The journey into the night started on Friday. We spent most evening and part of the night playing EDH and Modern and the games were nice and it was nice to forget about Journey to Nyx for a while... I just couldn't hear about the set anymore but I knew that the day after I would attend its prerelease. During the EDH games I was surprised how well my flat mate's Ephara deck (build out of my cube) actually works. Well my deck was also build from the cube so there were cards we both would want to play but couldn't (for example Wrath of God or Elspeth, Knight-Errant). When playing with my competitive Mimeoplasm these decks couldn't do a thing though.
Some time ago I signed up for the single player prerelease as usual and was asked if I wouldn't play two-headed giant with Jan Jestribek the day after. I told him that if he finds no one else to play that I would play.
On Saturday morning I was in relatively good mood (even though pretty sleep deprived) but this changed soon after I opened the first two booster packs. I opened the rest of the packs and went through the cards I already sorted by color. The best card was Underworld Cerberos, but red was uplayable and black wasn't stellar either. The best cards I had were in blue (7) but the problem was that part of them was for tempo and part of them were for heroic deck. Green seemed relatively playable even though it lacked good cards in general but still better than 3 merfolks for one that are unblockable that I couldn't even use (except for being 1/1 unblockable creature I would be able to drop in round 3 most probably). The best combination of colors I could play were Jund colors. Red being just a splash for Rage of Purphoros and Underworld Cerberos. There wasn't anything else playable. In black and green together I did not manage to even get to 14 'playable' cards so in the end I switched to grixis. Blue actually had flyers that could with a LOT of luck win a game sometimes. Later after losing even more games I decided to switch to Bant ignoring my bombs that cost either BB or BR. This deck was even worse than the previous two decks but it did not have a problem to have 7 mana early of all colors^_^.
This time WotC did not come up with some achievements but rather prepared some weapon forging which was really meaningless. The only thing it created was that the TO had more things to do. Usually having too much free time during the tournament I decided to forge my weapon to have at least one photo to show you on my blog^_~ (I was already sure that writing a serious report from JOU prerelease would be futile).
During the tournament Jakub Jandak send me a message. We could meet and try Legend of the Five Rings following the Ivory edition rules. After I lost the last round I waited to see if there would be players for Cube Draft. It did not really seems so. (in the end they might have actually gathered for some kind of limited tourney). So I moved to a different game store where Jakub was still playing. He lost the game, dropped of the tournament and we went to eat something. The place I wanted to get something was closed so we moved to local mall and I ordered something that is usually good but this time it was hardly the case. After this we moved to a café near the mall and proxied two L5R ivory starter decks. I was playing Crane and he was playing Phoenix.
My stronghold was clearly one for honor. The Phoenix one looks good for Enlightenment. When we started playing the game and after checking quite some information about rules changes we were told to get out (they were closing at 7pm). So we moved to his place were I had to eat some pills not to suffocate because of his two lovely cats.
I borrowed his guitar while he was preparing dinner and tried to play something. My brain was hardly remembering any notes so I had to cheat and check some tabs. No matter what my skill is rather none so the succession of sounds I can produce on a guitar does not sound well^^. After this we got back to our L5R game and tried to finish it. I was gaining honor from Proclaim ability and not much else as Honor producing holdings decided to stay somewhere in the deck. No matter what we found out how some things work and I realized that there are things I need to check how they actually work later. Before the second game we started shuffling our decks and I saw 'light up like a lightbulb' when he realized that there's something missing. He shuffled his stronghold into one of his decks but he realized it much sooner than most beginning players.
The second game we played was far better but my dynasty was messed up (not enough holdings) and Jakub's fate was even more messed up. I managed to lost a duel even^^ due to focusing one out of two FV1 cards (of the top) I still had in the Fate deck. In between some of the games we played I got bored and started building a house of cards.
