I made a pact with myself long ago, before I even saw any of the cards, that I would be playing Dimir at the Gatecrash prerelease.

Matter.

What.

If you’ve been following any of my Cube Drafts, my choice of guild really shouldn’t surprise you. My love affair with blue and black goes back nearly to the beginning of time. I’ve mentioned a couple times that before I played Magic competitively, I was very much involved in the Street Fighter tournament scene. After I made the trip to California to compete at Evolution (this was before they held it in Las Vegas), it seemed that I accomplished everything I could accomplish. My Street Fighter career was waning, and I knew it. The fact that my local arcade was closing down and I wouldn’t have a place to play anymore was the final nail in the coffin. I was never going to be anything more than the local hero, so I hung up my joystick for good.

One night, after visiting some friends in Toronto, I spent the entire two-hour drive home talking about Magic with a friend. I played way back in high school, so I knew how to play the game, but I had no idea there was a big tournament scene for it. I had an unfulfilled hunger for competition, so a few days later, I stopped by my local nerd shop and bought a few boosters of the current sets. I showed up for my first Friday Night Magic with a cobbled-together deck of random commons and whatever old cards I had that were Standard-legal. Despite being crushed, I knew that I found a replacement for Street Fighter.

I’ve never been a big fan of the attack step, and Dimir is all about finding alternate paths to victory. Whether I’m assembling some ridiculous combo or controlling the game and ensuring an inevitable victory, Dimir decks are among the reasons I love this game. So, even when I saw the spoiler and the early chatter about how “bad” Dimir was going to be for the Gatecrash prerelease, I never once entertained the notion of reneging on my pact. The fact that Dimir was by far the least popular guild made it so I didn’t even have to preregister.

I’m sure you all are dying to see my pool by now, so here it is:

Gatecrash Prerelease Pool

• White (7)
• 2 Basilica Guards
• 1 Debtor's Pulpit
• 1 Dutiful Thrull
• 1 Frontline Medic
• 1 Nav Squad Commandos
• 1 Smite

• Blue (13)
• 1 Cloudfin Raptor
• 1 Hands of Binding
• 1 Last Thoughts
• 2 Sage's Row Denizen
• 1 Sapphire Drake
• 1 Scatter Arc
• 1 Simic Fluxmage
• 2 Spell Rupture
• 1 Totally Lost
• 1 Voidwalk
• 1 Way of the Thief

• Black (17)
• 1 Balustrade Spy
• 1 Basilica Screecher
• 1 Contaminated Ground
• 2 Death's Approach
• 1 Devour Flesh
• 1 Horror of the Dim
• 2 Illness in the Ranks
• 1 Killing Glare
• 1 Mental Vapors
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Shadow Slice
• 2 Slate Street Ruffian
• 2 Syndicate Enforcer

• Red (10)
• 1 Act of Treason
• 1 Ember Beast
• 1 Hellraiser Goblin
• 1 Madcap Skills
• 1 Skinbrand Goblin
• 2 Tin Street Market
• 2 Towering Thunderfist
• 1 Warmind Infantry

• Green (6)
• 1 Adaptive Snapjaw
• 1 Burst of Strength
• 1 Forced Adaptation
• 1 Ivy Lane Denizen
• 1 Spire Tracer
• 1 Wildwood Rebirth

• Dimir (8)
• 1 Consuming Aberration
• 1 Deathcult Rogue
• 1 Dimir Charm
• 2 Mortus Strider
• 1 Paranoid Delusions
• 1 Psychic Strike
• 1 Soul Ransom

• Orzhov (5)
• 1 Kingpin's Pet
• 1 Merciless Eviction
• 2 Purge the Profane
• 1 Vizkopa Confessor

• Simic (6)
• 1 Bioshift
• 1 Hydroform
• 1 Merfolk of the Depths
• 1 Shambleshark
• 1 Simic Charm
• 1 Unexpected Results

• Boros (3)
• 2 Ordruun Veteran
• 1 Wojek Halberdiers

• Gruul (0)

• Colorless (9)
• 1 Armored Transport
• 1 Dimir Guildgate
• 1 Dimir Keyrune
• 1 Gruul Guildgate
• 1 Gruul Keyrune
• 1 Illusionist's Bracers
• 1 Riot Gear
• 2 Simic Guildgate

