Greetings to all Deep Divers and welcome to the second installment of the Deep Dive Games blog! With our last visit focusing on the Aetherdrift pre-release, this post will cover the results of the aforementioned, and the new commander bracket. Onto the content! The prerelease displayed satisfying results as many people flocked to the new set (I included). The actual events had an equally satisfactory showup, however I will cover that momentarily. One thing I found most interesting about Aetherdrift was that even conceptually, a lot of the chase cards and cards in general were just cool! Take for example, The Aetherspark. An artificial spark used as an Artifact Plansewalker, the first we’ve seen in fact (outside of test cards in the past). The theming alone was enough for at least I to be interested in Aetherdrift, but was also the reason that others found it interesting I found, outside of the mechanics that it introduced of course.
There were two events surrounding the release of Aetherdrift, one of which was on the Friday of the release, the other being the following Saturday. Friday held not only the aforementioned release, but also the coinciding constructed prerelease. If you happened to not be there for it, it followed the standard prerelease format with each win granting you one pack as prize support, the winner of the entire event getting an extra two packs for their victory! The following day held the 1v1 commander pre-con event which players registered with one of either decks. The two available decks were Eternal Might, an Esper deck surrounding the commander “Temmet, Naktumun’s Will” and was built on zombies/zombie tokens and buffing said zombies. Then we had Living Energy, which is a Temur deck with the commander “Saheeli, Radiant Creator”, and this deck was entirely built around energy. The event itself went smoothly with quite a show, both teams having around equal participants, while the majority was primarily interested in Eternal Might, myself being much more interested in Living Energy. When registering under one of the decks, you were put into one of two teams. Eternal Might, the zombie deck. Or Living Energy, the energy deck. Throughout the night, it was very neck and neck on which deck would win. However, at the very end Eternal Might won by one singular point!
Overall, the prerelease had a satisfactory showup. From the constructed prerelease, to the precon commander 1v1! Now while that did take up most of the post, there is other news to move onto. That being the new Commander bracket. While I’d love to go in depth, I’d rather not inflate this blog post with me merely regurgitating what is already readily available to almost everyone here, and to most reading this you already likely know about the commander brackets. In their words, it is an attempt to create a steady matchmaking system for commander, splitting decks into five categories. The first being exhibition, the last being CEDH. While it is in Beta, this hasn’t stopped it from sparking quite the debate in the commander sphere.
All in all, we’ll have to play it by ear and wait to see how it all turns out. But that just about wraps it up for today's post, so to whomever is reading this I wish you a great rest of your day, and until next time! This is your beloved writer, signing off.