Magical Hack - Preparing for Kuala Lumpur

With the State Championships right around the corner in two weeks’ time, it’s very easy to forget that even before States we will be seeing the start of the next Pro Tour Qualifier season. Starting as early as a week from tomorrow, players around the world are going to start having the joy of deciphering piles of 75 Lorwyn cards to craft playable Limited decks, and then navigating the tribal ebbs and flows of a draft to earn a flight to Kuala Lumpur. Lorwyn Limited seems to have a very linear feel to it, with the focus on individual tribes, but inevitably you’re going to have to start mixing tribes at least in Sealed Deck to get to 22 or 23 playables. Synergy is much more important than outright card strength in many cases, so the art of building a Sealed Deck is in making something that is greater than its individual parts.

The exercise, then, is to let the Pro Tour in Valencia play itself out and focus not on Extended as for this Pro Tour but look at Lorwyn Sealed Deck to start trying to qualify for the next Pro Tour. Traditionally, we’ve been pulling Sealed Decks apart by color to have a look at what’s underneath the hood. In Lorwyn that isn’t quite the full story, so we’ll pull this card pool apart by tribe and then have a look at how the different color combinations would play together. Instead of working with the misconception that Lorwyn is a world where you want to assemble the best deck possible by color we’re just skipping past color entirely to start off with, putting our fingers on the pulse of the tribes right from the get-go.

Elemental –
Hoofprints of the Stag
2 Flamekin Harbinger
2 Soulbright Flamekin
Inner-Flame Igniter
Faultgrinder
Flamekin Brawler
Ceaseless Searblades
Shriekmaw

Giant –
Sunrise Sovereign
Blind-Spot Giant
Giant’s Ire

Kithkin –
2 Goldmeadow Harrier
Goldmeadow Dodger
Goldmeadow Stalwart
Plover Knights
Wizened Cenn
Kithkin Harbinger
Kinsbaile Balloonist
Cenn’s Heir
Kithkin Daggerdare

Merfolk –
Paperfin Rascal
Drowner of Secrets
Tideshaper Mystic
Wanderwine Prophets
Judge of Currents

Treefolk –
2 Oakgnarl Warrior
Bog-Strider Ash
Battlewand Oak
Dauntless Dourbark
Rootgrapple

Elf –
Eyeblight’s Ending
Leaf Gilder
Nath’s Elite

Faerie –
Faerie Trickery
Sentinels of Glen Elendra
Faerie Tauntings
2 Nightshade Stinger
Dreamspoiler Witches
Thieving Sprite

Goblin –
Boggart Forager
Caterwauling Boggart
Boggart Sprite-Chaser
Mudbutton Torchrunner
2 Warren Pilferers
Squeaking Pie Sneak
Spiderwig Boggart
Exiled Boggart
Facevaulter
Boggart Loggers

Changeling –
Changeling Hero
Mirror Entity
Skeletal Changeling
Wings of Velis Vel
Turtleshell Changeling

Miscellaneous –
White: Neck Snap, Triclopean Sight
Red: Hurly-Burly
Blue: 2 Glimmerdust Nap, Whirlpool Whelm, Familiar’s Ruse, Ponder
Green: Hunt Down, Heal the Scars, Incremental Growth, Lace with Moonglove, Woodland Guidance
Artifact: Springleaf Drum, Runed Stalactite

Looking at these by color you’ll see very quickly that Blue, Red and Green are underwhelming. Green has a powerful permanent pump spell and semi-removal spell but generally slow critters with very little synergy with each other. Blue is downright miserable, with the best thing you can say about it being that at least it has more than its usual share of moderate, very temporary removal spells with those two copies of Glimmerdust Nap and the one Whirlpool Whelm as a bounce spell. While there are certainly cards you’d want to play, there aren’t enough of them to really justify looking at the color seriously. Red is also pretty weak off the bat, with just the Torchrunner as removal and some smallish Goblins and Elementals… while Black and White are both very clearly powerful, both within their own tribes and just in that “has good cards” and “can kill creatures” sort of way. Finding the color with the most powerful interactions can be hard in this format… but here in this pool we have a much easier time of it, cutting away the chaff immediately to see what is worth playing. Considering that the two most plentiful tribes also happen to map neatly onto our two most powerful colors means we have an easy time paring the choice down to a much smaller pool of cards, but there is more complexity to the game than “cut eight” rather than “add 22.”