Late night I showed Jakub my Magic 'Offline' Cube. The cube's list is from Magic Cube Online. He picked a part of it...and asked me a question about the card. He told me that the illustration is by Moeller and that it has the same colors as Putrefy. So I said Pernicous Deed. After a while of searching X in the Japanese Pernicious Deed he had in his hand he accepted my answer as correct^_^. From this moment on we started guess a card game. I have to say that it was lots of fun and some descriptions were pretty funny (smashed spider sitting on a supernova -> spellskite or 'image on which you can hardly see anything except a muzzle.....and eyes' -> voice of resurgence). This game also showed that the brain can work sometimes in a really strange way and that it knows the answer sooner than we actually realize it.
After 5am he drove me home. I took a shower and went to sleep so I would actually get up for the Prerelease that awaited me in few hours. I set my alarm clock to a time that was the latest I could get up.
When my phone started to ring I dismissed the alarm clock and miraculously got up. I grabbed my bag with Cube, sleeves and all the cards from the day before and headed out of my flat. My brain reminded me that I don't really need the sealed pools from yesterday so I left without them. But still my bag weighted about 10kg...I hopped on the tram to LGS and arrived there without falling asleep (and I was hungry).
Our colors were blue and black. We played UW heroic and BG with red spalsh for Xenagos. Both decks were slow for the format and not with enough bombs to save the day. But both decks were certainly playable and should have won us some games. But the reality was a bit different. It was much more fun though than the day before in which I had no chance to win and it was more of a torture to actually continue in the tourney. This wasn't the case on Sunday. During the tournament I also let Jan Jestribek guess some cards. His attitude to this was completely different and did not really follow the logic we followed with Jakub. So it wasn't that pleasant. He gave me two of his own. One in which I knew the answer is a UW creature with flash possibly some Liege and the other card being some UW instant doing whatever (either generating UW tokens or something that turns tokens in the guessed card or just some UW changeling or whatever). So I was quite annoyed when his hints were like...'the creature has flash' as all this I have already figured out and he just couldn't understand that. He showed me the Liege afterwards and told me what the other card is but he does not articulate so I just didn't really catch it. No matter what I did not care. His second attempt was with 'a creature that has more hands and is not human, used to be played at legacy but was replaced by a different creature'. I knew that he does not mean Emrakul and such and the only creature valid was Jin-Gitaxias. But I knew that this creature has two hands and yeah is not human. So after other hints he told me what the card is. So I showed him how it looks like and after that I was not willing to guess any other card. Few more rounds and the tournament was over. 2:3 and a pool that would hardly paid for itself.
After this tournament we actually managed to get 8 people together and play some cube. My first pick was Jace, the Mind Sculptor followed by Counterspell. For the rest of the pack I did not see a blue card. So I started picking some white and black cards. In the second pack I opened Sorin, Lord of Innistrad and passed Jace Beleren to my mono blue drafter sitting next to me. The packs in this batch were heavy red but green was prevalent as well. So I started picking some green cards from time to time and still tried to get some blue cards (counterspells mostly). Majority of my picks were lands though (in green, blue, white, black combinations). I needed a white dual land but none came and I knew that playing any wrath effect would be difficult (and I lost because of that in the finals). Anyway the third booster pack helped a lot and I picked any green mana fixing creature or a spell I could. So my plan was play lands, fetch lands, play some wrath effect and then play some fatty (Avenger of Zendikar or Simic Sky Swallower). I miraculously won against burn in round 1 even though in game 1 I got crushed hard. In round 2 I played against something that looked like bant. It was Birthing Pod deck with some creature recursion (and with Deranged Hermit...erm). It reminded me of how powerful Birthing Pod is. Fortunately I had Hinder for it and other counterspells ready for Elspeth or something more annoying. I was waiting for my second white for quite some time so my Blood Baron had to end up in play and chump but it did not matter. After the board was clear my opponent was left without cards in his hand and I had Jace TMS, Tamiyo, Woodfall Primus, Oblivion Ring etc...In the finals I played against white weenie deck that killed me pretty fast. My problem was not getting 2 white sources together in time (I added white sources in the deck because I knew this would be crucial...).
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The cube draft was a really nice change from Theros block and the horrible pools^_^ and it was fun to play and fun to draft. I certainly did not expect to win anything with my super greedy deck^_~ that looks more like a cube pack rather than a drafted deck...
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