War of the Spark Prerelease 2019-04-27

The awaited War of the Spark (WAR) is finally available!  This set is more story-heavy than most, and the story is about Nicol Bolas and his army of "eternals" (blue zombies) fighting against basically all of the other planeswalkers at once.  WotC made this happen in the cards by printing 36 different planeswalkers in the set and putting one in every pack, mostly at uncommon rarity; for reference, most sets have 3 - 5 planeswalkers total and they're all mythic rare, so most Limited decks don't include any planewalkers.  In WAR, most draft decks will have at least a couple and maybe 5 or more.  And for the prerelease, everyone gets 6 packs plus 1 normal promo and 1 planeswalker promo, so you have 7 planeswalkers in your card pool to build with!

The effect of all of these planeswalkers generally comes down to a few things:

1. The games are often more about fighting against good planeswalkers than trying to kill your opponent.
2. Therefore, good decks are often designed to protect their own planeswalkers with a bunch of big creatures.
3. With at least 2 abilities on every PW, the board becomes very complicated very quickly.

This results in slow, complex games that are rewarding for experienced players and probably daunting for newer players.

Anyway, lets see what exciting stuff I opened:

I had the amazing fortune of opening a single pack that had both Nissa, Who Shakes the World and a foil God-Eternal Kefnet.  My planeswalkers and Kefnet are all in blue, green and red, so I started out by building a multicolor deck with as many strong cards as possible.  But I just had too many cards I wanted to play, so I pulled out several color-fixing cards and all the red stuff, and I was able to build a more focused blue-green deck that combined powerful PWs and proliferate:

One big weakness of my pool was a lack of removal.  In black I had two Spark Harvest, but black was my shallowest color otherwise.  So my deck didn't really didn't have any removal aside from planeswalker abilities and No Escape, and my main plan was to win by having better stuff and card advantage.

I spent most of my time refining the blue-green deck, but I had a bunch of aggressive red and white cards and I threw together a second deck in the last 5 minutes of deckbuilding:

This deck borrowed a few colorless cards from the other deck.  It is not a good deck in general, but I wanted an option to play against slow or greedy decks, especially if I needed to finish a round before time was called.  It also has more direct ways of killing a bomb PW if needed.  Plus, Chandra is cool and I really was sad not to be able to use her.

So how did it go?

Round 1 vs. Grixis (UBR) Bontu

This was a greedy deck playing 3 colors with almost no mana fixing.  In game 1 I used Nissa's -8 (keeping her in play) and overwhelmed him with value.  In game 2 I switched to the second deck and won while he was looking for his third color so he could cast the cards in his hand.  Win, 2-0.

Round 2 vs. Bant (WUG) Ajani Proliferate

He also had a Kefnet.  He had good early game blockers, so I stuck with my first deck.  In both games, I was able to ultimate Nissa while keeping her in play.  I snagged Kefnet with No Escape in game 2, which felt awesome.  Win, 2-0.

Round 3 vs. UBG Amass

This deck was nuts, and I was having trouble blocking because of Angrath.  However, in the first game I managed to stabilize at 1 life with Nissa at ultimate.  I had to kill Angrath (who had been brought back from the graveyard) or I was going to lose.  I played Ugin and deliberated whether to make a token or kill Angrath directly, probably losing Ugin as a result.  I didn't see his on board trick and attacked with one creature into his tapped army (I couldn't afford more attackers).  He sacrificed his Herald of the Dreadhorde to Spark Reaper and blocked, assuring my loss.  I should have just used Ugin to kill Angrath and been satisfied with that.  I made the mistake of switching decks for the next game.  He had lots of good blockers and incidental lifegain, and I failed to make any headway with a fairly weak draw after we both mulliganed to 6.  Loss, 0-2.

Round 4 vs. White-Red Stuff

We agreed to split before playing, with winner taking the uneven pack.  I had good proliferate draws and just overwhelmed him with big fliers, even beating a Sarkhan in the second game with Ugin to kill it and a 6/6 Aven Eternal to dwarf the dragon token it made.  Win, 2-0.

So that went well overall.  I think I had a chance to win the third round if I had played better.  I was happy to have no rounds go to time -- a lot of other people were timing out, even in game 2 sometimes.  I got 4 packs of WAR for the performance, plus the foil God-Eternal Kefnet is theoretically a $40 card right now (although that price will probably drop by half after the presale period).  Not bad!

A few individual card thoughts:

• Ugin feels very much like a card that is amazing when you're ahead and is just a 6-mana removal spell with a little lifegain when you're behind.  That's still good though.
• Nissa, on the other hand, is really tough.  Her mana doubling ability means that you have access to at least 2 extra green mana on the turn you cast her if you +1 her on a Forest.  I did make a sequencing error several times though -- when holding a proliferate spell, you get the most value by tapping the land for mana, then using her +1 to make it a creature with counters, then casting the proliferate spell to make the creature bigger.
• Speaking of Proliferate, I was very happy with Bloom Hulk, Contentious Plan, and even Kiora's Dambreaker.  Teferi's Time Twist on one of those creatures is great value.
• Jiang Yanggu played well too, and I had one game where I just kept growing things and proliferating to keep the value coming.
• I didn't get any bonus value from Kefnet, but just a 4/5 flier for 2UU is disgusting enough.
• I misread Ugin's Conjurant at first -- I thought it lost 1 counter instead of taking damage, but it actually loses counters equal to the damage.  It's still fine, but not nearly as strong as I thought.
• Never got to see Chandra in action.  She would have really turbo boosted the aggressive deck, and I love the design.

Thanks for reading!  I can't wait to try drafting this set!