I want to play red at the prerelease. I can't decide if I should choose Mardu or Jeskai as my clan pack. If I choose Jeskai, I'll be able to play most of my cards regardless of which red clan I end up actually building. Whereas with Mardu if I end up building a Temur deck a lot of my cards will be wasted. But I prefer Mardu's playstyle to Jeskai's, I'm not very good at knowing how to use blue spells in limited.

Play the clan that you think is the coolest. That's more important than anything.

Temur are the coolest, but I like to win

Temur is the coolest but Mardu is probably the strongest bc of clan packs.

SCG has clan pack vids.

The store ran out of Mardu so I ended up choosing Jeskai. I've got so much mana fixing that I'm running WUBR with almost no problems. Currently at 2-0

Well all the best removal and evasion will do that. Keep on keepin' on, looking forward to seeing your decklist!

My sideboard has seven good removal spells in my colors which I decided not to run cause I want to be the aggro deck

I lost a match after having to keep bad six card hands against a Temur player who curved out well. Maybe I should have brought in some of that removal lol

probably. the curves in this format seem delicate, so disrupting them are bigger plays than usual. I think Zenbitz correctly called that blue 2-drop spell the "blue terror."

That was Tevash. I thought Force Away was better... not sure I stand by that assessment. I think singing bell strike is actually pretty tricky to play. Do you just buy time by slapping it on their 2/3 or wait until the morph flips...

Lost the last round against Mardu. He had that mythic Roc. Cracked a Sarkhan in a prize pack so I'm not too upset.

Was jeskay fun?

Did they manage to make combat a bit more interesting?

I'm going at mine 4/5 hours from now.

I'll post my pool and my deck after I wake up so you can tell me what I should have played instead. Jeskai was okay, all the standard Act of Treason moments apply, and the Efreet Weaponsmith has a lot of potential to change the outcome of combat, but I don't think I ever used prowess to change a creature vs creature fight, it just gave my flyers extra damage. As always, it depends how you choose to play them.

Yeah, I thought Blue Terror was apt for Singing Bell Strike, since it will essentially remove a creature of your choice for 1C but has a restriction (nonartifact nonblack for terror, pay to get it back for one use for SBS)

Generic answer to OP:
My advice? If you really want to win, stay away from Jeskai and Sultai: their clan-specific stuff is pretty bad. I did a big analysis of faction pack value, but most people didn't care for it. Long story short, Mardu has the best rares/faction specifics narrowly over Temur and Abzan. I think the Abzan have the best mechanic for power level but Mardu share 2/3 of their colors so why not try for Butcher of the Horde/Zurgo Helmsmasher and still run the vast majority of your outlast? Temur's pretty solid too but doesn't overlap well with the other power clans so you'll have fewer options, and of course taking Abzan themselves sets you up for the most nuts outlast BS

However, no matter which you pick it's just 1/6 rares and not even a full 1/6 of your pool, really, and without guaranteed promos you're dicing it anyway. Zurgo may laugh in Narset's face, but Narset laughs at the guy who pulled an Ascendency from his Mardu pack (... Or maybe she doesn't. Bad example, Narset is really terrible in limited. But the jeskai theme deck rare is still probably better than an ascendency, so there.), so there's that. And if your five non-seeded packs give you a powerful pool that doesn't support your chosen faction you may play something else entirely, that's just how it works.

Me? I'm going Jeskai. Their rares are terrible, but I love their art and flavor and I think that their trickery theme will be really fun to play with, even if it's not going to win me a ton of games. Plus, blue and white have really strong commons so that's good and if my white's not so great I could flux into Temur and take advantage of the depth of green. I'll still get totally blown out by Butchers, Surraks, Zurgos, and so forth, but I'm comfortable with that. If there was more on the line than the little crack-of-sunday-dawn prerelease I'm going to, maybe I'd take my own advice and pick Mardu instead but I'm too much a Johnny/Vorthos and not enough a Spike to do it when the difference is probably about 2 packs, tops, between me pioliting a UP Jeskai build and me crushing my enemies, seeing then driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women behind Mardu.

The five two color themes are GU morph, GB high toughness,WR weenies WB warrior and UR spells, right?

Your link is just a link to this thread.

I can't find the vids on their site.

They took them down.

