A couple of weeks ago, the new Magic The Gathering expansion, named Return To Ravnica, was released. As with all previous expansions for the last few years, I attended the prerelease tournament.

This prerelease was a bit different from most, in that you had to pick one of the ‘guilds’ that the set is themed around. I chose ‘Azorius’, a blue/white guild themed around control and denial. Each participant was then given a fun little box that contained various goodies (and, importantly, their cards) themed around their chosen guild:

So… I built a bad deck! I had misunderstood the rules a little, and assumed I must play blue/white only, and did just that despite perhaps having better green cards than blue. So I took what I had, put it all together, and ended up with a deck big on denial (especially the Azorius keyword detain, which prevents opponents creatures from acting for a turn) but very weak on offense and – importantly – removal.

The first round I won 2-0, against a player using a tri-coloured deck based around the guild Rakdos (which is red/black, but he put a bit of green in as well). I’ll admit my victory has a lot of luck in it, and even after only one game the weakness of my deck was clear to me. After the round I debated changing it (which is allowed, only between rounds) but was at that point already irritated by the sheer amound of players and general stuffiness of the venue that I decided to just continue and leave after my first loss.

This would end up being the very next round. I face another Rakdos opponent, and actually played a very lengthy but fun game against him, that he eventually won by (quite literally) a toss of a die. See this card for what I mean 🙂

The game had taken a long time – almost half an hour – so I forfeited the second match to give him a 2-0 victory against me, and I left early. I only played 3 games during that prerelease, and can’t say I had anywhere near as much fun as I did at others, mostly due to the crowd.

The next week I went back to my store and picked up my box of the set, which I had preordered. Over the last few days I’ve been opening the dozens of booster packs this gave me, and the above photo is a shot of all the cards laid out waiting to be sorted and boxed. There’s a lot of interesting material in this set, and I’m looking forward to tweaking my existing Commander decks and perhaps making some new ones.

The above shows the few mythics (and promos) I have pulled from the boosters, with only 4 or 5 left to open. In terms of numbers, this is statistically low. But I’m happy I got the Gorgon plainswalker and the big angel at the back of the picture. Epic Experiment though… that’s an underwhelming mythic!

Anyway I have a few unusual plans for my Return To Ravnica cards. In time, these plans will become clear to some of you 🙂