This pre-release featured some firsts for me.

I was planning on writing about more things than just the pre-release in this one. But I will focus on the pre-release this time, and I’ll talk about why in the end.

Let me start with the first of my firsts. It was the first time I participated in a pre-release with 22 people. The maximum I have ever participated in was a 15 person one. Thus, this also makes it the first time I joined a 5-round event. The event started roughly at 4pm and it ended a bit before 11pm.

Following my tradition this year of not opening obvious bombs or value in my pool, this time, I didn’t open a single mythic, nor one of the bazillion planeswalkers. So I ended up playing what I called Grixis salad. The only comfort for me was that I opened a good number of removal. Having removal spells that also drain or give you life (like Extended Absence and Terminal Criticism) was very helpful. Terminal Criticism was never useless in my hand, even though it lets you target only 2 colours. Vraska’s Final Mercy seems like a good card. A friend of mine is adamant it’s going to be a very good card. At least, at the pre-release, it worked quite well.

Kiora of Fire and Ashes was my finisher. People forgetting you can make more dragons apart from the ETB (enters the battlefield) one was not something I was expecting would win me a game. I can’t complain, to be honest. Null Summoner was a very interesting card that made a few players nervous. The best part about it is that, even if it leaves the battlefield, the card it stole remains in exile. An even better part is that someone put Infinite Coursework on it, but I still managed to play the card it had stolen because I copied it with Hall of Echoes. Surveil played a huge role in most of my games. Those little Jaces really helped a lot. Especially since I had no other planeswalker to use for Face Yourself. I also used it for Null Summoner.

I struggled a lot in this pre-release due to not seeing a concrete way to win with my pool. Still, I managed to go 2-2-1 and reach 9th place with it. It’s not a success in the context of the pre-release itself. However, it showed me how much I have improved my limited skills throughout this year.

Oh, another first was that I played with someone who was actively cheating. They tried to cast Proctor of Potential from the graveyard first, and then surveil. They surveilled during their upkeep and tried to change how they paid for it after seeing the card. And, last but not least, they did a mulligan, put one at the bottom, and drew a seventh card. I didn’t make a huge thing out of it because I was trying to correct them. But most importantly, I won. And I think that’s all the interesting parts of the pre-release. It was fun, I had some fun games, but I wish I had opened something fancy.

Now, why am I not talking about anything else other than the pre-release today? That’s because I made a decision. Playing magic is fun. But I feel I have gotten a bit tired of all the releases this year. So, I decided to not attend the last pre-release of the year. This leaves me 3 months to focus on my commander decks and work on upgrading them. I have a few commander decks I haven’t talked about here yet, so I will also get the time to do that. Especially since I have already played them and they were very fun.

So I will stop here now and I will be back with some commander decks I want to talk about.

And until next time, have fun!