The pre-release is coming! The pre-release is coming!
Saturday the 22nd you’ll find me at the Olathe Armory, likely on the wrong side of a flopped card as my life total reaches terminal velocity and cruises past zero into negative territory. I’ll probably win a match or two, if I’m lucky and go up against the right people, though I’m hoping to pull a few interesting cards for use outside the sealed deck environment for use against the Steves or Sully.
All in all it should be a fun morn, especially if Steve (Anna’s) is able to come along for the adventure, and if he can bring one or two of his people, we could take some serious damage from our opponents. I almost feel as though I’m taking the same approach to the Magic pre-release tournaments as I did during the bowling tournament all those years ago in that I know I’m likely going to lose to the serious Magic players just like we would lose to the team of girls a few years our junior every time we would face them, because they took the game seriously, where-as we were in it for the fun. I go in and create what would be equivalent to a 6 pound bowling ball. Unable to put my fingers in all the way, I can’t aim, but I make up for it in speed. Sometimes I get lucky and drop all the pins, sometimes I gutter ball, sometimes I forget it’s my turn and head off for some French fries leaving the opposing team annoyed. My deck works sometimes, mostly it’s an adventure watching it stray off into some weird direction while my opponents insanely focused deck drives straight in for the kill.
Ravnica and what I’ve seen of Dissension should be insane to play. There are some Dissension cards that do some crazy things, things that I try to build decks around, things that had been missing the past couple sets. Things I will bring home and once again dig through those boxes of cards to pull out some demons or spikes, fireballs and drain lifes, and yet another deck will be born.
Saturday, my friends and I will storm into the Armory too early in the morning with too little sleep, awake only because of energy drinks, hungry because all we have eaten were snack foods from the grocery store, and we will take a beating, and hopefully dish out a bit of our own.
Here here. (Hear here, here hear, hear hear, I don’t know which)
We should be accruing some amount of knowledge on how to create sealed decks. Our strategy is fairly flawless, if our deck construction skills can become at least average wins should occur the same way they do between our well matched decks: by luck and luck alone.
My enchant creature deck or izzit deck versus that deck of yours with fading people. It comes down to the draw if we can stop putting the wrong cards in.
But there is that important distinction: motive.
We like fun. We’ve created ‘friendly rules.’ It isn’t the win that is most remembered, but the ‘popping off’ of a grand combo, it is the ‘you brought me down to 1, I brought you down to 1, then you killed me’ that gets etched in our heads.
We may remember that my draw deck most typically defeats your discard deck, but it’ll be a fun ride worth doing despite the almost predestined outcome. We play different.
As far as bowling, I of course only went for awhile, decided I liked sleeping in more and a ‘handicap bowler’ would typically score higher than I (100, right?) So the analogy fails on me due to laziness.
The victory I had in Ravnica over the highly respected/well ranked guy stays with me. A well timed convoked spell made my creatures big, killing all of his and paving the way for a victory. The look on his face, the shake of his head, the shared laugh, that stuff is cool. It wasn’t that I beat him it was how I beat him that was cool.
Boo to linear players. (quite a ramble)
M:tGs?
Of course I’d like to go since this will be the last weekend I’ll be alive during for about a month, but the complications of work from 7am until 2pm on Saturday will probably cut me out of the running. It’s a shame since I excel at building decks that cause me to get beat on – I would be an indispensible addition to the raiding party.
Boo to the man keeping me down.
Telecommute! Phone it in, have ‘em call you when they need you and have them leave a voicemail, you’ll get back to them when your not so busy. Delegate to your assistants so you have time to think about the big picture. Become the man and hold others down while you help us get trounced at Magic Saturday morning.