At the Magic Pre-release
I spent yesterday afternoon playing Magic at a local’s store’s pre-release event for the new Dark Ascension set. The set continues the gothic horror theme of the previous set, and while I’m not particularly interested in Vampires or Zombies, I do like the Werewolf cards that have been added in these two sets. This was my first time playing Magic with someone other than Mike since the last time I attended Origins in 2006. The summary of the day is that I had a great time and learned quite a bit but failed to win a game.
Primarily I had a good time because I had reasonable people to play with. All of my opponents were polite and showed very good sportsmanship, and the judge was competent and professional and seemed fair. If I were guaranteed to play the same opponents I’d go back again in a minute.
I think I had a decent set of cards, though I’m sure I didn’t make the best use of them. I drew one really nice White-Blue mythic rare, Geist of Saint Traft, but I didn’t like my Blue enough to feel it was worth playing. I went with a Red-Black aggressive mix. As I said I never won a game but I didn’t feel like I was blatantly overmatched in any particular set. As I went, I saw two things: first, I made lots of mistakes in my play, and second, my deck could definitely have been better constructed. My opponents seemed to have more removal than I did: my second opponent explicitly pointed this out to me, and I did a little better in a subsequent game because I corrected this. Seeing what others were playing also helped me reconsider what I was willing to play. After my second match I went with a splash of white because my red had almost no removal, and I also put in a card, Wrack with Madness, that I had originally dismissed. I tried to build on a Vampire theme but I really don’t think I had enough vampires (6) to make it work, and while trying I included Vampires that weren’t very good (Falkenrath Torturer, for example). Here are a couple of breakdowns of the deck:
16 creatures: 8 black, 5 red, 2 white (including lingering souls), 1 artifact
17 land: 7 swamp, 6 mountains, 3 plains, 1 Haunted Fengraf
7 other spells:
- Red Fires of Undeath,Wrack with Madness
- Black Bump in the Night, Tragic Slip, Undying Evil
- White Burden of Guilt
- Artifact Blazing Torch
The average CMC was 2.9, with the following curve:
- 5
- 4
- 7
- 3
- 3
- 1
Now that I look, the curve seems a bit high to me, but I really didn’t analyze it formally during the half-hour deck building session. Probably one or two of the four 5-6 drops should have been replaced by a 4.
Overall I really enjoyed the experience of buying cards for the new set and getting to play with them right away in the Sealed deck environment. I would definitely like to try this again when the next set comes out.
