“No plan of battle ever survives first contact with the enemy.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
We have officially passed through the first week of Ravnica/Guildpact Sealed Deck and Draft for the Pro Tour Qualifier format, and the Grand Prix in Richmond has a lot of useful information to mine. The continent of North America fended off all Asian and European visitors to defend its Top 8 and, like a Canadian Jack Bauer, Rich Hoaen won the day in the face of foreign invasion. Some people would argue that Jack Bauer lost the day and Richmond was lost to a Canadian invasion, but we have come a long way since the war of 1812 and in these days when there are Japanese and European players coming to poach North American Grand Prix the Canadians are practically family. It’s a bit peculiar that the player who won is a well-known “local” (as compared to, um, Japan) Pro who is well regarded for his specialization in Limited, and that said player squeaked by unfeatured for a day and a half, but in the end the good guys got their time in the spotlight after all.
One key development that PTQ-level players can use as “tech” came from Frank Karsten, who was just the first to realize a method for looking at Sealed Deck card pools laid out spatially to allow you to look at interactions between all of the seven guilds we have active, which at the cramped tables of Richmond was “the lap method”.
Astoundingly complicated as it looks at first, with things squeezed in small print and pointed off in different directions, there is actually a very simple premise behind it that is reasonably easy to understand. Frank’s scribbled diagram should not be considered the end-all, be-all of the thing, as there are actually two different valid relationship trees with the same spatial characteristics, one for either of the companion colors for one of the two Blue guilds yet to appear in Dissension. The premise is simple: choose either Green or White to sit in the middle; in Frank’s case White. Put one color each on top and bottom of this color, and one to each side. These colors should be chosen as follows: the color combination of the guild on top and bottom should be one of the color combinations in Guildpact (Blue versus Green, Blue versus White, Red versus Black), as should the color combination to the left and to the right of the center. So with White in the middle, Blue and Green are opposite each other (either top-bottom or left-right) and Red and Black are opposite each other (either top-bottom or left-right). For Green in the middle simply swap White to wherever you’ve put Green in the other example.
By doing this, you will be able to draw a line from any one color to the color next to it and that line will represent a guild. With Red on the left side of this plus-sign formation, you can draw a line to the middle (Boros), a line up to the top location (Izzet) and a line down to the bottom location (Gruul). You cannot draw a line through White over to Black, which is fitting because that guild has not been published yet. The plus sign likewise lets you draw a connection for the central color to the rest of the colors, but you need to note that at least one of these lines cannot be drawn, to Blue: that guild has not been published yet. With these twelve piles (fourteen if you count lands and artifacts separately) you can put every color combination near to each other and get a broader look at your Sealed Deck in total while making your difficult decisions. Space is likely to be limited, however, and thus you can see Frank Karsten applying “the method”… on his lap.
Richmond helped to cement things in the collective awareness of Magic players, both at the Grand Prix and watching from home, most importantly being that Ravnica/Guildpact Sealed Deck is really, really hard. The common consensus is that thanks to the powerful shared-guild cards and the large number of guilds available vying for attention as you flex your decision-making muscles, every deck in the room is going to have very powerful cards… in their sideboard, as well as in their deck. When you are given card-pools that can easily have such heavy-hitters as Putrefy, Lightning Helix, and Stratozeppelid, you are going to be torn as you try and limit your colors to your very best, taking the Helix and Zeppelid into your Boros/Izzet deck and benching the powerful Putrefy. The temptation is strong to play five colors (or an otherwise reckless number of colors) and let the mana work itself out later by use of Signets and Karoos, playing a base two-color deck splashing however many other colors you need to in order to squeeze in your power bombs. This was a common-enough Draft strategy in triple-Ravnica, where you could pick up Civic Wayfinders and Farseek in large quantities to make things work out, but with just one Starter Deck of Ravnica at your disposal you are limited to one each of Farseek and Wayfinder, unless you get some spicy foil action. The mana fixing in Guildpact is far worse, and while there are fewer Guildpact cards in your pool than Ravnica cards, Guildpact cards are the only ones you should ever expect to have duplicate copies of. Double Silhana Starfletcher is nice, but not quite as nice as double or even triple Civic Wayfinder.
