I was at the Darksteel prelease on Saturday and it was a good time. I went 1-2 in swiss matches, but the games were all very good and since Sealed is my favorite format I had a good time losing.
I’ll wait until I get home to give a match run-down, as that is where my notes are.
Let’s hear some stories! I know that MTGman did a team flight, how did it go?
What do people think of the set as they saw it?
–Mike
I was at the SF Bay Area prerelease. I went 4-1 in the main event, losing in the last round to comically futile draws. (You know things aren’t going your way when your Troll Ascetic dies to Inflame). Highlights of my deck were the aforementioned ascetic and Sword of Light and Shadow.
I then played in the team event with two friends and we had a disappointing cardpool, and ended up a disappointing 2-2.
I’ve since drafted MMD 3 times, and I really am not impressed with Darksteel. It just doesn’t have good commons. The best green common in Darksteel, for instance, would be only 5th or so in Mirrodin. Drafting is no fun when there are only 2 or 3 playable cards in each pack.
I went. 500+ in Seattle, held on Saturday in the luxury box level of Seahawks Stadium. Never been there, so I went. Only played in one flight (the drafts were all Darksteel, so I didn’t feel like playing in those), but I went 3-0-1 (if I’d played the last instead of drawn, I would’ve gone 4-0) and got some nifty product, and managed to sell to a shop some of my older, more moldering rare cards.
And there was even a local masseuse present to offer her services!
A luxury box at Seahawks Stadium?! We had to settle for a couple of moldy rooms at the Seattle Center for Mirrodin…
Did anyone get any cards with Indestructible or Modular? How’d they play?
I did get a Darksteel Pendant and it was pretty cool. Ever since Sylvan Library and Mirri’s Guile I have liked looking at the cards that I have comming up and this one is almost impossible to get rid of. As for other indestructables that I saw the Ingot was used well in an affinity deck that beat me in a couple of very close matches. He also had several of the industructable lands and it made it very hard to slow down affinity. He got to his Brood Star every game and it my artifact hate (I had lots) didn’t do any good against those artifacts that were making it easy for him to come after me for big damage every turn.
Have you ever had one of those matches where you just know that you could have won “if only…” ? Well, my last match of the prerelease was like that. I was facing an affinity deck in the last match of our round and I had a Pulse of the Forge in hand and 8 mana. My opponent was at 7 life and I was at 3. Pulse of the Forge deals 4 damage to an opponent and you can bring it back to your hand if they still have more life than you after the resolution. Casting it would have brought him down to 3. That’s no good because then the life totals are even and I can’t cast it again. I sat there rtying to figure out how in the world I could deal myself point of damage so that I could have cast the Forge twice. Artifacts that deal me damage? No. Creatures that deal me damage? No. There has to be something!
Then it hits me. I can mana burn myself for 1 and then cast the Forge and win.
Problem is that it only hit me today. 4 days too late! :smack:
Holy crap! I’ve been going to the wrong Magic tournaments!
Cool, MDSL. Didn’t know there’d be indestructible lands.
I’m looking over the card list now and I’m dreading the ways my roommate’s going to pound my sorry ass into the ground with the mother of all Affinity decks.
I want Shield of Kaldra.
We did reasonably well. We opened and registered a cardpool in which a deck virtually built itself. Four Tangle Golem pretty much makes a mono-Green deck a no-brainer. But we didn’t put too much more thought into how we would build from that cardpool because we were going to be doing a deck swap. The Tournament Organizer for DFW events is traditionally horribly disorganized and this pre-release was no exception. From the time they said “Ten minutes till the team flight starts” to actual start was over forty minutes(a friend clocked it on his watch). Frustratingly enough I could have let my teammates register the original card pool and had enough time to finish up my individual flight before I was actually needed. I abandoned a 2-1 record in my individual flight to play teams and I had a pretty strong deck which I think I could have gone 3-1 with out of four swiss rounds.
My team got back a cardpool which wasn’t all that amazing. A few strong cards, but not much in the way of absolute gamebreakers. We probably built our decks wrong based on the cardpool we got. We had kind of decided on archetypes to build to before we saw the cards and we didn’t adjust our expectations enough once we actually saw them. We knew that mono-Green and mono-White are strong in the field as are G/R(which I had played in the individual event) and W/U. Black is pretty weak unless you can commit to mono-Black and get really good removal cards. Red, even with the reprint of Fireball, is primarially a splash color in these sets from what I’ve seen. We ended up building two reasonably strong decks, a W/U and a mono-G, and then our third player was left to build the best he could out of the B/R/Artifacts.
