Hey guys. Just to keep back on track with updates, I decided to share with you my experience on our local Alara Reborn Prerelease last Saturday. You might be asking why it’s a prerelease since the scheduled date was April 25. It’s because the product shipment was held by the Bureau of Customs. I didn’t know the real reason (and was too pissed to find out) why they did that but that really forced the local retailers to change the schedule a week later. Of course, a lot of players were disappointed with that delay but government crap can’t stop Magic players who enjoyed last weekend. I’m sure most of you too as this was also the schedule for the Release events.

Returning to the local scene, we held the prerelease with 20 players. Three Alara Reborn boosters were given along with three Shards of Alara packs. It was a fun time for the players opening each of the packs and pulling out bomb rares and chase cards. You can imagine how noisy we were. It was also my lucky day as I pulled out Elspeth from one of my packs. Woot. It was tough at first to decide which shard to construct the deck (my other rares were in color conflict) but after surveying my card pool, I decided to build a Bant aggro deck (exalted guys, a few mana fixers, and creature removal) with Elspeth as the star player or rather the player/creature support.

Here’s a summary of my match-ups. I went 3-1.

Round 1 versus Jund. Win 2-0
Match highlight: I was able to crystallize his Dragon Overlord and overpower him with an exalted Cave Thoctar.

Round 2 versus 5cc. Win 2-0
Match highlight: I was lucky in this round because he was mana screwed on game 1 and got mana flood on game 2.

Round 3 versus Esper/Bant. Loss 0-2
Match highlight: He stopped my early assault with a Pulse on Elspeth. In game 2, I got crappy draws and his early Wall of Denial stopped my critters. Oh, and Elspeth was again Pulsed in this game.

Round 4 versus Naya. Win 2-1
Match highlight: Overpowered me with big guys in Game 1 and I punished his mana screw with a one-two-three punch in Games 2 and 3.

And here are some of the pics taken from Oliver’s camera.

Players waiting for the distribution of the packs.

This player got his basic lands ready to be slid into the deck.

The deck construction stage. It looks so messy but the good thing is the tables are large enough to handle the sorted cards.

Can you handle the Dragon beats of this card pool?

Me wearing Tonton’s lucky Goofy hat.

Magic Iloilo players posing after a successful and fun prerelease.

Hey y’all, how are you doing? I just got some time to sneak in on some updates to this blog. I hope you had a fun weekend. Mine was great! I didn’t join the weekly tournament but it was fun. I’ll just go into every detail hehe… Anyways, I’ve been browsing for Magic: The Gathering news & updates this past few days, and here are some of them.

1. Saito wins in GP Singapore Extended format piloting a Naya Burn deck. It is also the most popular deck in that event. His opponent in the finals was a fellow Japanese Masaya Kitayama piloting Faeries. I remembered in the report that he killed Kitayama with 2 Volcanic Fallout to take the championship. Counter that Faes!

2. For the Iloilo Mtg community meta report, Ramon dominated last Saturday’s tournament with his version of Nassif’s Cruel Control. He changed a few one-ofs in the deck to adjust to the local meta. With him in the top 4 were John Paul (UW Lark), JR (UW Merfolks), and the RDW king Master Jaime.

3. The Prerelease and Release cards for Alara Reborn is already out! Here they are:

Prerelease Card
Broodmother Dragon 2RRRG
Creature – Dragon (M)
Flying
At the beginning of each upkeep, put a 1/1 red and green Dragon token with flying and devour 2 into play.
4/4
Jean-Sebastien Rossbach, *53/145

Release Card
Knight of New Alara 2GW
Creature – Human and Knight (R)
Each other multicolored creature you control gain +1/+1 for each of its color.
2/2
David Palumbo, *70/145

The card images from MTG France

 

4. A belated Happy Birthday to my very good friend and co-Magic player Master Mao. We celebrated his birthday last Sunday at Annex. The pics coming soon!

5. Today is the last day for my client in Eversun. My agent supervisor said that his reason was that it took a long for me to finish the training videos. We had connection problems these last few weeks so I think I got a valid reason for the delay. I’m not sure of his real reason since he didn’t even contact me for almost a month. Oh well… I still thank him though for the lessons learned from the training.

I guess that would be all for now. I’m still expecting a busy week though a this will give me enough time to do some study, practice in coding and site creation, and be productive before the weekend. Regionals are just around the corner and we’ll start preparing for that this Thursday.

See you in the next post guys!