Ixalan Prerelease 2017-09-24

I was really enjoying Hour of Devastation draft the last few weeks, so it was a little bit of a downer to have to switch to a new set, but Ixalan delivered and I had a great time at the prerelease.

I went Sunday morning, which is the worst attended slot.  There were only 9 people I think.  But that's enough to play some Magic!

My kid told me I should play pirates when I asked which of the four groups I should be.  My first two rares were black pirate cards (Dire Fleet Ravager and Fathom Fleet Captain), so I was already looking at pirates as I started to evaluate my pool.  I saw potential for a black-red aggressive pirate deck, so that's what I built as Deck A.  It looked like this:

My pool was really weak on removal, but I had a lot of good creatures, so I tried to push the raid theme in this deck.  Even though I probably had too many 5-drops, playing 3 Pyromancers seemed ok with all the attackers.  The 1-drop creatures also help with raid, even though they're not great.

Then I looked at the rest of my pool, and Gishath, Sun's Avatar was looking at me like "why the hell aren't you playing me?"  So deck B was dinosaurs:

The cool thing about this dinosaur deck is that it can get off to some super fast starts with Kinjalli's Caller, casting multiple 2-drops on turn 2 or even more things on turn 3, and Commune with Dinosaurs means I usually can find a big top-end dinosaur when I want it.

Here are the cards I sleeved up as sideboard.  I didn't change my decks much though, mostly just swapping decks based on play/draw or matchup considerations.

And here is the rest of my pool.  Notice that I didn't play blue at all.  Search for Azcanta seemed really good, and I definitely had some cards to make a blue deck work, but it just didn't call out to me.  I didn't have enough merfolk or vampires to make an on-theme deck for either group, and I ended up not playing some pretty good ones in favor of middling dinosaurs and pirates.  I also have no idea if not including Sunbird's Invocation in a deck was a mistake -- it is really slow to get out but then it can make big things happen (a lot like Gishath, without being self-enabling).

A quick look at the matches:

Round 1 vs. M (white-black vampires)
His deck was just all lifegain and all removal -- two of the things I didn't have.  I won game 1 with Deck A, then lost game 2 with Deck B and lost game 3 back on Deck A.  My saddest moment was in game 2 when I used Commune with Dinosaurs to get Gishath, but I had to wait until next turn to cast it.  He knew I had it and waited with Bright Reprisal (kills an attacking creature), and that was basically game over.  1-2

Round 2 vs. C (blue-green-red [Temur] value)
C had a deck filled with cards that gave continuous value if he could live long enough to play them, like Search for Azcanta, Waker of the Wilds, and Thundering Spineback.  I tried Deck B and then Deck A, and he just slowly ground me out of both games with  repeatable effects.  In the second game I kept forgetting that the dinosaur tokens from his Spineback were actually 4/4 instead of 3/3 because the Spineback pumps them.  He also countered Raiders' Wake, which would have been really good in that game.  0-2

Round 3 vs. P (white-black-red [Mardu])
I'm not sure that P had an actual theme, but he did have the planeswalker Huatli.  First game (Deck A) he got stuck on 2 lands and never got going, and second game (Deck B) my dinosaur curve just beat his.  2-0

Round 4 vs. M (sans-black 4-color)
I started on Deck A, but he had his own Waker of the Wilds, and he animated a land with a bunch of counters.  Next time he attacked, I didn't block it because I forgot he could just add more counters to the same land to make it bigger at instant speed, and it killed me.  He also had Huatli in his deck, and it gained him a bunch of virtual life every time he got it out because I had to attack it to avoid being swamped by it's repeat value.  Games 2 and 3 I played Deck B.  In game 2 I got Gishath and we had a complicated board.  I attacked all out with Rallying Roar in hand thinking I could use it on attack if he let me have lethal damage, and I could use it on defense the next turn if not.  He set up just enough blocks that I was able to cast it to do exactly the 16 damage that he had left.  Game 3 I got set up with Bellowing Aegisaur, and it either attacked unblocked or added counters, and I ambushed him with Rallying Roar and then swamped him with giant dinosaurs. 2-1

I was 1-2 and M was 2-1 going into the last round, so I made a deal with him like I've done once before when I was paired upward -- 3 wins gets a 7-pack prize, so there was nothing to gain from me winning, so if I won he would get the "official" win and split with me.  So I walked out with 3 packs, which is not bad.

There were some cards I definitely didn't feel like were as good as I hoped, but the weirdest one was Belligerent Brontodon, which I never actually cast because it would have usually made some of my creatures weaker (it makes my creatures do damage equal to their toughness instead of power).  Dire Fleet Ravager was kind of strange too -- I didn't usually want to lose 1/3 of my life because I was casting it to try to stabilize.

The cards that really impressed me were Rallying Roar, Bellowing Aegisaur (which I thought would have been too expensive to be worth it), Shining Aerosaur (just a 3/4 flier, but it usually matched up well), and the 1-drops in my Dinosaur deck.  In the Pirate deck, Pirate's Cutlass was good, and Fathom Fleet Captain was good in the one game that it didn't get instantly killed.

Overall, the Pirate deck (A) was 2-3 and the Dino deck (B) was 3-2, as I went 5-5 overall.  The Dino deck felt like the better deck.

Here are my rares and foils (including the back side of Search for Azcanta):

It was a good time, and I look forward to some Ixalan drafts over the next few months.