If your interest in Magic the Gathering has been piqued by one or another of the previous posts here, you might want to know that this coming week-end, September 29 and 30, is the perfect time to attend your first Magic tournament, because a new expansion, named Lorywn, is having its “prerelease.” A prerelease is a kind of opening day for the new expansion, when the cards are seen and played with for the first time (although they won’t be legal for other tournaments until the official release two weeks later.)
Prereleases are much more informal than ordinary tournaments, and beginners are very welcome (not that they aren’t at other tournaments). In the ones around Boston, typically 200 players will be there. You can arrive at any time on Saturday or Sunday, as new tournaments are started as players arrive. Your wait will be shorter if you arrive early on Saturday though.
You can choose to play in a “sealed deck” tournament, where you construct your deck from a pool of cards given to you, or you can play with a pre-constructed “theme” deck. If you’ve never played before at all, the theme deck option is a pretty good choice, and will also leave you with a deck that can be your starting point for constructed tournaments.
For all the details, you should go the this Lorwyn Pre-release primer page from the official Magic web-site, and this Prerelease schedule.
If you’re going, whether or not you’ve had Magic experience, you might want to check out the rules about “Planeswalkers,” a new card type being added in Lorwyn.
And if you want to know what all the cards in the Lorwyn set will be before you get there, there are spoilers available at MTG Salvation (some players love these spoilers, others hate the idea of them.)
If you can’t make it this weekend, there are also Release tournaments in a couple weeks (October 12-14), although those tournaments are on a much smaller scale.
Tags: Lorwyn, Magic the Gathering, Prerelease
Nerd Wisdom 
October 2, 2007 at 8:37 am |
Hi Jonathan – did you make it to the pre-release? If so, how’d you do?
The pre-release in Hartford was a good time, and Lorwyn looks like it’s going to be a very fun set, I think that this time they got a lot more “right” with the tribal theme than some previous efforts.
I went 2-1-1, a bit lower scoring than I had hoped and just a tad shy from earning additional prize packs, but overall the day was still a blast and pre-releases are definitely my favorite events!
October 2, 2007 at 11:07 pm |
Yep, I played. I did poorly though, at 2-2. I ran into a couple highly rated players, which is unusual at a pre-release. I hope Lorwyn turns out well, but I am a little worried that the good cards may be *too* good, and it will turn out like Kamigawa block (not that Kamigawa was terrible, but when you were on the wrong end of a bomb, it wasn’t so fun.)