With Standard falling behind us in relevance, at least until the StarCityGames.com $5000 Standard Open, the shiny bauble to catch the attention is now Shards of Alara Limited. While I have been focusing on the Draft portion of this format when I had covered it before, Sealed Deck had not previously been a fixture of analysis. I’ve heard a few glum opinions, such as that you need a Dragon and a Planeswalker in your Sealed Deck if you want to make the Top 8, but the fact remains that there is a lot you can do without stupid rares in your deck, and maximizing your card pool is going to be key to success in this format. When looking at the decks of others at this past weekend’s PTQ in Philadelphia, I noted that there just wasn’t enough greed going on, and a more effective deck would have resulted if they stretched further.
The simple reason for this failing is that Sealed Deck players get nervous about their mana, and have a very hard time figuring out how many sources is enough to play the cards in their deck. As a certain movie from the 80s would tell us if we chose to ignore the moral of the story, “Greed is Good.” But being greedy and smart is very different from being greedy and stupid, and in all honesty even after they get past being timid in this format, most players will lie somewhere in the middle. A players’ ability to make the most of their cards by maximizing their manabase will have a direct correspondence to how well they do in this format, and how well people can do this tends to fit on something at or near a Bell curve: fat in the middle, representing ‘average’ skill, and with fewer and fewer people at the extremes. Fortunately, this means there are very few at the bottom; Sealed Deck is a format that is easy to make good inroads into, and just playing it a few times or reading into it on the Internet will lead to somewhat average talents at building a sealed deck. Sadly, this also means there are very few at the top; there’s a reason GerryT can go to a PTQ and expect a good outcome in this format… regardless of the cards he opens, he knows he’ll do more with them than his opponent did with their card-pool, and that’s before we even account for play skill. (Congrats, Gerry, by the way… oh, and LSV too for winning, I guess. But only one of the people in the finals made it there after conceding to someone along the way, so… congrats!)
I can’t claim to be one of those statistical outliers. I can, however, claim to be higher on the curve than most everyone else I expect to face at a PTQ, because I have a reasonable understanding of how much greed is too much greed in this format, and how to build a manabase that reliably works with its spells. My opinion of what is the most important thing to look at when you open a sealed deck is not to flip for the Rares and count the noses of Planeswalkers and snouts of Dragons and hope that the tally is two or greater. It’s not to hunt for power commons like Branching Bolt and Oblivion Ring, or even to search for card synergy with Unearth and Devour or Sanctum Gargoyle and Executioner’s Capsule. I look for the things that have no color, because they will determine what you can and cannot get away with. Look to your lands and your Obelisks and you can heed their call.
After you know what you can get away with, or just how much punishment you can put on your colored mana needs before it starts weeping and remembers the safe word, then you can look at your spells and creatures to see if there is anything that can be supported within this framework. My Sealed Deck from this weekend’s PTQ is a case study in exactly that point, measuring risk versus reward and then taking pains to mitigate that risk. Let’s have a look, shall we?
