This week I’ve been playing a lot of M10 Sealed online. I’ve done over 15 events. They didn’t go so well at first, but recently I’ve been averaging about a 3-1 or better, which I’m satisfied with. It’s also encouraging that I did worse in my first few, as it helps me feel like I’ve actually learned something. In the beginning I think I was playing Green more often than I should. I think I wasn’t taking my own advice seriously enough, and I had a tendency to play Green just for solid creatures. Solid creatures very rarely win games in this format. Similarly, these days I’m much more excited about a Divine Verdict than a Stormfront Pegasus, but it used to be the other way around.
The commons that draw me to a color are now as follows:
White:
Pacifism: One of the best removal spells. It deals with most creatures and doesn’t cost much mana. People rarely maindeck removal for it (though it’s closer to correct in this format than I would have guessed) and it deals with Cudgel Troll, which a lot of other removal spells don’t.
Divine Verdict: Neck Snap is so much better in a slower format where other cards are less powerful and it doesn’t matter that it has not special synergies with your other spells. That much is obvious, but I’m impressed by exactly how much better it is. This may be because people don’t play around it enough in sealed, but the card’s awesome regardless.
Blinding Mage: Very good, but I’d rather just have a removal spell. He’s mana intensive and pretty easy to kill. Still, he can deal with a bomb, which is what I seem to be looking for in a common at this point.
Safe Passage: This does everything. Except that sometimes it can’t actually kill a creature you need to kill, and you need to have a board.
Stormfront Pegasus: Green and White are probably the two most played colors, and that means there are a lot of Spiders and Griffins to shut this guy down. Red’s Sparkmage Apprentice is also obviously problematic for this guy. It’s an extremely efficient creature, so I haven’t brought myself to move it further down my list, but it’s very likely that it’s nowhere near this good.
Razorfoot Griffin: He’s a slow clock and he’s pretty expensive, but as far as commons are concerned he rules the skies, so he’s pretty good. Much better on defense than offense, but that’s still what I’m looking for in a common.
Siege Mastodon: Not going anywhere for awhile? Everything that makes Stormfront Pegasus worse than expected makes this guy better. It’s extremely hard to attack into a Mastodon. It’s just the exact right size for this format.
Blue:
Merfolk Looter: The format is slow, and about finding bombs and the right answers. That’s exactly what Looter is looking for.
Snapping Drake: If people can’t deal with him, he can actually end a game in the air. I don’t think games go that way as often as one might expect, but it’s not unrealistic to consider him a possible win condition. He’s one of the best common creatures, especially threats.
Cancel: I would love to put this above Snapping Drake. It’s a better card. The only reason it’s below is because Blue is more likely to be a secondary color and Cancel costs UU. Still, I would probably play this even with only 7 Islands. I can’t think of a Limited format in which counterspells have been better than this one. It’s unusually easy to get to a position where you can just hold counter mana up every turn and only counter things you really need to stop and still not fall too far behind.
Negate: I’m probably playing as much removal as I possibly can, so stopping spells is going to be more important than stopping creatures with a counterspell. Especially useful for playing a bomb with counter backup to protect it.
Essence Scatter: While Negate is better, Essence Scatter still counters more different things, so I’d probably rather play the second Essence Scatter than the second Negate. Countering creatures is still extremely important.
Divination: I think counterspells are a little more important, but this is better than most creatures, since you’ll have time to play it and it will help you get to the spells that can really win you a game.
Wind Drake: I’m not going to be sad that I can’t play blue because I have a Wind Drake sitting on the bench, but it’s a solid enough creature that I’m happy to see it.
Ice Cage: It can work, but I really have having cards that can go dead so easily, I’ll often play it, but I’ll be pretty uncomfortable about it.
Black:
Doom Blade: Obviously
Assassinate: This is higher than I would have expected to put this card, but average removal is just so exceptional in this set.
Gravedigger: I would have guessed that I’d want this more than Assassinate, but that’s not how things have played out. Still, the card advantage and ability to return a bomb is a huge factor, and this card’s still great.
Tendrils of Corruption: It’s clearly not splashable, and you need to play a lot of Swamps to make it work, but it’s so powerful when it can happen that it’s worth paying a significant amount of attention to it.
Sign in Blood: Slow format, card advantage, etc. Don’t forget to kill your opponents with this. I’ve definitely had people draw cards against me while I was at two life.
Weakness: Weakness deals with most evasive threats and some utility creatures, and the fact that it only costs one mana is great. When I built my first Sealed during the prerelease I wasn’t sure about this card, but if Black is a primary color I’ll play as many as I have.
Red:
Lightning Bolt: We can all agree on this.
Sparkmage Apprentice: Sad but true. The worst part is that the body he leaves behind doesn’t even really do anything. I’ve still splashed for him (with other cards).
Seismic Strike: You know how I put Sparkmage Apprentice second? How many Mountains can you really expect to have in a deck?
Green:
Borderland Ranger: He may or may not be the best Green card, but he’s the one that suckers me in. I’ll have a Fireball I want to play, and a really good color, and I won’t like my red, so I’ll decide to play Green because I can splash and still have reasonable mana.
Giant Spider: Like Siege Mastodon, but more efficient
Centaur Courser: I think this guy’s a trap. I think I play Green because he’s so much better than my threes in other colors, but I’m playing the color for him and he doesn’t win games.
