them. A majority was needed to get a card on the banlist. For a while I was one of the people on this committee, until I stopped playing tournament magic after my son was born in 2012.
Z33 : The tournaments in Groningen then suddenly stopped in 2013. What happened?
H : Well... I don't know exactly, but maybe it simply was a matter of the core crew moving on to different things. Like I said, I had just said goodbye to tournament Magic a year earlier, parenthood requires some amount of dedication after all. By the time the Peasant tournaments stopped, I wasn't involved with the scene anymore, so I don't really know what happened.
Z33 : Did you stop playing peasant or Magic since then ?
H : For a long while I kept attending prereleases as the only tournaments, just one Sunday every few months. Over time that changed, and I now am the proud owner of two criminally underplayed cubes, and over 36 equally underplayed Commander decks. I want to play more, but realistically, there's only so much time you can devote to hobbies, and Dungeons & Dragons and computer games are a slightly bigger passion. Every now and then I do queue up a few Commander decks though!
Z33 : Finally, 12 years later, the peasant tournaments started again in Groningen with the enthusiasm intact. Who is responsible for this miracle?
H : Jasper revivified the format. The first one drew 8 players, but had a number of withdrawals because people weren't able to cobble together a deck in time (or at least the deck they wanted). The second tournament had 15 players, amazing! We might be back to playing once a month, if we can keep a stable player base!
Z33 : Do you prefer the current metagame or the one from 15 years ago?
H : That's tough to say. On the one hand, 12 years ago, cards on average were worse, so it was easier to come up with a weird brew centered around a forgotten uncommon that didn't get blown out of the water by other decks. On the other hand, uncommons are much stronger now on average than then, and there are a lot more commons that can to fill out certain archetypes, so it's easier than ever to pick a cool uncommon an build a semi-functional deck around it. With the banlists now being aligned with yours, it's also easier to swap ideas, which is also great! I think I would need a few more tournaments under my belt to really know.
Ecrit par zombie33 & Hennink