The past weekend was a travel to Manila for me as I went to participate in the first leg of the World Magic Cup Qualifiers. The tournament did not go well so I decided to just check the players’ binders so I could complete my buy list for that trip.

A beginner player has asked me to buy components for his planned Mono-Blue control mill deck. He needs the cards Thing in the Ice and a playset of Startled Awake. I was able to buy the three things whereas I was not able to acquire the Startled Awakes. Given that it is not a popular Mythic rare of the Shadows over Innistrad set, I was surprised that it was not found in most of the for-sale binders. I then looked for a few planeswalker cards from the current set to complete if needed for future deck builds.

Eternal Masters was just released and most of the binders were filled with cards from this special print set. I was able to check out foil versions of old cards such as Sink Hole, Wasteland, and Chrome Mox. Even though they would be essential for our Commander Card pool, I opted to just look for foil versions of Blue common cards that are usually included in Blue-based Commander decks.

On the last day (Sunday), I decided to meet up with the rest of Team Iloilo at Megamall. They were having lunch at Ippudo that time I arrived so I just went around to check the shops there and came upon Fully Booked. I remembered then that I bought the book 44 Laws of Power online so I checked if they had the other book that I was looking for: The Art of Seduction. Sadly they don’t have one in stock at that time so I decided to just look around and browse book titles as well as some Marvel Comics. I then saw at the front table the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Not much of a fan of novels but I’ve heard that the author is popular so I decided to buy a copy, a small softbound print.

To recap here is a picture of my hauls from that WMCQ I trip: