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 agree ! I played two headed giant at the prerelease, I had a solid blue-green scry deck and my friend played a red-black goodstuff pile.
First round we played ended in a draw because we were still at like 20 life each when the bell rang. One of the opponents was missing a color, but the other one had [[Butterbur, Bree Innkeeper]] and [[Horn of Gondor]] in play, which allowed them to make food and chumpblockers for ever.
Second round went quick, the other team had unlucky draws while we had very aggressive starts.
Third round we played only one game, but it lasted 45 minutes and we got to play [[Smite the deathless]] on [[Witch-king of Angmar]] which was pretty cool.