APPARENTLY 5E IS KILLING MTG
And to prove a point CrimsonDice bought all the commander precons. Fun was had.
CrimsonDice piloted Mystic Intellect
I piloted Merciless Rage
meanwhile Third piloted Primal Genesis
Third supposed that Primal Genesis and Mystic Intellect were the better decks since their commanders seemed less narrow than Faceless Menace or Merciless Rage. I favored Merciless Rage since, although narrow, Anje seemed like a very fast commander to me. And I’ve always thought agression like Ghired’s was not ideal for commander. Ghired’s aggression was very cool though, and populate on a commander lets you do a lot of tricky things. Fortunately red also lets you do very cool things with tokens, unfortunately not a whole lot of cool tricks seemed to be in the deck.
We played mostly blind. And these precons seemed admirable compared to the previous precons. I remember playing with the first set and a few of the sets in the middle with eminence abilities.
Or it could be me looking at MTG with rose tinted glasses.
For the first game Third and I piloted with the faces of the deck Ghirad and Anje respectively, while CrimsonDice used Pramikon.
I closed out the first game quickly by not missing land drops and dropping several beaters on the board. It didn’t demonstrate the speed of Anje, but it was interesting to have my turn at the end of other players’ turns. Playing Anje felt like playing a kind of draw-go control deck.
Meanwhile Pramikon seems to draw hate like no other. Ghired managed to create an army of rhinos, but the deck couldn’t deal with the flier I sent overhead.
During the second game, Third chose the Atla Palani. I switched over to Greven since I wanted to be convinced he was any good. CrimsonDice switched over to Elsha. Elsha managed to not miss land drops and keep a full hand and graveyard most of the game. I managed to get several hits on both players with Greven and ran out of gas. Meanwhile Third was manascrewed and didn’t draw much aggro. In the middle of this game Forth arrives and brings his Xenagod deck.
In the third game I switch back to Anje, Third keeps with Palani since he didn’t get to use her much, CrimsonDice switches back to Pramikon, and of course Forth is on Xenagos. I had a choice to use my own Scarab God deck, but decided against it since Forth was excited to play. He was likely to win against precons. Even though I had this thought process I still resented losing to Xenagod when it inevitably happened which I guess is just human nature.
Pramikon hit the board relatively early and set Crimson to catch Palani aggression and me to catch Xenagod’s aggression. Xenagos and Anje conspired to destroy Pramikon and eventually did, meanwhile Palani kept back and built up a board. Unfortunately our boards couldn’t keep up with then Xenagod’s, and he eventually comboed out after drawing thirteen cards through a Garruk.
Palani and Pramikon seem like they have interesting deckbuilding potential. Meanwhile Anje seems narrow but physically fun because of all the movement and speed in her hitting the board. I’d like to expore those decks here. But since this is getting long I feel like ending here. One day I’ll have interesting blog posts.
