After my dismal performance at U.S. Nationals that was the result of my mistakes, I was hoping to do well at GP Boston. I’d done quite a few drafts in preparation, and felt like I had a solid grasp of the format. While Core Set Limited doesn’t have nearly as much going on as the typical expansion, especially with the full block, M10 draft has enough depth that it is at least reasonably interesting.
Core Set Limited has always traditionally been a slow format, due in large part to the preponderance of walls and wall-like creatures, and M10 is no different. This means that anything that generates card advantage, or provides some kind of evasion or stalemate breaking effect, is far more powerful in M10 than it would be in other formats because the games tend to stall out. Most block formats tend to be much more about building decks around mechanical synergies, and while there are some minor tribal themes in M10, the majority of M10 Limited comes down to maximizing your removal, card advantage, stalemate breaking, and curve concerns.
One of the Top 8 finishers at the Grand Prix said “Everyone knows picks one through four. It’s picks five through fourteen that really matter.” I think that observation is a good one, though it’s certainly not uniquely true to M10. What is very different about M10 compared to typical expansion Limited formats is that while the middle quality cards may be largely interchangable, the gap in power level between the best cards and the worst cards is huge. Building a draft deck in Shards block is more a matter of cutting down to the best 23, while in M10 it can be a challenge to even draft enough playables if you’re not reading signs well.
All of these qualities combine to make M10 an interesting Draft format, but a pretty miserable Sealed Deck format. The pace of the games and the ease of stalling the ground makes lots of games into long, drawn out affairs, giving lots of time for overpowered bombs to take over the game. The coverage in Boston made a big deal about how I won a GP trial the night before with a Sealed pool lacking in bombs, but that was clearly the exception rather than the rule. Here’s the decklist (unfortunately, I don’t have the full card pool available):
8 Mountain
8 Swamp
1 Terramorphic Expanse
1 Bog Wraith
1 Dragon Whelp
1 Goblin Artillery
1 Goblin Piker
1 Howling Banshee
2 Inferno Elemental
2 Kelinore Bat
2 Lightning Elemental
1 Vampire Aristocrat
1 Viashino Spearhunter
1 Warpath Ghoul
1 Act of Treason
1 Assassinate
1 Deathmark
1 Kindled Fury
1 Lightning Bolt
2 Mind Rot
1 Rod of Ruin
1 Tendrils of Corruption
I specifically built this deck with the principles I mentioned above in mind — removal, card advantage, stalemate-breaking ability, and curve. I think removal in particular is much more important in M10 than it is in other Sealed formats, which is saying a lot, because removal is always a highly sought after card type in Limited. The difference is that so many of the bombs in M10 are creatures. An unanswered Ant Queen or Shivan Dragon will simply win the game, to say nothing of Baneslayer Angel. If you look at the 9-0 decks from Day 1 of the GP, all of them except Ben Stark’s have at least one “I win” creature, and all but Jason Lundborg’s U/G deck have a plethora of removal spells, though his pool makes up for it with Sleep, Mind Control, and Might of Oaks, which are all cards that can power past the game-winning creatures. My deck didn’t have a ton of removal, but it had enough to support an aggressive creature plan without just losing to something like a Serra Angel. Deathmark is a superb card in M10 Sealed deck — since Green and White are the best creature colors, your opponent will almost always have a target for it. I would main deck it every time.
Card advantage is another general class of effect that’s always good, be it in Limited or Constructed, but the slower pace of M10 Limited and the scarcity of cards that can generate card advantage make it even more valuable here. Games that aren’t dominated by some kind of bomb creature almost universally stalemate, which provides a lot of time for the extra cards to take over, especially if you have bombs of your own to dig to. My pool didn’t have any real bombs or card drawing of its own to speak of, but the two Mind Rots did the dirty work of forcing my opponents to discard their bombs in a lot of games. I think Mind Rot is excellent in this format both because of the generally high value of card advantage, but also because of how many late game bombs there are like Fireball and Overrun. Cards like Duress, Cancel, and Negate are much better in this format as well, simply because of the importance of stopping bombs. It’s also important to understand that card advantage isn’t always just raw numbers of cards, but also card quality and selection. M10 games tend to go long enough that it is almost inevitable that you will have excess land or other low value cards later in the game. Merfolk Looter can break those games wide open by giving you action when your opponent is flooding out.
