I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Knowing a Sealed format matters. Khans is no exception, and if anything, it is a much more decision-intensive
format than usual, both in deckbuilding and gameplay.
In anticipation of last weekend’s Grand Prix in Orlando, I spent a decent amount of time looking at and building sample Sealed decks on top of my Pro Tour
testing. While my pool was certainly above average to say the least, I was rewarded for my work with an 8-1 finish that was very close to a 9-0.
Let’s start from the bottom.
During my Sealed build deck tech, I described this
format as having four archetypes.
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1.) Good mana and 22 great cards.
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2.) Flier aggro with acceptable mana.
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3.) Opened a Draft deck.
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4.) The subpar version of deck #1, with either bad mana or bad cards.
Let’s talk about how the format drives towards these options.
Fixing
The amount and positioning of fixing in your Sealed pool is the single most important thing in defining what direction you take the deck you build.
There is about one common Dismal Backwater type land per pack, or about six per Sealed pool (ten out of 101 commons with 60 commons per pool). There is
about one uncommon tri-land per Sealed pool (five uncommons out of eighty with eighteen uncommons per pool). There is about half a fetchland per sealed
pool (two of each of the five fetchlands per 121 card rare/mythic sheet and six rares per pool). That puts the average Sealed pool at seven fixing lands,
which should be enough to do whatever you want within reason.
Except this is all averages of a random distribution and doesn’t account for colors. Lots of things can go wrong in the middle. If you have four lands, you
can’t play more than three colors. If you have four lands and two don’t line up with your main colors (i.e. Jungle Hollow when you are pushing Jeskai), it
gets even worse. If you have eight lands but five of them tap for black when you don’t have a significant number of black playables, you won’t actually be
fixing your mana for anything relevant. If you are trying to splash a card that also shares your tertiary color and your splash land taps for the off color
and tertiary color (i.e. Bloodfell Caves splashing Ponyback Brigade when you only want six black sources), it will be awkward.
However, if you have something like my Sealed pool, you have free reign over your entire pool. For reference, my fixing for a two card blue splash and a
two card ted splash in a Abzan deck trending towards G/W was:
On the above note, some general guidelines for how many lands supports a given color. Note that splashing the common morphs is extremely easy, as worst
case scenario, you can play them and trade off on turn 3. They almost don’t count as a real commitment to the color when counting for land splits:
2-3 lands supports a morph and a lategame card, like removal or an expensive bomb (Duneblast).
4-5 sources supports a couple powerful mid-drop creatures and removal, around four cards of the color.
6-7 sources supports a minor color you aren’t leaning on for any double colored spells or early drops.
Eight is the bare minimum to cast two drops of a color reliably on time. If the card’s utility extends later, you can fudge the numbers to play seven if
necessary. If you have a double-colored spell that isn’t time dependent to cast (for example, Arrow Storm) you can get away with the eighth as well, but if
you have one that is best on curve (Scion of Glaciers), you need the ninth source.
If you are playing any more than two colors with a lighter third or splash, playing more than five of any basic is a terrible idea. If that color isn’t
your main color, any more than three or four is hard to justify. You start getting into scenarios where you draw four lands that can’t actually cast
anything because you have two lands that only cast a single color of spells.
This is an eighteen-land format, if not nineteen in some decks. Missing your third land is just straight up lethal as they get ahead on morphs, because it
cascades into the second issue of missing your fifth land where the large morphs start flipping and creatures get out of range of early drop double blocks.
Now for the math part: You have eighteen lands. With basics, that is eighteen sources split among your colors per the above guidelines. Each tri-land adds
two sources to that count, and each fetchland or gain land adds one.
Given these rules, we can quickly see that just for a solid three-color deck we need multiple on color duals to hit eight sources of our main color and
six, if not seven, of each of our secondary colors as that is 20-22 total mana symbols needed in eighteen lands. If you have two heavy colors, you can only
afford a light four or five land commitment to your third color off two gain lands (four plus eight plus eight is twenty). With the average one tri-land
and six gain lands you have 26 mana sources, which is enough for a main color (eight), a secondary color (six or seven), a tertiary color (four or five),
and some mix of another light color or splash depending on how the other commitments break down.
And now you see how the numbers matter. Five red duals but only have a Ponyback Brigade, Arc Lightning, and Mardu Charm you want to play? That’s one or two
wasted dual land slots. Or what if one of your dual lands is Swiftwater Cliffs and you just don’t have a blue card you want, or you don’t have any black
duals to support the fact that you would also be splashing black? In the example of my Sealed deck, I had 1 Swamp, 5 Plains, 5 Forest as my basic lands.
That gave me seven sources of green and white as the bare minimum required for my solid commitments there, six black sources as casting my Abzan cards and
removal was huge, and two sources for each of my morph, plus one off color card splash.
Before going any direction with a Sealed deck, you need to consider whether the mana math works out. This math is how we divide category 1 decks (good mana
and spells) from category 4 decks (bad mana and good luck).
If you open a deck with bad mana, I’m unsure whether the more mediocre cards or worse mana option is better to start on, but you should be aware that part
of your plan should be to sideboard to your opponent’s level. Against the perfect five color decks you either need to board into more powerful cards at the
expense of consistency, while against the aggro decks you want the more consistent mana as your mediocre cards will match up perfectly fine against them.
Note that while Banners mesh very poorly with the hit a morph on turn 3, continue board development on 4, and flip a morph on 5 plan, they can bail you out
of a bad manabase. I would not play a Banner over an 18th land, but if playing two makes the mana count work for a deck that would otherwise fail, I can
maybe see seventeen lands and a Banner as a 19th mana source if absolutely necessary.
