June 30, 2020
peripeteia – noun : a sudden turn of events or an unexpected reversal, especially in a literary work
Did you know that home security systems run on something akin to a mini car battery that you have to change from time to time?
I did not. So the damn thing suddenly chiming incessantly at 10:30pm the other night was both obnoxious and baffling.
Ignorance is an ugly thing, especially when it wakes up your wife.
You know what else I didn’t know? That you can’t buy a Magic prerelease kit before 3:00pm on the Friday of the prerelease weekend.
Apparently the employees at my LGS didn’t know this either, at least until the day the kits went on sale.
On Friday I used my lunch break to run a couple errands (including purchasing a replacement security system battery – money grudgingly spent.) While out, I swung by my LGS to pick up prerelease kits for my son and I to play that night. I arrived at the store at 2:00pm to be greeted by a sign on the main counter stating prerelease packs could not be purchased until 3:00pm. The store employees were apologetic and stated that WoTC’s communication on the matter had been…lacking. They were clearly not thrilled about sending me away empty-handed.
Later that evening I had to make the 50-minute round trip back to the store to finally buy them. I was justifiably annoyed (not at anyone in particular – the miasma just sort of hovered over me and clouded the rest of my day.)
As a goodwill gesture, the store gave me three of these things when I picked up my kits:
As one of those lamewads who only visits their LGS for prereleases, I’d never gotten a promo card or pack at an LGS. I had no idea what was in these packs and whether the contents would make up for my frustration and lost time, but I appreciated the store attempting to make things right (or at least better.)
After dinner Friday night my son and I started opening packs, me in the kitchen and he in the living room. He quickly began some running commentary:
“My promo is Pursued Whale.”
“I got a foil rare.”
“Are there special arts in normal packs?”
“What was your promo?”
“I got another special art card, but a rare.”
“Check out this land!”
“Did you get any mythics?”
“I didn’t get any mythics.”
He showed me only the special land – one of the Teferi-themed Islands – but by the sounds of it, he’d done well overall. We also each opened one of the THB promo packs. His contained these 3 cards:
Mine had these:
We compared these mini-packs, and he agreed that he definitely got the better promo pack. Overall, I felt like he’d gotten a pretty good set of cards.
Except…
I’ve said it before – for the kid, getting a mythic is a huge deal with these kinds of openings. Getting one, even if it isn’t very good, can make or break his pack-cracking experience. We did an Ikoria bundle battle earlier this month, and the kid didn’t get a mythic in his 10 packs. I believe that disappointment was largely responsible for us playing with our bundle decks just one evening. They’ve sat untouched on the kitchen table in the 3+ weeks since then.
To my honest chagrin, I did get a mythic – the currently $10 Chromatic Orrery. Despite my assurances that it wasn’t good in sealed and wouldn’t be making whatever deck I built, he was likely bummed.
Fair and full disclosure: hoping I don’t open a mythic because the kid didn’t get one is kinda lousy, and it irks me to fall into such a mindset. My wife and I have tried to teach him to be happy for others when something nice happens to them, or they get something he wanted but didn’t get himself. And while he generally handles these situations decently, there’s a definite limit to his empathy. We play Pokemon Go as a family, and he’s gotten vastly better at being happy for my wife or I when we find a shiny Pokemon. But if he goes weeks without getting one while we rack up multiples in that same period, his annoyance or jealousy inevitably creeps through.
Knowing he’s probably not satisfied with what he opened, I reminded him “you got a foil rare, and a special art rare, and that cool land. And your promo pack was way better than mine. You got a good set of stuff!” Empty words, I’m sure – I think his reply was along the lines of “I guess”
But we built our decks, and we battled. He with blue/black, me with black/green. Both color combos surprised me. I would never have expected the kid, a Gruul mage to his core, to go blue/black, even if they were clearly the best colors in his pool. I suspect his Pursued Whale was the impetus for his choice to include blue.