We also don’t usually see this in Lorwyn Limited from what I have seen… the intertangled flow of one tribe into the next across the colors tends to invite splashing, as does the potential for easily-splashed removal spells like Lash Out, Oblivion Ring, or Eyeblight’s Ending. An uncommon cycle of Vivid lands plus a few commons like Shimmering Grotto all allow for easy splashing… but not in this card pool, which seems to label this as a weaker pool than some others you’ll see in a tournament setting. In our pool we have the worst of the fixers in my opinion, Springleaf Drum, and the only cards worth even thinking of splashing for are Whirlpool Whelm, Mudbutton Torchrunner, and Rootgrapple as Planeswalker / Oblivion Ring removal. None really scream for inclusion, and our mana would likely scream if we tried, so we must settle for the fact that our cardpool is probably a bit below average on the power scale and try and make do as best we can with a synergistic plan that makes good use of what we have and finds means with which to outplay the opponent.

After all, if your Lorwyn Limited deck doesn’t feel absolutely ridiculous, there are probably at least two dozen decks in the tournament much better than your own. Just looking here nothing screams “ridiculous,” so we’ll just have to settle as best we can for “good enough.” We can settle by crafting a good aggressive plan to use tempo to our advantage, and find means to make the best use we can out of the pool’s strengths… in this case the aggression-friendly Goldmeadow Harriers and the recursive Warren Pilferers, our most potent effects present in duplicate.

A few cards demand inclusion automatically – powerful bombs and useful removal spells. Shriekmaw and Eyeblight’s Ending are potent removal spells, able to kill most of the creatures you’ll find in the format… one is limited to just four out of five colors, while the other is limited to merely everyone outside of the Elf or Changeling tribes. Goldmeadow Harrier is about as good as all of its predecessors, able to selectively lock down the best creature your opponent controls each turn for a reasonable mana investment. Neck Snap isn’t the ideal removal spell, expensive as it is and thus hard to use truly effectively if you have to keep mana up for it turn after turn, but it’s not a card you’ll kick out of bed for eating cookies. Plover Knights is a high quality flier, and his cousin the Kinsbaile Balloonist… or in some circles “Red Bull,” because Red Bull gives you wings… represents a good deal more than just his own two power’s worth of flying damage. Rounding out the power creatures we have two copies of Warren Pilferers in the five-drop to provide a bit of card advantage with a Snidd-sized Gravedigger, and Mirror Entity to make offensive plans well and truly painful for the defending team. Out of up to 23 potential slots, we have ten filled… and it’s looking at the rest of the candidates where we have to start thinking, and thus we see the true difficulty of Lorwyn Sealed Deck comes to the fore.

Some can be dismissed easily. Goldmeadow Dodger is about the most miserable excuse for a one-drop I can think of, with its “evasion” ability still handily marking it for a pointless death the first time it enters the combat zone. Faerie Tauntings might be good if you were of the Faerie persuasion, and thus prone to playing most of your deck at instant speed… but according to this card pool it’d maybe be good for one damage a game. Exiled Boggart is a miserable two-drop, and that’s an impressive thing to be said coming from me, the person who fell in love in Odyssey Block not with Wild Mongrel but with his less-good Red counterpart, Mad Dog. Add to that our lovely Suntail Hawks with a downside and we’ve cleared five cards out of our pool, as the two Nightshade Stingers exit with a letter changed to reveal them for what they are, “Nightshade Stinkers.”

Starting with the less sketchy cards in the pool, our list so far looks like this:

1cc: Goldmeadow Stalwart, 2 Goldmeadow Harrier
2cc: Wizened Cenn, Cenn’s Heir, Skeletal Changeling, Squeaking Pie Sneak
3cc: Eyeblight’s Ending, Boggart Loggers, Kithkin Harbinger, Mirror Entity
4cc: Neck Snap, Kinsbaile Balloonist, Dreamspoil Witches
5cc: Changeling Hero, Plover Knights, 2 Warren Pilferers, Shriekmaw

We have a decent bit of evasion, a light but reusable helping of creature removal, and just enough creature recursion going on to give some long-term card advantage plans as Pilferers buy back Pilferers and Changeling Heroes hide Pilferers underneath them to become quite functionally unkillable in battle. Of course, the question has to be asked whether we can’t skip some of the junk in the middle and just take the good Black stuff to marry to the White cards, as some of what we have just doesn’t impress. We could probably splash that Shriekmaw and Eyeblight’s Ending if we had another deck that grabbed our interest. Unfortunately nothing else really seems to suggest itself… so Goblins and Kithkin seems to be our fate, and sticking just to cards that actually seem at least exciting when everything works perfectly in a perfect world we have 19 reasonable playables, some of whom require friends to really impress, but welcome to Lorwyn.

