General CBS

Anyone have sweet prerelease stories to tell?

My pool was mediocre, so I don't have good stories to tell despite holding out for a 3-1 record. I did mill 15 cards with waste-of-a-rare-slot Mindreaver. He held back a small horde of green creatures (alone!) using Aspect of Gorgon, a card that pleasantly surprised me.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
There were a ton of Heroes' Bane standoffs from where I sat (namely, the 0-3 table). It made for really awkward games of chicken where each side tended to have enough chump blockers for an arbitrarily large vanilla creature, enough to deter either player from attacking. Everybody just stayed home and kept pumping.
 
Hahaha. All the white seeded pools in my LGS were taken. I was one of only 4 people who played blue. I got the Thaumaturge I wanted, but nothing to support it or combo with it... :( I ended up switching to WB when I noticed that that part of my pool wasn't just a bunch of glorified Coral Merfolk.

PS: We had only one red player at our prerelease. Buncha white supremacists ;)
 

CML

Contributor
As I lurch towards adulthood I have found I have not only less time for the things I love, but also the things I hate. This weekend I was to go to a soccer game during the Saturday morning prerelease and to teach various pointless lessons during both Sunday prereleases, and midnight prereleases exemplify the things I hate the very most about Magic culture, so I could only make it for Saturday evening, which was when that one LGS (I didn't check the others because I am an imbecile) was holding two-headed giant.

Two-headed giant is only offered once every three months because that is about how long it takes for each team to get over the trauma of playing that true miscarriage of a format. Our pool was as ghetto as a Harlem natatorium; not only was it devoid of value, but its "bomb rares" were the most ineffectual bombs since George W. Bush was last commander-in-chief. It was also, like McCarran Pool, to be shut down prematurely -- but not before I ingested a small dose of mushrooms, a tardy birthday present for a friend who had also showed up under soberer circumstances.

Round 1 I was feeling fantastic and not even a boring-ass win over dorks who looked apprehensive about even being there could dispel that. Round 2 we got paired against a couple of dull software drones, the kinds of people to get fired from Amazon after no less and no more than a year, and took a cool 22 from a flying Heroes' Bane; I really love it when the prerelease promos decide the games; it's nearly as cool as facing a Black Lotus and a Sol Ring and Upheaval when the best you could do was some midrange thing. Meanwhile dire omens were beginning to appear on the periphery; the birthday boy, who had shoehorned our playgroup's strip club DJ (and token Black guy) into playing, became mildly upset that said impresario had insisted on including more combat tricks in the double Scourge of Fleets deck; I dunno what kind of standards you guys have for pools, but I wouldn't let a Kraken come within a marathon's length of my backyard blowup. Rather than hang around my partner as he passive-aggressively got into a standoff with the boring fuck who had just 22'ed us (cellphones out to no particular end), I ate more of the shrooms and felt some narcissism for being the "adult" in the situation, even though (because?) I was on a bunch of drugs.

In round 3 we faced a particularly dumpy store clerk and her inexplicably devoted boyfriend; things did not go well; my partner really didn't want to lose, to the point of debating the meaning of the word "OK"; yet lose we did. This was excellent timing, as the strip club DJ (who left his card at the bar) had been abandoned by the birthday boy; the birthday boy then told me he was picking me up so we could go drink in Bellingham with the final head of our Underworld Cerberus, and by "drink" I mean "drink and shroom and smoke weed." Two hours and some amount of caps and stalks later, we burst into a bar of ambiguous sexuality, where the homies were surrounded on all sides by twenties women of low-cut dress and self-esteem; it's times like this that remind me of the lack of such a culture in Seattle, if you're gonna be miserable with yourself, you might as well fuck the world. But I digress. In a few of minutes, a bouncer with beard and build not dissimilar to the brave photojournalist in Crackstyle would appear, to throw out one of the crew, on a flimsy pretense; before then, we would see another friend appear before us, and triumphantly shout words that have rarely been heard in Western Washington since the mid-naughts, words that were all the funnier for having been so obvious and unspoken for so long -- "I'm gay!"

So then we ate some more shrooms and I was back in Seattle early enough to teach two five-year-olds the piano. All in all, this was one of the better prereleases I've ever been to.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Sealed deck actually isn't half bad!

This seeded pack prerelease business with promos that you can run, though? Hot garbage.
 
I had a cool game, I kept a really slow hand and my opponent went: 3/1 for 2 -> athreos ->2/1 heroic guy -> another 2/1 of some variety... I was at, like 10 by the time I cast my first spell and he was 1 away from devotion for athreos.. fortunately I slammed doomwake giant and sent all those x/1s back to his hand. What followed was a miraculous stream of "enchantment, constellation trigger, all your guys die, let them return to your hand, attack for 4, go" every turn till I had him at 4, he had no fliers and I had a master of the feast.... that was "turn 5",so the match went to time. The guy graciously conceded though, and I gave him one of my prize packs after all was said and done.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
I actually like that since it makes the format a bit less luck dependant.

