...on one side not well. We went 0-3, last place in the standings and worst result I and my best friend have ever done since we started doing 2HG prereleases together in GRN.
On the other side, exceptionally well. Regardless of the result, we've still had a lot of fun and spending your whole day together with your best friend playing the game you share the love for, maybe the best game in the world, just feels so good! Who cares if we've gone from second place in M20 to dead last in ELD? We've had a wonderful time, and we shared a wonderful experience. That's what really matters. I've been playing in individual prereleases since Morningtide (Lorwyn was supposed to be my first, but the store I went to back then had no place left), but I've just discovered a new world starting 2HG in GRN with him. It turns out even doing things you already love gets even better if you do them with your best friend.
Tournament report. I and my friend had the same promo (
Feasting Troll King), a thing that had never happened to us before, but unfortunately we opened a very bad green, and couldn't certainly splash for a quadruple-colored mana cost. So we didn't play green at all. Instead, we opened a lot of Knights, especially in BR, and two
Brimstone Trebuchets, a card that I just fell in love with while watching the LRR PPR and that I knew I absolutely wanted to play today. So I built and played a Radkos Knight deck, with the two Trebuchets, one
Bonecrusher Giant, and one
Barrow Witches (that returns Knights anyway) as the only non-Knight creatures. I had 16 other creatures in my deck, and all were Knights, with most of them costing 2 or 3 mana. I only had a couple that costed 4 and only one costing 5, so my curve was very low (reason why I went with 16 lands). I had 8 pieces of removal in my deck (all the noncreatures in my deck plus one
Murderous Rider, also conveniently a Knight).
My friend went with a pretty normal WU control deck based on flying creatures and drawing cards. Neither of us opened any real bombs though, and we felt like that has been probably the biggest cause of our bad record. After the tournament, he came to my house, we had dinner together and then played some more Magic until around midnight, just for good measure. We've also gone mentally through each of our matches, and we felt like we've done only one strategic mistake, but one that costed us the whole game in round 2.
So, story time! It was round 2. My friend had a
Flutterfox enchanted with
All That Glitters, and the fox was something like an 8/8 with flying. He also had a couple of 1/N non-flying creatures, as did I. It had been a fairly equilibrated match. Both we and they were at rather low life totals, and attacking with the fox would have brought our opponents to either 1 or 2 (can't remember exactly), so we did it. There was a 5/5
Garenbrig Paladin on their side of the battlefield. We were thinking of just chump blocking it and then closing things out with the flying fox next turn. Too bad both I and my friend had completely forgotten that the Paladin has daunt... All of our intended chump blockers had power 1, so none could actually block, and that ended up causing us to lose the game on their counterattack.
In round 1, I was mana screwed. Maybe I should have actually played 17 lands. The game ended with me controlling
four lands, of which three Mountains and
one Swamp, and having the following hand:
Bake Into a Pie (costs double B),
Lost Legion (costs double B),
Barrow Witches (costs five mana), and double
Searing Barrage (costs five mana). The Witches and the two Barrages were the only cards in my whole deck costing five mana, and I had none costing six or more.
In round 3 (last round) we defended as best we could from a
Rankle, Master of Pranks holding
Embercleave. It turns out Rankle's trigger is just busted if you get to do it twice per combat phase thanks to the sword granting double strike...
Anyway, we've both loved the set and how it plays. We've still both got to do what our decks wanted to do, and I've absolutely loved playing a Knight deck based on the Trebuchets, I'm wondering whether something like that could be Standard viable after my monored Challenger Deck (the only Standard one I have, only modified with 4-ofs of
Light Up the Stage and
Skewer the Critics) almost completely rotates out in just a week.
When back at my home, he was also thinking that maybe he should have gone BG, using the not too many decent cards we had got in G, both of our promos, and the few B cards left out from my Rakdos Knights deck. The result was a BG deck centered around Food tokens, producing a lot of them and sacrificing them not to their own lifegain effect, but to other more interesting effects. There were essentially a bunch of Food producers and some things that consumed Food for profit. We've built that deck, and he tried to play it against my own. We've both been quite impressed by it, and now we're both convinced that he should have just built that instead of a WU deck to try to stay off of my colors.
LVP (least valuable players), aka cards that hugely disapponted me today:
-
Rimrock Knight - The +2/+0 has only been relevant once, and the "can't block" is way bigger of a drawback than I thought.
-
Stormfist Crusader - It turns out that giving cards to your opponents too and mostly losing a lot of life over the course of the game, as our opponents didn't want to kill it, is also way too big of a drawback. I finally found a way to get rid of it once we were at 3, having lost at the very least 12 life to it, and that way was just using it to chump block when it was already too late.
Instead,
Blow Your House Down surprised me when our opponents played it targeting our only three creatures, one of which was a Trebuchet of mine that got destroyed for technically being a Wall, even though a trebuchet is absolutely not a wall in real life... Obviously, that allowed them to make an alpha strike that heavily damaged us.
Oh, and by the way there was a team in the store where
both players opened
Oko, Thief of Crowns from boosters (not as either of their promos). One of them built a GU deck around the two copies of Oko and they obviously did very well in the tournament (can't remember if they won the whole thing, but they definitely had a good record at the end).
Ok, sorry for this aside, but I wanted to share it. Back to what you're actually here for. The judgments.