My pre-release experience was less fun than it usually was. My deck was alright, although I felt the usual problem with Sealed (not being able to fully dedicate to one strategy) was worse than it otherwise is. I first made a Dinosaur deck, having two
Kinjalli's Caller and a
Huatli, Warrior Poet, but my mana fixing and top-end was insufficient to really make it work. After that, I swapped the Green for Blue and made something of a tempo deck, trying to get in with evasive threats, supported by removal, which worked better, but not great. My pool didn't have any truly great synergies, so my motley crew of Vampires, Merfolk, Dinosaurs and Pirates couldn't get the job done most of the time.
I also found most of my matches ending up playing out pretty much the same. Everyone just playing creatures and turning them sideways, with very little in terms of combat tricks or more spell-based strategies. Enrage and Raid mostly care about things you'd end up doing anyway (mostly attacking) and Explore didn't add a lot of interesting things. Treasure felt similar to Explore, in that it worked fine, but rarely was exciting. It was all a bit boring, really, which is a shame because I was quite excited about the different tribes.
And Vampires were almost non-existing, it seemed. I played against dedicated Dinosaur and Pirate decks and saw a few Merfolk decks, but no-one seemed to be playing a Vampire-centric deck. When looking over the spoiler, Vampires seemed to offer the most interesting Limited gameplay, but either people really wanted to play Dinosaurs and Pirates, or Vampires weren't supported enough.