GP London Day 3 - Sunday - Please Not Black White!

So we were booked in for the 8:30am Super Sunday Series Sealed event and after the really long day of the main event and with 110 Tix in my wallet already I am hoping to do providing my pool is ok.

So we crack the packs and as I am showing my cards to the register I am seeing a lot of Black and my brain is going "NOOOO NOT AGAIN!" so I hand off my cards and get them registered. When I get the back I see I have a big Black pool but luckily I have landed a very good green pool to go with it. So I beginning building a Black Green Artifact deck so that I can sack puzzle knots to a Marionette Master.

The deck was doing well and ended up going 2-3 until I dropped as prizes were going to be out of reach for me. This left me feeling good after another solid performance we then jumped in on Standard On-demand event which was a welcome couple of games as after playing Limited the entire weekend.

So I ended up with 160 Tix in my wallet which allowed me to get 10 packs of Kaladesh, 1 pack of each Theros set for a chaos draft and 1 pack each of Origins, 2015 and 2014 for random pack openings.

 

So overall the experience was a positive one, loved the games and my opponents were all interesting people from around the world even as far as Vancouver Canada! So me and the lads have all chatted and we decided that we are going to attend GP Liverpool next year which again is a limited event but we feel that Limited is a great format as it means everyone is at an even starting level rather than buying yourself into high rankings with a $200 standard/modern deck.

So that is it for this Blog I hope you enjoyed following along I will be doing the same for next year for GP Liverpool so catch you all next time!

GP London Day 2 - Saturday - OMG What Do I Do!

So up early (more due to always being up early with my young son) went and had a very large and hearty breakfast as I just knew we were not going to get a lunch break. The boys turned up to drop there stuff of at my room so they didn't have to drag it around for the day.

We all then went to the hall to go to our tables and wait for the inevitable start of the GP. So the box is put on the table and I we go through the process of opening packs and registering the cards of the guys opposite you and then you get the pool back and I'm in trouble! I do not have a bomb I opened a lot of combo artifacts such as animation module & dynavolt tower, I then look at how many creatures I have in the colours and my favourite Red & Green are sorely lacking in a massive way with like 7 creatures in total. So I look my other colours Black is the strongest and both White and Blue are equal so this leaves me down looking at the evasion strategy so after doing a few sealed events I have seen that flying is best evasion as in this set there is not a lot of reach so White gives me a total of 11 power in the air Blue only gives me 9 so I went down the route of Black White Artifact this revolved around playing game 1 with animation module and decotion module to generate energy for thriving ibex and thriving rats and getting lots of servos from the modules.

So first two rounds I lost both 0-2 so was feeling very deflated but I regrouped and decided to look at my deck and what I had in the rest of my pool and decided to sleeve up a blue side board. Then I have no idea what happened but my deck started working and I mean working I was either winning game 1 then subbing out the modules for removal or I was losing game one and subbing in removal to destroy my opponents key creatures. I ended the main event at 5:30 going all the way to round 7 of 9 on a 3-4 record which would not be good enough to make day 2. But what a first experience of doing a main event at a GP and I can say I am hooked and already look forward to GP Liverpool 2017.

So after finishing the main event I entered a on demand draft and then me and the lads called it a day went for some well deserved food and pint! which went down like water and called it a night.

My final post for day 3 of the GP will be up soon!

GP London Day 1 - Friday - Lets Do This!

So over the next few days I will be releasing some posts on my experiences from the GP!

So Friday was an early start but arrived at the Excel in London for 9am and waiting outside of the hall was an experience in its self as I was surrounded by my fellow planeswalkers who were chatting, trading and gaming and I have never seen so many of us in one place.

So the hall opens and its mental the free mini masters event is what everyone is waiting for as why wouldn't you want a free pack of Kaladesh! The only downside was it was abit manic but when you have like hundreds of people jumping at the chance to play the judges did an amazing job! So I got through to round 3 of the mini masters with no big noteworthy pulls!

So after a quick tour around the vendors I jumped in on the Last Chance Sealed event and wow the atmosphere was a bit intense, I mean obviously it was going to be as everyone wants to win byes for the main event. But being that the event is single elimination it was extra pressure on building and registering a good deck. So I ended up doing a Black Blue artifact control had only 2 noteworthy pulls one being a the Aethersquall Ancient and the other being Static Orb! which by the way is hilarious to play with I played it 2 out of the 3 games but lost in game 3 due to getting mana flooded and having no action to deal with an ever growing board state!

