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.
I unfortunately didn’t play, but I’m planning to start sealed today on Arena. I was wondering if you think aggro would be good to start with, or if you saw any aggro decks at the pre-release? I was thinking of trying to jam Rakdos orcs/amass or Boros aggro to get started.
I didn’t see any aggro, but my card pool contained a few cards that gave an indication that it could be possible to play aggro. Watch out for combat tricks, though! There’s quite a few of them in every colour. At least blue and black also pack a few flash creatures.
My sealed pool had some decent low cost white creatures which I ran in my Esper deck (3 mana Eowyn and the 2 mana 3/1 that can sac itself to destroy artifact/enchantment were super nice).
I think Boros is equipment/token focused with some Human tribal and Rakdos is amass focused with some goblin/orc tribal. Black has the best hard removal, it seems, but white and red still pack some alright removal.
White has a neat 2/2 vigilance for 2 that can O-ring a creature if you sac a token (Food and 1/1s are pretty easy to find), so I feel like white is a really solid choice for aggro compared to black’s slower sacrifice synergy cards (the best sac engine is a 5 mana 4/5). You should take my analysis with a pinch of salt though, since I never saw any red decks or aggro decks at the prerelease.
If you can get your hands on a Denethor you should definitely consider splashing a color for him (especially if you get the land that fixes colours for legendaries). He’s an excellent finisher and value engine. Not a bad body (2/4) for 3 mana, either.
The +1/+1 sword for 1 mana that takes away abilities when blocking/being blocked is very convenient against the various cards that give indestructible/first strike/etc. I think it’s a good card to have.
This is awesome! great write up