Covered in Prerelease

So after Saturday’s Volcano tournament and the complete feastiality experience at Diana’s afterwards, I followed Jeff back to Toledo so we could go from there to Detroit for the Time Spiral prerelease.

We slept soon after we got there, after deciding what time we should get up (7:30, ugh!) and how we should coordinate the underwear dance-party for the bathroom. Just kidding. I was just warning Jeff’s girlfriend that I would want to take a shower in the morning, and that if she wasn’t careful, she might witness me trekking around their apartment in my boxers.

Sleep is tech.

Jeff and his girlfriend have a nice couch that they made up as a bed for me, but I nonetheless slept fitfully in it. I just don’t like sleeping not in my bed.

So, alarms go off at 7:30. I take a shower. No one sees me in my underwear. Jeff’s girlfriend packs us an awesome lunch of sandwiches, pudding, and orange soda. And we have some breakfast before setting off fifteen minutes late.

Good thing I had us leave a half-hour earlier than we’d have to, so right now we’re still fifteen minutes early.

Toledo is a lovely town of smoke-belching factories and old neighborhoods. The highways are empty at this time of day, and the sun is shining cheerily on everything. Good thing we’ll be spending the entire day inside, playing games with smelly nerds.

We have a little trouble finding the prerelease location. I was looking for a standalone convention-center type building, and it ended up being a “Trade Center,” essentially an indoor flea-market in a strip-mall. There was a big ugly open space and a confusing mural that depicted Alfred E. Newman, Supergirl, Hawkman, and Martians attacking picnickers and blowing up a train. Note that it was just the Martians attacking. Hawkman looked like he was falling out of a tree, and Alfred E. Newman looked like he might have been added as an afterthought.

So, yeah. Great place. Lots of tables and chairs. Perfect for playing Magic.

Jeff and I had a little trouble coming up with a team name. We eventually decided last-minute on COVERED IN CHEESE! Based, of course, on Paul Mastriano’s Xantid Swarm attack command, COVERED IN BEES! As I was writing it on our registration slips, however, I realized I would only be able to fit COVERED IN CHEES, and our team of English majors couldn’t have a grievous typo like that. I audibled into COVERED IN CHI! instead.

We turn in the sheet and pay our money. (Well, I pay my money. I’m keeping all the cards.) After a short while, pairings go up and we discover our team name has been changed or misread to be COVERED IN CHILI! There is a hearty laugh over that phrase, which soon becomes our new battle cry.

My throat’s still sore from saying it.

We get our cards and start building our decks. Though we didn’t plan things this way, in hindsight our gameplan seemed infallible. I could hold the early game with rebel white weenies, Jeff could pick up the middle game with Deathspore Thallid control, and we could charge into the lategame together with some beefy guys.

Here’s what we played:

Me - Wur Weenie
1x Prismatic Lens
2x Amrou Scout
1x Amrou Seekers
1x Benalish Cavalry
1x Cloudchaser Kestrel
2x D'Avenant Healer
1x Jedit's Dragoons
1x Knight of the Holy Nimbus
1x Mangara of Corondor
1x Pentarch Ward
1x Temporal Isolation
2x Errant Ephemeron
1x Prodigal Sorcerer
1x Telekinetic Sliver
1x Walk the Aeons
1x Bogardan Hellkite
1x Bonesplitter Sliver
1x Fury Sliver
1x Lightning Axe
1x Mogg War Marshal
9x Plains
4x Mountain
4x Island

Jeff - BG Thallid Control
1x Hivestone
1x Curse of the Cabal
1x Dark Withering
3x Deathspore Thallid
1x Dread Return
1x Phthisis
1x Sudden Death
1x Tendrils of Corruption
1x Urborg Syphon-Mage
1x Vampiric Sliver
1x Aspect of Mongoose
1x Call of the Herd
1x Durkwood Tracker
3x Herd Gnarr
1x Krosan Grip
1x Magus of the Candelabra
1x Savage Thallid
1x Spinneret Sliver
9x Swamp
7x Forest

Interestingly, the Detroit tournament organizers didn’t have players catalog one set of cards and use others, as has been the case at every other prerelease I’ve been to. We were stuck at the bottom tables all day, so I don’t know if that made a difference. If our opponents were cheating and using a more “constructive” approach to limited deckbuilding, they weren’t very good at it.

Except for our first opponents…

Round 1

I’m not sure if there’s anything we could have done to win this game. We got some early creatures out, sure, but we soon realized that every frickin’ thing they played had some kind of evasion, all kinds too! Shadow, Flying, Fear, Seeking, Protection, Swampwalk. I think our best way out of that would have been Earthquake for six and three or four Lightning Bolts. We were on the ropes the entire time.

This was our first experience with Looter il-Kor too. That guy’s pretty good. It kind of makes me want to play him in Fish. Actually, he might have been our best hope if our opponent only would have decked himself.

Looter il-Kor
1U
Creature – Kor Rogue
Shadow
Whenever this creature deals damage to an opponent, draw a card COVERED IN CHILI!, then discard a card.
1/1

It was pretty terrible.

