We started a MtG Tournament at work this week. Four rounds of swiss, over 4 weeks with 12 competitors. Each round is the best of 3 games, with the whole thing being run on the Challonge.com website. At the moment there is no prize support, we are currently playing for honour.

I’m playing an angel deck in this tournament. Which I didn’t do too well with in my first round match I lost 2-1. The first game I won, things went to plan. Which in the second game they didn’t. Things went down hill in that game when Overwhelming Splendor was removed from my hand just before I could play it. Sadly at the moment I only have the one copy (Yes more are on the way). But it’s a funny card to play.

It does a good job of buying time for the Angels in my deck to come out, and shutting down planeswalkers that my students like to play. But with the card discarded from my hand my “Great Wall of Darren” as I call it (I have 12 walls in this deck) managed to only delay the inevitable in this game. I just wasn’t hitting my Angels.

In the third and final deciding game things just got worse for me. I just wasn’t hitting land. I was stuck on 2 or 3 mana for a long time, unable to play most things except my walls, cycle the odd card in the hope of hitting land. It was a quick death luckily for me. And a poor start to the tournament.

On a brighter note in a “friendly” game earlier in the day I did get to transform Bruna, The Fading Light and Gisela, The Broken Blade into Brisela, Voice of Nightmares.

This does look really cool on the battlefield.

As you can probably guess yesterday was spent playing more Magic the Gathering. But it wasn’t planned that way. The day had started out as any other Saturday, chilled.

I’d had my morning mug of Pact Coffee, along with two chocolate chip brioche. I’m a creature of habit, and routine. I start everyday like this. After watching some YouTube videos I fell upon the latest Strictly Better MTG one U/R Curious Auras $10 Deck Tech. It looked interesting and just as important fun. So I clicked his TCGPlayer deck list link, and pressed the purchase button. Don’t be fooled by that $10 price, it was double that on TCGPlayer. But still a bargain. I’ve enjoyed the other decks of his that I’ve built (well bought the cards for them). Along with the CardKingdom decks I’ve bought I’ve got a nice little collection of premodern decks that like the now sadly cancelled Duel Decks I can just whip out and say to a friend who fancies a casual game of Magic “which deck do you fancy playing with?”, and then we can just play some Magic.

There was a card in one of his decks which I thought “hey that will go well with my Death and Taxes deck for its sideboard”. I particularly like it for playing against this deck Dale has built. Dale has one or two nasty etb’s in his deck, like taking over my creatures and using them against me. Can’t have that. Dale has said he has ordered cards that will work well in his deck against mine. And so the arms race goes on!

While I was in the card buying mood, I thought I’d buy some more cheap wall defenders to use in my work in progress Angel deck. The plan is to use cheap 1 or 2 cost defenders to chump block and keep me alive long enough to get my Angels out onto the battle field. There seems to be 2 approaches I think to an Angel deck. One is to have cards that give you life gain to try and keep you alive until you can get your Angels out, or you try and ramp up quickly and get them out faster than you should. I’m going with the later. I have the tron lands now.

Ordering those walls reminded me I had a play set of Wall of Omens that I should dig out and put with my Angels and tron lands ready to build with. But as I was looking through my collection I was coming across cards that would go well in my back burner deck I was going to build. So after finding the actual cards I was looking for, I ended up putting together my initial take of my version of the CardKingdom Red Rookie deck.

It was while I was deck building that Justin messaged me asking what I was doing. Naturally I said I was building a new deck. Justin asked if it needed testing. ‘Yep” was my one word response. So I ended up round his playing Magic, testing my new deck against a new deck he’d built. Plus playing my R/G Dino deck against it. Plus we tested another of his decks a vampire/zombie token deck against both my new deck and the dinos. My new deck didn’t do that great against the token one. I need to think about the sideboard and what I can add that will help against this type of deck.

Netflix Recommendation

My teenage years were spent watching amongst other things movies like Caddyshack, Animal House, National Lampoons Vacation, Porkies etc. The humour in these types of movies appealed to a teen me, and to be honest still do. Naturally back then I was oblivious to some of the tragic stories that hide behind some of these movies I loved. It was only in later life that I would learn of these tragic and heart breaking stories of some of my comedic heroes and heroines. Which brings me to a great Netflix recommendation. A Futile and Stupid Gesture tells the story of Doug Kenney co-founder of National Lampoon, creative genius behind some of those comedy classics I loved watching.

This is a really good biopic. I really loved the way the director and writers handled the end of the movie. There are some great decisions made to tell the life story of Kenney. They even break the fourth wall once or twice. They capture for me the spirit and humour fantastically. For me I can count the truly great biopics on one hand. I’m adding this to that list.

Even if you are not a fan of the type of humour Kenney created I think you will enjoy this movie. Just go watch it.

After the two Planeswalker decks for this set we are going to look at the six boosters that came with the second Prerelease kit I’ve had. This one I picked up on release day as part of my haul.

The Prerelease kit comes with 2 boosters from Ixalan. So let’s look at what cards I pulled from those before moving onto Rivals of Ixalan (although the foils and promo below are from both sets!).

Ok let’s now look what goodies I got from the four boosters from the new set that are included in the Prerelease kit.

That was the Prerelease kit. Next up will be the bundle pack.