So after a lunch stop with Steve we ended up getting ourselves into the Channel Fireball Sealed Foiled Again event so firstly I will say the foil promo's were straight up jank sylvan scrying, crumbling vestige and spatial contortion were the foil promo's I received. Oh yes I went 3-0 and I have to say that one card I opened was the reason I got the 3 wins and it was Authority of the Consuls was such a good card. As my opponents were always on the back foot and being a turn behind each time was dragging there decks down a lot hell I am even considering building a prison deck for standard!

So we ended up finishing for the day at 9:30pm so had been playing magic for just under 12 hours which left me feeling tired so went back to the hotel and chilled in the bar having a beer surrounded by magic players playing standard and modern. So keep your eyes posted for my next post which will be the main event.

Sealed Practice on Kaladesh Release Weekend!

So welcome back all gosh what a manic weekend! Driving all the way to Blackpool and back and then running a sealed practice session with the lads on Sunday.... body is very tired. But anyway here are some more things we have learned, please note we are not experts on limited format for MtG but we were playing our rounds at 50 mins and apart from 1 round all games finished with 10 mins to spare on average.

Pump for the win!
So we all know that combat tricks are generally best sideboard and most of the time are used to save creatures in combat situations. But using them on unblocked creatures to get either extra damage through or to finish the game is such a good way to win games. So the best trick in the set is Built to Smash! this 1 drop can end the game and if you get it on an artifact creature even the vehicles when crewed it gains +3/+3 and trample this makes it such a good card.

Don't count on getting gold cards!
One thing that I have noticed from not only opening the booster box but in the bundle to is the lack of gold cards. (From my bundle of 10 booster packs there was only 3 gold cards out of 150 cards that is a 0.2%) Now sometimes they are not needed but in other times they can be key pieces to making your sealed deck work such as Voltaic Brawler or Contraband Kingpin giving you extra punch or fixing your draws with scry's!

Do not put too much land in your deck!
One of the lads was running 18 lands for colour fixing this is a no no! I have found that the max land in total to run is 16 in which ever ratio you like for 2 colours. If I go 3 colour which I have only once you need to look at having fixing in terms of artifacts/creatures giving you opportunities for generating mana of the correct colour. Otherwise you just have to have the correct ratio of coloured lands and shuffle well (sacrificing some dice to the card gods can help also) and if your opening hand doesn't have one of each colour/fixing then mulligan to 6 or even 5 to achieve it as running 3 colours is hard.


Masterpiece does not guarantee victory!
Yes from my booster box one of the lads pulled the Sword of Feast and Famine! Which you can imagine had me jumping up and down for joy! He did play with it in his deck but found that like a true bomb when playing sealed if it wasn't in his opening hand he never drew into it. But it was impressive when it did hit the board and was hitting his opponent causing not only for him to discard cards but untapping all his land!

So it was a good practice and we all managed to finished before the round timer went apart from 1 game. But me and the lads are prepped for the GP as best we can be, planning on entering a last chance sealed trial on the Friday of the GP so will update you on that.

Post Pre-release thoughts! Time to start planning!

So well the dust is now beginning to settle after the pre-release weekend so after doing battle against several sealed pools here what I have taken away.

So after following my own advice from a video I have done on sealed deck building, I built a White Blue deck reasons why in red and black colours I have little creatures and removal and between the 3 remaining colours I have decent creatures and decent removal, counters and combat tricks but my deciding pull was my last pack when I pulled the planes walker Dovin Baan.

OMG how OP this guy is! So my deck went through a couple of variations in the day with being more creature heavy to having a few more spells but its safe to say that he was by far very over powered with his +1 ability giving a creature -3/-0 and cannot activate abilities. Now most of the time if your opponent drops a planeswalker in a game it becomes a priority to be destroyed as you generally do not want  getting its ultimate or using any of its abilities for a lengthy period of time. Now Dovin was fantastic I got to ultimate him once in a game, in several others I got lots of value out of his card draw and general +1 messing up a lot of my opponents attacks and abilities.