This doesn’t mean splashing recklessly is dead… or even necessarily wrong. Thanks to the Karoo duals, you can add splash colors more easily than ever before. Playing a base Black/Green deck off the strength of Putrefy; adding Selesnya Sanctuary and Orzhov Basilica for two free White mana sources; adding Dimir Aqueduct and Dimir Signet as if they were ‘just’ Swamps, and so on and so forth. With enough Signets and Karoos sitting where basic lands of your primary colors would otherwise be, you can get away with a lot more, even doing a light double-splash thanks to pre-existing Karoos and Signets you’d already be willing to run in order to fit in the most synergistic power cards. But there will often be strong temptations to squeeze just one more card or one more color in, when there just isn’t enough stable support to justify the splash. You really need at least three sources of a splash color to support a one or two-card splash, and if you have a Signet and Karoo you’d be willing to play anyway that’s just one basic land that doesn’t tap for your main colors that you’d have to add. If you have enough Karoos, you can even get away with a double-splash, with one basic land of one color and one basic land of a second alongside a bunch of Karoos and the right Signets to make these splashes as close to free as they come. The average Sealed Deck will be three to four colors, with the rare exception of true five-color decks, but two of their colors by themselves will cast nineteen of their twenty-three cards. Most of these decks will be three colors, because getting the good mana to support a painless double-splash will be the exception, not the rule, to go with the strong cards in those splash colors.
Sometimes you get the Savage Twister and the Gruul Turf. Other times, you get the Putrefy and the Boros Garrison. First things first, you have to make sure your mana works. Example: the undefeated Day One sealed decks from Richmond:
Jim Ferraiolo – 8-0
7 Forest
5 Plains
3 Swamp
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City Tree
2 Orzhov Signet
John Moore – 8-0
5 Forest
4 Plains
3 Mountain
1 Boros Garrison
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Gruul Turf
1 Temple Garden
1 Gruul Signet
Jon Sonne – 8-0
6 Island
6 Swamp
4 Plains
1 Orzhova, the Church of Deals
1 Izzet Signet
Taylor Webb – 8-0
6 Forest
5 Mountain
3 Swamp
1 Gruul Turf
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Selesnya Signet
Kenji Tsumura – 7-0-1
6 Plains
5 Swamp
3 Mountain
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Orzhov Basilica
1 Gruul Signet
Yes, there were other cards in their Sealed Decks as well. Most importantly, though, they all tried to make sure they had the best colored mana they could get, both in quantity of mana available and sheer mana-fixing capability. Sonne’s deck is the one that breaks the cycle, as it’s not full of double-lands and color-fixing Signets, where the other decks here packed as many double-lands as they could (as far as we know, anyway) and tried to make their colors as consistent as possible. There was plenty of talk about two colors splash two other colors, but once you look at the spells here you’ll see that the closest thing to fourth-color splashes any of them have are off-color activation costs on cards that are otherwise good on their own: Golgari Guildmage with a splashed fourth-color activation for the +1/+1 counters from Tsumura, a fourth- and fifth-color splash from Webb for the White ability of Selesnya Guildmage and the draw-a-card enhancement of Ribbons of Night, both of which are quite fine without the appropriate ‘splash’, and an unlikely touch of Red mana to go with the White in Sonne’s deck to maybe activate the “just-fine” Sunforger. The moral of the story seems to be knowing one’s limitations, and actually following them instead of getting greedy when you think you can get away with it.
So it seems that experience is telling us to temper greed with consistency, but with everything pulling in so many directions at once it becomes a seemingly impossible game of balancing mana curve, color consistency, creature count (and size), card advantage, and classes of removal all from the get-go. The varieties of ‘card advantage’ that are available are pretty astounding: there’s card draw, discard, comes-into-play creatures, Haunt effects, Radiate and Replicate, double lands, lands that double as reusable spells, token generation… you name it, it’s here. Even within each individual color, what you are trying to do is split two or three different ways, perhaps with some overlapping synergy but without any guarantee that “the plan” isn’t schizophrenic within the color itself, like Dimir Blue’s focus on milling versus Izzet Blue’s focus on big splashy Replicated effects. Ravnica/Guildpact Sealed Decks are trying to eat themselves, and they’ll eat you too unless you remember the simple rules: don’t be greedy, and build the best deck rather than a pile of the best cards.
