Darksteele Cube - Sealed of Doom

Occasionally, even the most avid cube drafter will be looking for a change from the bread & butter draft, whether it’s 8-man or Winston.
When the mood strikes, I like to spend a few days or weeks building decks from Sealed pools rather than drafting. Sealed is a go-to format when skill
levels are very mixed, or when a player doesn’t know a number of cards in the cube. But it also offers variety to those of us who cube whenever possible. It’s a nice change of pace from Winston Draft especially, because you don’t know what your opponent is playing whatsoever.

In Winston Draft – or any draft, for that matter – I often end up pre-sideboarding based on my sizeable knowledge of my opponent’s deck. I’ll usually have an idea of what I passed and absolutely must be able to answer. I might also include specific cards that are good
against the deck I’ve seen shaping up on the other side of the table – first strikers and Paladin en-Vec against a red deck, for example.

Sealed is also a really good format when you’ve made a lot of changes to your cube, like right after a new set comes out. You get to pick and choose what to play with full knowledge of the cards you’ll see, so you can decide to run that shiny new Venser, the Sojourner, or Molten-Tail Masticore if it’s in your pool. With the same group of cards in Draft, you might not see that new card you want to test until you’re committed
to another color. Sealed is great for getting quick assessments of how new additions are working out.

We usually use five packs for Sealed. Since the card quality is so high, that tends to be enough to get you a good deck without making cuts extremely difficult or producing pools that can support four different excellent decks.

We add 10% of the cards randomly, and the rest are divided equally among the five colors, artifacts, multicolor, hybrid, and land. You can easily change the ratio to suit your preferences – for example, decreasing the amount of multicolor or lands. I think it’s important to add
cards randomly, however, since it prevents you from having perfect knowledge about what colors are represented in your opponent’s pool. I like to shuffle the cards for all the pools together and then divide them into packs. Again, this ensures that you don’t have a perfect distribution of colors – more closely simulating real packs.

Justin and I played some Sealed this week, and it turned out to be a fun set of decks and an interesting indication of what’s working and not working in my cube. Here’s the pool I opened. What would you have built?

Cube Sealed Deck

Thea Steele

Test deck on 11-07-2010

Casual

Creatures (36)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Lands (8)

Spells (30)

Right off the bat, when you open these guys, you’re probably going blue. Simic Sky Swallower and Mystic Snake are tempting in U/G, but red looks awesome to me. Sulfuric Vortex is one of my favorite cards, and I have the burn and haste to back it up.

It’s pretty clear that I can also think about a splash, with Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds, as well as additional fixing for white
and black. Reveillark immediately stands out as a splashable card that’s worth the effort, but it’s not particularly amazing with my red and blue creatures – I only have four that it can bring back. Black has a number of splashable spells that are worthwhile – Terror, Recurring Nightmare, and Bone Shredder to begin with – but I really value consistency in my cube decks, so I decide to start with a U/R build and only splash if I need to.

I begin by cutting the Nucklavee and Oona along with Crater Hellion, because my goal is to build a more aggressive deck. Kira is a tough one – she’s interesting since my creatures are pretty easy to kill, but she’s also incredibly unsynergistic with equipment, and Sword of Body
and Mind is one of the best cards in my deck.

I make the remaining cuts by getting rid of things that are not:

a) Burn

b) “Excellent blue spells” (I made a video of the deckbuilding, and this was my exact phrase. I think what I meant was card draw/filtering.)

c) Ways to push damage through. In the context of this pool, that means stuff like Man-o’-War, Razormane Masticore, Dominus of Fealty, and creature-only removal.

The result is that I cut some of the redundant artifact destruction and Nevinyrral’s Disk, which makes me sad, but I feel like it’s
slower than my deck wants. I also cut Condescend – another card I love, but I wasn’t sure how often I would have mana up. In retrospect, it’s probably fine in my deck since I have so many other instants.

I left Copper Tablet in after some thought. It was a recent addition to the cube, and my impression so far is that it just doesn’t present
enough of a clock. It might be good next to Sulfuric Vortex, however, so I give it a try despite the feeling that it’s not really the card I should be running.

Razormane Masticore doesn’t seem broken in this deck, but I have the card draw to fuel it, and there’s a world involving Basilisk Collar that seems pretty sweet. I’m also a big believer in running lots of artifacts when you have a super bomb like Sword of Body and Mind, since
your opponent is likely to run out of targeted artifact destruction at some point and might be forced into some bad decisions.

I decide to splash black, but only for Creeping Tar Pit. I love that card a lot, especially as the cube has acquired more powerful planeswalkers. The splash is also extremely easy, since my three lands that can fetch black and the Mox Jet mean that I have six sources of black by running only one basic Swamp. I’m also starting with Wasteland, since it can randomly win games on its own, and something like Maze of Ith (not to mention
Library of Alexandria) would be pretty awful for my deck. Of course, if I did face Maze of Ith, I’d also have other changes to make – Kira, Pillage, and Aftershock would all come in.

