With the upcoming Pro Tour Kyoto to prepare for and in the knowledge I was going to have little free time for preparation in the lead up to it, I made my way down to Croydon for the Hour of Devastation prerelease.

I crack open my box and a foil promo Torment of Hailfire winks up at me.

Even in Sealed, I think the card is a little too slow. It is dead too often, provides too many choices to your opponent and is relatively weak when you’re behind. The Sealed format in Amonkhet was far slower than its draft counterpart. Games went long and cards like Sandwurm Convergence and Cruel Reality form the basis of viable strategies that can be relied upon to close out games for you.  Given the similarities, I expected Hour of Devastation provide much the same experience.

Despite this I ended up playing Red Green aggro splashing White for a solitary Trial of Solidarity (to go with 2 Cartouches) and the activated ability on Pride Sovereign.  I also played my copy of Samut, the Tested. I expected the card to underperform but in deck where you were either ahead, at parity or you’d already lost, it was well suited. Perhaps this card deserves another look.

Two copies of Granitic Titan topped off my curve and it performed far better than Desert Ceredon (its cousin from Amonkhet) would have. The increased cycling cost and decreased power is a perfectly fine trade-off for the menace provided. Desert Ceredon would all too often trade for something the opponent had spent far less mana on.

The cycling deserts overperformed. I believe that they will hamper your mana so infrequently that ability to shift a dead card in the mid to late game will prove excellent, not to mention when you start to introduce “Deserts matter” synergies with further great cards in Sand Strangler, Unquenchable Thirst  and Ifnir Deadlands.

I normally avoid Two Headed Giant like the plague but somehow I ended up playing it and had a lot of fun which was probably something do with the strategy of using one deck to put Gift of Paradise on the other’s lands to ramp out The Locust God, Nicol Bolas and cast a bigger Torment of Hailfire (which made the cut this time thanks to its favourable interaction with the 2HG rules).

But my real focus is the draft format and, though having not played a game of the format yet, I think it’s staying aggressive. Sure Green picked up Sifter Wurm, a card which will actually help stabilise the board if you manage to cast it. But it’s an uncommon and at common, the cards are still as fast. Unlike the various walls, Feral Prowler and Bitterbow Sharpshooters make for good blockers (perhaps helping to facilitate the Sifter Wurm gameplan). With Afflict focusing on attacking, Exert continuing to focus on attacking whilst reducing opportunities for blocking and a slew of aggressively slanted commons, I see a shift as unlikely.

Aerial Guide, Blur of Blades, Carrion Screecher, Cunning Survivor, Dauntless Aven, Firebrand Archer, Frontline Devastator, Gilded Ceredon, Granitic Titan, Khenra Eternal, Marauding Bonesmasher, Mummy Paramount, Oketra’s Avenger, Open Fire, Rhonas’s Stalwart, Sidewinder Naga, Spellweaver Eternal and Thorned Moloch are all commons and all tilt you to be aggressive.

It looks like a solid UR spells deck will come together more easily and will be able to lean on its higher spell count more allowing for profitable trades to occur whilst getting in chip damage. Then it will be able to finish its opponents off with the reach provided by Afflict, Firebrand Archer, Open Fire and Blur of Blades.

As eluded to earlier, Green may have the tools to go long now with Feral Prowler and Harrier Naga providing the blockers in the early game, Oasis Ritualist and Hope Tender helping you to reach your top end in Sifter Wurm and Rampaging Hippo filling in the gaps in between. But perhaps even that will fail to overcome the other Green strategy of curve out 2, 3, 4 and cast a 5 mana sorcery to win.

How are you finding the new format so far? Let me know in the comments below.