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?