Welcome back all! The past week's Kaladesh prerelease has been amazing for me. I started the 10 a.m. flight on a bit of a downswing because of poor deck choices and well-administered whuppin' by the genial and Limited-centric Joey Hoffer, but collected myself for the 1 p.m. flight and essentially ensured top 16 with an extremely grindy green white deck subsisting on token makers, a little lifegain a ton of creature control. Without ado, here's my deck, with following commentary:
This is about as good as I could have asked for in a sealed pool short of opening sweeper effects or other similar bombs. I rode the Fairgrounds Warden train early on in the day, but it eventually caught up with me in the later rounds. My third match in particular (my only draw) had me facing multiple ugly choices where I could either exile something getting abnormally large on the ground, or an energy-generating flier or...it didn't get better for our hero, folks. My opponent's deck was easily as grindy as mine, but he had additional +1/+1 counter support via artifacts that I could not deal with in quick enough order.
Outside of that match, playing Adam Meech was by far the most challenging duel. His deck packed Fumigate, Gonti, Lord of Luxury, and Demon of Dark Schemes. Oh, he also had good beaters. I managed to squeak one win out of him before falling in three games. But no hard feelings as sometimes you do just need to concede to the better played match and deck.
How were vehicles? I can't say. My round one opponent had a few but I managed to deal with them in short order. The set's artifact removal is very, very sweet. Old favourties like Creeping Mold and new ones like Fragmentize. Red brings gremlins and such to deal with the new overlords. White seems quite strong with a mix of efficient flying beaters, slower control elements and just plain decent Limited removal options. The lack of "ramp spells" has been pretty obvious so far, with none of those Rampant Growth or Cultivate variants making too much of an appearance. There is fixing, but not ramping, it appears.
Kaladesh prerelease overall was super fun, not the least for playing with old friends like Victor Yan and Adam Meech. I look forward to trying out Kaladesh drafts in the future, and hope you'll have your share of exciting stories to share in the future!
Until then, may you servo up a beating to your opponents.
