I remember stumbling through his consolidated performance with the deck, and it showed that out of the (3) Grand Prix events that he joined with this in hand, he posed an absurd win-rate of 91% - getting Top 4 in his first run at GP Phoenix (1,334 Players), placing 1 st in GP Las Vegas (2,776 Players – the biggest GP attendance to date), and again, at 1 st place in GP Hartford (1,819 Players). Matt Nass decimated the field to end up winning GP Las Vegas 2018 To emphasize further on the ludicrousness of KCI among all of the names that wielded this deck to success - Matt Nass was the most notorious of them all, and for good reason.

Unluckily for me, as the pattern of banning would illustrate, these were all cornerstones of primarily “Combo” strategies, where I mostly thrive in comfort. Having identified as a hybrid of a “Spike” and a “Johnny”, I always gravitate towards the best possible proactive deck available to me. Well, it’s not my fault that not only did these cards turn out to be oppressive elements of the archetypes they belong in, but were also coincidentally fun to cast. I’ve played all of these cards in copious occasions up until their final days. Plays “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys From Birthing Pod, Second Sunrise, Splinter Twin, Summer Bloom, Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, Gitaxian Probe, and Golgari Grave-Troll.

It’s either that, or probably I’ve grown immune to getting my decks axed, time and time again. And “KCI” was definitely provoking this fine line to an obnoxiously dangerous point, where the ban hammer was the only reasonable way out. Perhaps it was out of acceptance that at some point in time, a strategy displaying this level of consistency would disrupt the format’s drive to maintain a balance between skill & luck - comprising the fundamentals of gameplay for all TCGs. If anything, what I was regretful of was that I hadn’t capitalized more on the opportunity to play this deck to a greater extent, which obviously had quite the dominant showing in all tiers of competitive play, particularly during the last few weeks of its life cycle where more proficient hands decided to sleeve it up. Personally, that was the first time that a banning which directly affected one of the core decks I pilot, where I felt little to no remorse for. I’ll have you relish that memory of quietly smirking in delight when you first saw that news - for as long as you can, at least.

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