My pool

1 Mystic Monastery
1 Sandsteppe Citadel
1 Tranquil Cove
1 Dismal Backwater
1 Blossoming Sands
1 Swiftwater Cliffs
1 Wind-Scarred Crag
1 Thornwood Falls

2 Jeskai Banner
2 Lens of Clarity
1 Sultai Banner

1 Abzan Falconer
1 Ainok Bond-Kin
2 Alabaster Kirin
1 Erase
1 High Sentinels of Arashin
1 Jeskai Student
1 Mardu Hateblade
2 Sage-Eye Harrier
1 Seeker of the Way
3 Smite the Monstrous
1 War Behemoth

1 Cancel
2 Glacial Stalker
1 Jeskai Elder
2 Jeskai Windscout
1 Mistfire Weaver
1 Monastery Flock
2 Scion of Glaciers
1 Singing Bell Strike
1 Taigam's Scheming
1 Waterwhirl
1 Weave Fate

1 Debilitating Injury
1 Disowned Ancestor
1 Empty the Pits
1 Kheru Dreadmaw
2 Mardu Skullhunter
1 Raiders' Spoils
1 Rakshasa's Secret
1 Rite of the Serpent
1 Rotting Mastodon
1 Swarm of Bloodflies

1 Act of Treason
2 Barrage of Boulders
1 Bloodfire Expert
2 Bloodfire Mentor
1 Burn Away
1 Goblinslide
1 Howl of the Horde
1 Leaping Master
1 Trumpet Blast

1 Hooting Mandrills
2 Kin-Tree Warden
1 Longshot Squad
1 Naturalize
1 Sagu Archer
2 Smoke Teller
1 Tusked Colossodon

1 Abzan Guide
1 Armament Corps

1 Efreet Weaponmaster
1 Jeskai Ascendancy
2 Jeskai Charm
1 Warden of the Eye

1 Abomination of Gudul
1 Sultai Ascendancy

1 Mardu Ascendancy
1 Mardu Charm
1 Mardu Roughrider

1 Snowhorn Rider

Have fun with this pool (-:

---

My deck

2 Plains
1 Island
2 Mountain
5 Swamp
1 Mystic Monastery
1 Sandsteppe Citadel
1 Tranquil Cove
1 Dismal Backwater
1 Swiftwater Cliffs
1 Wind-Scarred Crag

2 Jeskai Banner

1 Abzan Falconer
1 Ainok Bond-Kin
1 High Sentinels of Arashin
1 Mardu Hateblade
1 Seeker of the Way

2 Jeskai Windscout
1 Mistfire Weaver

2 Mardu Skullhunter
1 Raiders' Spoils
1 Swarm of Bloodflies

1 Act of Treason
1 Howl of the Horde
1 Trumpet Blast

1 Efreet Weaponmaster
2 Jeskai Charm
1 Warden of the Eye

1 Mardu Ascendancy
1 Mardu Charm
1 Mardu Roughrider

Thoughts on the format

As has been pointed out before, there aren't too many terrible cards in this format. You are spoiled for choice, and will usually be able to build a few different decks.

There's more mana fixing in this format than there are multicolored cards. Even an aggro deck should never have any problem playing three colors.

There's a lot of removal, so you won't have to value it too highly, but a lot of it is situational or expensive, so decide what kind is best for your deck.

The format feels faster than it looks. Boros "go wide" has plenty of support between tokens and pumps, and Temur has a nice balance between cost and size. Even the Abzan mechanic 'Outlast' is good in aggro decks, since they can build up their guys whenever they're not able to get through, while the control deck usually can't afford to take them off blocking duty for a turn. However, they only need one counter to start acting like Slivers, so be aware.

There's a bunch of lifelink, but lifelinkers can't block evaders, so a lot of the time it works just as well in an attacking deck than a defensive one. I predict that if the midrange deck is able to turn the game around after surviving an aggro onslaught, the aggro deck is not necessarily gonna have a million turns to draw into some reach, so anything that helps you race is good.

In all my games, whoever got to be the beatdown won, but that's not a good representative of the format since I built my deck to be good at beating down and terrible at being beaten down.

Morph is the most interesting mechanic in the format. Many times, I was paranoid that my opponent had a Watcher of the Roost to suddenly block someone they shouldn't have been able to, though it never happened. Most of the morphs that are cheap to flip up don't gain extra toughness though, so if you want to trick your opponent into wasting a removal spell on a morph that won't die then you'll need to keep a bit of mana open.