Again, we aren’t likely to end up with the most outright powerful deck in the room, nor the one best taking advantage of tribal interactions. So what we’re left with is a deck that can hopefully earn small advantages over the course of the game and accumulate them into a win, and time advantage looks like one good key to start with… gained, of course, by earning aggressive tempo and keeping the opponent on the back foot whenever possible. We have three cards left to add and I’m looking at the ones that help fit this plan the best so far, those being Thieving Sprite, Spiderwig Boggart, and Runed Stalactite.

The first is a wimpy body and admittedly a wimpy effect, but a flying 1/1 that gets better for every Changeling in play and that can come down in the later turns to steal a potent spell is reasonably acceptable to me in this format. Unimpressive as he seems, he’s been decent every time I’ve seen him played, even if he “just” snatched a land. You don’t need to have this be a full-on Coercion to be good enough to play, even a flying Ravenous Rat is acceptable… just hold it past the first few turns and you’re likely to get a spell instead of a land, and your small flier to boot. Spiderwig Boggart is admittedly something of a placeholder, as he’s only technically on this side of playable, mostly because we’ll take that extra slight little bit of evasion to add to our pile and a Goblin to add to our count, making the Pie Sneak a more reliable two-drop. Runed Stalactite is a card people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around, and with good reason… but just like how Leonin Scimitar was just this side of good enough to play (even if you’d rather have a Bonesplitter), this aids a creature’s size just noticeably enough to matter, and adding the Changeling ability helps make a disparate pile of cards hum as you can switch some powerful interactions around. So far we don’t have a lot of humming available to us already, so a little bit of extra hum is well wanted and an extra bit of power to our fliers can’t hurt either.

After that, though, we’re really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel… but have gotten to 22 cards. Springleaf Drum doesn’t impress me at all when it isn’t color-fixing, Facevaulter just doesn’t impress me at all (… in Sealed Deck), and we are left considering card 23 as a weak combat trick, a powerful token-maker that can be a dead draw if it isn’t deployed in the early game, or that eighteenth land. My experiences so far are suggesting that this is not a deck for Triclopean Sight, whose only effective role in this pool is as a Disenchant for an opponent’s Glimmerdust Naps… and that a deck that wants to get to five mana reasonably consistently should probably take the eighteenth land instead of the extra situational card, as Hoofprints of the Stag is unlikely to be very good in this deck unless it’s drawn and played in the starting turns of the game. Triclopean Sight is technically a combat trick, it’s true, and we are aiming to be a combative deck that can capitalize on the early pressure it mounts… but this is such a sorry card that I still don’t want it, even if it is the only way we have to be a little tricky in combat outside of outright murdering an opponent’s creature.

How did this deck turn out? Let’s see how it fared:

1cc: Runed Stalactite, Goldmeadow Stalwart, 2 Goldmeadow Harrier
2cc: Wizened Cenn, Cenn’s Heir, Skeletal Changeling, Squeaking Pie Sneak
3cc: Eyeblight’s Ending, Spiderwig Boggart, Thieving Sprite, Boggart Loggers, Kithkin Harbinger, Mirror Entity
4cc: Kinsbaile Balloonist, Dreamspoil Witches
5cc: Changeling Hero, Plover Knights, 2 Warren Pilferers, Shriekmaw

Lands: 9 Plains, 9 Swamp

I’m still not happy with the deck, but that’s more the fault of the cardpool than of any decision we’ve had to face in order to get here. Our only other option is to try and get some fat in there by adding a third color, and the cards really just aren’t there to support that. We’d prefer to have a Sealed Deck letting us use the Elf and Treefolk tribes a bit more, to get quality creatures at decent size and acceptable cost, but… that wasn’t what came in the box. This deck is sorely underpowered compared to the competition… but it has a plan, it has a few removal spells and at least one bomb, so it’ll likely work out well enough if you keep your wits about you and remember to pressure your opponent rather than try to sit back and be the control deck. The path to victory isn’t power, massed quantity of removal, or any sort of synergistic inevitability coming from a few key cards locking together… the path to victory is to maintain an acceptable race, and sneak in some damage here and some damage there to win the role as the aggressive player. Waiting around is only going to make things worse, and so the deck has been drafted to fill the role asked of it: cheap creatures, most of decent size and some with evasion, allowing us to start off as the aggressor right off the bat and use a few positive interactions to cross the finish line before the opponent.

