I went on record before saying that the goals I set myself in terms of what I want to achieve on this blog are value on purpose. I like writing articles about whatever I find interesting hobby-wise and limiting myself by having to reach some arbitrary quota or finish writing all about a certain topic seems counter-productive at best. However, one soft goal, if you want to call it that, is that I want to feature example decks for every block I have listed in my “Magic for a Budget” section. On one hand, I like the idea of deckbuilding challenges and taking a look at some old set and having to come up with how those cards could be implemented into a newer strategy is certainly fun, but on the other hand I also want to give new players or interested readers an idea of what can be done with the cheaper cardboard that Magic the Gathering has to offer, regardless of its age. With this philosophy in mind, I saw the empty section of example deck lists for the Tempest block and went to work creating something that uses cards from Tempest, Exodus, and Stronghold in a cheap but functional deck; and I found a theme in the color-hate enchantments.

Eventide Preconstructed Decks take three comes with another two-color combination, and seeing how the other two decks were quite good I expect a lot from this one, too. And in my opinion, it does really have a chance to shine: “Life Drain” is its name, the colors are White-Black, and the entire theme seems to take inspiration from the Orzhov playbook using small increment of life loss and life gain to build an advantage. Let’s see how well it can do its job.

After the nice surprise that was “Battle Blitz” last week, giving us a White-Red Aggro-Control deck with a few surprises along the way, I do have high hopes for the next dual-colored Preconstructed Deck of Eventide. This time, we have Black and Green being featured in a deck called “Death March”, which sounds like we are going to un-alive something; not that Black-Green would not have the tools to do so. Let me get straight into the card analysis, since we might have another good product on our hands right here.

We start the Preconstructed Decks for Eventide with a classic color combination: White-Red. Now, that means we have an Aggro deck at our hands; and with the entire Shadowmoor block presenting some crazy cardboard, I have high hopes for “Battle Blitz”, the deck at hand. White-Red combines lots of good traits with high aggression from Red via burn and creatures with Haste, which meet exiling removal and other solid offensive keywords like First Strike and Flying from White. Let us see what “Battle Blitz” decided to go for.