I've been pretty well knocked out by illness and subsequent slow recovery for the last couple weeks, but I'm getting back on my feet bit by bit. While on a recent trip into Spokane to assemble a flat-pack kitchen set for my niece, I detoured to The Gamer's Haven and bought a Modern Horizons III booster pack.
A little background: This shop used to be located in downtown Coeur d'Alene, but a fire moved them to Post Falls, where I first started frequenting the shop. A better lease opportunity opened up in the Spokane Valley where they had an amazing game room painted in Warhammer 40,000 iconography. Now it has moved into central Spokane with an adjoining fusion restaurant for easy access to mid-session munchies. If you're in the area, there's a nice selection of war games, role-playing games, and trading card games along with various more traditional board and card games.
Anyway, on to the pack. These carry a premium over the usual pack price, but the possible cards are also often in high demand for Modern and Commander players. I paid about $10, but will I pull anything worth even close to that, either to trade or as an essential addition to one of my decks? That's the fun of opening a pack instead of making the wiser choice and just buying the singles one needs for a deck.
The commons aren't all that special, but there are some good additions for budget EDH decks and ideas to build a casual modern deck. Once you see the other cards, you might get some ideas for energy counters, for example. This would be fun to draft for sure.
This pack so far seems to suggest either green/blue Simic or black/white Orzhov ideas more than anything else, with only the one red common so far. The foil Glasswing Grace/Age-Graced Chapel is a pretty card, but not very valuable on the secondary market. None of the rest of these are worth a lot, either, but that Planar Genesis is probably a good card in any deck with Simic colors.
OK, enough delays. Sorry about the out-of-focus photo, but I don't feel like a re-shoot. I got a good pull, a mythic rare called Recruiter of the Guard, worth about $15 and perfect for my needed revisions to Alesha and Friends. Wrath of the Skies isn't too bad, either, at $2-3, although it would only fit in a dedicated energy token deck. Rounding out this set is an art card (meh) and a basic land. All told, a good pack for once. It's been a while since I had one.
I plan to start writing more original content instead of just republishing Creative Commons posts from other authors, so keep an eye out as I try to wrangle some partial drafts into something coherent about subjects more serious than card games.
If you're not on Hive yet, I invite you to join through InLeo or PeakD. If you use either of my referral links, I'll even try to delegate some Hive Power to help you get started.