Here’s the decklist I started with:

Ancestral Recall
Basilisk Collar
Copper Tablet
Electrolyze
Fireblast
Flame Slash
Impulse
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Magma Jet
Mox Jet
Pact of Negation
Psionic Blast
Sudden Shock
Sulfuric Vortex
Sword of Body and Mind
Time Walk

Blistering Firecat
Dominus of Fealty
Goblin Patrol
Inkfathom Infiltrator
Keldon Champion
Keldon Vandals
Man-o’-War
Razormane Masticore

5 Island
5 Mountain
Bloodstained Mire
Creeping Tar Pit
Evolving Wilds
Swamp
Terramorphic Expanse
Wasteland

And here’s Justin’s deck:

Brittle Effigy
Crib Swap
Cultivate
Erratic Portal
Garruk Wildspeaker
Honor of the Pure
Lightning Greaves
Naturalize
Sacred Mesa
Spectral Procession
Swords to Plowshares

Calciderm
Cloudgoat Ranger
Eternal Dragon
Kami of Ancient Law
Kitchen Finks
Mirror Entity
Nantuko Vigilante
Pianna, Nomad Captain
Qasali Pridemage
River Boa
Sun Titan
Tarmogoyf

4 Forest
11 Plains
Savannah
Temple Garden

Not to sound incredibly smug, but I expected this deck to do really well. It has good, bordering-on-broken cards and the means to win even after the other player has stabilized due to the burn and Sword-based evasion. Justin’s deck was G/W and thus pretty much by definition a fair deck. But when we played out the games, I lost pretty handily.

Sure, I won a few games due to mana screw (and lost them the same way), and Jace did his thing a few times too. I got to burn Justin out from twelve thanks to Keldon Champ, Sudden Shock, and Fireblast, and Sword of Body and Mind won the games where it wasn’t immediately destroyed. But on the whole, Justin’s deck was incredibly problematic for me. Let’s look at why.

First, this team (anti-team?) was really hard for my deck to handle. Shroud is the bane of every red deck, and haste is of course good against planeswalkers. Calciderm always surprises me – unless he gets countered, it’s either huge card disadvantage to chump for three turns, or
an absurd amount of damage. He’s especially good against a deck like mine that doesn’t have a ton of creatures, and some of those
can’t block (like Inkfathom Infiltrator and Blistering Firecat).

Secondly, Justin’s deck was full of good creature removal. There were a number of situations where I would’ve won a game if I’d been able to connect with a Sword of Body and Mind-ed creature, but Swords to Plowshares shut me down. Also, Crib Swap powers up Tarmogoyf. Gross! G/W decks are notoriously light on removal, but this one was an exception. Decks like this are a perfect example of why Brittle Effigy (and even Serrated Arrows before it) is really good in the cube.

The combination of tokens and a bunch of ways to buff the team isn’t necessarily problematic for a red deck, but I didn’t really have the tools to handle it. I tried a number of configurations during our games, since it was clear right away that I wanted the counters and couldn’t afford the Vortex. I tried builds with Crater Hellion and Disk, but both were troublingly slow, and Disk was too easy for Justin to destroy. By end of our games, I’d switched to splashing for black in earnest in order to play Terror, Diabolic Edict, and Bone Shredder. Nonetheless, I was still lacking a cheap-ish Wrath effect.

Sacred Mesa had a great showing this draft. I had no way to deal with a resolved enchantment, and Justin was pretty heavily white so he was able to activate it many times a turn. Unfortunately he never got Honor of the Pure + Mesa going, but the 1/1s were good enough. Speaking of which, we really need some Pegasus tokens…

One thing that we’ve been working on in our cube is the amount of artifact destruction. The situation really came to a head with Scars of Mirrodin,
so we added a number of pieces of artifact removal to white, green, and red. So far, I’m super happy with how’s it been working out. Justin’s redundant artifact destruction was excellent against my deck, as both the Masticore and Sword of Body and Mind never really got to be unfair. At least three of our games were directly decided by Justin having removal on the critical turn.

Of course, not all changes pan out. I was really excited to try Copper Tablet – it was one of those cards that I didn’t know existed
until recently – and hoped it would be the Vortex for base-green aggro decks. Unfortunately, the life-gain-allowing clause has already proved
important, and as an artifact, it’s easier to destroy. I’m willing to give it another chance – i.e., a chance in a deck that actually
is
the beatdown – but I don’t doubt that it will be replaced by the end of Scars block.

In summary, I’m really happy about this match – not just because it was fun, but because I like the direction my cube is moving. G/W has been an underdog in my cube for a while, as it lacks the reach of R/G, so it was nice to see it take down and a Jace – and Power – laced blue deck. I think that improving G/W will have a self-reinforcing effect. As the deck gets better, we’ll be more willing to commit to drafting it early and then will see the deck show up more often.

I hope you give cube Sealed a try. It’s a great way to rack up experience with new cards and helps to enable monocolor with only two players as well. Let me know what you think in the forums, and thanks for reading!