In which MetalJim learns how to hang in there and keep digging…

This past Saturday, April 21st, I played in the “main event” at the Nashville Area Pre-Release Tournament for the upcoming Future Sight card set for Magic: the Gathering.  After a grueling 9 hours or so, I placed 14th out of 88 players, and won 6 booster packs from the new set.  Read on if the details of such an adventure seem at all interesting to you…

[or just come back next week when the column will probably swing back to D&D related topics]

Iwrote a column a few weeks ago about playing in a sealed deck tournament at a local game store, where out of 13 players, most of them fairly experienced, I finished a disappointing 12th.  I said then that the experience would still prove useful when I got to the Pre-Release, and that turned out to be true.  I had a pretty good idea how the day would unfold, how to handle things like deck registration, etc., and even learned a few good lessons about how to build sealed environment decks.

The Nashville Pre-Release was held at downtown hotel, using up the conference room/ banquet hall area.  The total crowd was pretty impressive, and the organizers did a very good job of keeping the whole thing running.  I would guess a total crowd of close to 200 total players for the day as a whole.  I know that at least 3 flights of 32 player sealed deck tournaments were run, and the main event that I played in had 88 players.  There was a small two-headed giant tourney going on, and by the time I left they were starting up draft pod number 12.  Those drafts had 8 players each, but probably included players who had been in the early flights of the sealed deck tourneys, and several folks played in more than 1 draft.

We started the main event a little after 10 am, but it took a good 45 minutes to get everyone seated, pass out product and deck lists, and then register the decks.  The point of the process is to make it a little harder for someone to slip in a couple of good cards from “up their sleeve” – the packs that you are registering are most definitely NOT your own.  The first packs that I opened included a sweet foil version of the dragon legend that I previewed last week, but the rest of the cards were pretty lame, so I was happy to pass those cards along to some random person down the line.

We then had 40 minutes or so to build our own decks.  For a $30 entry fee, I had a Time Spiral tourney box with 45 useable cards and 30 lands.  The lands were put into a “common pool” in the center of the table, making it much easier to optimize a two color build.  I also had 3 booster packs from the new Future Sight expansion to work with.  Knowing that I had fifteen cards MORE than the last time I did a sealed deck tourney, I was determined to try a two color strategy, hopefully with some good fatties and a couple of bomb rares.  I was reasonably happy with the tools at my disposal.  I had some decent blue cards and a blue/ black card called Shadowmage Infiltrator.  These guys are a fun way to gain card advantage, but I had to put the Infiltrator aside in order to take advantage of all the red and black synergy in my card pool.

I had two copies of a Future Sight common called Henchfiend of Ukor.  This guy is a 4 mana red critter with a small echo cost that requires black mana to be tapped the next turn.  He does have haste, and he was pumpable in terms of offensive power with either black or red mana.  The 3/2 stats meant he had a pretty low toughness, and no way to pump that.  Still, this was a good, flexible, mid game beater.  I also had multiple copies of some new Future Sight critters that were basically 2/1 beaters for 2 mana.

My two bomb rares were a Time Spiral legend named Kaervek the Merciless and a Future Sight rare called Pact of the Titan.  Kaervek is a 7 mana gold bordered card.  He’s a 5/4 critter, but his real power is that he “burns” the other guy for damage each time he tries to play a spell, to the tune of 1 point of damage per point of mana in the converted mana cost of the spell that is being cast.  This is sort of a “win more” card – by the time this guy hits the table and starts to put the squeeze on, I was probably winning the game already anyway.  Still, he made it onto the board in at least 3 different games that I played, and it was fun to watch the other players squirm.  The Pact of the Titans card allows you to put a 4/4 giant token into play out of nowhere as an instant without paying any mana.  The catch is that you have to pay five mana (including one red) during the next upkeep or you LOSE THE GAME (cue dramatic music).  The beauty is that you can drop a 5 mana critter on turn five, wait until your opponent attacks you with something on his turn, drop in a 4/4 fatty to the rescue, and then pay for it on turn 6, where the giant token is already free of summoning sickness and ready to attack on its own.

The other good combo in my deck involved a red “burn” spell called Lightning Axe and a new black zombie critter from Future Sight.  Lightning Axe allows you to do 5 damage to a critter for only 1 red mana, provided you discard a card.  The Grave Scrabbler zombies can be played for a madness cost of 1B if they are in the process of being discarded.  Nothing turns a game around like watching your opponent tap out five mana to play a really big critter, then nuking it as an instant effect at the end of the turn, putting into play a 2/2 zombie, and pulling another creature out of your graveyard (bonus effect of the zombies), all for 3 mana.

