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!

 

 

Kaladesh Masterpieces.... Ok things just got complicated!

Hello all welcome back,

So since my last post I have been following the spoilers and have been getting super excited about the releases but just about a week ago WotC announced that Kaladesh would have Masterpieces and oh my god these things are amazing not only are we seeing some amazing reprints of some old and valuable cards but the artwork is sick!

However this then led me to the thought of oh god there's a possibility that someone or even myself could open one of these and my god that is a scary thought. As firstly if we look at the mana rocks such as Mox Opal, Sol Ring or Mana Vault, this will give you or your opponent a huge advantage in ramping into bigger scarier things. I mean if you turn 1 Sol Ring that gives you the possibility of having 3 mana turn 2 if you have an untapped land but as we can see from the spoilers there are a lot of generic mana artifacts which could affect the game hugely if you can cast them a turn earlier than normal.

So now that we have talked about mana rocks lets discuss equipment or more specifically swords they only put the 3 best swords ever as masterpieces and my god it terrifies me that someone could equip the sword of light and shadow to a thopter and swing for 3 damage, untap all there lands and I have to discard a card!

Lastly we have the creatures so ignoring the excellent gearhulk cycle that has been introduced in Kaladesh the two creatures I am most excited about is the steel overseer which could beef up all your artifact creatures and the hangarback walker which during magic origins proved that its a good limited power house as it can boost itself up and make lots of thopters.

So realistically the chances of opening a masterpieces is very very VERY slim. But I am sure by the end of day 1 at the GP that a percentage of people in the top 64 will have a masterpiece and have built there deck around using it. So that's it for this article next time I will let you all know what I think of the full set!

GP bound

Hello All Jordan here from Orcs Head Magic..... So I have no idea how to start a blog so apologies for the babbling if it happens, but I wanted to share my thoughts on going to a magic the gathering GP for the first time.

So I have been playing paper magic the gathering since September 2015 joining at the time where Origins was just finishing and Battle for Zendikar was about to be released. I had learnt to play magic the gathering using the free app on android and also by playing the free game through my Xbox One. Coming from a war gaming background (Warhammer fantasy and 40,000) I loved the game immediately as one the benefit was to my poor arms and back for not having to drag around a huge gaming case with all my miniatures!


In my starter deckbuilder tool kit I pulled a foil Dromoka, the Eternal

So I attended my local (not so local I can walk but its only a 25 minute drive) Friday Night Magic with what I thought was a good deck. Turns out 4-colour dragons with no land fixing is not a good deck to play with but I had a lot of fun and did win a game or two and my opponents were a good bunch of guys to play and learn from. I then began to read into the strategies for MTG with decks, formats etc. and discovered the magic GP scene.

Now living in England we are only blessed with 1/2 GP's a year and unfortunately I have been on holiday for the last 2 GP's when they were announced but this year I am going to be attending the GP in London in October 2016. So I have began reading up on what to do for a GP and to be honest apart from a 5 minute video on the wizards website there is not much information so this had led me to gathering information on my own.

So first thing I did was get my GP main event ticket and a hotel room booked as living an hour and a half from the venue would kill me in traveling for the day. Plus my wife gave me permission to run off for 2 nights from her and my son to play all the magic I want, so naturally I snapped her offer up immediately. Luckily some of my magic friends I have made are also going to the GP so I should be having a fun weekend with friends and planning on Vlogging it for the YouTube channel.

So now all I have to do is look into the spoilers of the Kaladesh set and how hard can it be to learn the interactions of 264 cards in just over 3 weeks... wait I'm also having to learn the 30 Kaladesh inventions..... Damn it!