Shards of Alara Prerelease: DONE

I went to the Shards of Alara Prerelease on Sunday! It was awesome. To start off, I'll list my sealed pool. Some notes:
- At the end of the night, there were still 10 booster packs left, so the host gave them out randomly as a reward for those who stuck around till the bitter end. (A lot of players left early to preserve their rankings or some crap.) So I ended up with one of those, and when I got home, I mixed them all together. So I don't remember exactly which ones were in that booster and which were in my Sealed deck, but my list should be pretty accurate except for a few commons.
- There are 86 cards: 44 from Sealed (because one was a foil Plains) and 14 from each booster.
- I've organized the cards by shard, but I’m not 100% sure about which cards go in which shard. Most are easy to categorize, but some I just guessed.
Without further ado:

BANT
1x Angel's Herald
1x Angelic Benediction
1x Angelsong
1x Bant Charm
3x Bant Panorama
1x Clarion Ultimatum
1x Dawnray Archer (not sure about this one)
2x Excommunicate
2x Guardians of Akrasa
1x Knight of the White Orchid
1x Resounding Silence
2x Rhox Charger
1x Rhox War Monk
1x Seaside Citadel
1x Topan Ascetic
1x Waveskimmer Aven
2x Welkin Guide (one foil)

ESPER
1x Cloudheath Drake
1x Dispeller's Capsule
1x Etherium Sculptor
1x Filigree Sages
1x Obelisk of Esper
1x Oblivion Ring
1x Onyx Goblet (not sure about this one)
1x Punish Ignorance
1x Spell Snip
1x Steelclad Serpent
1x Thoughtcutter Agent
1x Tidehollow Strix
1x Tower Gargoyle
1x Vectis Silencers
1x Windwright Mage

GRIXIS
2x Banewasp Affliction
1x Blightning
1x Dreg Reaver
1x Fatestitcher
1x Grixis Panorama
2x Incurable Ogre
1x Kathari Screecher
1x Kederekt Creeper
1x Lightning Talson
1x Shadowfeed
3x Skeletal Kathari
1x Skeletonize
1x Undead Leotau

JUND
1x Branching Bolt
1x Carrion Thrash
1x Deathgreeter
1x Dragon Fodder
1x Goblin Deathraiders
1x Goblin Mountaineer
1x Hissing Iguanar
1x Magma Spray
1x Sarkhan Vol!!!
1x Tar Fiend
1x Thorn-Thrash Viashino
1x Thunder-Thrash Elder

NAYA
1x Cylian Elf
1x Exuberant Firestoker
1x Godtoucher (not sure about this one)
2x Gustrider Exuberant
2x Jungle Weaver
1x Lush Growth
1x Naya Charm
1x Obelisk of Naya
1x Qasali Ambusher
1x Rakeclaw Gargantuan
1x Resounding Roar
1x Savage Hunger
1x Soul's Fire
1x Soul's Grace
1x Soul's Might
1x Where Ancients Tread
1x Wild Nacatl

So as you can see, my pool was fairly heavily invested in green and white. Luckily, I love green and white, so my deck ended up being green-white-red splashing blue (for the three excellent tricolor Bant cards). Plus, almost all of my mana fixing was Bant, so I had to do SOMETHING with it. Also, I had to run red because of Sarkhan. With this deck…I got completely destroyed 0-2 against a green-white-red-black deck. Also, my deck was 50 cards because I just didn't have the heart to cut anything. Beginner's folly.

So then I said SCREW IT and completely redid my deck for the second round. I started with blue, and ended up with all 5 colors and another large deck of 46 or 47 cards. I went 1-1-1 with it (against a green-white-blue-black deck with Empyrial Archangel, which was not especially easy to deal with), though I probably would have won the last game but just barely. It was not a good deck since I could rarely play any of my spells until I had all 5 colors of mana out.

So then I said SCREW IT and was going to completely redo my deck but it was already time for the next round, so I lost 1-2 with my crappy 5 color deck again (against a solid Naya deck). But after THAT swift defeat, there was plenty of time to redo my deck over and over until I liked it. So I bit the bullet, chose a shard (Bant), and cut any card that was not ideal in a Bant deck, like Wild Nacatl and, sadly, Sarkhan Vol. The one time I had gotten to play him previously, I made a tactical error and stole a dude, but left my opponent with a flyer on his turn to finish off Sarkhan. However, my focus on Exalted made Sarkhan's abilities not especially useful, so cutting him wasn't really that painful. I managed to get my deck to 40 cards by running just 16 lands, but with no spells costing more than 5 mana. It worked pretty well, as I went 2-0 in the fourth round with it and 1-2 in the final round (though the 2-0 was against a guy who clearly was new). If I had made that deck for the first round, I might even have done respectably well. Oh well, at least I had fun with the new set!

