A couple of weeks ago, a buddy of mine asked if I wanted to attend the Amonkhet prerelease with him. A�To be perfectly honest, my first reaction was “Nope”, but lately I have been guilty of being anti-social so I agreed. A�It was my first prerelease so I didn’t know what to expect exactly. A�I figured that it was just a handful of players cracking five or six packs, eating some free pizza and playing some casual games. A�I had no idea that it was a tournament and also that there was going to be a fairly large turnout. A�I assumed that most people are like me and choose to spend their Sunday afternoon silently crying about having to go to the office the next morning.

I was floored when I walked into my LGS,(that’s local game store for all of you not in the “know”), and every table was full of players waiting for the signal to crack their packs. A�I grabbed my prerelease box, spotted my friend, who had saved me a seat, and sat down with a confused look. He then filled me in on how a prerelease actually goes, which was essentially that it was slightly more competitive than I had thought. A�I had been doing sealed drafts with Shawn lately (we actually had done one the week before), so I was feeling pretty good about it. A�We were given the signal to start building our decks and the place went quiet except for the frenzied tearing of wrappers.

My first pack made the choice for me, I pulled a Glorybringer, which had been my personal pick of the set during the Amonkhet spoilers. A 4/4 flyer with haste AND a Mizzium Mortars built in one is a limited bomb and, spoiler alert, it served me well the entire tournament. The other packs were decent, as I also pulled a Hazoret, as well as some other green and red cards that solidified my choice of RG aggro. A�I decided to splash white for some defense, which was actually a poor choice as I barely played one white card the entire tournament except when I was discarding them to play Bloodrage Brawler (1R, 4/3, Discard a card when it comes into play).

I won’t give a game by game play by play, but I’m proud to say that I represented 2 A�Generations Gaming the best I could. I lost one game out of the 4 matches, and that was to a mirror-match. I reached the finals and my opponent and I agreed to split the grand prize as it was late and we both didn’t want to sit through another 2-3 games. We then A�decided to play one game after claiming our prizes (10 packs of Amonkhet), in order to see who was the actual winner. A�After several turns of us both being flooded, I drew a Glorybringer, broke the stalemate, and on my next turn, played a Scaled Behemoth, pumped it up and used Fling to end the game.

After it was all said and done, A�I sent Shawn a text letting him know that I had won. A�He had always said that we could really make some noise in competitive play so it was nice to prove him right. A�Regardless of winning or losing , I would do a prerelease again, it was fun, and the fact that everyone was on equal footing A�made the games interesting. A�With that said, there were some things that could have been improved on. A�The 50 minutes given to us to construct our decks felt a little excessive. Shawn and I usually construct our sealed decks in 20 minutes so I basically sat around, waiting for people to finish building. The time between rounds waiting for the next brackets to be posted also felt slightly long. I think with slightly decreased wait times, I would try to make every one, but I just don’t have the free time to sit around for 5 hours. A�To be fair, I did use the wait times to peruse the X-wing miniatures, since I had been talking about the game the night before with Shawn…but more on that later…