White:
Elspeth, Knight-Errant
Oblivion Ring
Excommunicate
Knight of the Skyward Eye
Akrasan Squire
Metallurgeon
Sunseed Nurturer
Soul’s Grace
Marble Chalice
2 Dispeller’s Capsule
Blue:
Covenant of Minds
Courier’s Capsule
Kathari Screecher
Resounding Wave
Spell Snip
Cancel
Etherium Sculptor
Cathartic Adept
Black:
Vein Drinker
Bone Splinters
Blister Beetle
Scavenger Drake
Skeletal Kathari
Undead Leotau
Glaze Fiend
Resounding Scream
Demon’s Herald
Deathgreeter
Banewasp Affliction
Red:
Skeletonize
Bloodpyre Elemental
Hissing Iguanar
2 Scourge Devil
Ridge Rannet
Thorn-Thrash Viashino
Dragon Fodder
Volcanic Subversion
Lightning Talons
Viashino Skeleton
Green:
Manaplasm
Godtoucher
Soul’s Might
Savage Hunger
Drumhunter
Gift of the Gargantuan
Elvish Visionary
Mosstodon
Cavern Thoctar
2 Jungle Weaver
Colorless:
Obelisk of Grixis
Obelisk of Bant
Arcane Sanctum
Crumbling Necropolis
Bant Panorama
Naya Panorama
Jund Panorama
Gold:
Blightning
Rakeclaw Gargantuan
Waveskimmer Aven
Deft Duelist
Sigil Blessing
Thoughtcutter Agent
2 Tidehollow Strix
Blood Cultist
Carrion Thrash
Necrogenesis
Hellkite Overlord
Jund Charm
Naya Charm
Yes, there’s a lot of stuff you can work with there. But let’s start with my first guideline: look at the manabase possibilities and then see whether there’s a deck that might want to fit within the framework of what is possible if you stretch as hard as you can. We have two tap-lands, two Obelisks, and three Panoramas; if we utilized all of them, we would have access to the following in addition to some number of basic lands:
Black – 4 sources
Blue – 5 sources
White – 4 sources
Green – 4 sources
Red – 4 sources
Playing one basic land of each color plus those altogether gives a minimum of five sources of each color, out of 12 slots in your deck. This is pretty good mana, which is what you should expect with three Panoramas, two tap-lands, and two Obelisks, but the implication is that if you wanted to go crazy and play whatever, you probably could so long as you tiered things so that you still leaned more heavily on one to two colors and merely splashed the rest.
White is clearly pretty weak, with only (“only”?) Oblivion Ring and Elspeth as cards that lure you in to wanting to play it. For gold cards, Deft Duelist, Waveskimmer Aven and Rakeclaw Gargantuan all are worthy of noting, and Naya Charm is a game-winning-level card that also has the utility needed to do the job that is required of it when Cryptic Commanding the opponent isn’t the right mode to choose. Blue is also rather weak, with some card draw and a Cancel in the color itself, but gets better when you look at the gold cards… Tidehollow Strix is very solid as a pseudo removal spell that just happens to be a two-mana, two-power flier as well, and again Deft Duelist and Waveskimmer Aven stand up to be counted. These are the weak two colors, but after that we hit the shard of Jund and things explode. We get Hellkite Overlord, Necrogenesis, Jund Charm, Blood Cultist, Carrion Thrash, and Blightning in our gold cards, a hefty chunk of Green fatties, some Red and Black removal, plus another bomby card in Vein Drinker. It seems really clear that our deck should be a Jund deck, because it has the best creature base and most if not all of the bombs. Remembering that we can splash if we want to, we look at the core of the deck as follows:
Creatures:
Blister Beetle
Elvish Visionary
Hissing Iguanar
Manaplasm
Blood Cultist
Scavenger Drake
Thorn-Thrash Viashino
Drumhunter
Carrion Thrash
Skeletal Kathari
Bloodpyre Elemental
2 Scourge Devil
Mosstodon
Vein Drinker
Undead Leotau
Cavern Thoctar
Ridge Rannet
2 Jungle Weaver
Hellkite Overlord
Spells:
Skeletonize
Dragon Fodder
Volcanic Subversion
Gift of the Gargantuan
Blightning
Jund Charm
Necrogenesis
Bone Splinters
This is 29 spells, not counting a Grixis Obelisk, and you then get to cherry-pick from your creatures to make your color requirements cleaner and better-suited to your manabase. For fixers, you get a Naya Panorama, a Jund Panorama, a Grixis Obelisk, and a Crumbling Necropolis to help on the colors, and likely end up B/G/r, using the Red for the good Jund cards and its removal and leaving stuff like Thorn-Thrash Viashino and Ridge Rannet on the sidelines. It’s a pretty solid deck.
But it can do more.
Remember, if you will, that we had all three Green Panoramas, and two non-Green tri-lands, meaning we can make a very consistent base-Green deck with various splashes. Green has all our best men, and many of our best spells, so looking at the deck as a mono-Green-splash-everything deck you can just pick all the best of everything and make the mana work after the fact. Here’s what I ended up playing, which is greedier than the above-mentioned deck (and not just a little, because most people will consider it very reasonable to build a beatdown curve to their Jund deck and add Naya Charm and Oblivion Ring).
