Looks like the pacing is going to be all over the place in this series. We got barely halfway through the first chapter in this episode (though that was mostly due to the excision of the 2wei-ending cliffhanger for the anime adaptation), yet the next week preview shows (more like spoils, really) something from the end of chapter 3. Well, I guess we'll see. Lot more action in this manga than the previous two, and that often makes pacing hard to predict, since you can animate a whole chapter's worth of action in just a few minutes.
Animation and art direction are gorgeous. Somehow seems a bit more bright and colorful than I expected, though.
For the sake of anime-only viewers, the anime has gotten far enough that we can safely discuss the major difference between the original manga and the adaptation (both 2wei and 3rei).
Spoiler for since there's bound to be someone not interested:
To put it simply, the first half of this episode never happened in the manga. Neither did most of the latter half of the last episode of 2wei. The fight with Gil ended with his defeat and the ejection of his card, but the two as-yet-unnamed girls who fought our heroines in this episode appeared immediately after our heroines prepared to go home, appropriated Gil's card, stole Miyu with little trouble, and they all disappeared along with the surrounding terrain, leaving Irisviel to come across a pristine mountainside and wonder where everyone had gone. That's how 2wei the manga ended. 3rei started right up with Illya waking up in the snow, and progressed from there as it did in the new anime episode, with leaving the mountain, discovering the changes, and encountering Tanaka.