![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This past weekend, I participated in one of the pre-release tournaments for the latest Magic: the Gathering expansion, Mirrodin Besieged. These tournaments worked a bit differently than normal - everyone chose either Mirran or Phyrexian, and based on that choice you got Good cards or Evil cards. Well, that's not really fair. The Mirran cards encompass the entire native population of Mirrodin, which means you get the whole spectrum of good and evil on their "side." It has all five flavors of metallic humans as well as the metallic cat people, goblins, metallic elves, vampires, and zany four-armed vedalken. So there are a lot of different philosophies and goals mashed together there. The Phyrexian half, on the other hand, just wants to kill everything and then nail pieces of metal to their corpses to make biomechanical zombies, uplifting them to their idea of perfection.
Anyway, normally everyone gets the same kind of packs to build their decks, but this time everyone gets 3 packs of the base set for the block (Scars of Mirrodin) and then either 3 packs of Phyrexian or 3 packs of Mirran cards from the new set. Your fancy promo card was also determined by this choice - you either got a Hero of Bladehold or Glissa, the Traitor. In the days leading up to the tournament I devoted a significant amount of thought to the weighty decision of which faction to support.
For storyline purposes, I kind of have to go with the Mirrans. It's hard to root for the biomechanical zombies.
For which promo card...it's tricky. They're both pretty cool. Hero of Bladehold is easier to build a deck for, and is probably the better card, but Glissa is more interesting.
Eventually I decided I'd go with the side that seemed like it would give me better cards for the actual tournament, because winning is fun. This was more complicated than I originally considered.
First I went through the spoiler list and seperated the cards out by faction. Then I counted up how many of them I thought would be playable in the deck format that we use for these tournaments. That came out to 43 vs 45 in favor of the Phyrexians, which was hardly conclusive. Then I tried to figure out which colors were better represented across each side, and how well they meshed with the effectiveness of cards from the base set. That didn't help much either. Pretty much all that told me was that if I wanted to play Red and White I should go Mirran, and Green and Black for Phyrexian, and Blue could go either way. I already knew this.
So then I figured out the relative frequency that each card appears in the new set, so I could more accurately gauge each side's relative power. For example, if all of the good Mirran cards are Rare, that doesn't really help their case much - I'd only get 3 Rares, after all. That bit of math was much more revealing - 28% of the new set is composed of Phyrexian cards good for sealed deck, compared to only 16% Mirran. The other 56% of the set is really only good for constructed formats, or is awful, or is at least of such quality that I would hope not to include it in my deck. It would seem, then, that I'd be joining up with the flesh-sculpting nightmares after all. And I did.
Now, I had expected that at least for the first round we might be paired off against opponents with the other faction as much as possible, but this did not turn out to be the case. In fact, in spite of the fact that many people apparently chose the weak and foolish Mirrans instead of the glorious perfection of Phyrexia, I found myself pitted against fellow Phyrexians during all four rounds of the tournament. This led me to bemoan this senseless infighting to my round four opponent, asking "Can't we all just be biomechanical zombies together?"
You might think that a question like that wouldn't alarm your average fantasy gaming enthusiast, but in the case of the people seated near me, you'd be wrong.
Anyway, normally everyone gets the same kind of packs to build their decks, but this time everyone gets 3 packs of the base set for the block (Scars of Mirrodin) and then either 3 packs of Phyrexian or 3 packs of Mirran cards from the new set. Your fancy promo card was also determined by this choice - you either got a Hero of Bladehold or Glissa, the Traitor. In the days leading up to the tournament I devoted a significant amount of thought to the weighty decision of which faction to support.
For storyline purposes, I kind of have to go with the Mirrans. It's hard to root for the biomechanical zombies.
For which promo card...it's tricky. They're both pretty cool. Hero of Bladehold is easier to build a deck for, and is probably the better card, but Glissa is more interesting.
Eventually I decided I'd go with the side that seemed like it would give me better cards for the actual tournament, because winning is fun. This was more complicated than I originally considered.
First I went through the spoiler list and seperated the cards out by faction. Then I counted up how many of them I thought would be playable in the deck format that we use for these tournaments. That came out to 43 vs 45 in favor of the Phyrexians, which was hardly conclusive. Then I tried to figure out which colors were better represented across each side, and how well they meshed with the effectiveness of cards from the base set. That didn't help much either. Pretty much all that told me was that if I wanted to play Red and White I should go Mirran, and Green and Black for Phyrexian, and Blue could go either way. I already knew this.
So then I figured out the relative frequency that each card appears in the new set, so I could more accurately gauge each side's relative power. For example, if all of the good Mirran cards are Rare, that doesn't really help their case much - I'd only get 3 Rares, after all. That bit of math was much more revealing - 28% of the new set is composed of Phyrexian cards good for sealed deck, compared to only 16% Mirran. The other 56% of the set is really only good for constructed formats, or is awful, or is at least of such quality that I would hope not to include it in my deck. It would seem, then, that I'd be joining up with the flesh-sculpting nightmares after all. And I did.
Now, I had expected that at least for the first round we might be paired off against opponents with the other faction as much as possible, but this did not turn out to be the case. In fact, in spite of the fact that many people apparently chose the weak and foolish Mirrans instead of the glorious perfection of Phyrexia, I found myself pitted against fellow Phyrexians during all four rounds of the tournament. This led me to bemoan this senseless infighting to my round four opponent, asking "Can't we all just be biomechanical zombies together?"
You might think that a question like that wouldn't alarm your average fantasy gaming enthusiast, but in the case of the people seated near me, you'd be wrong.