So what else I learned from pre-release was flyers matter in this format more than previously as this set has a lot of creatures with higher toughness than there power making excellent blocks on the ground so look for flyers to get over those pesky ground troops. Or you could do what some people where doing (myself included) and crew the Adara Express with a Gearshift Ace (and another creature) and let the 8/6 Menace First Strike hype train do its thing!

Next major thing I took away from the pre-release is that this format is pretty slow, so being an aggro deck in my opinion can make the best decks so best options for this would be Red White or Red Green decks! As I did see several people in games going against theses decks and were struggling to stop the early game damage!

So now that's the pre-release come and gone its time to focus on proper 6 booster sealed rather than 6 boosters and one extra rare which can make all the difference.

Kaladesh Pre-release

So pre-release weekend is coming up and this is probably the best practice I can get for the upcoming GP. However my good friends also advised me that there are sites that show generated sealed pools for sets and now that the full list for Kaladesh has been released you can go to these sites and use it as a visual practice for learning the cards and doing a variety of builds from a pool. Some site even allow you to deck build and generate sample hands etc.

So the first site I looked at was Statistical Magic Sealed Generator now for a sealed pool this opens the packs one at a time and then shows you each pack at the end then allows you to build a deck and submit it to the site. Overall I like seeing each pack and reading at my own pace but the end deck build is very clunky and I am not a fan. So I would rate is 5/10.

 

The next site I tried using was MTG mirror this time the packs are all opened at once so the entire pool is visible also foiled cards are highlighted, I like this site as it also provides some rudimentary charts on the side indicating how many cards you have of each colour and a filter system can help narrow down your fields. Cards are easy to select for deck building and generating a sample hand is great too my only negative is when conducting a mulligan from sample hands you cannot scry thus making decisions on playing a hand difficult otherwise I highly recommend this site 8/10.

The last website I will talk about is Draftism which looks very basic but does have a great feature of auto build which in turn allows you to look at the pool of cards make a rough decision and see what the computer comes up with and to my surprise the computer does come up with some sweet builds but some of the time it misses vital cards that should be splashed etc. In all I like it for the auto build function but abit too simplistic 7/10.

So I terms of practise it good we have sources in website to build sealed decks these also can have drafts done too but I'm not focusing too heavily on that just yet. So signing off for now talk again soon.

Kaladesh a brewer's paradise

So the full set has been announced and wow Wizards of the Coast have hit this one out of the ball park! So this time i am going to discuss what cards have inspired me for brews around the standard format.

 

So first card is Panharmonica just look at it this artifact is insane, so whenever a creature enters the battlefield (EBT) it will trigger its EBT effect twice this will also work in conjunction with any permanents on the battlefield such as Kalastria Healer. So naturally brewing and ally deck would be easy as in late game you can cast March from the tomb to get more ally triggers. But this artifact works amazingly with the new fabricate mechanic as you can make your Aetherborn Weaponsmith enter as a 2/3 with two servo creature tokens. So definately a brewers dream would be interesting to see what you could do in modern or legacy with this thing.

 

 

My next brew is not around a specific card but around robots! or artifact creatures as they are better known in MtG. Now this set is bursting at the seems with artifact creatures from the adorable Filigree Familiar who is so good as one gets you some life on turn 3 which can affect the whole game and then you can use him for chump blocking to get a card draw amazing! But wait the 2 drop slot can be just as good, Scrapheap Scrounger is an amazing upgrade on despoiler of souls from Magic Origins as it can come back late game for board swings or as surprise blocker! I personally think that Robots could be a standard staple but it will take someone with a better brewing mind than mine to make them a tier one deck!

My final brew that I have been enjoying is Dwarfs! Now this stems from my love of playing them in Warhammer Fantasy and Depala, Pilot Exemplar just screams to my soul. Now I have been brewing with her in a vehicle deck but now the full set has been released I may just think of mono dwarves with the odd vehicle as game finishers such as Demolition Stomper or Skysovereign, Consul Flagship for fire power but one card I am most definitely using in the deck is Nahiri the Harbinger because my god she is amazing in a Red White Aggro deck!

So that's it for this article I will look at doing a set review maybe but I cannot wait to get my teeth into the upcoming pre-release this weekend as it will be somewhat good practice for the GP!