I spent a fabulous Prerelease day as usual at The Games Club in central London, the UK’s premier tournament organisation under the watchful eye of TO Jason Howlett. Next week, my article will have bonus podcast attached, featuring chat with some of the players, and an interview with Stuart Wright about the likely impact of Alara Reborn on Constructed, with Pro Tour: Honolulu starting to loom on the horizon.
But today, I want to focus on Sealed play. During the course of the day, Stuart and I were Deck Doctoring and Gunslinging, which is a great, great way to spend a Prerelease. First, you get to meet a ton of new people. I reckon Sti and I got through about 50 opponents during the day. Second, you really get to find out what your deck can and cannot do, and have the time to explore plenty of interactions that you just wouldn’t get around to during a 6/7 Round Sealed Deck tournament. Third, you get a real sense of what people are choosing to play, both in terms of individual cards, and also colors/shards. Fourth, patterns start to emerge about the shape of games, the ebb and flow and cut and thrust. In terms of playtesting a Format, it’s a dream job. Fifth, you start to understand just how difficult most people find building a Sealed pool, and many of the typical mistakes that inexperienced players tend to have in common.
My plan therefore is to show you the pool I had, talk through some of the options, and then look at some of the highlights of the day. I want to make it clear at the outset that I consider myself being a Deck Doctor to be the height of irony, since I have no claim to Magical greatness. However, after twelve years in the game, and spending so much time with the best in the world, hopefully I’ve picked up a little more than someone at their second ever tournament. Or, as my friend Neil Rigby put it, ‘So basically, I walk up to you, hand you my deck, you totally ruin it by taking out all the good cards and putting in crap ones, and then say “Congratulations, you have built your deck perfectly, here’s how you could have built it if you were rubbish at Magic.”‘ With friends like these, who needs enemies?
To business then. Here’s my pool.
Sunseed Nurturer
Soul’s Grace
Welkin Guide
Gustrider Exuberant
Marble Chalice
Resounding Wave
Etherium Sculptor
Cloudheath Drake
Kathari Screecher
Sharding Sphinx
Steelclad Serpent
Steelclad Serpent
Bone Splinters
Viscera Dragger
Corpse Connoisseur
Scavenger Drake
Onyx Goblet
Bloodpyre Elemental
Dragon’s Herald
Incurable Ogre
Godtoucher
Elvish Visionary
Wild Nacatl
Savage Hunger
Stormcaller’s Boon
Deft Duelist
Talon Trooper
Ethersworn Shieldmage
Ethersworn Shieldmage
Sanctum Plowbeast
Fieldmist Borderpost
Vedalken Ghoul
Deny Reality
Mistvein Borderpost
Brainbite
Brainbite
Demonic Dread
Terminate
Blightning
Kathari Bomber
Vengeful Rebirth
Violent Outburst
Violent Outburst
Giant Ambush Beetle
Godtracker of Jund
Rip-Clan Crasher
Rhox Brute
Trace of Abundance
Marisi’s Twinclaws
Steward of Valeron
Bant Sureblade
Sigiled Behemoth
Pale Recluse
Sigil Captain
Qasali Pridemage
Sigil of the Nayan Gods
Stun Sniper
Cerodon Yearling
Cerodon Yearling
Double Negative
Skyclaw Thrash
Marrow Chomper
Maelstrom Pulse
Fire-field Ogre
Grixis Sojourners
Unscythe, Killer of Kings
Enigma Sphinx
Esper Sojourners
Windwright Mage
Punish Ignorance
Flurry of Wings
Rhox War Monk
Bant Sojourners
Obelisk of Esper
Obelisk of Bant
First things first… It was bad enough trying to decide how to type the list, and judging by the puzzled expression on many faces, players didn’t have the first clue how on Earth to structure the cards physically on the table in front of them. There’s a memorable picture somewhere of Steve Sadin and Gabe Carleton-Barnes on a plane en route to a Grand Prix, with twenty-three separate piles of cards laid out on a table the size of a very small thing. Although a work in progress, Stu and I ended up with a kind of Five Step approach.
