Join the Maestros


Today, I went to a local store to Join the Maestros play the Streets of New Capenna Prerelease event.  This being my first in-person hosted event ever, I was pretty excited.  In the event, you chose one of 5 families.  they gave you sealed booster packs plus some cards specific to that family and you were let loose to build your deck.  We had 4 rounds today and I went 2W-2L, which netted 2 extra booster packs.  I definitely chose the Maestros (UBR), for I have some experience playing Grixis (UBR) decks.

I ended up with some really sweet cards, but some of the best I had were in Green/White.  Reading Twitter today, I was reading about how weak U (Blue) was turning out, and I agree at least with the cards I had.  I lost the worse to an Obscura (Esper) deck that had the Sanctuary Warden:
With the Shield tokens it comes with, removal for me wasn't much of an option.  I had 2 removal spells that would work for most other creatures: Murder and Maestro's Charm.  But with the shield counters, it could shrug them off.  My only hope was the Disdainful Stroke, but I never had that in hand for these games.  Or popping a flyer in front of it to remove a shield counter, then hit it with removal: hard to do when they have tap target creature effects.  Watch out for this card everyone, it's a doozy.

My two highest value cards I got to play today were:
  1. Galmorous Outlaw:

    I actually had 2 of these in my deck and was able to win 2 games with the ETB effect: 2 damange to each opponent.  The mana fix plus an ETB near the end was nice.
  2. Body Launderer:

    I only had one of these, but I got a lot of high value out of it every time it was on the battlefield.  Even if it dies, you get value and if you're lucky like I was, you get that sweet ETB from the card you reanimated.  I can see a bunch of these making their way into black decks in Standard: they loop each other.
Overall I really enjoyed my event today and I'll be back for more in the future.  Did you do a Prerelease?  How did you do?

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