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Avacyn Restored is a set about angels, so I went in hoping to have enough good white cards to to play W/x (white plus enough of another color to finish the deck). Angels are some of my favorite cards in Magic, so I figured that I would like my cards whether I was winning or not. I didn't open anything spectacular (any of the four mythic rare angels in the set, for example), so here's the deck I played:
LANDS
8x Plains
9x Swamp
WHITE
1x Divine Deflection
3x Angelic Wall
1x Nearheath Pilgrim
1x Emancipation Angel
2x Seraph of Dawn
1x Defy Death
1x Voice of the Provinces
BLACK
1x Predator's Gambit
1x Death Wind
1x Killing Wave
1x Blood Artist
2x Crypt Creeper
1x Necrobite
2x Soulcage Fiend
2x Corpse Traders
1x Evernight Shade
1x Grave Exchange
ARTIFACT
1x Bladed bracers
My plan for this deck was to use lifegain effects (nearheath pilgrim, seraph of dawn, blood artist) to boost my life enough to allow use of some of the life loss effects (soulcage fiend, killing wave). Angelic Wall was great for blocking early and I had two cards that brought creatures back from the graveyard. It was a pretty good deck, not spectacular but good enough. I left out Thraben Valiant, a cheap white creature, but Crypt creeper seemed to do that trick well enough. I left out Mental Agony, a black discard&damage spell b/c I thought it was too expensive and too late for the effect, but I saw Rob using it later to great effect. My blue was pretty non-descript, with none of the great card-draw or bombs I saw my opponents running. Red was mostly a wash as well, but with 2x Pillar of Flame (a very cheap kill card) I was seriously considering it. Green had a semi-bomb in Soul of the Harvest, a 6/6 trampler that would draw me a card for every creature I played afterwards, but I wasn't really impressed with the rest of the color. Avacyn Restored is a slower set than I anticipated, so some of the big creatures would have been more playable, but I don't think my record would have been better going W/g.
Rob had some serious black bombs (a 5/5 deathtouch creature that draws you a card whenever a creature dies, and a creature that lets you exile an opponent's creature for 6 mana, add a counter, and use all the abilities of all exiled creatures) to play B/w. He's more of a R/W player, so he wasn't really appreciating his cards. I told him that if he didn't at least end in the winning bracket with that deck, I would deck him in the face. Julianna had a nice red mythic rare creature and played W/r.
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I didn't win any prizes, but there was some good swag handed out. Besides the usual tournament promo card, this was a "helvault release" which had a special prize which had "secret contents" which we would all receive. The "secret contents" were 2 double-sided angel/demon tokens, a special 20-sided die, and an oversized mythic angel card for each person. These oversized cards are not tournament legal, so they are really card-shaped posters. They are used in EDH to represent the commander (if your commander matches). I traded mine for Bruna, whose art I really like, and someone gave me his Avacyn since he doesn't play EDH. I plan to collect all 5. Pictures are posted below, but the scanned images show some bad aliasing...