Last week, we looked at the mana options available to us in Shards-Conflux Sealed Deck. This week, we attempt to put our new-found knowledge to practical use, by seeing what the rewards and pitfalls are should we go down the five-color route. As before, we’ll look at all the cards in the format that are impacted by our mana spread, and work out whether, as the saying goes, the game is worth the candle.
I want first to put the format into context, as we are just starting to get an understanding of what the switch from Tournament Packs to six boosters is going to do to Sealed play. BDM explicitly pointed out the foremost change, namely the availability of multiple commons, whereas with Tournament Packs a single Oblivion Ring was all you were ever going to get. Now doubles and even triplicates are floating around, and I think that does some very, very significant things to the way decks will be built when we turn up for Grand Prix: Rotterdam this weekend. (And, as always, if any of you are attending what promises to be a huge GP, come and say hi.)
Although in the past successful Sealed players have attempted to create decks with plenty of synergy, for the most part a typical cross-section of Sealed decks finds us looking at collections of basically good cards, surrounded by a few sub-optimal choices dictated by the chosen colors, and hopefully one or two legitimate bombs, authentic threats that look to dominate the game as or soon after they hit play. We saw last week that there is a ton of options available for fixing our mana, so even with double and triple mana requirements floating around (you’d have to be pretty cute to try splashing a Predator Dragon), by and large we’re going to be able to play our bomb spells. More significantly, the poor cards that used to occupy roughly slots 20-23 in your 40 card deck can mostly be relegated to the sideboard. Those slots are now occupied either by perfectly serviceable cards like Cylian Elf, or actively good mana fixing along the lines of the basic land cyclers or Ridge Rannet/Jungle Weavers.
In other words, the average deck quality will have risen as a result of the extra booster. Although that seems an obvious thing to say (and it is), there is more than just extra cards at work. It is now far more possible to build an authentic Draft-style deck than ever before. That means that there are going to be highly recognisable archetypes running around in Rotterdam, and consequently a more clearly-defined Metagame than we’re used to in Sealed. If we think back to Ravnica Sealed play, before the arrival of Guildpact and Dissension, 7 out of 8 Sealed decks ran Forests. That made a card like Ivy Dancer a stone-cold hit, since it granted Forestwalk to any of your guys. In Shards-Conflux Sealed, I believe there are essentially three decks running around.
First, there’s RG plus 1, 2, or 3 color support. At heart, this is a highly aggressive deck that makes 1, 2, and 3 drops, ideally along the Wild Nacatl into Woolly Thoctar line, and gets to a position where the first piece of removal like a Bloodpyre Elemental or Soul’s Fire effectively represents game. Should the game go long, they have enough heft via cards like Mosstodon to punch through the last few points, and they also have a late-game enormity or two, ideally of the flying dragon variety.
This deck preys hungrily on the true five-color deck coming up in slot two. Although Green is likely to feature heavily, this deck is super-greedy and looks to exploit Domain and genuine five color cards to the max. As a result, it might play Woolly Thoctar, Predator Dragon and Blood Tyrant quite happily in the same deck. The consequence of this is that they probably have 4-5 slots in the deck devoted entirely to mana issues. That might mean a couple of Obelisks, an Armillary Sphere, a Mana Cylix and maybe a Kaleidostone. This deck is highly likely to cycle its Basic Landcyclers almost automatically, and may well have incidental cyclers like Molten Frame or even (help) Angelsong, because they’re banking on a combination of Spearbreaker Behemoth, Blood Tyrant, and Maelstrom Archangel being far too much for anyone to handle.
The final deck in the format to my mind is essentially an Esper deck. It’s the mid-range deck positioned between the screaming Red-Green beats and the five-color late-game pounding. I suspect this is the deck that most strong players will want to be playing with, since it’s comfortably the archetype that gives you the most chance of outplaying your opponents, and the best chance of rendering much of their gameplan useless. The cyclical nature of the Esper deck from Shards Draft is well-known, and plenty more ammunition has been added from Conflux. Although drafting seven Glaze Fiends is likely no longer possible, or sensible, the interlocking pieces of this deck are myriad. Sanctum Gargoyle, Courier’s Capsule, the afore-mentioned Glaze Fiends, Esperzoa, Kaleidostone, plus some spanktastic flyers like Tower Gargoyle make this a hugely irritating deck to play against, and great fun to play with. Like both the other archetypes, this deck has the ability to play bombs, although for the most part it tends to stay inside its three color comfort zone.
The astute amongst you will have spotted that all three archetypes I’ve talked about have the ability to play bombs, and it was noticeable from assorted forums after the Prerelease that this bombtastic slant to the format wasn’t especially welcome.
Pay. No. Attention.
