The latest MTG duel deck to be released is Sorin vs Tibalt. I purchased it and have played the two decks against each other to see how they match up. Here’s my results…
Sorin’s deck uses the Sorin, Lord of Innistrad card from the Innistrad set, and the theme of the deck seems to be ‘tokens, vampires and lifelink’. As played, it was a fast deck with quite a bit of evasion (fliers, mostly) and some strong removal.
Tibalt’s deck uses his only appearance so far, Tibalt the Fiend-Blooded as the Planeswalker, and the deck utilizes hosted creatures, sacrifice effects and strong but optional direct damage (such as Browbeat.
In the four games I played, Sorin won handily every time. In two of the games, he won 20-0! This is as close to a mismatch as any duel deck I’ve played in the last few years, with Tibalt lacking both the speed and the removal to deal with Sorin’s creatures even if Sorin didn’t have lifelink!
In many of the games, Sorin had 2 or more flying spirit tokens out very quickly and Tibalt had little defense. A card like Lingering Souls could turn the game if drawn early, and often did.
Sometimes Tibalt gave a good fight (notable cards strong in this matchup: Vithian Stinger, Sulfuric Vortex), but usually Sorin managed to cast some evading lifelinker and turn things around very quickly.
As far as a well matched pair of decks therefore, this product gets a thumbs down!
However, as a product I’ll give this one a definite thumbs up. Personally, I owned neither Planeswalker, so it was nice to be able to get them both in one product. Secondly, a few of the other cards in the decks are nifty and I’m glad I now own copies. I’ll give a specific mention here to Phantom General, which had been notably absent from my white soldier token deck!
And of course, from my perspective, I had to get this anyway for the basic land 🙂
