Saturday 9/8/2012: Stupid Sexy Sentinel Spider

Long time no post. Luckily I have much to post about. I will start with my experience at Magic Celebration on September 8th and will follow this shortly with two posts about some more card finds I had.

Magic Celebration was September 8th and was help in many locations all over. I went to my former Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) in Delaware, Days of Knights. For those who were unaware, the format of Magic Celebration was as follows. You are given 3 of each basic land (15 cards total) and are given a single booster pack of Magic 2013. You shuffle the entire booster together with your 15 lands to make a deck of 30 completely random cards. This is about as limited as Magic gets. The format was exciting since you had no idea what your deck consisted of. The format also underlines the difference in skill quality between players. With such limited cards and an unknown deck, any decision, no matter  how small is very important.

After the first round, the winner receives another booster pack. From this round forward, players were allowed to construct their deck with the cards they got between the two booster packs. The only restriction was that the deck had to be a minimum of forty cards. With so few cards (15 basic lands, 30 random cards from boosters) there are few decisions to make when constructing your deck. Every subsequent round the winner would receive a new booster and continue refining their deck, until they made it to the top of their bracket. Getting to the top and winning the final round usually resulted in a booster pack as a prize.

The boosters that were used were supplied by Wizards of the Coast and most stores ran a single-elimination tournament, with the winners receiving the free booster packs. At the store I went to the losers were allowed to enter a losers bracket and continue playing and receiving free booster packs. Thing was above and beyond what I could have suspected. It created a fun atmosphere for all involved, even for the players who would normally be knocked out the first round.

My first round I drew and excellent rare, but the booster pack was weak overall. Akroma’s Memorial provides your creatures with excellent keywords and abilities, but if your creatures do not have much power or toughness to back it up, the keywords are wasted. My opponent drew stronger creatures than I including the namesake of this entry. After two quick loses I found myself in a loser’s bracket. Round Two went well. I grabbed a victory my first game thanks to these two guys. I lost the second game due to constant attacks from flyers and my inability to get out Silklash Spider. Third game I won handily thanks to Vedalken Entrancer decking my opponent. My second opponent was a pretty cool guy, giving the the cards from his booster pack after winning, since he didn’t collect magic cards, but just played. Third game I again went 2-1, destroying my opponent with larger creatures like these two brutes. My final round I went 1-2. The final round was quite a nail biter, with my opponent gradually wearing my down with Staff of Nin. The booster my opponent won did not contain any particularly expensive cards, so I wasn’t let down by the close loss. Heres the breakdown of what I won:

 

As always, prices are the medium price listed at tcgplayer.com (on the sideboard) ————>

Akroma’s Memorial: $5.52

Silklash Spider: $0.55

Fervor: $0.45

Hamletback Goliath: $0.34

Mutilate: $3.28

Total Spent: $0

Approximate Retail Value of Rares: $10.14

All in all I had an excellent time at Magic Celebration. I would love to try that format again. The uncertainty of what you will be playing with is quite exciting, but I can see why it would not appeal to some people. It is also a format I would not want to do everyday.

Till next time