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!