Tourney Report: M12 prerelease

As always here's a report on the recent prerelease. Non-magic players be warned, this one's full of jargon and talk of the game and not much else and is super skippable. Real blog coming soonish.



It felt good to be back at a prerelease. I had skipped the prere for New Phyrexia and I've definitely been hankering for pwning the n00bs in some sealed deck. M12 appears to be a pretty decent, nothing in it is going to break the game wide open, but that's the nature of core sets so it just feels good to see exciting reprints. Notable cards from the set include
Grim Lavamancer
Gideon Jura
Day of Judgment (AKA Wrath of God)
Oblivion Ring
Smallpox
The Titan Cycle
Sutured Ghoul
Goblin Grenade
Incinerate
Overrun
Rampant Growth
Solemn Simulacrum

There's some new cards as well including some mediocre planeswalkers and bad sphinxes, dragons and demons, the usual fare.

I open my pool to find a pretty good set of cards staring back at me. I have bomby rares in Aegis Angel and Furyborn Hellkite. My white is very deep with 2 pacifisms and 1 oblivion ring with some solid flyers to back them up. My red is pretty abysmal so I have to let my dragon sit on the sidelines. Instead I end up playing blue with the big cards being Turn to Frog, Chasm Drake, Phantasmal Image, Phantasmal Drake and Sidewinder Drake. So In short I'm playing blue white flyers with a good removal package, classic stuff.

Kevin and Dan put together decent decks each. Dan's pool was a little lackluster so he had to splash blue in his primarily black/white deck. Kevin had a blue/black concoction with flyers and good removal. Strangely both Kevin and Dan had the same bomb in Sorin Markov.

Round 1
I start off by facing the mirror match. His deck is incredibly close to mine. It even has the same white bomb in Aegis Angel. Game 1 I steam roll him but blowing up his threats and swinging with flyers. Game 2 is where things start to slow down. I mean that literally, my opponent over thinks pretty much every play and takes a long ass time. The board stalls out early with him having a creature tapper and defensive flyers. He gains a slight creature advantage and starts hitting me for two a turn. This of course makes the game last a very long time and suddenly our judge shouts out "10 MINUTES LEFT IN THE ROUND." Well shit, I'm sure I can beat him in game 3 but we probably won't make it by the time he finishes thinking and actually manages to kill me. I go for a win in this game even though I'm behind but he still takes it. As we move into game 3 time is called and we end up drawing since we can't kill each other in 5 total turns.

Record 0-0-1
Kevin 1-0
Dan 1-0

Round 2
I hate drawing in magic. Getting a draw is almost as bad as just losing (you get 3 points for winning, 0 for losing and 1 for drawing for reference) so that's a bit of a kick to the face for the start. This round I'm facing one of the more annoying guys there. He's one those who thinks he's the shit at magic but is actually mediocre to straight bad. I know he had swept his opponent in the previous round. We start up and he 's playing some green and black thing. His deck's not bad but he doesn't seem to playing terribly well. He's got a lot of spiders to block my spiders but I just pacify them or send them to oblivion and my fliers are enough to take game 1. Game 2 is very similar but he drops a Grave Titan at some point. That's all well and good and is probably why he won the first round but I'm way ahead at this point so I just O-Ring a spider and beat his face in with my flyers.

Record 1-0-1
Kevin 2-0
Dan 2-0
Everyone's doing well today. That accursed draw is holding me back!

Round 3
The guy I'm playing is the owner of the arcade in the mall. He's pretty down on his deck and up on mine. He's got a black white thing with nothing particularly memorable except for a Vengeful Pharaoh that I end up O-Ringing. When he plays his creatures he lays them out so that the text is facing me. It's very odd and somewhat annoying. I understand it's a courtesy but if I need to read your card I'll ask to see it. He gets me game 2 with some good tempo but I roll him over games 1 and 3.

Record 2-0-1
Kevin 2-1
Dan 3-0
Kevin's down a game but Dan's still going strong.

Round 4
I'm facing a guy Dan beat in a previous round. I'm also in the middle of a trade with him. I'm looking to pick up a Sword of War and Peace and he wants my Splinter Twin for a recent standard combo deck. His deck is super aggressive with 3 Threatens and lots of ways to get them back. For the first time my Aegis Angel decides to show up to the party and turns out to be pretty sweet. I get him in game 1 with flyers removal etc. and he gets me in game 2 after attacking me with my own dude 3 times and top decking a burn spell for the win. Game 3 I smash him with flyers.

Record 3-0-1
Kevin 2-2
Dan 3-0-1
Dan chose to draw this round with his opponent since he knew he'd be making the top 8 no matter what. I was sad to see Kevin had lost since there was a pretty good chance that knocked him out of top 8.

Me and My opponent draw this round to both skate into the top 8.
Record 3-0-2
Dan 3-1-1
Kevin 3-2
Dan's opponent wanted to play for whatever reason and his decks was just the nuts. He had about 4 different beastly flyers and tons of removal backing it up. Kevin won his game and the tiebreaker stars aligned and put him into the top 8

Top 8 Round 1
I have no idea how my opponent is in the top 8. His mana is bad both matches but I don't think it would have made a difference. He's playing Sundial of the Infinite and I can't imagine why. I knock him out 2-0

Kevin and Dan both lose their match unfortunately but they play much better opponents. With a top 8 place they get 3 packs of m12 each. At this point I'm also exhausted and convince the others to split for first. we each get ten packs and are on our merry way. It's good to win a tourney as always and my packs are awesome. I open Jace, Memory Adept, Grim Lavamancer, Solemn Simulacrum and Primeval titan.