Battle For Zendikar, Magic the Gathering Pre-release

Last Saturday morning, basking in the newness of my newest obsession with Magic the Gathering, I went to my local game shop at 8:00 am for the pre-release event for the newest Magic set coming out.  I was completely new to playing for real, though a pre-release seems to be more about fun and playing with new cards than getting competitive.

I was greeted at the game shop by a very friendly gentleman who helped me get registered and set up for my first official Magic event.

That's not the friendly gentleman.  The friendly guy was wearing a polo shirt and jeans. And his eyes weren't that scary.

After registration, I had a donut and some coffee while I waited for things to start.  It was free, so that was nice.  But it was Dunkin' Donuts, which, it turns out, has not very good donuts.

Too dense and not very sweet, but makes for a nice picture.

For those of you new to Magic (like myself), the "Sealed" Pre-release event I attended goes something like this:  For $25 I got a special event deck box containing 6 booster packs from the new set containing 15 cards each.  Using those, we had 50 minutes to construct a 40 card deck to use over 4 matches throughout the morning.  More booster packs were given out as prizes to those who did well (not me).

Shiny promo deck box, and D20

We also got these sweet promo tokens that one of the store workers' friend made.  Pretty cool.

The play area was set up with long tables with full table sized playmats.  A lot of the players put their own playmats on top of these playmats.  Extra protection I guess.

Giant playmat!

So sitting down at my dragon art table, with my bunch of cards, I realized I had no idea what I was doing.  I ended up playing a blue/green deck.  Those are the two colors I like to play the least, but my blue cards all worked together and with my strong colorless cards nicely and my green cards had abilities and creature sizes that balanced out my weaknesses, so I went with them.  In hindsight, I could've used some different colors but time pressure got to me.  Actually, most of the players played tri-color decks, but with my inexperience I figured that would be too much to handle.

I even brought card sleeves so I didn't look like a noob.

My cards.

I didn't take any pictures once the tournament started, because I didn't want to look like some kind of wide-eyed tourist.  And it would probably annoy people. 

Anyway, I didn't do too awful.  I won my first match and drew my second.  I got crushed in my third and had a close loss in my fourth.  I didn't win any extra prizes.  Except extra fun.
There was even a really nice guy who sleeved his cards with sleeves with pictures of kitties on them who, after our match, gave me some pointers.  Nice people.

Oh, I did get a free deck box in the attendance raffle.

It's a deck box.   It says so.

Overall, I had a TON of fun.  It was long and exhausting, but worth it.  I will do it again next time.  In fact, I'm even thinking about occasionally going to Friday night events at my store to play some more.  I'm excited.

I'm getting obsessed.

After the event, I ate a burrito.  Because my favorite taco shop is down the street from my favorite game store. And I was very hungry.

It was a good burrito