Greed is obvious in so many of these Sealed Decks, because we have a format where the colored mana is as dense as it has ever been, having access to all your colors of mana in the right quantities is more important now than it has ever been before, even in Invasion block. Invasion block was the first multicolored theme block, and with only two of the three expansions and seven of the ten guilds we’ve already got a format that is so heavy on the colored mana it’s not even funny. Invasion was all about doing whatever you wanted, and gave you all the fixers you needed to get there, but as good as the Gold cards were – with three-color Dragons and cards like Pyre Zombie and Void to out-bomb the opponent – it didn’t matter quite so much that you were playing five colors. Sure, you splashed one Mountain in your Green deck for Flametongue Kavu or for Magma Burst, or threw an Island or two in your Red/Black deck to cast Crosis, but it was the overarching theme that the number of land types mattered because of Domain – not because your deck would be severely underpowered if it didn’t bleed over into more neighboring colors because the best cards are all Guild cards. In Invasion block, you could go a little crazy. The fixers were there to help out, so you could get away with tossing an off-color bomb in pretty randomly. In Ravnica/Guildpact Sealed, however, it’s all a blur of power creep: sit your Ghost Council next to your Savage Twister because you’re having a hard time getting to twenty-three, or you really need the extra power card because your filler Black cards were a touch shy of removal this time, or just something simple like try to correctly evaluate the situation when you’re faced with the above example of Helix vs. Putrefy vs. Stratozeppelid.
If you think that question is hard out of context, not knowing the rest of your options for the deck, imagine how much harder it is in context when you have Ogre Savant in Red and Dimir Guildmage in Black/Blue and Selesnya Guildmage or Tolsimir Wolfblood in Green/White and the colors are literally bleeding all over the place. These two key lessons of Ravnica/Guildpact sealed deck are very closely related.
Lesson One: Don’t Be Stupid Greedy
Unless something has gone horribly, horribly awry and you’ve got the mana of the Gods at your disposal, squeezing in that fourth or fifth “light splash” is going to be hard and will create more randomness in your deck. This does not “up your bomb count” to lower the “randomness” of getting overpowered by an opponent who might draw more bombs than you. Instead of losing games because your card was an underpowered 2/2 when your opponent’s last card was a Flame Fusillade that wiped your board, you’ll invite situations where your mana is just that little bit wonky and you’re stuck with Bathe in Light in hand and no White mana to be found. The name of the game is Magic: the Gathering, not ‘Cold War’, and the point is not to arm yourself with as many thermonuclear devices as you can get your hands on, but instead to land the most good blows and defend against those same blows from the opponent. A deck that is consistent but light on bombs will play out better than a five-color mish-mash trying to get the most of their Niv-Mizzet splash into Savage Twister splash into Moroii splash into Lightning Helix. Colored mana is at a premium and you have all these nice dual lands… but you also have the highest density of colored mana to fuel your spells ever, with so many gold cards and ‘virtual gold’ cards like Boros Fury-Shield requiring mana of both colors to actually contribute to the game in a meaningful way.
This is a pretty swingy format. The person who builds the best consistent deck with the most powerful consistent cards in their two-guild or three-guild three-color combination will probably be the one checking “two,” while their five-colored, mana-screwed with “only” four colors of mana opponent will be the unhappy recipient of the number “zero” at the end of the match. You’ll need all the mana fixing there is – Signets and double-lands and Terraformers or Civic Wayfinders – to just get your deck to work right with just three colors, because you’ll have your “White” cards in your base-Gruul deck be Selesnya Evangel and Thundersong Trumpeter and Lightning Helix. Your “Green” cards may be Transluminant and Gruul Scrapper while your “Red” cards are Tin Street Hooligan and Ordruun Commando, and if you draw “just” Red and Green cards with no Plains you may still be at a severe disadvantage because you aren’t getting the most out of your cards. Drawing “just” Green and White is even more of a disaster than usual, because not only are all of your Red cards stranded, but with Lightning Helix and Thundersong Trumpeter as your splash cards who’s saying you can even cast your White cards?