Spells:
Obelisk of Bant
Skeletonize
Bone Splinters
Oblivion Ring
Gift of the Gargantuan
Covenant of Minds
Jund Charm
Naya Charm
Necrogenesis
Creatures:
Blister Beetle
Vein Drinker
Bloodpyre Elemental
Hissing Iguanar
Carrion Thrash
Blood Cultist
Hellkite Overlord
Elvish Visionary
Drumhunter
Mosstodon
Cavern Thoctar
2 Jungle Weaver
Lands:
Crumbling Necropolis
Arcane Sanctum
Bant Panorama
Jund Panorama
Naya Panorama
Island
Plains
2 Swamp
3 Mountain
6 Forest
In hindsight, this deck was minimum one, most likely three cards mis-built. You will note that the deck excludes Manaplasm, and that was largely due to my inexperience in dealing with that particular Rare in this format. When looking at cards to make the cut I chose Hissing Iguanar over Manaplasm, figuring that Iguanar was the better defensive card because it would always trade with an X/3 creature. I felt I needed to take a defensive stance, because with my defense solidly shored up the deck will draw cards and overpower the opponent with fatty boom-booms both mundane and mythically rare. While you could argue I could include both and cut the 18th land (plus an Obelisk!), that seems to be pretty clearly wrong to me, as the deck should be taking Green as its primary color, Black as its secondary, and then Red… as-is, it takes Red second and Black third, when the Black is actually more intensive early on in the game and has the cheaper of the two double-colored splashed bombs with Vein Drinker requiring double Black on a six-drop instead of Hellkite Overlord’s double Red on an eight. Having played against Manaplasm enough to realize now that its inclusion would allow the deck a significant early game aggressive presence that would live up to the motto that “the best defense is a good offense,” and thus be the better three-drop as well as the on-color one, I would go back and make the following changes:
-1 Hissing Iguanar
-1 Mountain
-1 Obelisk of Bant
+1 Manaplasm
+1 Swamp
+1 Obelisk of Grixis
By doing so I would reduce the amount of Red wanted in the early game, cutting a cheap drop that doesn’t fit with where my color configuration should be to fit in a cheap drop that is in my main color rather than one of the major splash colors. (I see the deck as a Green deck with two major and two minor splashes. It’s five-color mono-Green!) I would maintain the same amount of Red mana, while increasing my Black mana by two, all at the expense of one count each to my White and Green mana. Green, presumably, wouldn’t be hurt by taking the tenth source of Green and cutting it; most two-color decks only have nine sources of their heaviest color and they get by just fine with that. I don’t need double Green until I have found Jungle Weavers to cast, so this is a minimal change to my Green mana; I would be decreasing my Oblivion Ring-and-Naya Charm splash from five sources to four sources while increasing my second-color splash from five sources to seven, and leaving the Red and Blue splashes alone.
How things played out was quite interesting. I was playing off four hours of sleep again, which is far from ideal but sadly just sort of the way things work nowadays, as I’ve found myself a bit of an insomniac and even when I’m tired I have a hard time falling asleep before 2am. The first two rounds went by in a blur of firebreathing, hasty regenerating trampler, with the Hellkite Overlord going 4-0 in games over the first two rounds. A fair chunk of how I’d designed my deck was to dig, filter, and draw cards, killing creatures and letting my fatties overwhelm the opponent, topping the curve off with Hellkite Overlord because he ends games like no other and can kill from 20 in an eyeblink of time. Unsurprisingly, when my opponents gave me breathing room or stumbled themselves, I settled into a late-game of Jungle Weavers and Cavern Thoctars attacking and attritioning only to conclude the game with my unfair Dragon, and both my first two opponents gave me space to work with even if things were still within the vague neighborhood of ‘close.’ Both had Quietus Spike and Violent Ultimatum in their arsenal, and neither was allowed to leverage these rares into game wins; against one I killed him before he could find the seventh correct mana source to go with his GGBBBRR, and against the other he could use the Ultimatum to come back from the brink and actually kill my Dragon, but not actually survive against a board that included Necrogenesis among other things.