Step One is to go through the entire pool card by card and set aside any of the cards you really don’t want to play with because they’re not very good. Don’t set aside cards because you don’t like the shard or perceived style of deck that a card might lead to, but try to measure it fairly. Bad cards, off to the side. Just because they’re out of the way doesn’t mean that one or two might not sneak back in later in the build, according to the precise needs of your deck.
Step Two is really easy, since it involves laying out the five colors in color wheel order. That’s to say white, then blue, black, red, and green, in a kind of pentagram-ish circle. If you struggle to remember the color wheel order, feel free to turn over any Magic card, and use the handy diagram on the back.
Step Three takes us to the next-door neighbour cards. UW cards sit on the second ring between the white cards and the blue cards. Then UB between blue and black, next BR, then RG and then finally GW between green and white. This is where we have our first and major stumbling block to a neat arrangement, namely what to do with the hybrid cards. Our current solution is to have them at a kind of mid-way point, outside the mono-colored circle, but inside the dedicated two-color ring. So a card like Trace of Abundance would basically sit just outside the green pile, in a sense waiting to see whether it would be going ‘up’ to join the green-white pile, or ‘down’ to hook up with the green-red pile. The advantage to doing it this way is that you don’t have to decide which way you prefer to use the card before you have all the information about your pool in front of you. However, another approach is to look at the numbers of playables in each of the two-color piles and then weight the hybrid cards towards one side of the other. If you have very few RW cards but a lot of GW, you’d place Trace of Abundance in with the GW, and just make a mental note that you might end up wanting to shift it later on.
Step Four is nice and easy, since it’s a small ring of cards in tier three, which are the straight-up three-color Shard cards, like Punish Ignorance or Rhox War Monk. For these, just put them level with their dominant Shard color, so Bant cards go level with your mono-white pile, Esper with blue, Grixis with black, Jund with Red and Naya with green.
Step Five is to make a hopefully-sizeable pile of convenient lands and artifacts that are going to, again hopefully, fix your mana in such a way that you can actually justifiably play the spells that you want to. This pile can be off to the side, out of sight, but most definitely not out of mind.
This delightful arrangement pre-supposes that you have seventeen acres of real estate to sprawl your deckbuilding across. My build process looked like a card Stonehenge at one point, so unless Steve Sadin and chums can come up with a better plan, I fear they may need to upgrade to Business Class for the foreseeable future if they wish to continue their Mile High Sealed Club.
What to do with the pool… It’s at this point we need to make a couple of points clear that tend to get lost in the shuffle when talking about Prereleases. First, six and five are different numbers. Second, Conflux is a Magic set. For those confused by these last two sentences, it’s my way of reminding you that Prereleases differ quite considerably from any Sealed play you’re likely to encounter subsequently. With a total of six boosters to build a pool from, your options are multiplied hugely from the regular five we’ve had historically. However, with the move away from Tournament Packs, I believe I’m right in saying that six boosters is now going to be the standard number for Sealed play. Have I just made that up?
What six packs means is not only more options, but more Rares, more removal, and more power in decks. Looking to rely on one or two powerful cards to carry you to victory is fraught with danger,
since not only is it more likely that your opponent will have ways and means to deal with those threats, he’s much more likely to have threats of his own that come down on turns six, seven or eight and say ‘Whatcha doin’ then, my man?’, which is what a 37 year old middle class Englishman assumes an inanimate card would say if it inexplicably came to life during a game and wanted to sound ‘street.’
In order to get plenty of new cards into hot sweaty player palms, the middle set of the block, in this case Conflux, is generally missing from Prerelease day. Drafts this time around were Shards-Reborn-Reborn, and that clearly changes the behavior of gold cards that rely on other gold cards to do their thing.