Notice how many double-colored mana cards there are, or cards that like more and more of the mana of their colors? Hybrid cards can be splashed if you only have one of their colors, like having Djinn Illuminatus in your Red/Green deck without an Island. Double-Red is fine, but put that next to double-Green for your Selesnya Guildmage and wanting more and more Red mana for your double Pyromatics and you need to get your third color too? You don’t need just one Red, one White and one Green from your lands, you probably need double (or more!) of your main colors in addition to always drawing your splash in a timely fashion. You have dual lands to help smooth this out, at common no less, and you’ll probably have a decent chunk of them. But your deck will already be so greedy just for its three colors that splashing a fourth that you actually expect to have matter is just stupid too greedy.
Sometimes it will work. Sometimes, you won’t have a choice, and you’ll just have to pray to the mana gods that you’ll lucksack your way through it somehow because if you don’t drop bombs like they’re going out of style then your weak filler cards will have to shine and frankly nobody ever intended for Restless Bones (?) to overpower your opponent. If Card Twenty-Three is Faith’s Fetters where the other guy has Wild Cantor, but they’re base Red/Green and you’re running the Fetters off of Orzhov Basilica, Selesnya Sanctuary and Boros Signet plus a Plains in your Black/Green/Red deck, I’d be counting the early beats from the Cantor before telling the opponent what a n00b they are. “Nice deck!” as you take Mourning Thrull beats all you want, when your fourth or fifth color never appears.
A case in point about greed: in a Draft earlier this week I got a pretty saucy Red/Green deck, with a White splash for Tolsimir Wolfblood, and came up just a little bit short at the end but had plenty of Signets and double-lands. It was an easy decision to make to go the double-splash route, playing sixteen lands and two Signets and still having really good access to my two main colors with three sources each for both splash colors. I got a little lucky and got Tolsimir more often than I didn’t, and always had the double-land or the Plains to cast him by turn six or seven when I did draw him…
Creatures (16)
- 1 Goblin Spelunkers
- 1 Bramble Elemental
- 1 Carven Caryatid
- 1 Greater Forgeling
- 1 Root-Kin Ally
- 1 Tolsimir Wolfblood
- 1 Transluminant
- 1 Bloodscale Prowler
- 1 Ghor-Clan Savage
- 2 Gruul Scrapper
- 2 Izzet Chronarch
- 1 Scab-Clan Mauler
- 1 Tin Street Hooligan
- 1 Ulasht, the Hate Seed
Lands (16)
Spells (8)
Things went really well, drawing Red and Green mana without an abundance of Plains, but always at least one by the time Tolsimir appeared. The deck drew mana smoothly, and on the play the double-lands hardly seemed to slow the deck down thanks to the many places in its mana curve. It can naturally develop a “hole,” with five two-drop cards (three men, two Signets) and only three three-drops. By playing a decent number of Signets instead of real lands, and having enough double-lands that the chances of drawing at least one are reasonable. Thus, your chances of getting “free” help into the five or six mana range is also reasonable along with some acceleration into the four- and five-mana sweet spot of the deck.
But what about the Izzet Chronarchs? I’d figured that, with a pair of pump spells and three Pyromatics, I’d have a decent shot at getting at least one Pyromatics each game. If not then there would still be something for the Chronarch to return, and with two Izzet Signets and an Izzet Boilerworks that my Blue mana was basically “free” as part of my Red mana count.
Simply put, it was greedy. The card splashed for potentially had great synergy with my deck, letting me re-use a powerful card that can pick off more than one decent card if used properly in combat, or “at the worst” wait a bit as I deploy Wildsize or Seeds of Strength at an appropriate time before getting that pump spell back for me. What happened in actuality is that I never drew the “Chronarch and Blue Mana” combo, and more than one game I’d left the Chronarch stranded in my hand because I was greedy in deck construction, thinking I’d abuse my triple Pyromatics and just keep getting them back over and over and over.
The moral of the story is that I had a Boros Signet I could have played instead of one of the Izzet Signets, and at least one match was lost because I drew a Blue-mana card when I had no Blue mana myself. Any Red or Green creature would have sufficed by at least doing something in play, rather than being stuck in the hand. For consistency’s sake, if I’d just run two less-impressive, less flashy cards actually in my colors I’d have evened out the mana on my White splash, still run a second Signet and third double-land to get the same acceleration and free boost from five mana to six, and not have shot myself in the kneecap trying to make my deck more powerful. Admittedly, if it was double Stratozeppelid I’m sure everyone would tell me that I was right, that the cost-benefit analysis game of throwing in more splash colors off a good mana base that already includes three sources of colored mana just off the cuff worked out in my favor. Those bombs would win every game they were deployed almost by themselves, and probably wouldn’t cost me if I drew just one card I couldn’t cast over the course of an average game.