Against my third opponent, I played conservatively and defensively against a solid Naya deck with double Branching Bolt and double Oblivion Ring, who happened to accidentally show me all of these things and more (like a Bull Cerodon) while he shuffled his deck at my face. I even told him he was showing me cards, but then he said he didn’t care and continued to do so, and I shrugged and mentally noted all the things he was showing me like Skeletonize, Angelsong, and Titanic Ultimatum that I’d love to know about beforehand. He even won the first game, to get karmically paid back for my knowledge of what was coming, but I dragged back into the next ones and very carefully killed him with fat creatures. It is, after all, what I do. Round 4 I had the joy of facing an equally-competent player who had more Dragons than I did; I won the first while overpowering him with card drawing, lost the second to a Hellkite Overlord that I had several outs to: Naya Charm to stay the beats for a turn while my fatties killed him, Oblivion Ring and Bone Splinters to kill it since he tapped out to cast it, and my own Hellkite Overlord to kill him that turn all did the trick. With about 15 cards left in my deck and two chances at some of them because I could chump-block with a Jungle Weaver to stay alive and get a second chance at both Oblivion Ring and Hellkite Overlord, I instead drew a land, stayed back to block, and drew another land instead of stealing the second game back to finish the match. In the third I was consistently overpowered while fighting far too hard to make my mana work, not because my colors were awkward but because my eighteen-land-plus Obelisk, Gift, and Drumhunter deck stalled on its way to the five mana it needs to really play menacing cards my opponent has to deal with. Thus the first loss was earned, but with a deck like mine it’s very realistic to expect to be able to cruise through the rest of the X-1 bracket up to the Top 8.
I continued on course, doing exactly that in the next round against a non-threatening Grixis deck that I easily manhandled in round 5, then facing Jacob Van Lunen in the sixth round with his solidly aggressive Naya deck. I won the first with careful planning and budgeting resources, not exposing myself to tricks if I could help it and leaning on my non-rare fatties to win the game with a Hellkite Overlord appearing in my hand the very turn I won; I figured I would rather show him two commons, Bone Splinters and Bloodpyre Elemental, than show him my most dangerous Rare and tell him that he had to play around it or budget removal for it in addition to everything else he’d seen that game, like Vein Drinker. Game 2 he and I fight it out some more, ending up both at one life with a tense board position in which I’ve just attacked aggressively to force his Vithian Stingers into blocking when I have Necrogenesis in play to prevent them from pinging me to death, and dying to his Rhox War Charger when Necrogenesis makes enough tokens to trade for it exactly but he kills one with Magma Spray to deal the final point in trample damage.
For game 3 I choose to draw, because he’s not so very aggressive that I have to reconsider, Jake mulligans once and then fails to play a second land until turn 4, having discarded a Welkin Guide before he makes his second land drop. I accelerate into Rakeclaw Gargantuan (sideboarded in for my Hissing Iguanar, because I felt it would dominate the board and I wouldn’t want to try blocking with an Iguanar anyway) and follow up with Jungle Weaver, figuring I’m beating the stuffing out of him when he’s played a Manaplasm and said go so far. Imagine my surprise when my attack for ten is met by Qasali Ambusher, pumping the Manaplasm despite being free because Wizards decided it should still be able to be countered, and pumped the Ambusher with Sigil Blessing, nudging both over the 6/6 mark to kill both my creatures and remain in play. After figuring the game was over, suddenly I was at risk, and quite unhappy with this turn of events as I’m sure you might imagine. A careful set of attacks eventually put me in the position where I’d drawn Hellkite Overlord and wanted to set up for when I finally drew my eighth mana source, making for a turn in which I attacked with Mosstodon to put him in single-strike range from Hellkite Overlord, but was dead to an Oblivion Ring and an attack because I’d stabilized at four life. In this one-turn window he consolidated his defenses, presumably preparing for a big aggressive push the next turn; land number eight came out of my hand from a prior Covenant of Minds and dropped a Hellkite into play tapped. All that work in game 1 to not show him my Rare finally paid off as killing him with it won me the match; otherwise, I imagine he’d have known to stay above eight and trade with my Mosstodon earlier in the game.