Around 12 noon, we finally got to shuffle up and deal for the first round matches.  My first round opponent was good, and eventually placed in the top 8.  He outplayed me, including a second game where I got Kaervek the Merciless into play and still lost.  My round two opponent was a lady who really didn’t know how most of her own cards worked, including some of the older Time Spiral cards.  This is the wide range of skill that you can find at a Pre-Release.  I won the first game, and my deck sputtered in game two, before eventually drawing a game on time.  Still, it was a win.  I was up to 2–1 after a match in which my opponent got mana screwed, and fell to 2–2 after a match that I could have easily won.  In that one, I easily dominated game one before having all kinds of mana problems against a guy who was playing a somewhat similar red-black deck.  “That’s Magic”, as the saying goes.  Sometimes you are on the winning end when someone else gets mana-screwed, and sometimes you are the one getting screwed. 

Now, at 2–2, I knew that my chances of placing in the “prize” rankings weren’t good.  I knew that a top 8 was pretty much out of the question.  However, I had some faith in my deck, and I decided to stick it out a little longer, to see if I could at least finish above .500.  Well, my deck started to click, and I coasted through some easy games.  Getting to 3–2 was easy.  I dropped one game against a pretty funny guy playing blue-green with a bunch of fungus creatures, but managed to get to 4–2.

Going into the 7th and final pairing, I knew that I was sitting at 20th place in the overall standings.  I knew that I was going to be playing against another 4–2 player, and that basically one of us was going to go into the top 16 and win 6 booster packs, and the other was going to go home unhappy.  Needless to say, I was pretty psyched up.  I think some nerves hit the other guy a lot worse than they hit me.    My deck fired off properly.  The other guy got himself up to about 6 mana and played a legend called Dralnu, Lich Lord.  Dralnu doesn’t actually take damage, but he makes you sacrifice permanents instead if gets hit.  So, when I hit Dralnu with a Lightning Axe shortly after he hit the table, the other guy had to sacrifice five of his lands and the game was basically over right there.  He made some timing mistakes in game 2, and Kaervek hit the table to put the icing on the cake. 

Let me just say that I was feeling pretty good.  This was at least as much fun as winning $50 playing poker, and I’ve done that on 3 different occasions.  The actual value of the cards in the 6 prize packs wasn’t anywhere near as important as the satisfaction of knowing that I had pulled my way up throught the ranks in a 3 match winning streak to earn myself some respectability.  Now, I know that my overall skill level right this second is nowhere near that of the top 10% of Magic players in Nashville.  I have a long way to go, and I need a lot more game time in real, competitive situations against the local pros before I can really hope to scrap with some of those guys, even in a sealed deck tourney with a theoretically “fair” card pool.  The way that I snuck up through the pairings meant that I never actually played against any of the top 10 players, except for that first round.

Some more thoughts on the event as a whole… First of all, it was really well run.  The overall prize payout was good enough to keep people happy – apparently the last few such Pre-Release tournaments in the area were handled a little differently with a much stingier prize distribution.  The organizers didn’t have a huge number of judges on site, but there were enough to keep things moving.  I think that there really weren’t that many rules problems overall, because there were enough friendly and skilled players interspersed throughout the crowd that people were able to help each other through any niggling rules weirdness with some of the new cards. 

Secondly, let me just say again that I like the Time Spiral block a good deal.  I think that the “limited” card pool is very balanced, and makes for a lot of interesting decisions in sealed deck and draft games.  Later on in the day, I was chatting with the guy who had beaten me in the first round.  He insisted that Ravnica was the “best block ever”, but he thought Time Spiral was okay.  He hinted that it was too early to tell how the draft format of Time Spiral– Planar Chaos– Future Sight would work out.  He thought it would be less predictable and more random than the Ravnica drafts had been.  I see that as okay – it should be up to the good players to find good synergy within a sometimes confusing set of cards.

Anyway, I now get to sit at home and stare at my shiny Pre-Release souvenir foil – it’s a black legend called Khorlash, Heir to Blackblade, with a nice gold stamp of April 21, 2007 to remind me of a very cool day.  It was a grueling 9 hour marathon, but I feel pretty good about sticking it out and managing to make a decent finish.  Of course this means I will still have to go out a buy a booster box of Future Sight when it comes out in a couple of weeks, but then, that’s the kind of enthusiasm that such tourneys are supposed to build.