“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
I’m having a good time on this lazy vacation! We abandoned the idea of a road trip and are freewheeling it day-by-day.
There’s been lots of shopping:
A bit of gaming:
Some fine dining:
Lots of driving:
And the evenings always end with this:
We’ve now opened and played full drafts of two sets. Tomorrow we’ll start making decks from Bernard’s now-sizable collection and move on to playing them 🙂
Some of my recent posts have been too long so let’s keep this one short!
These are the two Planeswalker decks released with the new set Amonkhet. Each of them includes a few exclusive cards (including unique versions of the Planeswalkers) and a couple of boosters. The idea is you use the boosters to tune the deck, but I played as-is.
The decks are simplistic, big on creatures and games tended to turn into beatdowns. That said both decks were fun enough, although Liliana beat Gideon in every one of four games. Her deck seems to utilize the new mechanics better as well.
A good pair of decks for new players, or to introduce the Amonkhet set, but in my opinion not near as much fun as this next release…
I like duel decks in general. I think the price ($20) is right and the decks usually contain a good mix of unusual cards and are reasonably well matched.
This set though exceeded my expectations. Both decks are very heavy on spells (one has only 13 creatures) and the R/U one in particular is a combo deck that even includes cards with the hilarious ‘storm’ keyword!
They’re not greatly matched (Lovisa lost all but one of five matches) but they’re fun to play, which is what counts surely? I would have very much liked to play both of these with an actual other human player, and it’s been a while I’ve thought that of a duel deck. Recommended.
I went to the prerelease for the latest MTG set Kaladesh this past weekend. I’ve been to dozens of these over the last eight years and have blogged many so you know the drill.
Kaladesh is an artifact-heavy set that takes place in a sort of ‘Indian steampunk’ world. It’s a wonderful set both in design and the way it plays, with oodles of fun cards that work well with each other.
There were many players (about 40) and there were four rounds of play. As has been the trend the last year or so, the tourney was very casual and you won boosters according to your games won. In the end I won two and placed somewhere in the top third.
My deck was green and white, and when it won did so mostly due to this pair of cards:
The artifact is seriously powerful, and generated me tokens every round while pumping up my other creatures. If I got it out with a +1/+1 on a card, I usually won.
The set includes a new vehicle artifact type, but I included none in my deck. They are powerful though, and were difficult to deal with when played against me. The guy that ultimately won the tournament was lucky with his card pool and played a deck based around vehicles.
For me the measure of an MTG card – and an expansion – is in the answer to “do I want to build decks around this”? This is why Kaladesh succeeds, because it has many such cards. These two for instance…
That first one seems made for my life gain deck, and the second just cries out to be abused 🙂
So my verdict is: a great set with cards that are fun to play. Doing just that this past weekend may have been the most fun I’ve ever had at a prerelease.