Battle with Savagery and Kolaghan: Fate Reforged Prerelease

I was out of town for the Khans of Tarkir prerelease, but I did get to experience my share of Mighty Morphin' KTK limited format through my first ever competitive booster drafts (once at my local comic shop's Friday Night Magic and once at Grand Prix LA). There are two schools of thought on how to build a Khans deck that fully takes advantage of the distinct powers of the five three-color clans. One is to go for the long haul and rely on your slow but powerful morphs: face-down 3-mana 2/2 creatures that can be turned face up (i.e. reach their full potential) for their (usually) more expensive morph cost. The other is to prioritize two-drops (which can get on the board before the morphs), and try to gain enough of an early advantage that the late game doesn't matter. Being the somewhat nervous and panicky Magic player I am, I didn't really subscribe to either strategy, rather letting the first rare I opened dictate my draft each time: I built one deck around the star of Temur's intro pack, Avalanche Tusker, and the other around the aggro tokens generated by Mardu Ascendancy.

Fate Reforged, the second set in the Khans block, is an entirely different animal. There are no morph creatures in the set, but there will be plenty of dudes that look like morphs, thanks to the new Manifest mechanic, which puts the top card of your library onto the battlefield as a face-down 2/2 creature. Like morphs, you can flip up manifested cards for their mana cost, but only if they're creatures to begin with. FRF also has no three-colored cards (as opposed to KTK's 39, plus 17 other two-colored cards), meaning that it's easier to play fast and loose with the clan associations. The clans do still come into play, as each one had a wedge-specific keyword ability: bolster and dash are new for Abzan and Mardu, respectively, while ferocious (Temur), prowess (Jeskai), and delve (Sultai) all return. But there is also a rare cycle of ten clan-specific mono-colored creatures with an activation cost that requires hybrid mana of its clan's other two colors. One of these cards was the first one I saw upon opening my sealed pool, and once again it was the card around which I built my deck.

Since the Return to Ravnica block at least, prerelease events have been a little more complex than a normal sealed deck tournament, where participants crack six packs and build a deck from their contents. Upon signing up, participants choose a certain faction, and one of their six packs is a "seeded" pack that's weighted towards cards in that faction. For RTR, you chose one of the 10 guilds, for Theros you chose a color, and for KTK you choose a clan. I picked Temur, mostly because of my EDH deck starring Intet, the Dreamer, but also because I'm first and foremost a Timmy-style player, and the idea of overwhelming my opponents with huge creatures excites me to no end. Actually, I'm first and foremost a Vorthos-style player, which means I primarily pay attention to the backstory and flavor text aspects of cards. And with that particular idiosyncrasy in mind, there was another reason for picking Temur.

The current block takes place on the plane of Tarkir, a world once ruled by fearsome dragons, which have been extinct for hundreds of years, at the time of the Khans of Tarkir timeline. Tarkir is also the home world of planeswalker/protagonist Sarkhan Vol, and to make a long story short, the storyline of Fate Reforged involves Sarkhan going back in time to when these dragons still exist! According to Uncharted Realms, Magic's official weekly fan fiction article, when Sarkhan completes his temporal journey, he meets the powerful khan of the Temur, a fierce female warrior called Yasova Dragonclaw. In the latest installment, she reveals to him various plot points involving Ugin and Nicol Bolas, a couple of the Magic universe's most popular dragons, the former of which got his first official card representation in this set. The story is still ongoing, but the point is, the first card I saw when opening my seeded pack was the legendary creature herself, Yasova Dragonclaw.

