GP Nashville - lots of fun, no day 2

We ended up having 7 players head down for GP Nashville, which ended up meaning two cars. My car got a hotel about a 1/2 mile from the site; day 1 was fun. I had a good pool with w/r removal, steel hellkite, tempered steel, double embersmith, and good filler. After my round 1 bye, I played against another r/w deck - game one I got flooded out and destroyed. Game 2 I flooded again, but missed a play that might have kept me alive a few more turns. Bad way to start.

After that, I won my next two rounds 2-1 each; both rounds I lost game 1 to mana-screw (keepable hand round 3, should have mulliganed round 4) then pulled out the next two games on the back of my bombs. Round 5 was where I basically lost the tournament - I played against a Grixis control deck with double rust tick and lots of tricks; game one I think I took fairly easily, game two I lost, and game 3 I lost in the first turn of overtime after multiple misplays. My opponent was playing slowly and I made multiple minor misplays over the course of the match which culminated in 2-3 major misplays in game 3 that left me very frustrated and tilted. I don't usually tilt, so I didn't really know how to deal with it.

So, 3-2 and needing to win my next 4 rounds to make d2, I sat down against Alex West. This was heartening - Alex makes the second writer I've played against, so it was cool to play against a name guy. He was easily my most fun opponent of the day, very friendly, classy guy. Game 1 he dropped a Venser and began flickering his contagion clasp, which did a pretty good job of wiping my board. After Venser ultimated I conceded; game two I came out fast and rolled him pretty quickly, killing his Venser on the way. Game 3 was a long, drawn out battle and we ended up going to time. With either one more white source or two more turns I had him dead on board, but I didn't have either of those things. Knowing we were both eliminated with a draw, we sat and looked at each other for a couple minutes. He asked me if I had double embersmith, I confirmed, and he offered to concede since I had the better deck. I was still tilted a little bit from the previous round (and going to time here), didn't feel like I was playing that well, and told him that I thought he had the better odds of day 2-ing based on playskill, so I conceded to him and dropped. (He ended up making day two and coming in 132nd).

Jose, one of the guys in our car, made day 2 with a pretty crappy pool, losing the tenth round to knock himself out of t8 contention before day 2 started. We went out for supper/beer, crashed, and headed back to the site for day 2. I didn't feel like running side events, so I busted out Ascension and played 3 or 4 games of that until Jose dropped after 1-2ing his first draft, and then we headed back.

All in all, it was a pretty fun weekend - I ended up with a promo Jitte, the cool promo deck box they were giving out, some valuable experience, and good memories. Hopefully my next GP will prove better (also, looking to have more byes before the next one).