The Prerelease and Release metagame is radically different from what you can expect moving forward. For a start, in purely Spike terms, the quality of opponent is lower. I found my day of Gunslinging at The Games Club in London to be pretty eye-opening, not so much for what cards people were playing with but for the ones they weren’t. In Red decks, you might suppose that Soul’s Fire and Resounding Thunder would make the deck, and I might suppose that too, but that wasn’t always the case. Also, at the Prerelease, where fun is the driving force for many, the opportunity to play a foil mythic rare can be overwhelming. I didn’t open one, but had I seen Nicol Bolas in one of my packs, you can bet I would have played with him. I’m almost certain that Kelly Digges would rather spend a week eating cement than actually play with a WWUUBBRRGG creature, protection from everything or not, yet he spent an entertaining afternoon winning games with Progenitus. I submit to you that the format on those first two weekends were packed with cards that are almost certainly too slow for a developed format, and that means that if you’re going to play with all those massive five-color investments, you really need to watch the early game. Nacatl into Cylian Elf into Woolly Thoctar is going to happen a lot more than you’d like, if you’re busy going Mana Cylix, Rupture Spire, Obelisk and Armillary Sphere. In short, the early game in Sealed now resembles the early game in Draft, and the late game has become more distant.
So, with that overview of the format in mind, let’s see what we get for our five colors of mana.
Within Shards, the design of the Block dictates that there’s little to say. Clearly all the mana fixing has become more important, whether that’s Tri-Lands, Obelisks or Panoramas. Other than that, the only group of cards that have benefitted from the shift towards five color are the Resounding cards, since their huge cycling ability has become closer in many decks. For the most part, however, it’s on Conflux that we need to focus our attention.
White
Paragon Of The Amesha
Aven Trailblazer
Gleam of Resistance
I love the Paragon, not least because it has at least three distinct functions. First, it’s a perfectly serviceable 2/2 1st Striker, and that’s fine in a base-white deck on turn three, and not disastrous at many other points in the game, where 1st Strike plus a small burn spell becomes a 1-for-1 trade with a rival fattie. Second, it has a truly monstrous ability (which, by the by, can be activated more than once should you have the wherewithal). A 5/5 flying lifelink on Turn 5 and subsequently will win many games on its own. And third, and perhaps most interestingly, it has a nice juicy bullseye painted on it, whether you have 5 colors available or not. For one thing, if you get to rainbow mana, it makes simply burning the creature hard, although Fiery Fall fits the bill. Second, it’s a good bet that even one activation is going to hurt. All in all, chances are that your opponent is going to spend a removal spell on a fairly-costed okay-but-unexceptional 2/2, as long as your deck shows the slightest indication of being able to switch it on. I’d play it in a three-color deck just for that reason alone, but it’s clearly fabulous if you can get it working.
The Aven Trailblazer is the first of the Domain cards, and for each we’ll try to work out where the tipping point is, where the card stops being ok, and starts being good. As a two-power flyer for 3, as long as we get a 2/2 we’re doing okay, and the third color takes us into positive territory. The fourth point of toughness probably doesn’t do much other than enable us to bounce off a Cloudheath Drake, and a fifth is probably only of use if we’re facing a Tower Gargoyle. Since you’re almost always going to be playing a third color at least as a splash, this is fine in any deck. As for Gleam Of Resistance, I believe you will automatically play these in almost any deck, and whilst they clearly go up in value the more splashes you have, they start at a baseline of ‘really good’.
Blue
Grixis Illusionist
Worldly Counsel
Traumatic Visions
If you’re going to play Blue in Sealed as a main color (and I’m not sure you are) then Grixis Illusionist is a nice card to have in your pool. Not only does it fix mana, but it also turns on one aspect of Domain. Worldly Counsel isn’t that exciting a card, although I suppose you might, if you were reasonably lucky, get three land to the bottom of your deck late in the game, get a nice spell into your hand to replace the Counsel, and know you have a decent topdeck to come. I suppose that makes it ok, but it certainly isn’t a reason to embark upon five color goodness, more an incremental bonus. As for Traumatic Visions, it gains from having so many bombs to counter, but loses because the format is potentially much quicker than regular Sealed, and so having five mana spare ‘just in case’ is a big ask.