Her presence in my card pool made it easy to lean towards green as a base color, or at least a prominent one. The card quality only got better in the rest of the seeded pack, which included such Temur mainstays as Snowhorn Rider, Icefeather Aven, and Temur Charm (all three of which did some major work during the tournament). The deal was sealed when only Khans of Tarkir rare I opened (the sealed pool was broken down into 4 FRF packs, 1 KTK pack, and the seeded pack) was the super efficient mana ramper/fixer Rattleclaw Mystic. But when I saw the Kolaghan, the Storm's Fury (the Black/Red legendary dragon) in one of my Fate Reforged packs, I knew I had to splash in order to include it. KSF would not be lonely in the deck either, as I also pulled a Shockmaw (Shock-and-Awe?) Dragon, but left a Lightning Shrieker in my sideboard, since I agree with LSV when he compares it to a Lava Axe that can be blocked and that dies to removal. Luckily for my splashing needs, my pool included seven nonbasic lands, three of which produced both black mana and one of my other colors, so it was not too hard to make it happen.

My two white rares I ignored outright, even though Dragonscale General can be great in the right deck (the same cannot be said for Rally the Ancestors). But my two other green rares (actually, two of the same green rare, although one was foil) gave me the chance to experiment with the manifest mechanic. Wildcall allows you to manifest the top card of your library basically as a Hydra (i.e. put X +1/+1 counters on it, with X being the amount of mana you spend when casting the spell). I left out the second copy, as finishers like that aren't necessarily good in multiples, and as it turns out I never got to cast it during the proceedings. I had other opportunities to play manfiest cards, but I left a Fierce Invocation and two Write into Beings in my sideboard since a) I would rather use those card slots on other good creatures and b) I wanted to be able to cast my spells rather than have them sit on the board as dumb grizzly bears.

One reason I wanted to be able to cast my spells was because I had three pretty solid blue flying creatures with prowess, the Jeskai mechanic that buffs your creatures when you cast a noncreature spell, to keep my dragons company. The other reason was that I had some pretty decent removal, both of the bounce and direct damage variety. True, I could have used my bounce spells (and sided in Ambush Krotiq) to bring some of my manifested spells back into my hand if I needed them, but I find it's generally a much more effective play to bounce your opponent's creatures to set up advantage in combat rather than to effectively pay for your spells twice.

You can check out my full decklist (and even playtest it!) on the amazing MTG site tappedout.net. As far as the actual tournament went, I lost in the first round against Mardu-splash-Yasova - turn 3 Yasova, turn 4 Citadel Siege is a nigh unbeatable combo, then in the second game I lost to Crater's Claws for exactsies right as I was about to sweep in for the victory. That gained me a bye in the next round cuz one of our players left, but after that I won my next two matches flawlessly. My MVP had to be Goblin Heelcutter, who showed up in most of my games and allowed me to get a significant amount of damage through. Unblockability is one of my favorite mechanics in Magic, and effects that prevent opposing creatures from blocking (such as one of the modes on Temur Charm) obviously achieve the same result. I wish that I had walked away with more than just two Ugin's Fate booster packs, featuring alternate art cards and tokens, but the prizes are secondary to the fun that was had by all, right?

Thoughts About LEGO 76023 The Tumbler

When I read the side of the box of LEGO set number 76023, I immediately thought of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Except he would be saying, "In France The Tumbler is The Tumbler, except it's Le Tumbler." Thinking about this while watching a commercial for McDonald's quarter pounder - in the background during that heartbreaking Ravens vs. Patriots playoff game, which is when I first started building this late holiday gift to myself - was decidedly meta. The fact that I had the time and means to embark on a project of this magnitude - almost like a minifig-sized Bruce Wayne - is hashtag one thing I'm thankful for.

My relationship with the LEGO Tumbler goes back almost two years to when I manually reconstructed the iconic discontinued set 7888 from my collection supplemented with custom-ordered bricks. My relationship with the real Tumbler goes back a couple months before that, to when the Dark Knight Legends exhibit was in Los Angeles. While there I snapped a picture of an actual Tumbler used in the movies. While it didn't have the flare or style of the Batmobiles of the 60's and 90's, it was pretty darn impressive to behold. Before jumping into the new set, let's compare my two previous Tumbler experiences. According to the design specs decal from the new set, the actual vehicle measures 15 ft. by 9 ft. 4 in., which translates to roughly 8.5 in. by 5.5 in. in LEGO dimensions. According to my math then, set 7888 and its 449 total pieces (not all of them devoted to the Tumbler itself) represents roughly a 1:20 scale model. And I have to say it's pretty accurately minifig-scaled.