For round 7, I get paired against one of the three 6-0 players and vaguely consider attempting to draw and take my “must-win” luck to round 8 against a less highly-placed opponent, but considering the quality of the opponents I’d already handled on the day (quite high) and the quality of the cards needed to beat me so far (double hasty Dragons) I figured I was wimping out even considering it and was contemplating a tournament-level error because I was tired and run down. Sadly, my opponent overwhelmed me in two with aggressive beats, forcing me to leverage my cards poorly (Oblivion Ring versus Goblin Assault, rather than O-Ring versus Huge Creature two turns later) because I couldn’t find a creature to cast before turn 6… then in the second game getting a huge swing off Where Ancients Tread and turning the fatties around on me like I had done to so many of my prior opponents. And just like that, in two lightning-fast games, it was over. I was left wondering if I’d did anything wrong, like play my Panoramas in the wrong order or something, but really, no, I just died. I had a lot of lands and not a lot of things to stop his guys, and no time in which I could realistically play my card-drawing spells to find more to work with. One loss was to the crazier-deck factor, and one to the screw-or-flood factor, and it’s realistic to expect that each of these things might come up eventually… you just hope, plan, and play to avoid the latter coming up twice in the same match, and take your chances.
Anticlimactically, I won the last round pretty easily, going to three games yes but punishing him with card-drawing and fat as I had been doing in the previous rounds; in the first game my library was half the size of his about half-way through the game, because I’d fetched, cycled, played a Visionary, a Gifts and a Covenant, and let huge monsters finish him, starting with a Vein Drinker I was very careful to protect and finally used a Jund Charm to keep alive in a critical exchange including his own Agony Warp if I recall correctly. The second I lost to an opposing Vein Drinker that grew too big too fast, a counterpoint to my win in the first game that suggests if there is a $Deity, he/she/it has a sense of humor, and the third returned us to the games of the first few rounds, i.e. blowouts involving my Hellkite Overlord murdering him.
I share this story because I think it’s important; I got an awesome deck, and squeezed it to within an inch of its tolerances to make it bleed as it over-performed. Because of the huge monsters, plentiful removal and actual card advantage in the deck, I was able to turn most of my opponents into non-entities, with the only really threatening interactions being from the two people who managed to beat me and the one opponent who was unquestionably better than me… and I was able to cram all of these things in here because I chose a particular stance on how the game was going to play out, and made it happen with my deck design and card choices, like splashing the fifth color for a draw-three spell. But the lesson to be learned is that there’s always a lesson to be learned: I thought I’d done everything right, but my already-awesome manabase was playing the wrong Obelisk and missed the correct basic land count by one card, because I’d over-valued my tertiary splash colors at the expense of my main second color… and I’d left a rare on the bench I should have been playing, that might have turned around one of the two matches I lost by doing more than Hissing Iguanar did in either of the two games I lost in the fourth round.
Luck only matters if you do everything else right; I know a considerable amount about this format, and even I didn’t do “everything else right.” Should these have been game-ending mistakes? No, hardly… everything was as a whole very well designed and played almost flawlessly. But should I be mindful of the fact that sometimes my second Black for Vein Drinker was delayed, putting the match at risk when I could have had two more Black sources if I’d thought harder about it? Certainly. I’m towards the top of the Bell curve, certainly, but it is folly to think I’ve attained mastery instead of merely very high competence.
Feel free to sound off in the forums about what you would have done with my Sealed pool, and just how critical these small changes I’d have made after the fact are in your opinion… Sealed Deck is best when it is a dialogue between multiple people all seeking to get better at the format, after all, and this one is a particularly good example of how difficult it can be to make some of the hard choices.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com