Traveled up to the Bay Area to visit some friends and see one of my favorite bands play a gig, stopped by for pre-release at the old CFB game shop. Went 2-0-1 at the FNM prerelease and split the final round for prize packs while playing for fun (won 2-1). I opened a very solid pool that was headlined with 5 rares and mythics in B/W and gave me enough playables in those two colors to make it work. Pretty much pointed me in the direction I'd have to go and I went with it. Took a little time assembling the final 40, wasn't quite sure how to evaluate the speed of this format, but this sealed was slow and grindy enough to let me get there with some clever sequencing letting me win G3 in each round:
BW Draw a Bomb
This deck was all about grinding value and sequencing my ways into setting up decent board-states to stall time until I could draw into my big bombs. All-Star of the night was
Razorlash Transmogrant being able to recur and come back later in the game once I made some trades and/or put myself in a position from where I could chip in for 6+ damage and put the opponent on the backfoot. Being able to recur it at instant speed was so huge as this prerelease had many times where both sides would exhaust resources and spend some time late in the game playing some draw-go. It's a card I had on my maybe list for includes, but realizing how recursion at
in my cube wouldn't be a pipe dream AND the fact that it's a zombie for Gravecrawler makes this one that I'm definitely trying out. Traded for a prerelease copy from my friend and looking forward to seeing it in action.
When my two mythics in
Phyrexian Fleshgorger and
Platoon Dispenser were allowed to stick around they did work, but they were most often kill on sight (except Gorger, which I sometimes just didn't deploy until my opponent had already used up removal and was in danger range off a Ward 7 damage). However, I did manage some games where I was able to leverage pressure from other creatures (like
Trench Stalker or the Razorlash) to force removal and then deploy them to stabilize. Gorger is a dumb card to face down, but usually just got to trade for multiple bodies and pad my life total. Dispenser is one that I had underrated heavily but it plays very well as that 4/6 body is awkward to deal with on board and the passive card draw becomes massive if left unchecked. It was easier than expected to get it going with how stalled some games can get. Unearth can lead to big swings for stabilization as well. I won a game that went to turns on the final turn because I was able to sink enough mana into making enough 1/1s to go wide enough to swing for lethal. All the while drawing a card each of my end steps.
Unearth gave my deck a LOT of play by allowing me to string together boardstates that could hold the fort until I could deploy something more relevant. It also led to some sweet sequences late game where I could Unearth a guy and then use
Fateful Handoff to value off by drawing 4 cards off a
Scrapwork Rager or
Scrapwork Cohort before they got exiled. Another card that surprised me in this set was
Union of the Third Path which would often gain me 4-6 life and allow me to stabilize and give me more time to draw into relevant cards. It was so good that I went up to the 2nd copy after my first game in round 1 and it came up huge when I went up against a R/W deck with the Unearth Juggernaut. I just traded on each actual exchange and then used Union to get me back up to a healthy life total with a full grip in hand. Star and Bauble also helped me with triggering the Stalker for big 4 point lifegain swings and also allowed me to smooth out my draws all throughout the night. I'm real curious to see the effect that these retro and schematic artifacts have in this set. In the 2nd round I faced a U/W deck that had Teferi and a
Psychosis Crawler and that was definitely not something I thought I'd have to navigate through (tough, but barely pulled it out).
Had a lot of fun with this set, looking forward to drafting it after not touching Limited since Kamigawa. Aside from the few times I was flooded for a while, it felt like I had a ton of different actions I could take to advance on any given turn whether it was curving out, Unearthing creatures, or just firing off a Union to get closer to a bomb.