It's pretty much all downside. Everyone gets the same promos, so you have to deal with the same bombs over and over, round after round. Meanwhile, you're still every bit as susceptible to the luck-based randomness of sealed deck across your five normal packs. On top of that, there's additional feel-bads when you don't open enough playables in the colour that you chose, meaning you're down a playable promo card while your opponents mostly are running theirs.

I don't know of anyone who actually likes the seeded pack format, after its novelty in Return to Ravnica wore off. I long for the days when I can just rip open six booster packs and play some Magic again.
 
Without having played since M14, I think the RtR packs were better, as because the actual booster was all XY, it gave your pool a good swing towards the colours you wanted, but of course because it's two colours, you get more leeway on actually being able to play them if one does end up in the shitter.

The promos are rubbish because they're bombs and bombs make for bad limited.
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
The main targets for prereleases - casual players with only very loose ties to organized play - seem to like the casual packs, so I guess they work as intended.
 

CML

Contributor
Not even sure that's true, Dom -- ever had the pleasure of dropping an unbeatable bomb on a hapless newb?
 

CML

Contributor
i love how wizards' whole shtick is "people don't know what fun is" until suddenly it lines up with their own definition. then they understand
 
Well there's three things:
  • What people need
  • What people think they need
  • What people say they need
These things don't line up. As a game designer, your job is to give people what they need. If you give them what they say they need, they won't be satisfied because it a) won't be what they actually need, but also b) won't be what they think they need. With regards to this, people say they don't like the colour pack (because they don't like the promo). What people say is they don't want the promo pack. What they think they want is to go back to no choice. What they actually want is probably a solution that guides sealed pools without containing guaranteed GRBS.
When people get what they need, they are happier and feed that back, even if it isn't what they think they need or what they've said they need.
 
My prerelease was as always. Opened so few creatures (counting token-spells as creatures) that the most I could have in a two-color deck (disregarding curve, playability etc.) was 14 in green/white.

Drew like a complete lucksack (almost perfectly) in my first round, but got buried under 3-mythic 9 rare deck power gap. 0-2 butthurt dropped after getting turn 3 fabled hero turn 4+ some kind of evasion bestow/multiple tricks twice in a row. I couldn't draw any of my seven removal spells that would kill it before it was bestowed more than once. Would've stayed but my usual crowd all ditched that night so I was effectively alone in a sea of people who I had to help beat me (93 players), and they weren't very sociable.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Image.ashx


Oops, I never realized this said "if you control no snakes". I thought it just made deathtouch snakes galore.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
With regards to this, people say they don't like the colour pack (because they don't like the promo). What people say is they don't want the promo pack. What they think they want is to go back to no choice. What they actually want is probably a solution that guides sealed pools without containing guaranteed GRBS.


This is an interesting vantage point. I don't disagree that having seeded packs minus the promo - but guaranteeing an on-colour rare - might address a lot of the existing problems. It is admittedly nice to have some say as to which colour you'll run in an otherwise random sealed pool.
 
This is an interesting vantage point. I don't disagree that having seeded packs minus the promo - but guaranteeing an on-colour rare - might address a lot of the existing problems. It is admittedly nice to have some say as to which colour you'll run in an otherwise random sealed pool.

As long as the pool of on-color rares remains in the "useful" area. Every color gets rares that would really stink in sealed; I'd be mad to open generic red rare "lolrandom everything" or obscenely overcosted bad effect guy. I'd like 6 normal boosters + smaller pack of all chosen-color cards. Almost all of my seeded packs are "colors that you COULD play with your chosen color but your boosters have none/bad of that color so joke's on you." When there's an uncommon cycle, like the ordeals, emissaries, or bad-bestow creatures, they could easily take a place in chosen color packs.
I just had a thought: why don't they make foil Reprisal the white promo?

I wouldn't have anything against 'strong cards that don't actually kill your opponent' being promos, but at the same time removal is not equal across the colors. If white's was reprisal, what would the other colors get that's in a similar place?
 
I mean, I fundamentally think that rares ruin limited, but are basically the marketing value for constructed so can't be disposed of, but that's neither here nor there. I also think the constructed game is horrible. Did you know you can buy every extant netrunner card for around $260, which is probably cheaper than the cheapest possible standard deck, and that's including buying three base sets, which is basically not required except in extreme circumstances.

A promo booster of solid limited playables breaks the limited game in a different way, but is probably better for prerelease except in the false expectations new players may get.
 
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