[easybox]Apologies for the blank article earlier, glitch with the site, and I dared to go to sleep and schedule the post rather than push it live manually. Sorry >_< -- Trick[/easybox]

I hope everyone's Prerelease was excellent! Mine involved sleeping in, eating Cheerios, playing some Halo 3 ODST, and then heading out around 1:30 PM for the afternoon drafts. I love it when I don't have to rush in the morning.

Today I have a couple draft walkthroughs for you, which should be interesting since they're in a soon-to-be-obsolete format! (D'oh!) In fact one draft was ZWW, and the other was WZW. How weird and crazy is that?

However the lessons to take away are still valuable. Since getting any kind of experience with Worldwake cards will reveal how Worldwake will change Zendikar Limited. The true power level of the cards starts to come out.

New York Worldwake Prereleases can get really crowded, and this Prerelease was exceptional because it was even more crowded than at the Zendikar Prerelease. The venue was Fight House, a martial arts studio where people were martial arts-ing while the Prerelease was going on at the other side of the room. As people boxed in the ring, players were battling it out Planeswalker-style at the tables. Unfortunately there was no space to draft at the designated time, so I had to wait an hour or so before a draft got underway.

I opened a Hideous End, which I took over other good cards. I still had a thing for black in Zendikar; I figured it would be quite good even with Worldwake.

I proceeded to take some more heavy black cards: Gatekeeper of Malakir, Kalitas, Bloodchief of Ghet. Expectedly, however, black quickly dried up. I guess I wasn't the only one with a fondness for black cards. However the turning point was really when I noticed a Bladetusk Boar, and it was clearly better than my black option. It was the best card in the pack, that I recall. It was risky, as I had passed Burst Lightning and an Inferno Trap, but I decided to head into Black-Red. Perhaps it was a greedy choice. But I am a greedy, greedy girl.

I continued to feed off a stream of red: 2 Goblin Shortcutters, 1 Hellfire Mongrel, and almost a last pick Spire Barrage. I didn't think I'd run the Barrage, as my black cards needed a very heavy amount of Swamps, and my red cards could more-or-less be splashed. I was planning on running maybe 7 Mountains.

My risk was not rewarded, however. Looking through my deck now, I see 11 cards from Zendikar, and 11 cards from Worldwake. So the quality of my cards from Worldwake dropped considerably. And I ended up with a lot more red.

Here is the decklist:

The curve is quite high for an "aggressive" deck, but I felt it was more a deck that was meant to "ping" the opponent for increments of damage, through cards like Cosi's Ravager and Blood Seeker. And the evasive four-drops would provide a more solid approach to getting in damage. Occasionally it could get more aggressive starts with Shortcutter backed up by Smoldering Spires.

Evaluation of Worldwake cards: The Zendikons are ridiculously aggressive. In particular, Crusher Zendikon, which is technically a 4/2, haste, trample. As a 4-drop. I played it on Smoldering Spires, to add insult to injury and a way to push in more damage later when the Zendikon died. I never did this, but I could've also played it on an untapped Quicksand to have double the Quicksand.

Quicksand is one of those cards I completely hated when I first saw it. It felt very narrow and easy to play around, but I was very wrong. It is just a solid removal "spell." Not particularly excellent but very playable and very useful. It can stop an army along with some blockers, to present trades favorable for you. Its weakness is to fliers and to pump spells. Fortunately it does deal with a lot of the landwalk creatures that can present problems for certain decks. Also Surrakar Marauder and Bladetusk Boar. I would never first pick Quicksand – there is a need to find spells to play before picking useful lands, but it should still be picked fairly highly. It also clashes with having high casting cost cards (like my Kalitas) since if you ever want to cast those spells you would rather not sac one of your own lands. But you just need to weigh cost-benefits to see when you should use it.

I think the real trick is knowing when to run into a Quicksand without any tricks of your own. Obviously, if the opponent only has 3 lands, you run into it because your opponent probably isn't going to want to lose that tempo. At four lands, it's a little less certain, but I think I normally don't mind risking it. Your opponent loses quite a bit of tempo, losing the 4th land drop. At 5 it is probably too late. But on the play, it might still be worth it as you'll have 2 more lands than your opponent if your opponent cracks it. This puts you in a pretty favorable position if you don't mind losing a creature.

Quicksand is just a very complex card in itself. Whether to use it or not, it is up to the specific situation presented. Whenever there's a Quicksand on the table, you must think very hard about what to do and think about what your opponent's deck may have.

In the first round, I went 2-0 against a mono-white deck. First game went pretty fast. Had a lot of Smoldering Spires to push in damage. Second game I got out Kalitas and stopped his fliers from pecking at me. In the second round, I think my opponent's mana was not as good as he would like since he was playing three colors. I noticed that both drafters on my left and right picked red cards. This opponent was on my right in the draft. His Calcite Snapper was very annoying, but I stole the games 2-0. In the last round I got pretty crushed by a GR deck. First game was marginally close, and I made one big mistake. (I think I could've destroyed his Trusty Machete with my Hammer of Ruin one turn, but completely forgot about it. Realized the next turn, a turn too late.) He made his own mistakes, too, apparently. The board got very complicated at some points. Never-the-less, I kept losing to his Bestial Menace. As soon as that dropped, I was mentally, like, “Well, I can't win against an elephant, a wolf, AND a snake.” They were all represented by different-sized pieces of Styrofoam, too. It was an urban jungle, and it was trampling all over me. I also got screwed for black game two, but I kept a risky hand. So I'm probably to blame there. We played another games afterwards, and I had a decent hand, but he had a start of Arbor Elf into turn-two Leatherback Baloth. That was kind of a pain, but I had a Hideous End. But he then dropped Terra Stomper. I lost to exactly three cards basically.

