The next time I mention I'm thinking about going to a midnight prerelease event, please, Please, PLEASE remind me that as a middle-aged man with two little kids who act as alarm clocks without snooze buttons, it's probably a bad idea.
That being said, BfZ is an awesome set, and I did have a lot of fun playing and building with the new cards last night (or should I say this morning?) at Brap's Magic in Burlington. I went in with my usual heart of gold, intending to fight for the fate of Zendikar with an army of allies. Alas, the cards were against me, and the power of the Eldrazi was overwhelming and drew me to the dark side. I ended up going with a predominantly black and blue deck with a splash of red, which seemed to work out really well. I lasted three rounds before I was just utterly exhausted and had to start paying attention to being awake enough to drive safely home. Of those three rounds, I left in a pretty happy 2-1 state. I pulled a few fun lands, including Sanctum of Ugin, Fertile Thicket, and Prairie Stream. Even though Fertile Thicket and Prairie Stream weren't keyed toward the colors I was focusing on, Fertile Thicket's ability on entering play was extremely helpful, and the ability to access white mana from the Prairie Stream as well as the green mana from the Fertile Thicket helped me to kick up some converge presence. Roilmage's Trick won me a game more than once with the extra mana colors hanging around. As far as creatures go, the Herald of Kozilek, Barrage Tyrant (my promo card, which was also a game changer), and Sire of Stagnation were the ones that really drew me to basing myself in black, blue, and red. My top pulls for pure, colorless Eldrazi were Conduit of Ruin, Bane of Bala Ged (well, I heard they did say they were never printing "Annihilator" again as a keyword...), Deathless Behemoth, and an Eldrazi Devastator. Now, come on, admit it... with a pull like that, you would have gone to the dark side, too. In fact, you probably did. In such a limited format, it did seem that the Eldrazi side of the battle was a little overpowered. All three of my opponents' decks were Eldrazi decks. The allies seems like they have some awesome synergy potential, but they seem more difficult to get to gel in a sealed format. My first two rounds were pretty tight matches, and really fun. All three of us were running tri-colored decks with a significant Eldrazi board presence, and both rounds went to third matches for the win, which I was able to scrape by on with some split second decision making that just ended up falling in my favor. My third round was my least fun, and left me wondering why I didn't pack it in after my first two rounds (though with a 2-0 record at that point, of course I had to at least stick around and give it a shot in round 3), when I started getting high enough in the ranks to play against a less casual player. This guy was a rules lawyer, the guy you feel uncomfortable even asking about the possibility of changing a minor decision even half a second after you make it and realize it wasn't what you meant to do. Transgress the Mind won this guy games. That is a crazy, common card. If you pull one today, do yourself a favor and play it! It was annoying when he wrote down my hand upon using it though. Intense tournamenting is just not my scene. I'm looking forward to some more BfZ games this week though, so keep your card pools and decks together after the weekend to play with on Thursday. We can throw together a mini, one-off tournament at Gaming Group this week if enough folks are interested. What about you? What was your BfZ Prerelease experience like? Write up a post and email it to [email protected] and we'll post it up on here! Game on! -H.
2 Comments
Kieran
9/28/2015 09:59:54 am
I also pulled a prairie stream and Gideon ally of zendikair but as far as I know Robbie pulled ulamogg.
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