Last weekend we had our Spirit of Rebellion Prerelease event at Comic Culture & The Games Store. With spoilers coming thick and fast (not even including that Polish leak), everyone was eager to get their hands on the new cards.

The format that FFG recommended for this event was open play; basically you turn up with your current decks and play some friendly matches. They also included a small list of tasks to complete during the course of the event (see picture below).

These tasks are easy to complete, but are a great idea as it gives players something to aim for and encourages them to stick around longer than just picking up three booster packs and leaving.

Speaking of booster packs, here are mine (as well as my promos):

As an exclusively-Villain player, I was a bit gutted that all three of my rares were Hero ones, but at least I’ll have something to trade with once Spirit of Rebellion has been released!

I was quite pleased to get a copy of Training, as it’s a card that I’ll definitely be using, and sometimes uncommons can be hard to track down (I know plenty of people that had a lot of trouble getting copies of Electroshock).

So, how did the event go?

Over the course of the event we had twenty-four players attend. As you can see in the picture above, there were players of all ages, as several father-son combos showed up.

Just to put that in perspective, this level of attendance rivals that of our Magic the Gathering prereleases.

Overall, I would say that this format is realistically the best way of doing a prerelease for Destiny, as a limited format (opening boosters, etc) is just not practical due to needing characters and dice upgrades.

My only criticism is how early this prerelease is; most TCG prereleases are exactly one week before the set’s release. Based on the number of preview articles FFG have left to do (Red Villains, Blue Heroes, Blue Villains), the earliest I can see Spirit of Rebellion being released is 27th April.

This is only a small criticism though, as I’d much rather have a prerelease this early than not at all. In fact, it has got us all hyped for the next set, so I guess it’s fulfilling its purpose.

Cheers!