Shards of Alara prerelease
Sep. 30th, 2008 01:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwangoI tried to go to the prerelease at TE at 11:00 AM on Saturday, but it was already full. I was surprised - I didn't think Alara would be as popular as other recent sets, and I wasn't sure what sort of attendance to expect at the first prerelease at TE. I figured it would be similar to the turnout for release events, but apparently I was way off. Oops. Fortunately, they were starting another one at 2:00 PM, so I signed up for that one. Since I had almost 3 hours to kill I decided to stop by Gaming Weekend at WPI and see if anything was going on. I wasn't sure how populated Gaming Weekend would be on Saturday morning.
I wandered into the Vault of Games and sat down to read the rules for Race for the Galaxy. As I was finishing, the owner of the game came by and asked if I wanted to play it. I said I'd be delighted, since I've been wanting to try that one for a long time, and I still had plenty of time before I needed to be back at TE for Alara. I was greatly amused that I turned out to be reading the copy that belonged to the guy who I ran into at the airport on the way to Gen Con, who I knew from previous Gaming Weekends. We never got a chance to play at Gen Con, but I still ended up playing my first game with him anyway.
I made a couple of early mistakes because I mixed up a few icons and didn't know the composition of the deck in the game very well, but I eventually I got a terrible engine of doom going. I came very close to winning our 3-player game, with final scores of 41 to 40 to 28. I'm very keen to play it again, and I'm currently working on some way of getting a copy cheap, since I don't feel like I should spend a lot more money right now.
After that, it was back to TE. I opened my cards and decided that I'd have to be insane not to play White and Green. I was going to have to play a little of a third color, and I considered both Red and Blue. In the end, I decided that the Red cards might be better, were definitely cooler, and I had slightly better mana fixing to play them, so the final deck was White/Green/Red. I had 7 creatures with Exalted, one of the new mechanics. If you attack with only one creature, it gets +1/+1 for each Exalted thing you have out. I love Exalted. Several times I had 3 or 4 Exalted things out, so I could attack with a crappy 2/2 creature that turned into a 5/5 or 6/6 powerhouse of doom, and even if it died all I'd really lost was a crappy 2/2. Then I could just attack with one of my other critters next turn. Very effective.
I did awesome in rounds 1-3, and even game 1 of round 4, but ran into the ridiculous Sarkhan Vol in game 2 and got obliterated. Then, for the crappiest of all finishes, I couldn't draw a 3rd land in game 3. Everything in my hand was 3-cost or needed a second white mana, except for the spell that cost 1 red. I had 2 artifacts in my hand that cost 3 that tapped for mana, both of which could produce red. Any land at all would have gotten me a mana artifact, immediately let me tap it to shoot something with my R spell, and then on the following turn I could play any other card in my hand. But no, instead I drew 6 or 7 nonland in a row and didn't play a single spell the whole game. Bleh. Oh, well. At least my 3-0 record got me 4 free packs, and the OTHER games were fun.
I wandered into the Vault of Games and sat down to read the rules for Race for the Galaxy. As I was finishing, the owner of the game came by and asked if I wanted to play it. I said I'd be delighted, since I've been wanting to try that one for a long time, and I still had plenty of time before I needed to be back at TE for Alara. I was greatly amused that I turned out to be reading the copy that belonged to the guy who I ran into at the airport on the way to Gen Con, who I knew from previous Gaming Weekends. We never got a chance to play at Gen Con, but I still ended up playing my first game with him anyway.
I made a couple of early mistakes because I mixed up a few icons and didn't know the composition of the deck in the game very well, but I eventually I got a terrible engine of doom going. I came very close to winning our 3-player game, with final scores of 41 to 40 to 28. I'm very keen to play it again, and I'm currently working on some way of getting a copy cheap, since I don't feel like I should spend a lot more money right now.
After that, it was back to TE. I opened my cards and decided that I'd have to be insane not to play White and Green. I was going to have to play a little of a third color, and I considered both Red and Blue. In the end, I decided that the Red cards might be better, were definitely cooler, and I had slightly better mana fixing to play them, so the final deck was White/Green/Red. I had 7 creatures with Exalted, one of the new mechanics. If you attack with only one creature, it gets +1/+1 for each Exalted thing you have out. I love Exalted. Several times I had 3 or 4 Exalted things out, so I could attack with a crappy 2/2 creature that turned into a 5/5 or 6/6 powerhouse of doom, and even if it died all I'd really lost was a crappy 2/2. Then I could just attack with one of my other critters next turn. Very effective.
I did awesome in rounds 1-3, and even game 1 of round 4, but ran into the ridiculous Sarkhan Vol in game 2 and got obliterated. Then, for the crappiest of all finishes, I couldn't draw a 3rd land in game 3. Everything in my hand was 3-cost or needed a second white mana, except for the spell that cost 1 red. I had 2 artifacts in my hand that cost 3 that tapped for mana, both of which could produce red. Any land at all would have gotten me a mana artifact, immediately let me tap it to shoot something with my R spell, and then on the following turn I could play any other card in my hand. But no, instead I drew 6 or 7 nonland in a row and didn't play a single spell the whole game. Bleh. Oh, well. At least my 3-0 record got me 4 free packs, and the OTHER games were fun.
