TABLETOP TALES PRESENTS
MY M14 PRE-RELEASE
To check out my other decks, hit the link below:
This
article serves two purposes: To share the nerd entertainment around
with anyone who might find it interesting and, in this case, to share my experiences with the M14 pre-release.
You
can find Magic Cards in super stores (Ex. Walmart, Target) but the best
place you can buy your cards, meet other players, and play in events is
at your local comic book store or hobby shop. I buy most of my cards at
The Comic Cellar.
Here is a link to its Google Maps location at 3620 Austin Peay Highway #2 Memphis, TN 38128.
And here is a link to Comic Cellar's Website
I took part in the M14 pre-release on July 13th at The Comic Cellar. For the entry fee, each player received 6 booster packs, from the M14
Core Set, and all the lands they need to make a 40 card deck. Then the
player took part in 5 one-on-one matches, each a best of three rounds. The highest ranking players got to split the packs of a M14 booster box.
The thematic monster of M14 are Slivers, a multi-colored tribe of monsters with overlapping and stacking effects, that are one of the most iconic creatures in the game. To celebrate the theme, everyone who participated received a special Megantic Sliver, shown above, as a promo card for participation.
M14 is the newest Core Set in Magic the Gathering. Core Sets serve several purproses; they arguably the best way to introduce new players to the game, serve as a way to add deck-building tools that thematically wouldn't fit in the featured sets in standard, and introduce upcoming themes for players to grow excited for-- in this case, it is clear that certain tribes will be relevant in the next set, Theros, coming out in the Fall, and enchantments will be important to the standard scene soon. M14 will be in standard until Fall of 2014.
Besides enchantments and slivers, the other cool things to spring up in M14 are new version of the planeswalkers Chandra & Garruk, reprints of some classic cards, and themes like monoblack, symbiotic creatures, blue-white flyers, and more...
I participated in two pre-releases; the deck we're looking at today is from the midnight prerelease in which I went 3-2 (a fairly successful pre-release that shows my progress). Now, let's take a look at...
MY M14 PRE-RELEASE DECK #1
"RAMP UP THE TEMPO" OR "BANT FLYERS"!
I had three themes with this deck; the first theme relied on my green ramp like
Lay of the Land and big bombs with trample like
Garruk's Horde. The second theme relied on tempo-- basically, the ability to stall out a match with control, suppression, and removal until you can drop bombs with non-creatures spells like
Pacifisms &
Claustrophobias with a lot of help from
Deadly Recluses. Finally, in order to survive long enough to put out bombs come the strongest theme of the set, in my opinion, blue-white flyers like
Griffin Sentinel and
Nephalia Seakite that take potshots at the enemy until you can alpha strike with a big bomb or turn them into a truly devastating air force with
Archangel of Thune.
The biggest threat to this deck that I ran into in 4/5 of my matches that night were better constructed blue-white control/flyer decks. After my third match, I changed up a few of the cards to build more agression, better tempo, and card advantage (
Opportunity) by removing the walls I had in the deck. The Achille's Heel of these stall decks is that, if you're not careful, you can stall a match long enough to run out of time or mill out. To help compensate, I added five more cards to my deck and brought the total to forty-five (and only 16 lands out of that due to the incredible land-get ramp I could pull off in this slow format).
Now, let's take a look at one of my very best Pre-Release decks...