Onlookers' faces have been obscured for my legal protection.

It was also raining during that fateful game when Baltimore was eliminated from the 2014-15 playoffs. Whenever I walk in the rain, I think of the song from the signature Cowboy Bebop episode 5 called Rain. There were two versions of that song, one that appeared in the actual episode and one that was released on album one of the show's soundtrack. I made a fan mashup version to showcase the two of them together. The funny thing about that song is that whenever I hear it, I think of Hans Zimmer's haunting theme from the 2008 film The Dark Knight, on which set 76023 is based, which officially plants Christopher Nolan's versions into the DC Comics Super Heroes division of the LEGO snowglobe. I've included some of that in my fan mashup as well to show you what I'm talking about.

Now back to the new set. Bag 1 (of 11) took almost the entire football game to complete, and it wasn't until the beginning of Bag 2 that I realized the scale of this project and its 1,869 pieces was going to be far larger than the average minifig. To give a completely baseless comparison, in fantasy baseball points, that set's pieces count is exactly equal to Matt Holliday's 2014 performance, and he's a damn solid player, if not one you can build a team around. Set 7888's 449 pieces equals the production of Texas rookie outfielder Daniel Robertson (not to be confused with the shortstop prospect who the A's just sent to the Rays in the Ben Zobrist deal), not by any means a major league regular.

Professional scale models of the Tumbler do exist, like this one at left, also from the Dark Knight Legends exhibit, that was used in the movie. Comparing that pic to the official LEGO marketing image on the box, you can see how closely the designers followed these professional models, even down to the bronze coloring in the front wheel wells and the spoiler support struts. I realized after finishing Bag 3, the instructions for which included steps that called for both 16x and 20x of the same element, that what I was building resembled one of these scale models more than a more traditional LEGO "playset." That's why the special edition minifigs are off to the side in all the promotional materials. It's disappointing that I won't be able to use this new Tumbler in my minifig-centered vignettes (unless I employ some impressive forced perspective), but it's worth it when you see such detailed elements as the windshield wipers found in Bag 4 accurately represented in LEGO.

In Bag 5, after you put the huge unique tires on, you get the true sense of how much this new set dwarfs the original 2008 Tumbler. It's about the same overall size as the Millennium Falcon, which is much smaller than actual minifig scale. In fact, Han Solo's famous ship from Star Wars might be pretty close to Kenner's old Micro Machine scale, but I have yet to break out the old figurines from my childhood to check and see how it would look. The rest of the bags are devoted to the roof - which does not actually attach to the rest of the vehicle with any LEGO elements but somehow manages to fit ever so snugly - the ornate armor plating on the side, and the elaborate system of spoilers. The process ended with a lot of mirror image repetition and a lot of superfluous ornamental aspects that make the model look pretty but also hard to find a place where you can grip it to lift it up. It also made me question where I would put the damn thing. But I guess that's a good problem to have.

Detractors of LEGO often point to the lack of functionality: once you finish putting the thing together, it doesn't really do anything. But that's where the concept of replay value comes in, because at any time you can demolish the original product and have the entire experience over again. It's the particular experience that is important in playing with LEGO, you see, that first impression you get when you take those pieces out of the box and literally transmute them into something else. After finishing construction of the model, beyond being both satisfied and exhausted, I felt a greater sense of accomplishment than I had felt following any "instruction build" in my previous LEGO career. At times like these, I can't help but recall the King Crimson song Indiscipline, especially the penultimate lyric: I wish you were here to see it! Which then makes me want to thrash around on the drums all progressive rock style.