With these caveats out of the way, it seems to me that there are broadly three decks that we might look to put together. If you want to play along at home, now’s your time to finalise your version of the deck.. I’ll wait…
Okay, the first is pretty firmly an Esper deck:
Creatures
2cc — Bant Sureblade, Deft Duelist
3cc — Ethersworn Shieldmage, Ethersworn Shieldmage, Talon Trooper, Kathari Screecher, Windwright Mage, Esper Sojourners
4cc — Viscera Dragger
5cc — Welkin Guide, Corpse Connoisseur, Cloudheath Drake
6cc — Sharding Sphinx
7cc — Enigma Sphinx
Spells
1cc — Bone Splinters
2cc – Sanctum Plowbeast
3cc — Resounding Wave, Obelisk of Bant, Obelisk of Esper
4cc — Punish Ignorance, Brainbite, Stormcaller’s Boon
5cc — Deny Reality
I should probably explain what Sanctum Plowbeast is doing as a 2cc spell rather than a 6cc creature. Of course it can be either, but in terms of deckbuilding you should calculate that this will mostly be a cycler, since that’s the most likely reason for putting it in a deck. Like Ridge Rannet before it, if you happen to end up with a 3/6 Defender in the late game (or a 6/4 for seven), all well and good, but without the cycling they would often miss out on a starting spot. Now is also the point to say that the official Stuart Wright Seal of Approval goes to the Borderposts as replacing a land in your deck, at least until you start getting into silly numbers of them, like 4+. In other words, this deck can run both Mistvein and Fieldmist, plus 15 basic land.
The upsides to this deck are the exciting flying Rares at the top, plenty of support flyers, an ability to beneficially use the pitiful amount of fixing the pool had, and a chance to see whether Cascade has been costed correctly, or whether doing small things for a big cost with a gamble thrown in turns out to be the way forward. On the downside, the spells are plenty unexciting. A four mana counterspell? An expensive bounce spell with a possible eight-mana version turning up three weeks on Tuesday? And come to that, a five mana bounce spell that isn’t even an instant? Yuk.
What about deck number two then? This time, we’re going to go down a Grixis route, thus:
Creatures
1cc-
2cc-
3cc — Kathari Screecher, Jund Battlemage, Hissing Iguanar, Kathari Bomber
4cc — Grixis Sojourners, Fire-Field Ogre, Viscera Dragger
5cc- Corpse Connoisseur, Cloudheath Drake, Bloodpyre Elemental, Giant Ambush Beetle, Skyclaw Thrash
6cc- Sharding Sphinx, Flameblast Dragon
Spells
1cc — Magma Spray, Bone Splinters
2cc — Terminate
3cc — Blightning, Demonic Dread, Obelisk of Esper
4cc — Unscythe Killer of Kings, Brainbite
5cc — Deny Reality
With this deck, we still have excitement at the top end, since Flameblast Dragon is an absolute must-kill threat, and we’ve kept the Sharding Sphinx. There’s still a reasonable flying squad and some decent Unearth action. On the spell side, there’s a bit more of a discard theme, with Blightning added, and a second Brainbite in the board if needed. Unscythe turned out on the day to be a major pain in the backside to play against, though perhaps not for the reasons you might suppose. See, it’s every bit as clunky as it first appears. It costs BB in between that U and R, and then it’s two to Equip. Making it huge is obviously tedious, and First Strike ensures that the monster it’s equipping likely won’t die. All this is fine, and of relatively little concern, outside the time they put it on their unblockable man and kill you with it, but that’s the time to just shrug and sideboard in your Naturalize for game three. No, the proper irritation is when you’re trying to punch through the final points of damage, because first of all it gets to kill one of your attackers, and then turns your attacker into a stupid 2/2 Zombie ready to do his bidding the following turn. This card is hideously difficult to outrace.
The other point to notice — and I take no credit for this, since it’s modelled on something Sti did with his pool — is that there are deliberately no creatures at 1cc and 2cc. Why? Because that turns Demonic Dread into a ‘Removal Tutor’, as it were. For three mana, I cast the Cascade spell, which a lot of the time is a very unexciting ability. However, as I Cascade there are only three cards the deck can find — Terminate at 2cc, and Bone Splinters and Magma Spray at 1cc. It’s possible that I won’t have a creature I’m willing to sacrifice, or that 2 damage won’t get the job done. A lot of the time, building your deck in such a way as to have a degree of control over Cascade is going to be good times.