In retrospect we should have gone mono-W with combat tricks and equipment, G/r(mainly green, splash red for damage and creature control) and then U/b/art because we had stome decent Blue. As it ended up I had a very difficult time getting down to 40 cards because I had so many strong choices for my W/U. That should have been a hint to us that W/U should be split up because any time you can’t find room in your deck for Solar Tide it probably means you should share the wealth. We did some post-game analysis of the builds we had done and poor Kevin had ended up with a deck which probably would have lost to my sideboard. He still steered it to 2-2 though because he’s just that good a player.
I played W/U and went 4-0 matches and 8-1 games with one game loss in the fourth round when I drew a hand I probably should have mulliganed. I ended up drawing five cards which cost WW and I only had one white source on the board. I was facing some pretty relentless beatdown too. Fireshrieker is just too brutal to allow a 4 power creature to get through unblocked if they have one on them. I had to sacrifice a Gold Myr to block or go down into single-digits very early in the game. All I kept drawing was double-W casting cost cards though. Two Loxodon Mystic, a Pristene Angel, Solar Tide(I found room, what do you think, I’m nuts?) and a Emissary of Hope sitting in my hand just mocking me. Aside from that I had a couple of tough games, especially against a mono-U affinity deck with a couple of the Quicksilver Behemoths. We did get an Eater of Days and two Lightning Greaves but none of us wanted to risk it. A Shatter can really ruin your day if you play with that guy.
Overall we went 3-1 in the teams event and took home half a box of Darksteel. We went back to my place to play some multiplayer after the event finished(at the ungodly hour of 9:30PM) where we had some fresh meat for the multiplayer game. Kevin’s girlfriend had come to town with him and while she didn’t feel up to playing in the event, she was interested in playing multiplayer Magic afterwards. We played a five-player game at my place and she pretty much set the tone by playing an aggressive merfolk deck with Coastal Piracy. She was dealing tons of damage and drawing tons of cards. I did some strategic sucking up to other players by using a Maze of Ith and some bet-hedging by using Spirit Link type effects on her biggest creatures(I can’t believe she played an Alpha Status on one of her flying merfolk, making it something supidly huge like a 27/27 and then put a Bonesplitter on it to add insult to injury). Follow that all up with some good old-fashioned intimidation by demolishing her attack with Stormbind on her Lord of Atlantis’s and insta-blockers courtesy of Rith’s Charm. She lost a lot of critters when she came my way and even though she tried to turn a land into an Island with Tidal Warrior I was able to remove their islandwalking by destroying the Lords and block with weenies to trade. When she tried it again later in the game I just sacrificed my newly-Islanded land to a Zuran Orb to allow me to block her critters again. She ended up killing everyone else off and then fell right into my trap as she ended up drawing herself out of cards and unable to break my defenses.
Two general observations. Wizards is really, REALLY trying to push lifegain and equipment. I can see a WW/Equipment deck materialize which may not be good enough for Tier 1, but will be a reasonably strong Tier 2 deck. Especially with Leonin Shikari, and Auriok Steelshaper. Both are excellent cards and with global abilities that make equipment like Sword of Fire and Ice and Mask of Memory SOO much harder to deal with. In the mid game if a WW deck is starting to run out of gas, being able to switch a Mask of Memory onto an unblocked creature at instant speed is exactly the kind of card-drawing boost WW needs to keep the pressure on. Not sure if it will be good enough to beat Affinity regularly, but in the hands of a good player I think it will allow them to shine on the battlefield.
I’m not sure lifegain will be as important in constructed tournament M:tG as Equipment could become, but it is certainly a force to be reckoned with in Limited. In the match I lost in the individual flight we only got to complete one game. Our first game was very drawn out by my opponent gaining 27 points of life over the course of the game. I did 36 points of damage to him and he still ended up at 11 when he finally managed to get the final points through to me. It was partially this which made me choose the Emissary of Hope over Neurok Prodigy in my build for the teams event even though I generally far prefer self-bounce abilities(damage evasion, removal evasion) over lifegain. The Emissaries did well by me though and I’m going to have tough decisions in the future as well I’m sure. I probably wouldn’t take the Emissaries over the Prodigies in a PTQ or pro-level event though.
Enjoy,
Steven
Yeah, I really really like the Tangle golem. I played two of them in my tournament deck too. I also had an Oxidda Golem as well, but I didn’t like it nearly as much. (finally figured out how to link :)) The 5/4 is just unfair on turn 4. Give him any equipment and he’s great.
I think I’m going to try and put together a deck that is designed to win with the Darksteel Reactor It’s just too fun to pass up. As Mark pointed out today on M:tG.com you can target it with Dismantle to double the counters. With Coretapper and the Dross scorpion recursion engine you can win pretty quickly I think.