Entangling Vines: This may not be better than some of Green’s other creatures, but if I’m playing Green I’m going to have some reasonably bodies, and I’ll want the extra removal spell to back them up. This makes it much more likely that I’ll be able to play Green while still having a deck that can do what I need it to do.
A quick list of commons I’ve never played or try to avoid:
Angel’s Mercy
Holy Strength (I can imagine siding this in, I just haven’t done it)
Lifelink
Coral Merfolk
Sage Owl
Zephyr Sprite
Tome Scour
Disorient
Jump
Convincing Mirage
Acolyte of Xathrid
Disentomb
Duress (I tried this recently and almost always missed with it… I understand that it can be good, and it can save you from a loss, but I think I’d rather side it in when I know that the cards I’m worried about are non creatures)
Soul Bleed
Unholy Strength
Jackal Familiar
Raging Goblin
Burning Inquiry
Burst of Speed
Lava Axe
Panic Attack
Yawning Fissure
Kindled Fury
Shatter
Trumpet Blast
Firebreathing
Goblin Piker
Viashino Spearhunter (I’ll play Piker and Spearhunter because red is so short and sometimes you need to play enough mountains to cast a Chandra or a Dragon, but I really don’t like them)
Mist Leopard
Bountiful Harvest
Fog
Regenerate
Naturalize (I’m happy to have it in a pool to side in, though)
Cards that I’ll go out of my way to make a deck work for, or cards I’ll play in over 90% of pools:
Baneslayer Angel
Captain of the Watch
Guardian Seraph
Serra Angel
Ajani Goldmane (Not Planar Cleansing)
Djinn of Wishes
Sphinx Ambassador
Mind Spring
Sleep
Mind Control
Liliana Vess
Cemetery Reaper (this is worse than the others, but I mention him because he’s probably better than Royal Assassin and he might even be better than Hypnotic Specter, and I think it’s possible to miss that)
Bogardan Hellkite
Capricious Efreet
Goblin Artillery
Magma Phoenix
Shivan Dragon
Siege-Gang Commander
Earthquake
Fireball
Chandra Nalaar
Ant Queen
Cudgel Troll
Master of the Wild Hunt
Protean Hydra
Overrun
Garruk Wildspeaker
Gorgon Flail
Magebane Armor
Platinum Angel
Whispersilk Cloak (Patrick Chapin mentioned that he doesn’t like this card. It is too slow for some formats, but it’s played extremely well in this Sealed format, and I think it should almost always make it in)
Gargoyle Castle
Terramorphic Expanse (not sure if I should list that one, but I’ll basically always play it)
I was hoping to go through my last 20 or so Sealed games and see how many of them were won by common creatures rather than extremely powerful uncommons or rares to prove a point, but computer difficulties related to my recent move have prevented me from doing that at the moment. I’m fairly confident the number is under 20%, and I would actually expect it to be under 10%.
Standard and the Madison PTQ
This weekend I stopped by a PTQ in Madison a few rounds before Top 8, and stayed for most of the remaining rounds. This PTQ was unique in that, as far as I know, no one in the Top 8 had ever been in a Top 8 before. The Top 4 had Brian Kowal’s Naya deck that Jake Van Lunen played at Nationals beating Five-Color Control, and Cascade beating Giantbaiting, then Cascade beating Naya in the finals. Having read a tournament report from the loser of each of those matches, everyone who lost blames mistakes on their part, so it might be best to take those specific results with a grain of salt.
What’s interesting to me is the decks that did well and the decks that underperformed. Five-Color Control, which has clearly been dominant recently, and which I expected would continue to do well for the rest of the season, did not make a particularly strong showing. Players seem to have effectively found a way to attack the slow control decks by going too fast for them, which impresses me.
Bob Baker’s Top 4 Giantbaiting deck, for example:
Creatures (24)
- 2 Imperious Perfect
- 4 Wren's Run Vanquisher
- 4 Bramblewood Paragon
- 4 Boggart Ram-Gang
- 4 Nettle Sentinel
- 2 Wild Nacatl
- 4 Bloodbraid Elf
Lands (24)
Spells (12)
Sideboard
He recommends cutting the Magma Phoenixes for a Snakeform and a Chameleon Colossus, and cutting the Wild Nacatls for Twinblade Slashers. His tournament report was full of games where his opponents just didn’t do anything.
The claim is that this deck, like Kowal’s Naya deck, has good matchups against most of the field, particularly the slower decks based on Vivid lands, but that it more or less can’t beat Kithkin. Fortunately, Kithkin has dropped dramatically in popularity due to fairly unimpressive results at Nationals, due largely to a (debatably) bad matchup against Five-Color Control. This seems to indicate either that now is a good time to consider trying to outrace the rest of the format, or that now might be a good time to pick up some White creatures, depending on where you expect your local metagame to be. Personally, I can’t quite bring myself to trust aggressive strategies like these at the moment, and I would play Faeries or Five-Color Control, but it’s good to know that the option seems to be out there for real at the moment.
I’ll be at Gen Con all this weekend, so feel free to say something if you see me there, but you might have to look away from the Magic tables to find me.
Thanks for reading…