Although I quite like the look of this deck, I was worried by the absence of early plays, and wasn’t sure I’d be able to recover against a quick start. In Sealed, I prefer to be on the front foot as often as possible, which made my third deck a clear winner, and the one I went with:
Creatures
1cc — Wild Nacatl
2cc — Elvish Visionary, Steward of Valeron, Qasali Pridemage, Stun Sniper, Bant Sureblade
3cc — Naya Battlemage, Jund Battlemage, Hissing Iguanar
4cc — Rhox Brute, Marisi’s Twinclaws, Sigil Captain
5cc — Giant Ambush Beetle, Welkin Guide, Naya Sojourners, Blodpyre Elemental
6cc — Flameblast Dragon, Sigiled Behemoth
Spells
1cc — Magma Spray
2cc — Resounding Roar, Trace of Abundance, Pale Recluse
3cc — Sigil of the Nayan Gods
With 18 monsters aboard, this deck is rarely going to run out of onboard smashing. Although the deck has very few pieces of actual removal (Bloodpyre Elemental, Magma Spray), it has all sorts of unfriendly ways of effectively neutering the opposition. Stun Sniper might kill things, but certainly stops creatures getting involved. Naya Battlemage turns off any kind of enormous flying man, or Fear monster. Giant Ambush Beetle will almost always be able to trade 1 for 1, usually with the creature the opponent has just made, and frequently stays around, most often thanks to one of the Exalted monsters taking it out of range of its intended prey. Naya Sojourners is a disaster as a 5/3 for 5, since it dies when you breath within 50 feet of it (that was my experience throughout the day), so rather it’s an occasional monster that’s really a ‘target creature gets +1+1, you draw a card’ 3cc instant. And of course, a no-Summoning Sickness Flameblast Dragon ends opposing creatures very rapidly, if it isn’t busy in ensuring the game’s over in short order. Resounding Roar also functions as removal most of the time.
Although I didn’t especially value the deck at the start of the day, as it pounded its way through almost all opposition (it was something like 21-4 on the day) so many things cropped up to showcase its versatility and power. Here are a few items of note:
We all know that a turn one Wild Nacatl is a good thing. Qasali Pridemage on turn two is also a good thing. With a further six 2 or 3cc monsters, there was always going to be some form of additional pressure, and if either Rhox Brute or Marisi’s Twinclaws came down there was usually no way back.
Talking of Marisi’s Twinclaws, I was surprised how many people seemed to underappreciate it on the board. To my mind, any card with Double Strike is an unexploded time bomb, and nobody who played against Gaea’s Might Get There and got smashed about the face for a bonus 10 damage by Raphael Levy can doubt the effectiveness of the keyword. Putting Sigil of the Nayan Gods on this was tantamount to cheating.
The Sigil Captain was the only real awkwardness I had over mana, despite the fact that fixing wasn’t plentiful by any means. The double red in Flameblast Dragon was usually available by the time it was needed, but double white on turn four sometimes didn’t materialise. On the face of it, the Sigil Captain would be the first to go, especially as only Elvish Visionary can trigger it. However, two things kept it there, three if you count being too busy to rebuild the deck at any point. First, there are a lot of early drops that are abundantly playable, and a Hill Giant is perfectly acceptable in Sealed most of the time. But the main reason for leaving him in was the insane comedy of watching him interact with Jund Battlemage. No, I didn’t have access to black mana to make my opponent lose 1 life, but I did have access to green mana to make my opponent lose all his life as I churned out a 3/3 every turn. Bonkers.
Undoubted highlight of the day was winning a game on turn five going second. Wild Nacatl kicked things off, and attacked for three on Turn Two courtesy of Qasali Pridemage. He attempted to kill the 3/3 Nacatl on Turn Three, but cycling the Naya Sojourners took it out of range, and he was down to 12. Magma Spray cleared the way for Turn Four attacks, while Trace of Abundance left me six mana for Turn Five, and a combination of Sigil of the Nayan Gods and Resounding Roar left him at less than the minimum required for continued participation.
As always, I’d like to hear your tales of Prerelease triumph and disaster, so break open your inner bard and head to the forums.
Until next week, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.