Trash Sealed Deck - Festival Fantazie

In the Czech Republic there is a convention that lasts about ten days. It is the biggest Science Fiction, Fantasy and Gaming convention in the Czech Republic. It takes place annually in Chotebor, a relatively small town somewhere in the middle of the country. The name of the convention is Festival Fantazie (FF in short).

Each year thousands of people to gather there to play games, listen to panel discussions, seminars, to watch movies etc. Among those people you can also find Magic: The Gathering players.

This year our shop had a stand at Festival Fantazie. During the ten days we organized few tournaments. The regular ones like draft of Scars block, Standard and Legacy took place, but such tournaments don't usually bring anything new or funny. I have to admit that the first draft was funny in a way. A strange group of players gathered. The differences in skill were high and that led into one player having this =>



The drafting itself took ages (two and half hours), but in the end everybody was happy. The draft ended round 1 am.

There was one tournament for new players who would play with the half decks WotC gives to new players. Half deck consist of 30 cards and are of each color. In one batch of the decks there are 2 version of each color deck. There were 16 people who participated and many found out that flyers + greatsword is evil. But wait how about 2 arrests on your two only creatures and Shattered Angel wielding a Greatsword? Goblin deck could surprise with Goblin Bangchuckers. I had a game in which this card managed to destroy three of my creatures before finally hitting itself. One poor player was killed by 1/1 elf with hexproof that got a nice trollhide. Hm how that elf looked like then one wonders.

Anyway near the end of the convention we prepared a Trash sealed deck. Each player would receive 84 cards that would be randomly chosen from Alara Block, Mirrodin Block and tenth edition. Each player received the same ratio of cards from each set.

We could divide the players' decks into two groups. One group playing aggro decks mainly build from Alara Block cards + some equipments from Mirrodin and control deck builds that used cards from all sets and usually ending up playing white and blue. The third color was usually black or green. But some tried even a five color deck (picture follows)



If you checked the top players decks' you would find out that all those control decks are at the top and the aggro decks are below except me playing almost monogreen with Pestilent Kathari (that meant adding two colors, but that was fine as black had some rather poor removal and red had dark temper) ending third.

And the winner? The winner played a bant with some counterspells, unsummons and relatively big creatures. 3/3 flyers were big for this format. With few more tricks and good player this deck made it to the top. Here he is, with his prize!

(oh yeah, that is dragon whelp sitting on trash^^, I made this in illustrator for this occasion. the author of the idea is Lukas Verner.)

The whole event was for free. People could keep their cards or trash them afterwards as they chose to. All the players had fun and wanted another event like this in the future. So I guess from now on Trash 'sealed deck' will be a must at any convention we go.

Thanks for coming!