On Saturday night SFL and I played in the prelaunch for the new Magic The Gathering expansion called New Phyrexia.
It was unusually unpopular. There were only 12 entrants, compared to 30+ for every other prelaunch I’d been to. Reading online it seems the reasons were a mix of college exams, mother’s day weekend and the fact that this was the third expansion in the ‘block’ (and some players are therefore sick of this block).
Neither of us were particularly enthused about the cards we pulled from our 3 Scars Of Mirrodin and 3 New Phyrexia boosters. I had the intent of playing some weird deck like mono-blue or red/black but a stunning lack of creatures more or less forced me into green/black. I have a distinct memory of playing this at the last prelaunch as well.
All told I played 11 games, and won 5 of them. It was about half-way through the evening when I realized how simple my deck actually was. Of the 40 cards (including land) I had only 3 uncommons and but a single rare. Furthermore, it wasn’t even a New Phyrexian card! It was this guy:
And what made my wins particularly absurb was that despite me playing an infect deck, not one of my victories was due to poison! In fact almost all were because of the above card, which I luckily drew – and got to play – in almost every game.
The most useful New Phyrexian cards I saw on Saturday night were not in my deck. When played by others, I was particularly amused by how effective these two were:
In prereleases it is not uncommon to go a few turns without casting anything due to the underpowered (and very random) decks. Therefore cards like the above (which seem overcosted normally) are very viable. In one game I was mana-starved in a big way, choosing to play with a hand of only 2 land and then not drawing any for many turns. By the time I had drawn my third land my opponent had the parasite out and basically won the game on it’s ability.
And Norn’s Annex is just nasty!
We played the four qualifying rounds, but then left since it was very late. They were cutting to top eight at that point, and the winner was still going to get a box of boosters. Not bad for a tourney with only 12 entrants 🙂
All in all it was a lot of fun, perhaps even the most fun prerelease yet. Here’s looking forward to MTG 2012…