“Stalemate breakers” is a fairly broad term that’s not quite as obvious as the previous two categories, but refers to anything that can win a game when it’s hard to attack on the ground. This happens all the time in M10 thanks to cards like Drudge Skeleton, Siege Mastodon, Rhox Pikemaster, and all of the various walls in the format. This makes evasion creatures in general more important in this format than they typically are. Giant Spider alone makes it hard to rely on just small flyers for your evasion needs, so often other ways to break open games are necessary, and much more valuable than they are in other formats. Whispersilk Cloak, for instance, was a marginal card at best in Mirrodin block Limited, but is capable of winning M10 games almost singlehandedly. Because of its ability to alternately lock down opposing attackers and blockers, Blinding Mage is a card that can fall into both this category as well as that of pseudo-removal — I think, in a lot of decks, Blinding Mage is actually more important than Pacifism because of this. .My trial deck may look light on stalemate breakers, but four fliers along with two Inferno Elementals gave it at least a passable ability to get damage in even on a cluttered board.
My primary plan with this deck, however, was to try to play aggressively. That’s where curve comes in. Most people have a good understanding of the importance of mana curve in Limited formats, but it has a slightly different role in M10. While in Shards block, for instance, a deck with 5-6 two-drop creatures was often incredibly potent because of its aggression, in M10 the value of the bottom end of the curve is much lower. Compared to Shards, creatures in M10 are generally smaller for their mana cost, and also tend to be weighted more heavily toward toughness than power. There is no Exalted to power up your small creatures turn after turn. Once they are outmatched, they stay that way, especially since so many of them are vanilla. Compare Silvercoat Lion to Knight of the Skyward Eye for a particularly striking example of where that difference comes from.
Because of this, a solid curve in M10 tends to focus much less on early drops. If you look at my list above you’ll see that it only has a single two-drop in Goblin Piker, and yet I called the deck aggressive. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with a controlling Shards deck that didn’t have at least 2-3 two-drops, and yet this beatdown deck generally gets started on three mana. The aggression in this deck comes from playing all offensively oriented creatures rather than cards that are perhaps objectively “better” but that aren’t proactive. Curving out with Drudge Skeletons into Wall of Fire is hardly what I want to do when I’m trying to put pressure on my opponent and deny them time to draw their bombs.
With all of that in mind, this is the pool that I got for the Sealed deck portion of the Grand Prix:
White:
2 Angel’s Mercy
1 Blinding Mage
1 Elite Vanguard
1 Harm’s Way
1 Lifelink
1 Palace Guard
1 Soul Warden
1 Siege Mastodon
1 Righteousness
2 Veteran Armorsmith
1 Veteran Swordsmith
1 Wall of Faith
1 White Knight
Blue:
1 Alluring Siren
1 Convincing Mirage
1 Disorient
1 Horned Turtle
1 Jump
1 Levitation
2 Negate
1 Polymorph
1 Ponder
1 Sage Owl
1 Tome Scour
3 Unsummon
Black:
2 Acolyte of Xathrid
1 Assassinate
1 Duress
1 Haunting Echoes
1 Hypnotic Specter
3 Kelinore Bat
1 Megrim
1 Mind Rot
1 Relentless Rats
1 Rise from the Grave
2 Soul Bleed
1 Unholy Strength
1 Vampire Aristocrat
1 Weakness
1 Zombie Goliath
Red:
2 Burning Inquiry
1 Burst of Speed
1 Dragon Whelp
1 Firebreathing
1 Fiery Hellhound
1 Lightning Elemental
1 Manabarbs
2 Prodigal Pyromancer
1 Seismic Strike
1 Stone Giant
3 Viashino Spearhunter
Green:
2 Bountiful Harvest
1 Bramble Creeper
1 Cudgel Troll
1 Elvish Piper
1 Emerald Oryx
2 Giant Growth
1 Giant Spider
1 Nature’s Spiral
1 Mold Adder
2 Regenerate
1 Runeclaw Bear
1 Windstorm
Artifacts:
1 Angel’s Feather
1 Coat of Arms
1 Spellbook
Lands:
How would you build this deck?
I’ll reply in the forums with the build I played in the GP as well as the alternate suggestions from other pro players on how to put it together, but I want to give you the chance to build it first.
See you next week!
bmk