I signed up for a Shards of Alara draft for this Friday. Drafting should be much different from Sealed, and I'm excited. I'm going to get crushed, but it will still be neat. I'm really hoping to get Elspeth, Knight-Errant since she is just SO AWESOME. Even with Jund. Free dragon food each turn! I will relate my drafting adventures next week.

As far as conclusions about the set go, I'm not really cut out for that sort of thing. I saw few dedicated Esper decks, but I suspect that will be a different story in a booster draft. I saw plenty of red and green, as Naya and Jund seemed to be popular in Sealed. As far as my personal tastes go, I am a fan of Bant, since Exalted is quite a powerful mechanic in Limited. With lots of defensive Exalted creatures (like Guardians of Akrasa) and a few evasive creatures, you can build up damage quickly without sacrificing defense. I really like Welkin Guide; at 4W, it's expensive for a 2/2 flier, but its comes-into-play ability can give another powerful creature evasion, and then become your evasive Exalted champion itself on subsequent turns. Sweet.

I also really like the interactions of the mechanics in the set – except for Esper, which is a jerk. Exalted works well with Naya cards that care about having a creature with power 5 or greater during combat or at end of turn, which is a fair number of them. Devour works well with anything involving creatures with power 5 or greater, since Devour creatures are often huge. And Devour also works with Unearth: Unearth a dude, attack with him, and if he's still alive, Devour him, since he's going to leave play anyway. But then there's Esper, which only cares about artifacts, which has nothing to do with anything else. You know what, Esper? BITE ME.

Well, that's all I have for now. Hopefully I'll have more to say next week after the draft. Until then, BANT RULES GRIXIS DROOLS KBYE.

Shards of Alara Prerelease

OH MAN. I signed up for the Shards of Alara Prerelease! A nearby store (well, somewhat nearby) is having an event on Sunday. I haven't posted in a while, so I thought this would be a good enough reason to do so.

As of this moment, MTGSalvation.com has spoiled 183 out of the 249 cards in the set (which includes basic lands, so it's really 163/229), and BOY ARE THEY AWESOME. I'ma talk about some shards.

BANT. The best shard ever, because it is white-green-blue which is the best color trio ever. Bant is the classic knights-and-castles world, with griffins and stuff. Like Erathia. Their signature mechanic, Exalted, is based on attacking with just one dude each turn, but when you do, that dude is HUGE. This lets you stand back and defend with lots of dudes each turn while still packing a punch in your attack. However, this strategy is weak against chump blocking and removal, since they can just block or pop off the one guy who attacks. And unfortunately, Jund looooves tokens. So although Bant is cool, I don't know how awesome it will actually turn out to be mechanically.

JUND. Jund is the black-red-green shard. As I said, Jund likes tokens. Their mechanic is devour. When a creature with devour comes into play, it devours some of your other creatures to pump itself up. So if you have lots of tokens, you can easily sacrifice them to your devourers to make them huge. And some even give back to the community by making more tokens for future devourers. Jund also likes Dragons, and it likes them A LOT. There's even an enchantment that pumps dragons exclusively. And Sarkhan Vol's ultimate ability makes a game-winning array of dragon tokens. I like red and green, so I wouldn't mind playing Jund. I certainly won't pass up the chance to play Sarkhan himself.

NAYA. Naya is the red-green-white shard. Naya likes big dudes even more than Jund. Their mechanic is stuff-involving-creatures-with-power-5-or-greater, which is a lot of their creatures. Red-green is going to be great for anyone who likes giant dudes, because both Naya and Jund are going to have massive dudes in red and green. There's not that much to say about them other than that they are pretty neat I guess?

ESPER. Esper is the white-blue-black shard, and man do I hate it. But that may be because I hate blue-black. And artifacts. Their theme is artifacts, and all of their creatures are artifact creatures. I don't know exactly why I hate Esper, but I just do. Probably because it will be CONTROL CITY, and as you know, I do not much like control. If my sealed deck contains insane Esper cards, I'll grudgingly play it (because WINNING IS EVERYTHING) but otherwise I will be packing plenty of artifact destruction.

GRIXIS. Grixis is the blue-black-red shard, and is totally uninteresting to me. It's just standard evil demons and stuff. Their mechanic is Unearth, which lets you return a dude from your graveyard to play with haste one more time before removing him from the game. Yawn.

I know I've been a total douche about which shards I like. But that's because this article is about me and what I'm going to do, not an informative article about the block. There are plenty of those here. So anyway, I don't really know what I will be playing since I'm not the type to enter a tournament saying "GONNA PLAY MONO RED TODAY NO MATTER WHAT," but I will try to play whatever is strongest in my packs. I know I talked about how much I hate black and blue, but a tournament is different from casual play, and the chance to win twenty bajillion booster packs is not something one gets every day. Nevertheless, if all things are equal, I am more likely to play something with white or green in it than not. And if I do win prizes, I'll be sure to build some decks ASAP and mention them here! (Even if I don't win anything, I'll still have the tournament pack and 3 boosters worth of cards to work with.) Hurray!