I'm not surprised I lost to that deck. Bestial Menace and Leatherback Baloth are incredibly powerful uncommons for green in Worldwake, and really, I think it somewhat needed them to be more viable outside of mono-green. Well, I suppose Leatherback Baloth can only be played in a very heavy green deck, again. But Bestial Menace can certainly be played in Gx decks just fine. He also ran Explores, which boosted the deck, gave it some digging power for bombs, and seemed pretty solid overall. He also had multiple Graypelt Hunters, which are very solid by themselves or with other Allies.

The second draft was WZW (I went to a different store), and I was a little weirded out by that. It also did weird things to the draft, I think. But anyway, I did a 180 and went UW! A favorite color combination of mine.

My first pick was a little unsettling however. I took a Searing Blaze over Kalastria Highborn. Maybe I should've playtested the rare and went for a black Vampires deck. Anyway, red definitely died after that. So my Searing Blaze didn't see my deck. Here's the list I ended up with:

Look at all those tempo spells! Sheesh! It has life gain, bounce, tapping, difficult blockers, and lots of fliers. It certainly looks like a UW fliers deck.

My memory is a bit hazy on my first round. I know I went 2-0 pretty easily however. My opponent was green; probably couldn't handle the fliers. It might have been against this opponent I had one of the fastest kills I've seen a blue deck produce. It was turn one Welkin Tern(?), turn three Horizon Drake, turn four Wind Zendikon (8 damage). And then a Horizon Drake or something to finish.

The second round was a lot more interesting. My opponent was BR, but his deck seemed to full of removal spells rather than threats. He had Smother, Urge to Feed, 3 Cunning Sparkmage(!!), and Marsh Casualties. In game one, it started a bit slowly. I stalled the board a little with a Wind Zendikon on my Quicksand. I left mana up for AEther Tradewinds both times in case he tried to kill my creature. When he went to Urge to Feed it, I bounced it and his Quag Vampires. However when I replayed it, I had two other 2/2s on the board. He played Marsh Casualities and killed all 3 of my guys. Oops. I recovered later, when I used Refraction Trap to prevent Giant Scorpion's one point of damage and pointed it at his 0/1 Cunning Sparkmage. The Scorpion died in combat. Eventually I won with a really big Apex Hawks. Game two, I used Refraction Trap for his Cunning Sparkmage again. And swung in overhead. While a bigass Guardian Zendikon was left on defense. At some point I also tapped a guy with Kor Hookmaster and bounced it with Surrakar Banisher the next turn.

Third round I got utterly crushed by a mostly white deck with a slight blue splash. My deck was great at defending against ground creatures, but against his deck of 3 Fledgling Griffin, 2 Kor Skyfisher, and whatnot, I couldn't really do much to defend myself. My turn one Perimeter Captain never blocked once. I got a little stuck on mana at some point. But I'm not sure what I would've done if I hadn't been stuck anyway. I feel my deck would've had a chance if it had the right defensive cards, but I had too many irrelevant ground dudes.

The BR guy might've had more of a fighting chance perhaps.

I realized one thing. Maximizing fliers is very important since there are almost no good answers to them. The best blockers generally don't fly. Which is why I was disappointed in Perimeter Captain and Guardian Zendikon a bit – they just weren't any good against fliers. Same with Quicksand.

I was still very pleased with my deck overall. I think I won one game while manascrewed. That was the "fast kill" draw I had. I didn't have white mana and got stuck on three lands for a while or something. Tideforce Elemental, Refraction Trap, and Lightkeeper of Emeria are also very powerful cards; although I never got to play the Tideforce Elemental. They'll be much harder to find in ZZW draft, though, unfortunately. So one cannot rely on getting these powerful cards to fill out a UW deck.

I imagine UW got slightly more powerful with Worldwake. The format is still incredibly fast, however, so one cannot really waste too much time waiting to play Guardian Zendikons. Cards like Fledgling Griffin should provide a way to speed up the clock and fill out a UW fliers deck. And Kor Skyfisher, if this is possible, probably got even a little better with Worldwake. My opponent bounced his Halimar Depths back to his hand to replay it. Getting back most of the common lands in Worldwake seems pretty good. And imagine playing a Kor Skyfisher with Archon of Redemption out. You can get a lot of value bouncing permanents back to your hand with Worldwake. Getting back Multikicker creatures to play them even bigger? Sounds good!

As people start to play the "real" format of ZZW, more information will come out as to which archetypes are now the best. Will BR reign as champion still? Or will people start fighting for white cards? Allies also seem nuts with what's available in Worldwake, but will it become more reliable to try to force Allies? How does Worldwake shake things up for Zendikar? We'll hopefully find out soon!