For me, playing black/green was…bizarre. Arena offers up daily quests, many of which are to play 25 or 30 spells of a specific color combination. Most of the time I can fulfill these quests using one of my personally fashioned decks. When a quest requires playing a color combo for which I don’t have my own deck, I’ll use the Arena welcome deck of the necessary color combo.
And yet I cannot remember the last time I played the Golgari welcome deck. I’ve apparently avoided being stuck with that particular quest for a very, very, very long time. Truthfully, I have no strong feelings for black/green either way. I know the wolf tribal deck I played for a bit after Throne of Eldraine was released was white/black/green, as was a Calix enchantment deck I toyed with earlier this year. But I suspect its been 4+ months since I played a deck with black and green in it. I suspect every other 2-color combo’s been played on Arena a fair amount in the last month alone.
I win game 1, he takes game 2, and I manage to beat him game 3 despite a resolved Pursued Whale (I was able to kill the pirate token the Whale gave me, saving me from having to send my creatures to suicidal combat annihilation.)
Each prerelease kit came with two boosters as “prize packs.” For the Ikoria prerelease, the match winner got to pick which two sealed boosters were their prize packs. Pathetically, I don’t remember which of us won our Ikoria prerelease match, but I do strongly recall the kid’s IKO prize packs were much, much better than mine. This time, I suggested what I thought would be a more equitable way of splitting the prize packs – opening them all up, and drafting the rares/uncommons/foils in “snake draft” format (match winner gets pick 1, loser has choices 2 and 3, winner gets 4 and 5, and so forth.) My hope was that there’d be at least two strong cards in the 4 packs, to ensure we both walk away with something snazzy.
The two prize packs I open contain Runed Halo and Volcanic Salvo – neither particularly exciting (in fact, the Salvo is the second least valuable rare in the set currently, behind only…Pursued Whale.) There was also a very cool foil plains in the M21 showcase frame.
One of the packs the kid opened contained Fabled Passage; undoubtedly a very useful card, but one we both admitted was unexciting. It was the kid’s other pack that changed the trajectory of the whole evening. Immediately upon opening it he exclaimed, with a mix of excitement and laughter, “I know what card you’re taking!” That card?
He hadn’t even read the thing and he knew a mythic rare planeswalker was the clear first choice of prize picks.
Before any of you accuse me of being a monster, OF COURSE I gave it to the kid. When he asked me why I was going to let him have it, I explained that I’d gotten a mythic in my kit and he hadn’t, and that if he got Ugin, I would take the Fabled Passage, the foil plains, and one of the other rares. We’d then draft what remained as we’d originally planned (we included the last promo pack in the pool of picks, but its contents were tragically uninspiring.)
When I told my son Ugin was a reprint, and that the Fate Reforged version had once been worth over $80 and was still quite valuable, he was even more excited to have it. Though it was already past his bedtime, we spent 15 or 20 minutes discussing the card and how amazing it was, how quickly it could be ramped out with the right draw, and how hard it would be to overcame if played against you. I also let him know that I’d already been completely wrecked by it several times on Arena. The card’s a behemoth, whether ramped out or dropped on curve. I encouraged the kid to add it to his prerelease deck when we next played, though that hasn’t yet happened.
The cruel irony of all this is that Ugin, the Spirit Dragon was the one card from Fate Reforged I knew I would likely never own. Too expensive for me to buy as a single, and unlikely to be reprinted because of that same hefty price tag, I’d resigned myself several years ago to the notion that I’d never have the card. When I saw that it was reprinted in M21 I was shocked, but knew the chances of ever actually opening one from a paper pack was remote. And then, when I actually had the chance to add one to my collection, my first thought had been:
“Give it to the kid.”
My second (very brief) thought was “you won first pick, take it, you’ll never have another chance to get one.”
But my third and final thought was “let the kid have it – he’ll be so happy.”
He was.
Casual Magicking 