There is a late-game plan… you can use card synergy by means of the Warren Pilferers to get the aggressive forces working together again, or maybe “just” cast Shriekmaw a bunch of times… or cobble together an indestructible Changeling Hero. These aren’t an ideal plan, especially compared to the kinds of late-game cards you can expect to see coming online for the opponent as the game progresses, but some plan is better than no plan at all, and that this plan also involves card advantage effects and hasty 3/3s for five at the top of our curve helps with the overall main plan of consistent aggression. I would rate the deck as a low deck on the grading scale – if we’re using a ten-point scale, I’d put this as a solid 4 and hope for manascrewed opponents or misbuilt decks from the other side, anything that can give an extra turn or two before the opponent’s blockers really start to come online… and I’d hope for it every round, because this is not a deck to easily make it to the Top 8 of a tournament, even if it does provide you with the tools to outplay your opponent. You’ll gain a bit of an edge against the opponent who didn’t realize that his deck required eighteen lands, win a free game against the opponent who decided to go splash-crazy but didn’t really have quite enough mana-fixing to do so smoothly and reliably, and pray for opposing mulligans to put you on more equal footing.

That said, you’ll also win games with Mirror Entity by himself (… though hopefully not all on his lonesome, as that’s a hard way to win a game) as your one true bomb with which to overpower the opponent, and you’ll note that he goes especially well in this deck that is capable of going one-drop, two-drop, Entity, play a fourth land and attack. Mirror Entity makes sure that your opponent can’t have good blocks early in the game, and can use mere mana to turn a wimpy attack into a lethal blow, so there’s at least some hope… if you draw him a lot and dodge Peppersmokes in the early game, your deck clearly jumps above the average to a 6. This still isn’t enough to excite you, but a little bit of luck in the right direction can give you the breaks it’d take to accomplish the goal of scuttling your awful sealed deck in order to draft for a PT slot… so really, it could be worse.

Compare this to some other sealed pools you’ll see… just look at The Ferrett’s first experience with Lorwyn sealed and you can see what I mean… plenty of card pools have a fair bit more removal, a little bit of mana-fixing and decent-sized creatures to work with.

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 10-07-2007

Lorwyn Limited

Creatures (48)

Lands (1)

1 Shimmering Grotto

This card pool is easily a 6 or 7… it doesn’t really have any outrageous power-bomb cards to win the game by itself with, but it does have strong tribal synergies (Goblins that sacrifice Goblins for damage, Goblins that do stuff when they die… what a team!) and a hefty chunk more removal than this pool had: Oblivion Ring, Tar Pitcher, Lash Out, Mudbutton Torchrunner, Sower of Temptation, 2 Glimmerdust Naps (… well, they still aren’t good, but they aren’t completely miserable), Weed Strangle, Peppersmoke, Hornet Harasser, Eyeblight’s Ending, and Oblivion Ring can be shuffled around in various builds and never end up with a deck that is nearly as lacking in removal as this entire card pool was. This deck will outclass the deck our pool has made available to us, as will most other decks in the format as this is a pretty standard pool to work with from what I’ve seen so far, but with one caveat: if you give it the time to.

It’d be wonderful to have the best card pool in the world and be able to easily capitalize on the tribal strengths of the format with nary a care about the cards your opponent tries to drop in your way. In reality, however, Lorwyn Limited is a format where carefully honed beatdown skills will earn you a profit on the day, much like it would in Time Spiral Limited even if not to quite such an exaggerated degree as the truly aggressive Time Spiral Limited prior to Planar Chaos and Future Sight complicating matters. You can build a Sealed Deck to maximize aggressive potential, to apply pressure early and maintain it as you attack… or at least with this deck you can, which is good because the other (and admittedly preferable) vectors down which your cardpool’s strengths could lie are woefully absent except for a few high-quality cards like Shriekmaw and Mirror Entity.

In addition to learning to adjust our perspectives of the format, to pick up the unusual lessons like understanding the true value of Changelings and the intricate decisions put forward by the tangled “modular” cross-tribal interactions on top of the “linear” same-tribe benefits, learning how to make do with what you have and find a path to victory when things aren’t pretty might serve you well in the upcoming PTQ season. Not every Sealed Deck is pretty… some are well and truly a random assortment of 75 cards. This is especially harsh in a format where card synergy can have such a powerful contribution to a deck’s strength, making the power gap between the best of the best and the worst of the worst even more insurmountable. Thankfully, at least in Sealed Deck play, that “best of the best” deck is not realistically going to appear across the table from you… so even when things are going badly, you can still usually do something to affect your destiny, despite when your card pool being ineffective.

Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com

Magical Hack – Preparing for Kuala Lumpur

Creatures (48)

Lands (1)

Spells (26)