Round 2

I’d like to say that Round 2 went much better for us, and it did compared to the previous game. Our early game was strong and Errant Ephemerons were going to be joining the fight in not too long. Unfortunately Jeff and I both decided to draw goggles for five consecutive turns while our opponents rebuilt. We started rebuilding ourselves and were about to turn the tide when they swung with everything (including the Temporally Isolated 5/6 trampler COVERED IN CHILI!). We block carefully and are prepared to take 12 damage into our 24 life when they spring Strength in Numbers (a.k.a. Fixed Berserk) on us and deal us 25 instead.

Strength in Numbers
1G
Instant
Target creature gains trample and gets +X/+X where X is equal to the number of attacking creatures.

That sucked. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done about that, though.

The problem is that I let Icatian Crier go on far too long with Mangara of Corondor in play. Because of that Crier they had six extra citizen tokens in play to attack with. Next time, Mangara and the hot chick COVERED IN CHILI! take it outside the game.

Icatian Crier
2W
Creature – Human Spellshaper
1W, T, Discard a card: Put two 1/1 white citizen creature tokens into play.
1/1

Mangara of Corondor
1WW
Legendary Creature – Human Wizard
T: Remove Mangara of Corondor and target permanent from the game.
1/1

We definitely could have won that if we had taken care of that Crier early. Without that, I’m not sure we could have gotten back into that game without playing one of our bombs.

Round 3

Our opponents seemed pretty depressed about having lost their first two rounds, so we pretty much sent them packing with a unified effort and a flawless gameplan. My rebel chain was working, and Jeff’s Thallids were pumping out the tokens and doling -1/-1 death wherever appropriate. As their last-ditch effort, they played and broke Magus of the Jar but got nothing COVERED IN CHILI! out of it. At the same time, I removed a pocket of three Plains from the top of my library.

Once we swung for eleven with Errant Ephemerons leading the way, they, COVERED IN CHILI!, scooped.


Round 4

Ah, round four.

A good round. And welcome to round four.

This round was, I think, surreal. We played against two kids who must have been sophomores in high-school. They weren’t very old, but the one had a class ring on. Lemme lay it out for you. Player A, their leader, was very quiet but seemed like a competent player. If he wasn’t competent, he at least will become competent with some more practice. From what I saw, though he made a few minor mistakes, he was solid.

Player B, their renob, talked the entire time. His game started off with a devastating attack of, “Thisguyiknowmadeamovieaboutaguyinthebathroom.” To which Jeff and I replied, “Dude, I don’t think we want to hear this.” He went on with his rambling, two-hour story about people going to the bathroom and not flushing and “AWMAN!whatsmellslikerotteneggs?!” At the end, Jeff and I just laughed (not entirely with him) and said, “Can we take our turn now?”

So Player B follows up his opening with such tried-and-true tactics as “playing spells just to get them out of his hand” and “playing Islands,” of which he was very proud to only have three in his deck. These things he does while his teammate is trying to make sane plays and, I don’t know, win a game? When Player A does try to assert himself and make a play, Player B berates him saying, “I’mtakingmyturn!”

Meanwhile I’m beating down with hard-to-block rebels, and Jeff is setting up Thallid control. After turn five, we would have to be COVERED IN CHILI! to not win this game.

Deathspore Thallid
1B
Creature – Zombie Fungus
During your upkeep, put a spore counter on Deathspore Thallid.
Remove 3 spore counters from Deathspore Thallid: Put a 1/1 green saproling token into play.
Sacrifice a saproling: Target creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn.

We end the game by dropping Hivestone to give all of Jeff’s creatures the ability of our oponents’ Sedge Sliver (which was Temporally Isolated by me) and attacking. When our opponents see Hivestone they both comment on how much they want to get some of their own. Turns out slivers are still everyone’s favorite creature type. (Except for Jeff’s, of course, which is Thallids.)

Hivestone
2
Artifact
All your creatures are slivers in addition to their other creature types.

When round five’s pairings go up, Player A, the competent, one is looking at the list next to us and finds his team at the bottom. He asks Jeff, “It’s my teammate, isn’t it?” and explains how he normally wouldn’t be playing with him except “He sort of bought my way into the tournament.”

Yeah, that sucks. A lot. I’m sorry your friend is a renob.

When our round five opponents drop and we realize that we won’t be able to make top eight and prizes either, I give Player A the Hivestone on my way out. Hopefully that made up a little for the bad day and he won’t, like, quit Magic or anything.

So we head out of Detroit and talk about the tournaments of Saturday and Sunday. I make Jeff stop so I can get some victory (consolation?) beers at the Speedway by his house. Actually, his girlfriend promised steaks for us, those steaks just sounded like they wanted beers to accompany them through my alimentary canal.

The grills at their apartment complex turn out to not work, though, and I broil us some cow in the oven. They were delicious, especially with the Killian’s. If only there had been some sort of spicy, tomato-based meat stew to smother the mashed potatoes in. Hmm…

I guess technically we ended our tournament at 3-2 and could have been a possible 5-2, but, I’m really glad we left when we did. Neither of us really wanted to wait another hour and a half for round six pairings to go up.

I’ll write more about my Time Spiral impressions later this week. Suffice to say, I’m interested to see how this set’s popularity pans out once people realize that the fixed power cards they were given are actually COVERED IN CHILI!