Another strange corner case to note: there is such a thing as too many dual lands, or more accurately, too many enters the battlefield tapped lands. Once
you get north of ten gain lands or tri-lands, you stop being able to hit your third and fifth land on curve because they will just enter play tapped too
often, resulting in a crucial loss of tempo.
Trades for Days, Evasion, and Removal
Creatures in this Sealed format just trade a lot. In Draft, it’s possible to find ways to break tempo or sizing parity, but in Sealed you can’t reliably
open the cards necessary to do that. Having enough two drops and tricks to get in multiple spell turns or tempo out their five mana unmorphs is very
difficult, and the higher density of uncommons and rares means that a lot of the spell slots where a conditional trick would be fine in Draft are just
taken up by higher quality removal. As a result, combat is pretty straight forward. Morphs trade for morphs. Big guys trade for removal or other big guys.
If it doesn’t trade, it just clunks around. Multiple 2/5s and 4/5s stare at each other across boards with no way to break through thanks to the wonderful
game mechanic called double blocking.
There are a few ways to break this open. The first is just open a category 3 aggro deck, but I find it very unlikely that this is common. A lot of the X-0
decks at the Grand Prix looked like this, so if you are the person who gets there, congrats. Look for the Draft aggro deck, but never get suckered into
playing it. Another is to just ignore the ground fights and max out on fliers and tempo spells to prevent your opponent from playing this game, which is
where the category 2 decks fall. This is rough as there are still two common x/5 morphs that block fliers (Sagu Archer and Sage-Eye Harrier), so there is
a good chance you are still brick walled and get into a lot of the same grind fests that playing a normal good cards deck would get you into.
The real ways to break this up are playing evasive or trump threats, playing answers to their trumps, and playing more ways to find your trumps. Basically,
the same thing that Sealed has always skewed towards: fliers, removal, rares. For examples of some less assuming cards that are great: Mystic of the Hidden
Way is extremely splashable as a way to get through, and Abomination of Gudul hits two of three categories here as an evasive card-filtering engine.
Your removal does need to be flexible. You can lose a game to Sultai Scavenger, but you can also lose to Abomination of Gudul (an X/4 flier) or a Woolly
Loxodon (a 6/7) or any number of crazy rares. Bring Low? Not really going to cut it unless they have a bunch of outlast creatures to peg down. Arc
Lightning? Cool on turn 3, not good after turn 5. Kill Shot and Smite the Monstrous? A+ let’s go!
Note that there is a big difference between four damage (Mardu Charm) and -4/-4 (Throttle). One of these wrecks double blocks or KOs their creature running
into smaller blockers. The other creates one-for-twos because they still have power to kill your creature with when you need to kill an X/5 or larger.
If there is so much trading, getting ahead on cards is going to be huge. There aren’t a lot of ways to naturally do this, so you have to devote slots to
the cards that provide raw card advantage. The obvious card here is Treasure Cruise, which, while clunky in Draft, is very easy to enable in Sealed. It is
both splashable and back-breaking. Bitter Revelation is like a Foresee that generates delve mana, and Rakshasa’s Secrets is very similar in terms of Mind
Rot and only slightly less awesome.
Aside on delve: I don’t think most Sealed decks can support more than two delve cards. There are also a few cards like Scout the Borders that I would also
rarely play that suddenly become reasonable if those delve cards are super expensive and powerful like Dead Drop or Necropolis Fiend.
Aside on card drawing: Decking can happen in Sealed. It is very much a real concern. More on this in a second.
Sweepers
End Hostilities and Duneblast are two of the best rares in the set. Wraths in Limited vary in power depending on the specific card and the format, but in a
board stall format, being able to bait out all their threats and fire back with the better ones you were sandbagging is hard to beat. When Duneblast lets
you keep the one you already had in play, you probably aren’t losing. For reference on how good the card is, my Sealed pool had Duneblast, as did my
opponents’ at 7-0 and 8-0.
If you are getting deep into a tournament, you will likely play against these cards. It doesn’t help that these cards are both normal rares, so about 20%
of pools have one or the other, and because Khans is a highly flexible multicolored set, the vast majority of them will be played. When in doubt, pushing
too far ahead can be a bad idea.
The corner cast I alluded to earlier? If you and your opponent have sweepers, things get a little dicey. It’s actually very easy for both players to run
out of things in a properly played game and have it come down to decking. I had the luxury/luckury of a Cranial Archive for this scenario, both to rebuy
cards to not deck with and to get a second Duneblast cast to ensure the game played to that point in grindy Wrath mirrors.
Note that Death Frenzy is not a Wrath as it doesn’t kill actual creatures. Thousand Winds is also not a Wrath, but that’s because it is more of a Plague
Wind.
Blue and Red Don’t Have Outlast
When in doubt, remember this: outlast is the ability that lets commons and uncommons fight rares and win any board stall. Most decks will be based in white
because it has two outlast commons and two great removal spells (Smite the Monstrous and Kill Shot), with green and black as the other likely core colors.
The Shell Game
Morphs are weird and complicated. I’m still working through all the tricks with them after a seven-year hiatus since I drafted Time Spiral Block seriously.
All I can definitively say at this point is, if you play morph better than your opponent, you get a significant edge. What that exactly entails is
something that is going to take a lot more focus on my part to define in distinct terms.
Khans is one of the deepest Limited formats I’ve seen in a long time. This is only the first level on how to present a playable deck. Playing the games is
a completely different animal, and the best way to figure that out is just keep jamming. This Sealed format will reward the people who put the most work
in, and if you want to make it to the Pro Tour, now is one of the best times to make a run at it as a result of this.