Black
Absorb Vis
Drag Down
Fleshformer
Voices From The Void
Drag Down is one of my favorite Domain cards from the set, since it allows you to plan ahead for a big splurge, or use it quietly and efficiently in the early game. Although Infest makes 2B for a -2-2 effect to just one monster seem underwhelming, that’s actually perfectly acceptable to deal with an early creature. At 3 color or above, this is a quality spell, and at 3 mana for -5-/5 it’s spectacular. Fleshformer shares the excitement of Paragon Of The Amesha, and in some ways the need to get it in the bin is even more pressing. This is one of the first cards we’ve seen so far that would actively make me want to go five color. The same certainly can’t be said of Voices From The Void. Given that it costs five mana, the chances are that this will empty your opponent’s hand at 3 colors or above, so although it’s Domain it probably almost always reads ‘your opponent discards their hand’. That phrase doesn’t sound shabby, but if they’re playing Naya aggro, you likely won’t have 5 mana to spend against a rainy day that won’t be coming before you shuffle up for game two. In short, unexciting.
Red
Fiery Fall
Molten Frame
Wandering Goblins
Worldheart Phoenix
You know my views on Fiery Fall — it’s excellent. Molten Frame similarly, except it isn’t excellent. At the Prerelease I found Wandering Goblins to be frankly amazing, but they’re comfortably worse than that performance suggests. As I’ve already said, players were playing very slow decks, and it wasn’t unusual for me to get to 10 mana, including my 1-1-1 third fourth and fifth color splashes. In and of itself, even a 15/3 isn’t great, other than it trades at a 1-for-1plus-bunch-of-mana for a fattie, but I opened two Mosstodon, and a 15/3 Vigilant Trampler ends games very quickly. At 3 colors, this isn’t enough, but at 4 color he can deal with most things with a little effort. I’m not sure this makes most decks, but the Mosstodon combo was pretty tasty. That leaves Worldheart Phoenix, and this is one of the most interesting ‘five color matters’ cards, because it matters here more than almost anywhere. In mono-colored sets, red might be interested in having a vanilla 2/2 flyer, but flyers are available to every archetype in this format, so alone it’s pretty poor. The ability is outstanding, so much so that your opponent will often actively want to be taking two damage a turn from it, knowing that’s so much better than the 4/4 alternative waiting in the wings. In this context, it’s functionally a 2/2 unblockable flyer, and that’s no small problem for opponents. To my mind, this is genuinely a ‘five color or bust’ card.
Green
Matca Rioters
Might Of Alara
Shard Convergence
Spore Burst
Sylvan Bounty
I’m a big fan of Matca Rioters, and they amply demonstrate the value of Domain. Two color, it’s a Gray Ogre. Three Color, it’s a Trained Armodon. Four color, we have amazing value, and at 5 mana, only Phyrexian Negator and Stoic Ephemera have those stats, both with inherent drawbacks. Clearly, anything above two color makes it good value, and at the cost, it’s especially good in the latter part of the midgame, where potentially you make something like an Ember Weaver as a 3/3 first striker and a 4/4 Matca Rioters on the same turn, and that’s a change to the board for sure.
Three color is the tipping point for Might Of Alara, since at that point it’s Giant Growth, but to be honest, at the cost you’ve got every chance of it doing what you want — namely, being a removal spell — at two color or even one.. It’s simply an automatic inclusion. Shard Convergence clearly works best when going for the whole caboodle, and there are going to be times where you draw your lone Swamp in your opening grip, fetch up your lone Island with a Panorama, and then cast this as a seriously expensive fixer for your one remaining splash, plus your third Mountain, which probably doesn’t represent value. In genuine five-color, this shines. Spore Burst has a much higher threshold for usefulness than many of the Domain cards. In topdeck mode I guess three is acceptable, though still not great for the cost, but really four is the minimum I’d expect before I want to play it. The thing is of course, that generating four and five colors is a lot easier than generating four or five basic land types. Only at the full five does this feel like good news.
Multi-color
Child Of Alara
Conflux
Exploding Borders
Fusion Elemental
Maelstrom Archangel
Progenitus
So now we come to the cards that have no incremental advantage. You either play them or you don’t, and cast them or you don’t. Child Of Alara gets us going with its undercosted 6/6 trampling body. This is clearly good, but I’m not sure the same is true of its rather wordy ability. You’d like to think that you were ahead when you were playing this guy, and if you’re behind, why? Perhaps you’re getting hit by flyers over the top, which this won’t change. Perhaps you’re getting killed by tempo and aggro, in which case they’ll probably sacrifice one guy to your Child, and keep on hitting. Or, heaven forbid, you’re going to chump block with the Child on something even more enormous. In any of these scenarios, you’re in trouble. In my experience with the Child, the only time I was able to trigger it was with a rather desperate Devour strategy, and who wants to add more resources to the board, only to sweep them off seconds later as part of the same spell? Miserable. By and large, this isn’t much better at 5 mana than many of the green monsters you’d be playing with four less colored requirements.
