Return to Ravnica
Sep. 30th, 2012 03:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwangoOn Friday, I attended the Midnight Madness prerelease for Return to Ravnica. Normally, I do these things at TJ Collectibles, but that wasn't practical this time around, so I went to Myriad Games in Salem, NH. This saved me about as much in gasoline as I paid in additional entrance fee, but it also saved me driving time, so it was theoretically the better choice. However, it turned out to be crowded (TJ's has a ludicrous number of nice big tables, and can comfortably sit at least three times as many people as we had packed in like sardines at Myriad) and not as smoothly run, and of course I didn't know anyone, so I'm not sure it was the right choice.
This tournament was different from every other prerelease so far in that we didn't just get 6 random packs to build our decks. This time, you picked which guild you wanted to play for, and got 5 random packs and a special pack of cards with the appropriate colors for your guild (you could still play whatever cards you wanted). I got my second choice, Blue/Red Izzet, rather than my first choice of Green/Black Golgari. Apparently, about half of the players who signed up wanted Golgari. Bafflingly, I played against someone Golgari who had it as their second choice, and who had wanted to play Izzet. If only I'd known before we opened our stuff we could have traded. I don't understand how with 25 people picking Golgari as their first choice someone ended up playing it who would have preferred to play something else. Another strike against Myriad.
Round 1 I beat an Izzet player and round 2 a Selesnya player. Then I got savaged by 2 Golgari players in a row (and of course envied them their card pools the whole time), and finally lost to a Rakdos player in round 5. Blah. So definitely no prizes, and the cards I opened aren't really worth anything - my most valuable card clocking in at $3.00. Ouch.
I just finished recording my deck and my card pool, as I do for all of these things, and realized to my great distress that I probably could have made a pretty decent black/green (with a bit of white) deck in spite of the slant towards red/blue in my pool...since just because I had more red/blue cards than other colors, it doesn't mean they were actually good red and blue cards. I remember carefully considering other colors during deckbuilding in spite of how silly and unlikely it should be that I play something other than my guild colors (maybe with a splash of a third color, as many people did), but unfortunately I focused too much on being able to reliably play cards, and not enough on whether those cards would be good enough. I think that's why I won rounds 1 and 2 - I could reliably cast spells, and won the race in round 1, and simply outlasted my opponent in round 2. But in rounds 3 and 4 I played against opponents who simply had better cards, and there was little I could do to catch up to them when they started putting out unstoppable monsters of doom. Oops.
This tournament was different from every other prerelease so far in that we didn't just get 6 random packs to build our decks. This time, you picked which guild you wanted to play for, and got 5 random packs and a special pack of cards with the appropriate colors for your guild (you could still play whatever cards you wanted). I got my second choice, Blue/Red Izzet, rather than my first choice of Green/Black Golgari. Apparently, about half of the players who signed up wanted Golgari. Bafflingly, I played against someone Golgari who had it as their second choice, and who had wanted to play Izzet. If only I'd known before we opened our stuff we could have traded. I don't understand how with 25 people picking Golgari as their first choice someone ended up playing it who would have preferred to play something else. Another strike against Myriad.
Round 1 I beat an Izzet player and round 2 a Selesnya player. Then I got savaged by 2 Golgari players in a row (and of course envied them their card pools the whole time), and finally lost to a Rakdos player in round 5. Blah. So definitely no prizes, and the cards I opened aren't really worth anything - my most valuable card clocking in at $3.00. Ouch.
I just finished recording my deck and my card pool, as I do for all of these things, and realized to my great distress that I probably could have made a pretty decent black/green (with a bit of white) deck in spite of the slant towards red/blue in my pool...since just because I had more red/blue cards than other colors, it doesn't mean they were actually good red and blue cards. I remember carefully considering other colors during deckbuilding in spite of how silly and unlikely it should be that I play something other than my guild colors (maybe with a splash of a third color, as many people did), but unfortunately I focused too much on being able to reliably play cards, and not enough on whether those cards would be good enough. I think that's why I won rounds 1 and 2 - I could reliably cast spells, and won the race in round 1, and simply outlasted my opponent in round 2. But in rounds 3 and 4 I played against opponents who simply had better cards, and there was little I could do to catch up to them when they started putting out unstoppable monsters of doom. Oops.
