Limited Lessons — A Sealed Conundrum

Unfortunately, I didn’t attend Grand Prix: Montreal this past weekend, due to longstanding vacation plans. This is both a good and a bad thing, since I’ve been looking forward to sitting on the beach and doing nothing, but I also do like the Block format. I wish there was some way I could’ve played and still gone on vacation.

This week, I want to dissect a Sealed pool that I opened on Magic Online that was very difficult to build. I’ll follow it up with some match summaries. It’s been a week since this Sealed tournament, and I’m honestly still not sure I’ve found the best build for this deck. Here’s the cardpool.

Magic Online Sealed Cardpool

Nick Eisel

Test deck on 07-01-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (45)

Lands (1)

1 New Benalia

Spells (29)

If you take a close look at this pool, the first thing you should realize is that it is all over the place. There are plenty of game-winning cards, but no color combination jumps out at me right away. I tried multiple builds and almost ran out of time doing so. I want to go through some of them, and discuss the pros and cons so that you guys will have a starting place for your own builds (and comments for the forums).

Firemaw Kavu
Flickering Spirit
Kavu Primarch
Lymph Sliver
Magus of the Scroll
Mire Boa
Seht’s Tiger
Shade of Trokair
Spinneret Sliver
Sporoloth Ancient
Whip-Spine Drake
Wormwood Dryad

Chromatic Star
Dawn Charm
Empty the Warrens
Foriysian Totem
Harmonize
Judge Unworthy
Prismatic Lens
Strength in Numbers
Sunlance
Temporal Isolation
Utopia Vow

2 Mountain
8 Forest
7 Plains

This was my trial run at building this pool. As soon as I was done with it I already hated it, and was not happy leaving all of the powerful gold cards on the sidelines. The problem is that the deck has tons of tricks, but the creatures suck and there aren’t enough of them. This forces a splash of Empty the Warrens along with the other Red cards. I didn’t think this deck had the power necessary to get me to the Top 8.

For what it’s worth, I think no matter how I end up building this I will have to splash for Firemaw Kavu, Magus of the Scroll, and Foriysian Totem, as no pair of colors is deep enough and these are all very good splash cards.

Crookclaw Transmuter
Firemaw Kavu
Flowstone Channeler
Bewilder
Chromatic Star
Empty the Warrens
Kaervek the Merciless
Magus of the Scroll
Merfolk Thaumaturgist
Synchronous Sliver
Tectonic Fiend
Timebender
Tolarian Sentinel
Viscerid Deepwalker
Vorosh, the Hunter
Whip-Spine Drake
Aetherflame Wall

Bewilder
Chromatic Star
Empty the Warrens
Mystical Teachings
Prismatic Lens
Riddle of Lightning
Venser’s Diffusion

Forest
2 Swamp
7 Mountain
7 Island

This is the first attempt of many at building a two-color deck that splashes for some of the gold cards. Since these were the best two gold cards in the pool, I thought this might work out. Overall the card quality is low, Mystical Teachings doesn’t really have too many spicy targets except for Crookclaw Transmuter, and I’m running things like Bewilder main. Back to the drawing board.

Crookclaw Transmuter
Firemaw Kavu
Flickering Spirit
Kaervek the Merciless
Magus of the Scroll
Seht’s Tiger
Shade of Trokair
Timebender
Tolarian Sentinel
Viscerid Deepwalker
Whip-Spine Drake
Opaline Sliver
Lymph Sliver
Synchronous Sliver

Teferi’s Moat
Dawn Charm
Foriysian Totem
Judge Unworthy
Mystical Teachings
Prismatic Lens
Sunlance
Temporal Isolation
Venser’s Diffusion

7 Island
2 Mountain
7 Plains
Swamp

This build was a little tougher. I ended up having to cut the Chromatic Star, D’Avenant Healer, and Fortify to fit in the three slivers and make the creature base a bit more tolerable overall. I really didn’t want to cut the Star, but I also don’t see anything worse in the list. The Kaervek splash is iffy, but I think it’s necessary as this deck should stall the game out and hopefully get the Sentinel plus Firemaw combo online. The one thing this deck really has going for it is that Mystical Teachings is firing on all cylinders. Seht’s Tiger, Crookclaw, Isolation, Judge Unworthy, Dawn Charm. They’re all ready to be tutored up. I know when I wrote about Dawn Charm a couple weeks back a lot of people said I was overrating it in the forums. While this may be true, this is the type of deck where Dawn Charm shines, as you may need to regenerate a key creature or stop that one alpha strike before locking down the board.

I tried a few other variations of this build and the U/R one listed above splashing for gold stuff. Of all of those, I believe this U/W build was the best one I came up with and probably what I should have played in the actual tournament.

What did I play?

