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.

Following on from the Vraska Planeswalker deck it only makes sense to move on to the two booster packs that came with the Angrath, Minotaur Pirate Planeswalker deck.

So let’s start with the Foils and Rares/Mythics

And finally the Uncommons

Well I did purchase some product on Friday for the latest set Rivals of Ixalan. I didn’t attend any events at my FLGS due to commitments such as fixing a relatives pc on Saturday, and Gloomhaven today.

So my coverage for my pulls will be spread over the next week, interspersed between my other compelling content. If you can read that last bit with a heavy hint of sarcasm, as if anything I write would be compelling. Spreading it out also means I’m spreading out the scanning in of the pulled cards to the Decked app that I use to track my MtG collection and build my decks.

So we are starting with the two booster packs that came with the Vraska, Scheming Gorgan Planeswalker deck. I’ll do the usual coverage of the cards pulled, show foils, rares/mythics and the 3 uncommons from each pack.

So here are the poorly photographed cards I pulled from those 2 packs plus the foil planeswalker card from the deck.

Let the fun and games begin! Yep after pre-release weekend last weekend, we know hit the release weekend for Rivals of Ixalan. These two weekends are like shooting fish in a barrel for your FLGS. Release weekend means that most stores will be running draft or sealed events. Excuses to buy even more MtG product from the new release. Sadly I won’t be at any store events this weekend.

Here is a photo of my haul of product from my FLGS. Which means lots of sad look at what I pulled posts soon.

This evening was spent playing MtG though.

At our regular Friday hang out for gaming The White Lion Hotel, along side the normal gaming, one or two of us played some MtG.

The MtG session started off with Justin testing his new deck against the raw aggression of the CardKingdom Rookie Red deck. The first game was over fast as the aggro of the red deck kicked in as its meant to. The second game was played at a more slow tactical pace because Justin got three of his cheap 0/3 blockers out. Although I stopped his Nissa from being a problem by zapping her with direct damage. While we were jostling for a tactical advantage Charlie arrived. In the end the cards were kinder to Justin and he won. But as a game gets drawn out, the longer it goes on the more likely it is that this red deck will lose.

Using the 2017 Commander decks, the three of us started a game of commander. Our fourth player hadn’t turned up. After taking 3 rounds of Charlie hitting me for 5 life, things started to change and the smashing each other for damage began to get shared around. Charlie likes the cat deck and it’s artefacts and cats working together. Justin was playing the Vampires, whilst I was the Wizards. I actually like this deck, and it’s graveyard shenanigans, both it’s own and the opponents. In the end the game came down to Charlie and I could gang up and kill Justin, or one of us could kill the other and leave it for Justin to finish off the survivor. It was my turn, Charlie said we had a deal. But I didn’t trust him, so I killed him. Which meant I was wide open for Justin to kill me for the win.

Our next game was four player. Our fourth player having turned up some what late. They had the dragons. Boy there are some cool cards in the wizard deck. I was able to stop any real big nasty threats stay on the battlefield. Which meant not being hit by big bad dragons. I had lots of land, great cards to play. But we were running out of time. At 9:30 despite the best efforts of a poor three man alliance, I was declared the winner having the most health at that point in time.

It was a fun evening playing MtG.

Oh out of no interest to you lot what’s so ever here is a photo of the first 3D object that was printed on our new 3D printer at work. We had the students set it all up, and run this test printing. They will be using it alongside their 3D Modelling unit. My interest well its gaming related for sure ;)