Welcome to MTG Leeds! Whoo! An update. I can’t wait for the day they find procrastination genes so I can splice mine out, but until then I need to get motivated, and not just for writing blog articles. So what has happened since the last update?

Well, the last Lowryn draft happened, and Rob and Joe came out on top of the sunshine, leading our Leeds pack to plunge right into the darkness of Shadowmoor. We also had a constructed event, without Shadowmoor and various events that happen during the day also made me wish to enforce writing decklists prior to the event, but to spare the embarrassment of a certain person, I won’t go into detail. Rob came out ontop of it, thanks mainly in part to Wei’s excellent faerie deck. It was a large event, with 17 people turning up, possibly one of our highest turnouts for Type-2 constructed, and half of those decks were pure block decks. Some actually did reasonably well, with Jonathan’s Vigor-Ashling deck taking the only single gameloss Rob had to suffer all season… though he did lose the other two.

After that, on saturday the 3rd of May, Leeds have had their first ever proper Release Event, welcoming Shadowmoor into our pool of ever-growing cards. Avatars run rife, both in person and as their enchantment incarnates, Lieges lead kin-hued armies into war to defend or to oppress, there was one particularly interesting board situation where there were 4 different lieges out, two on either side. Twenty-three people turned up to receive the Shiny Vexing Husher, a release promotion that was arguably better then the one for the release event. Mick Edwards came out ontop, looking more smug then he really should, with a monster of a green/red sealed pool. Eight players stayed on for a single draft we had that night.

Twenty Three came in this Wednesday to do their’s. For the first time ever, Leeds has managed to hit three draft pods, two eight man tables and a seven man table, with a mild requirement of having to change into a bigger room… then having to actually move into two different rooms. We apologize sincerely to our members for the inconvenience, and will attempt to avoid such a thing from happening again, although the transition did go rapidly and without much of a hitch, people plunged into the dark pool of Shadowmoor.

In the second round of my particular match I played against Matt Kitchen, a cheerful and friendly persona who managed to draft a white/blue aggro deck versus my Red/Black aggro deck. The first game didn’t particularly go too well, as he ended it rapidly by just smashing face with Zealous Guardian enchanted with Steel of the Godhead.

Game Two was a lot more interesting, as my life total dwindled after a number of very fast beats, I can’t actually remember what smacked me from 20 life to 6 in under six rounds. Scuttlemutt went online, and stalled out the game by ensuring silkbind Faerie maintained itself to be a red 1/3, despite Matt having enchanted it with Steel of the Godhead. Kulrath Knight got locked down by Chains, and it was looking pretty grim until I pulled out Power of Fire from the deck. It didn’t stay very long, though I stuck it on a creature with Wither and smacked a -1/-1 counter on the faerie, who, while still a 2/4, can’t actually attack or block whilst Kulrath was in the way.

Torrent of Souls prompted a comeback, driving in over 16 points of damage with creatures on the board, and a returned Cinderbrand, and we are onto game three. Which lasted a whole of five minutes as the W/U beat down went in savagely, certainly not enough time to level the board once again.

Joe and Rob won pods, with John Ingram heading up the third pod. With their records, I am sorely tempted to stick both Joe and Rob in a winston draft, best 3 out of 5. There can be only one, after all, in the end. Leeds has hardly been quiet these days.

This Saturday will be another casual-magic day in conjunction with Sci-Fi, up in Meeting room 8. There won’t be a sanctioned event, as such, but should we have enough people and enough decks of a specific format, then I welcome you to put your ratings on the line. For those who don’t care, bring a couple of decks, fun decks you wouldn’t otherwise try, multiplayer monsters or weird combos that never matched up to the standard environment.

That’s actually it for today, until next time.

~Jin.