Buy This Deck

Unlike the Return to Ravnica prerelease, it looked as though I was actually going to get to play my chosen guild. From what I can tell, there are two typical Dimir decks: defensive mill decks and offensive cipher decks. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have the right cards to fully dedicate to either strategy, so I went with the old dependable evasion-plus-removal workhorse. Here’s what I played:

"Evasion-Plus-Removal Dimir"

• Creatures (13)
• 1 Balustrade Spy
• 1 Basilica Screecher
• 1 Cloudfin Raptor
• 1 Consuming Aberration
• 1 Deathcult Rogue
• 1 Horror of the Dim
• 1 Sapphire Drake
• 1 Sepulchral Primordial
• 1 Simic Fluxmage
• 2 Sage's Row Denizen
• 2 Syndicate Enforcer

• Spells (10)
• 1 Devour Flesh
• 1 Dimir Charm
• 1 Killing Glare
• 1 Psychic Strike
• 1 Totally Lost
• 1 Hands of Binding
• 1 Merciless Eviction
• 1 Soul Ransom
• 1 Dimir Keyrune
• 1 Riot Gear

• Lands (17)
• 2 Plains
• 7 Island
• 7 Swamp
• 1 Dimir Guildgate

Buy This Deck

A few notes about the deck:

• I don’t have quite enough evasive creatures to make the more expensive cipher cards worth playing, but I feel that I can justify Hands of Binding. Unlike the other cards, it has a tremendous impact on the board, so it’s worth taking the risk that I don’t have a good creature to cipher onto.
• Even in a deck that isn’t dedicated to milling, Consuming Aberration is still a bomb. It doesn’t take much work to make it gigantic, and preventing it from attacking doesn’t stop it from killing your opponent by itself.
• Riot Gear isn’t usually that impressive, but I need some way to block bigger creatures.
• There’s pretty good synergy with Simic Fluxmage and Sapphire Drake I can take advantage of.
• The Sage's Row Denizens aren’t meant to mill my opponent out, but they have a decent body for the cost and help enable the late-game bombs like Consuming Aberration and Sepulchral Primordial.

I actually really liked my deck, but I knew it was still going to be an uphill battle. Boros and Gruul seemed like the guilds to beat, and I was going to need all of my dirty blue mage tricks to win. It was definitely the first time in a long time that I thought I wasn’t favored to make Top 8 at a local prerelease. I’m not going to do a super-detailed, round-by-round report, but the highlights included being 20’d out of nowhere by an Aurelia, the Warleader and playing against a small child who tried to attack me with a Skullcrack. I ended up finishing an underwhelming 3–3, but honestly, my matches were generally very close and could have gone either way.

Early Impressions of Gatecrash

I found myself having a really hard time against Gruul, mostly because of bloodrush. I would often be forced into having to double-block and being blown out. They’re far more likely to have a bloodrush creature than I am to have a removal spell, and I can’t just declare no blocks indefinitely. A small part of it is that I haven’t yet memorized all of the bloodrush effects, so I’m sure that some of my blocks were suboptimal. Still, whenever I don’t have a removal or bounce spell in hand, I live in fear of bloodrush.

Boros felt a lot closer—as long as I can keep the player off battalion, his creatures are easy to deal with for the most part. Of course, he can still nut-draw, and Boros has an insane number of bombs (like Aurelia—grumble, grumble).

I didn’t play against Simic, Orzhov, or the mirror, so I don’t have a lot to say about those matchups at the moment, but you can expect more from me on that in the future.

For more general impressions about the prerelease, I asked people online what their MVPs were. Here’s what Facebook had to say:

I also posted a thread on the Magic subreddit, and here were some of the responses:

1. Gruul
2. Boros
3. Orzhov
4. Dimir
5. Simic

This could be completely different in Draft, in which you have a bit more control over what cards you have. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it plays out. Schedule permitting, I’ll do an online prerelease again, so stay tuned for more videos once the sets comes out.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you guys next time.

Take care,

Nassim Ketita

arcticninja on Magic Online

http://www.youtube.com/nketita