I won’t go into too much detail, but I felt that most people were playing highly synergistic decks with a bunch of value engines that took a while to assemble, either in Abzan or Esper (or 4 color without red). I played Esper colours myself, with a lot of token and sacrifice synergy.
Didn’t see anything I would describe as an aggressive deck. All of my matches went to time and I tied two out of three matches. I felt like I was playing essentially mirror matches every match, just with slightly different cards. One table at the event went 30 minutes overtime in the first round. It was the board stall from hell.
Even though the ring-bearer mechanic incentivized attacking, it was usually done to trigger the looting to get more value cards and the board states just kept piling up, despite the format having pretty alright removal, I feel.
I still had fun, but it was a bit draining, I suppose.
well the price was higher than the prereleases are normally, I know where I go the pre-release tournament was actually 5 bucks more than just buying the prerelease box to take home, that probably has a lot to do with it