Well, if you look at the above lists you’ll see that they’re all lacking in power even after splashing for some good stuff. Because of this I decided to make a risky decision and just move all in on the full five colors. In retrospect this was probably a mistake, and I should’ve just played the U/W version, but this was more fun anyway even though I barely missed Top 8 and it was likely because my mana was really bad.

TSP Sealed Deck Final Build

Nick Eisel

Test deck on 07-01-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (11)

Lands (18)

Spells (11)

At least I’m running eighteen lands right?

This deck is very powerful, and equally sketchy on the mana. Now that you’ve seen all of the builds I went through, I’d like to hear opinions in the forums on who would’ve went with the U/W, or if you just want to tell me how crazy I am for playing all five colors. Offering alternative builds is also encouraged.

Round 1
Game 1 bounced back and forth for quite some time. My opponent got Sprout Swarm online fairly quickly in his U/G deck. Thankfully I had the turn 5 Moat to answer that nuisance, and since he didn’t have much else I was just waiting to draw a way to win. I finally drew Scion about five turns later and attacked with it, used the ability to search up Vorosh, and then used Vorosh’s ability to pump the Scion. While this was all cute in the abstract, my opponent had amassed a ton of Saprolings with Swarm and just Venser’s Diffusioned my Moat on my end step and attacked for the win.

Game 2, my opening hand was all five colors of mana, Scion, and Kaervek. Looks like a keeper. This game wasn’t close as I drew some early guys and then assembled both of my gold cards relatively early on. I actually drew Vorosh on the turn I was going to “combo” with Scion, and so I just cast Kaervek instead, which shut down any Sprout Swarm nonsense in the future.

Game 3 my opponent chooses to play first and mulligans. My deck played pretty much like a normal deck this game, with only Forests and Plains and Harmonize to gas up. Seht’s Tiger ambushed a guy on turn 4, and the Tiger and Sporoloth Ancient teamed up for the win in combination with Temporal Isolation and Judge Unworthy to clear the way.

1-0

Round 2
This round my opponent took forever to show up, and almost timed out in game 1. I topdecked a Plains on turn 5 to cast Moat and stop his two attackers, which was very lucky. This bought me time to get Vorosh online a couple turns later, and my hand was filled with good White spells. The dragon easily went the distance.

Game 2 my opponent got a fast draw and my deck stumbled on mana. This one wasn’t even close as he had four guys to my one and I had three cards in my hand that I couldn’t cast on turn 6.

Game 3 he chose to play and got a quick start. I barely stabilized on five life, but wasn’t too worried since he was primarily G/W with a Black splash that I hadn’t seen yet. Dawn Charm was absolutely crucial in this game, as was Seht’s Tiger. I’d also boarded in the Tolarian Sentinel and another Island, and eventually got it online, with Firemaw and Seht’s Tiger on board. The main reason for doing so was that he had a lot of small fliers like Flickering Spirit, and I also didn’t think he could beat the combo with Firemaw. Eventually his board was clear, and my ground guys got through for the win.

2-0

At this point I realized that the tournament was only going to be five rounds instead of six. That meant I needed to win one of my next two rounds to draw in, which seemed easy enough despite my deck.

Round 3
This round really sucked. My opponent’s deck was not only better than mine, but also more consistent.

Game 1 I got a quick draw (if that is even possible) featuring Mire Boa, Seht’s Tiger, and Teachings with Flashback potential for later. My opponent stalled my board with Saltfield Recluse, and I topdecked and played Vorosh. Just when I thought the game was mine, he cast Damnation. From there it was all downhill. I drew Scion with him at 7 life and thought I’d have a chance, but he simply searched up Big Game Hunter with his freshly active Blightspeaker.

If game 1 was bad, game 2 was a complete blowout. My opponent started with turn 2 suspend Knight of Sursi, turn 2 Blightspeaker, turn 3 Necrotic Sliver. My deck can’t really beat that draw, and he spent the next couple turns searching up Saltfield and Rathi Trapper to seal the deal.

2-1

Round 4
You all know where this is going by now. It was bound to happen eventually.

Game 1 I mulliganed to five and my hand was not good at all. I lost to random dudes without really doing much.

Game 2 I mulliganed to four before seeing a hand with more than one land.

2-2

Normally I’d only write about a Sealed tournament if I ended up making Top 8 so that I could also do some summaries on the draft and matches there. I felt that this Sealed pool was very difficult to build correctly, and that I probably missed the Top 8 because I decided to gamble and have terrible mana. Maybe if I’d run the U/W build things would’ve turned out better. I do know that I won one of the first two matches largely because I had multiple gold cards in play that wouldn’t have made the cut in the U/W build.

It’s unfortunate that Sealed isn’t a relevant format right now except for online, but those of you who play in the 2x tournaments a lot can benefit from this article, and I’m also just interested to see what people would’ve done differently if they opened this pool.

See you in the forums.

Nick Eisel
[email protected]
Soooooo on Magic Online