What about Conflux then? We’ve been spoiled with Cruel Ultimatum into thinking that cards that cost a bundle should be the Swiss Army Knife of Magic, doing pretty much everything, up to and including making the tea. Eight mana is a lot, and Conflux doesn’t impact the game in almost any way at first go. However, let’s not pretend that you finding the four most effective monsters left in your deck isn’t going to put your opponent in a world of hurt. They need to be very, very close to wrapping the game up when you cast this. The other thing to bear in mind with this one is how many multi-color cards you’re running, since you want to have options in your minor colors in what is likely to be the bottom half of your deck, assuming you’ve seen at least 15 already by the time you cast it. I wouldn’t play five color because I had it, but would probably play it if my deck was set up to take advantage.
I have a feeling that Fusion Elemental is straight-up poor. Child Of Alara is better in so many ways, and even an unexciting Spore Burst is going to take the Elemental three turns to chomp through. Now admittedly, seeing this Turn 4 off an Obelisk with Elder Mastery on it hitting me for 11 on Turn Five and making me discard two cards was a Combo I could have lived without, but really, I shouldn’t be needing to put an enchantment on my guy to make him decent. For the record, obviously an 8/8 is gigantic and always will be, so perhaps ‘poor’ is a little harsh, but not by much.
Progenitus — One of my missions in Rotterdam at the Grand Prix is to try and find somebody who played and won games with this. Ten mana. Ten. Two of each color. You don’t know this, but I actually paused at the end of that last sentence to put my head in my hands. There’s nothing wrong with the card being in the set, in fact I think it’s a spectacular card in terms of flavor and excitement and pushing various boundaries and appealing to certain demographics. However, the chances are that you read a lot of us here at starcitygames.com because you like to win, and high-level Limited victories and Progenitus appear to me to be mutually exclusive. Let’s see if I can find something in Rotterdam.
Oh dear. Child Of Alara, Conflux, Fusion Elemental, and Progenitus, and so far we haven’t found an out and out reason to play five color. Only one true five color card remains in this slot. Will this change our minds if we open it? Yes, my friends, it will. At 5/5 for five mana, Maelstrom Archangel is solid. At 5/5 Flying for five mana, Maelstrom Archangel joins the ranks of legitimate endgame powerhouses that simply dominate the board and say ‘hurry up and kill me, or you be dead’. If that was the end of the card, I’d want to move heaven and earth to play it. In truth, it might well behave like that, since 5 to the face can often be the end of things. But should you need to do a little more than have a 5/5 flyer smash face, the ability to cast something for free is likely to put things over the edge. I saw someone cast Conflux for free off this at the Pre-Release, and doing something similar with Progenitus would, to put it mildly, alter its value somewhat. In terms of Rares, this is one card I’d be wanting to open time after time, since few cards more clearly and frequently say ‘you win the game.’ Spectacular.
Artifacts
Manaforce Mace
Obelisk of Alara
Clunky is a good word for Manaforce Mace, but Sigil Of Distinction has been superb in all-Shards play, and the Mace might well behave in similar fashion. The biggest downside is the inability (realistically) to equip the turn it arrives, but +4/+4 is a lot to add to anything, and turning a 2/2 flyer into a 6/6 flyer is backbreaking. The Obelisk is quite clearly a phenomenal toolbox of options, and it’s hard to imagine it being rubbish. The looter effect of blue is the most subtle, and the white is probably the least exciting, although five life is a decent chunk. The red ability is a swift clock that can help you win races, while the green and black act as quasi or actual removal respectively. Even if I was mysteriously some RUW deck and thus had only the weakest three abilities to play around with, I’d still be playing this, and a two color Red-Green deck would kill to have this late game finishing power of the burn spell and the pump spell. In short, another great reason to play rainbow.
Conclusion
Every deck in the format has access to bombs. Every deck in the format has potential access to multiples of important removal cards like Oblivion Ring. Every deck in the format almost certainly has available some configuration that makes it powerful and tough to beat. Many of the rewards for playing five color are incremental, and there is only one card in the entire set that actively demands a five color strategy and screams ‘play me,’ namely Maelstrom Archangel. I believe that most decks that make Day 2 at Grand Prix: Rotterdam will have five colors only ‘by accident,’ i.e. they will be basically a two- or three-color deck with minimally-disruptive access to colors four and five. I just don’t see the upside in the multi-Obelisk, Cylix and Sphere type of deck, given the likely rewards for achieving the rainbow. By contrast, there are going to be some extremely fast aggressive Red-Green decks that are going to punish you most efficiently for wasting early turns. If you’re going to rely on your lategame power, you want two things to be true. First, you want your early defence to be watertight, and second, you want to make sure that you have stone-cold answers to the bombs that your opponents will most certainly be playing. Quite frankly, if you’re not trying to beat people savagely with base-Naya, I’ll be very interested to see your pool as you head off undefeated into Day 2…
As ever, thanks for reading.
R.