After 5 weeks of relearning all the rules to Magic the Gathering, I finally went to my first pre-release event. A Little Shop of Comics is pretty close to my house and was holding tournaments all weekend. Dragon’s Maze is the second expansion of 2013 and its a pretty tricky beast. Basically, two colors are paired together and form a guild. In Ravnica, we were introduced to the basic guilds. Dragon’s Maze now has 10 guilds total and at the event you had to pick a guild and you were given a complimentary guild to try to make a deck.

Sealed deck events are a crapshoot. If you get pumping bombs or fancy tricks, you get easy wins.  If you miss out on unpacking 8 rares, you’re going to have a hard time.  This happened to me on Saturday when I picked Izzit, the red/blue guild.  I managed to go 0-3 that day and made it home just in time to host d&d for 4 hours.  Sunday I performed much better and I owe all my success to Rakdos.  My one friend and I managed to get enough wins by ourselves to get the dlc code for the online achievement on planeswalkerpoints.com, which has no real world benefit other than proudly representing our guild.

You see, Dragon’s Maze refers to a labyrinth of magic that goes through each of the 10 guilds. Each win was worth 2 movement points through the guilds.  10 guilds means your guild only needed 5 wins to get to the end and get the prized online achivement.  I really liked this event because it was so radically different and gave everyone a chance to get to the end (if you played more than 1 day).

So today I managed to go 2-2 using Master of Cruelties.  He’s a great card if you get give him flying and somehow make him unblockable.  I managed to win 5 of my games off this guys back, then finished 2 of those games off with a nice little Stab Wound. Somehow, I managed to get 4 blood rush cards and BOY were those great on my secret guild, Dimir.  I ‘m pretty sure I bloodrushed 14 points of damaged twice using Deathcult Rogue.  In limited play, I love that card and went blue/red/black just for him and while it didn’t pay off as much as I would have liked, I still managed to get my 2 match wins and did Rakdos proud.

Rakbros ftw!