RTR Game Day

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Happy Monday MTG peeps,

On Saturday, Return to Ravnica Game Day events took place all over the world.  Yours truly (CopySix) headed over to the local Magic: the Gathering games store, OMG! Games here in Barrie, Ontario.  To say that the inclement weather had an adverse effect on attendance may be an understatement.  It was cold (~ 7ºC / 44 ºF), raining and at some times blustery with rainbands from Hurricane Sandy more than 900 kilometers south-east making the day less than ideal.  This inconvenience of course pales in comparison to what is being experienced by some of our friends and family working / living in New York City where there are some evacuations taking place.

Anywhoos - RetroTech and RStomp stayed home and I took my Black / White token build to game with.  Altough I am somewhat sheepish that this deck features essentially no new Return to Ravnica cards, I was happy with the result - going 3 wins (against excellent players Rob, Derek, and Nick), 1 draw (with sneaky Matt), and 1 loss (against Jonathan) to land me in third place and scoring the participation promo (Dryad Militant), the Top 8 promo (Cryptborn Horror), as well as 22 Planeswalker Points.

We think that strategies develop and evolve with any new standard and Return to Ravnica will be no different - from aggressive creature-based aggro decks with the release to more control-based strategies over the next few months.  The deck I took really is a throwback which may have took advantage of other players new and developing builds.  That black / white build did fail terribly against Jonathan's Rakdos burn.

We will be working on completing some new standard constructed decks with RetroTech playing Azorius, RStomp playing Naya (black / green / red) Zombies, and yours truly playing Selesnya.  We only have a hadfull more cards to pickup from MTG Mint Card to have everything complete.

We have friends all over the world and get a lot of eMails.  Our friend 'Marvel Sutantio' in Jakarta (Indonesia) sent in this excellent report from Game Day -
    I used a Jund control deck for yesterday's RtR Game Day (using Abrupt Decay, Dreadbore, Bonfires, and other removals while using Desecration Demon, Thragtusk, Vraska & Garruk Primal Hunter for the winning condition), and it sucked pretty badly.

    The deck just couldn't handle a plethora of big, ugly creatures my friend threw at me. My local metagame consist of either a mid-range / big creature decks or zombies. I'm totally prepared for zombies, but seriously, the big bad creatures deck is just horrid.

    They kept throwing Thragtusks, Angel of Serenities, Restoration Angels, Armada Wurms, Huntsmen, you name it.

    And due to Angel of Serenity as well as zombies, I think the best solution to any kind of threat in this format is Detention Sphere.

    And even then, it's a lot wiser to play a big creature deck ourselves. At least we can trade 1 for 1 with their creatures.

    Dunno bout the metagame in your place, but I'm sure as heck disappointed with the current standard. It's like an pseudo Legions-only-with-a-splash-of-onslaught kind of standard where creatures run rampant... But we lack the means to nullify them. Supreme Verdict enables regeneration, Abrupt Decay is almost useless since most powerful creatures are at least cc5. Dreadbore is a sorcery.

    Good luck with the Game Day, hope you have better luck than I do :P
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