I am going to be headed to Los Angeles this weekend to gunsling at the Conflux Prerelease — one of a handful of large events going on around the country this weekend. If you are a Top8Magic listener in the LA area and are planning on attending the LA event please stop by and say “hello”. I will almost certainly be doing live updates to the site from the tournament so if you want to get a first look at how the Conflux cards fare in action be sure to check in this weekend.

You can find all the event details here. You can find all the Prerelease locations here.

I am very interested to see how the new Sealed deck format plays out. As you may or may not know Wizards is doing away with Tournament Packs and all Sealed Deck events will be run from a selection of five booster packs — although it is three Shards and three Conflux for this weekend, I believe. While the Tournament Pack based format was dominated by bombs this booster based version may turn out to be much more dependent on redundant commons. There was only the slimmest of chances that you could open a pool contain multiple Sanctum Gargoyles if this event was being run with a Tournament Pack — basically you would need an aberrant print run or a foil — but it is conceivable that players could end up with two or three under the booster based version. My dream pool would contain a couple of Sanctum Gargoyles, a capsule or two, and this bad boy:

My Hero!