2014-15 Precon Championships: Round 8 and the Leaderboard

Round 8 is upon us! Not only the final and deciding round of the Lauer Division, but also the last of the rounds in the lead-up to the Final Four and Grand Final. This weekend’s matches will decide which deck represents the Lauer, and the week after this whole thing comes to an end.  

For our predictors, a fat prize package of a bunch of boosters and an Eldritch Moon Prerelease Kit awaits. Icehawk sits in the lead, but by the slimmest of margins with a pack on his heels. With only six more points up for grabs, victory is by no means certain.

This past weekend’s action saw a large number of predictors rack up some serious points. Scott Mazurek, ubur, Grue, refresh_daemon, and westbrook57 all went four-for-four, which might be an all-time record for number of perfect predictions in a particular week.

Westbrook57 seemed to sum up the opinion of many for the first match, where Khans of Tarkir’s Abzan Siege went down in flames.

Landslide Charge. It’s an event deck.

Next up was Enlightened Mastery versus Relentless Rush in a battle of the Dragons of Tarkir Event Decks. Here’s how refresh_daemon saw it. 

I love the Jeskai and even their temporal successor, Dragon Clan Ojutai, but the creatures in Enlightened Mastery are honestly quite underwhelming and most don’t synergize well with what the deck is doing–where there more prowess or prowess-like creatures in the deck, the value from all those rebound spells would be fantastic, but the defenders and otherwise fat butted creatures like Updraft Elemental or Student of Ojutai aren’t really much of a win condition, essentially making the deck reliant on its few bombs (or Skywise Teachings) to actually win. There is draw and filtering, but while #TeamOjutai is trying to find its bombs, Relentless Rush is doing to keep crashing in.

For our third match it was Grave Advantage (Fate Reforged) versus Furious Forces (Dragons of Tarkir). Here’s refresh_daemon again with the rationale of that pick.

Grave Advantage is a bit of a curious deck, it has a bit of a self-mill plan in order to activate its delve cards, but it only have five delve cards altogether. A self-sacrifice theme almost moves towards this goal, but that’s all I can do with its graveyard and while its bombs are super good between the Archfiend of Depravity and Hornet Queen and there is some filtering offered in that self mill.

Grave Advantage… gets to eventually cast undercosted dudes while hopefully digging for increasingly more relevant cards and these guys, while removable like most intro pack creatures, don’t rely on other creatures to turn on its abilities. For that, I choose Grave Advantage.

Finally, the Commander deck Sworn to Darkness trounced Massed Ranks of Dragons of Tarkir right out of the tournament. Few could expect the insanely perfect game that Sworn had, but here’s jeskai_angel’s take.

I think I’ve got to vote Sworn to Darkness. Its opponent lacks the oomph to score a quick win, so even thought Sworn to Darkness looks slow, I think it will survive long enough to take over the game.

Here’s how the standings look. It’s a nailbiter!!

As always, if you see any discrepancy, please let me know and we’ll be happy to correct.

Here are the predictions we’ll want for this Sunday’s action.

Game One: Landslide Charge (Dragons of Tarkir Event Deck) versus Relentless Rush (Dragons of Tarkir Intro Pack)

Game Two: Grave Advantage (Fate Reforged Intro Pack) versus Sworn to Darkness (Commander 2014)

Divisional Final: Winner of Game One versus Winner of Game Two

Best of luck, everyone!