God of Slaughtered
The first weekend of February was the pre-release of Born of the Gods. It was the first time with an official Two Headed Giant format for pre-release sealed. My brother and I went into Saturday night hoping to get some good games in. Last time, with the Theros Pre-release, we did pretty well. This time.. We, uh, failed.
So, the change in the format allows for two 6 pack pre-release boxes between the team. 2 Color-skewed packs, 4 Born of the Gods Packs, and 6 Theros Packs. Normally you’d only get 8 packs to build your deck with, and my brother and I thought that these packs would help smooth the process out. Sadly, this was not the case. Instead of helping it created a ton of tension – Every color and every combination was solid.
We took green and black: Both colors had almost thoroughly solid rares. Black removal and green ramp were going to be where it was at. We had a solid pull, however: Gift of Immortality, Fated Retribution, Purphoros, Hammer of Purphoros, Spear of Heliod, Mogis, Karametra, Nessian Wilds Ravager (Promo) , Flame Wreathed Phoenix, Eater of Hope (Promo), Curse of Swine, Heroes Downfall, Archetype of Imagination: one more, but I don’t remember it having a great impact on what happened.
Unfortunately, with all the colors being so filled out with the 12 packs, we had a hard time cutting any. I built a black/red fast deck, and my brother built a green/white/blue heroic deck. we had to cut a ton of really good cards, and I think it hurt us a lot that we didn’t drop one color, probably blue. We argued a bit about the cards we wanted in each deck. With each color so rich there was always going to be something good left out. It was really much harder to make a 12 pack deck than it was an 8 pack. Next time, we cut a color early.
our first set, against our friend Dan and his buddy from CA, ended out pretty poorly because I couldn’t get a second swamp on board. with three sips of hemlock rotting in my hand because I had only the one black source, the new Hero of Leina Tower dropped on turn 2 got real big, real fast, and we had no hope of stopping it. The ordeals and Aura’s targeting it made it really bad. We had a chance here and there, if I’d have been able to either asphyxiate it or Sip of Hemlock it, but we just couldn’t get it in.
Next, we got the bye, which is sad. You come to places like this to get some games and and hang out. My brother and I got to play each other, though, and hang out, which was awesome. However, with the decks built as they are, mine just out-removaled his, and I won most of the matches we played: But he wasn’t built to actually take any decks on alone, so it made sense. I just happened to have the removal deck.
The last set we played was against our friends John and Ben. Turns out, that not having two mountains is just as bad as not having two swamps. Ben ended up playing Mogis, and we just couldn’t keep up between the 4 damage a turn or sacrificing creatures to appease the god of Slaughter.
We didn’t win a single game, and that was really alright, because I got to hang out with my brother and a few friends, and I did make out with some seriously good Pulls: Mine were Hammer, Mogis, Karametra, Heroes Downfall, Gift of Immortality, and Fated Retribution. I should be able to either put them into commander decks, or trade them off for good stuff, and honestly, I look forward to starting to draft again in March.
Until then!