Born-of-the-Gods-League-Slawomir-Maniak

So a few months ago a new brick and mortar gaming shop opened up in the heart of my beloved city’s downtown core.  I was there the day it opened and couldn’t thank the owner enough for doing something that was so risky.  See, shops in our city’s downtown region don’t usually last long unless they serve coffee or cigarettes, so this guy was taking a huge risk.  But it was a necessary one because if you wanted to game and you lived downtown there was nowhere to do so without hopping on a bus for a 20 minute ride or so.

So you can imagine my excitement when this shop opened up, and how excited I was to hear that they were going to be starting a Born of the Gods league if they got enough DCI numbers before the release.  Well they managed to accomplish this and I’m now entered into this league.

But what is a league you ask?  Well this league is a WotC sanctioned series of events.  You start with a seeded sealed pool.  Meaning that they are using Born of the Gods pre-release overstock packs to start our limited decks off.  So, I chose white again seeing as I had such great luck with it last time, but I will get to that in a bit.  From this sealed pool of three Born of the Gods boosters and three Theros boosters you make your deck of 40 cards (minimum) and then you play at least 3 matches against others in the league within a weeks time.

After the first week you get to choose either a Born of the Gods booster or Theros booster and add those cards to your pool, and keep going.  This goes on for 5-6 weeks and then prizes are handed out depending upon how you did.  The store keeps the decks in their shop to ensure that nobody cheats by modifying the contents in between matches, but after the first week you can opt out of the league and take home everything you pulled.  Though I don’t know why someone would do this.

So, like I said I picked the white seeded sealed pack and went to town opening up my product to see what I could manage to pull off.

First I will get to my rares:

Plea for Guidance

Plea for Guidance – This was in my seeded pack, and I couldn’t have groaned any louder upon pulling it.  I am not a fan of this card, though it might not be that bad if I could pull something else to compliment it, such as a god, but overall at sorcery speed I can’t be happy with this.

Mindreaver

Mindreaver – I didn’t really look twice at this card.  It’s not that bad as a mill engine with it’s heroic ability, but it’s second ability holds almost no relevance to the limited format because you don’t generally see multiples of cards in within your top 23.

Chained to the Rocks

Chained to the Rocks – This card I was happy to see.  One of the best white removal spells in the format.  Though it is not as good with Born of the Gods bringing in Revoke Existence, but it is straight up cheap removal.

Xenagos the Reveler

Xenagos, the Reveler – The planeswalker, not the god.  I was quick happy to see him show up in my pool.  If things went my way I could easily pull off an awesome deck if I got cards to compliment him.  Either way I had found my money card.

Arbor Colossus

Arbor Colossus – Another great card, cheap beats with a monstrous ability that can take out every pre-release promo except green.  Awesome!

Fellhide Spiritbinder

Felhide Spiritbinder – This guy is a beast for abusing enter the battlefield abilities.  Not to mention a ¾ body for four mana isn’t bad at all.

Overall I wasn’t too pleased with my pulls, I mean I certainly wasn’t pulling off the Blue/White heroic deck like I did at the pre-release, but from the rares I pulled it looked like I might have been able to pull off a monster Red/Green deck.  So let’s take a look at what I did pull that didn’t make it into the deck.

White

Red

Blue

Green

Black

Multi-coloured/Land

And then I had the deck.  I resorted to playing Red/White with the use of Chain to the Rocks and the Felhide as the champion rares.  The deck looked to be as fast as I could possibly make it with a quarter of the deck being only a single converted mana cost, the next stage up had another six, after that there was one three CMC card with only a handful beyond.

Creatures (17)

Spells (6)

Land (17)

Come back for Day 2 and beyond as I take the deck through the league.  If you have any suggestions or see something I missed please leave a comment and I will look into it.  Thanks.

~ Gerald Knight