Don’t be greedy; the costs during deckbuilding are higher than they look. Sometimes you won’t have a choice but to try and get a little lucky in your attempts to win, but basing your game-plan on drawing four colors every time like it’s nothing is not a good plan.
Lesson Two: Build For Consistency
This is a related lesson, but perhaps a harder one to get a handle on. Without all the good mana-fixers from Ravnica as populous as they were in the prior Limited format, it’s going to be hard to get variable-colored mana fixers that can get you whatever you need at the moment. Silhana Starfletcher, Civic Wayfinder, Farseek… and that’s it. This is also assuming that what you need is something Farseek can get you, which does not include a second Green source unless you opened fifteen bucks in your Rare slot. You’ll have access to a lot of two-colored fixers, with all the double-lands and Signets, but these aren’t ‘true’ mana fixers that can suit your needs of the moment, just another part of the puzzle for saturating your deck with good colored mana. This saturation really adds up as you add more and more of it, which is why I’d always be pretty happy to have a mana base like John Moore’s 8-0 deck, with an on-color dual, an on-color Signet, and one each of his three on-color double lands. This truly is the mana of the Gods, because with ‘just’ seventeen sources, sixteen lands and a Signet, he has access to twenty total mana, and access to nine Green sources, seven White, and six Red, with Green his largest main color and the following actual cards in his deck:
Conclave Equenaut
Sandsower
Graven Dominator
Devouring Light
Seed Spark
Indentured Oaf
Tin Street Hooligan
Fiery Conclusion
Galvanic Arc
Dowsing Shaman
Elves of Deep Shadow
Elvish Skysweeper
Scion of the Wild
Fists of Ironwood
Scatter the Seeds
Wildsize
Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi
Selesnya Evangel
Tolsimir Wolfblood
Centaur Safeguard
This has an awful lot of colored mana in it, and it’s split with only “a little” Red, but still six cards using Red mana, five requiring it because Gruul Guildmage is “fine” with “just” the Green ability active. You’ve also got seventeen Green mana symbols, three of which can be Convoked down and three of which can be spent with other colors of mana, and fourteen White mana, one of which can be spent with other colors of mana and five of which can be Convoked down. Since you’d need a White source to be able to Convoke at all, let’s drop the double-colored Convoke costs to just one colored mana each, which gives you a discount of one Green mana and two White. We just won’t count the Guildmage as a Red card, and consider its double-Green cost to be easier if you draw a Mountain; meanwhile we won’t count the Centaur Safeguard at all, since all but three mana sources can tap to play it one way or the other.
Lands/Signets tap for:
Green: 9
White: 7
Red: 6
Spells ask for:
Green: 15
White: 11
Red: 5
Let’s look at the hidden costs! Seed Spark and Tin Street Hooligan both prefer Green mana around, and so you have an artificial Gold card instead of a White or Red card. So you really want seventeen Green, and that’s a lot of colored mana thanks to the numerous ways in which getting your guild mana have been made to count in this Limited format. Some of these cards require up to three colored mana, and sure you may hold your Congregation at Dawn until later in the game when you can turn three random draws into three stellar topdecks that fit what you need, but it’s still very color-intensive, and that’s one of the symptoms of what makes Ravnica/Guildpact limited so difficult.
This is the format where you want to try and squeeze more colors into your deck? Remember my Draft deck where I got greedy instead of trying to be a bit more consistent?
Lands/Signets tap for:
Green: 8
Red: 9
White: 3
Blue: 3
Spells ask for:
Green: 16 (15 if you reduce GG to G thanks to Convoke)
Red: 13 (only counting Pyromatics once!)
White: 2
Blue: 2
My Red is even greedier than it looks, because it wants RRR or RRRR later in the game so that Pyromatics can be ridiculous instead of merely good. My splash colors don’t ask for much, and if I don’t draw a splash card I don’t suddenly have six other cards that are less than optimal, just the Transluminant wanting a little extra something-something. And this is the deck I decided got a fourth-color Blue splash because it was “free”?
Be aware of your hidden costs, and make sure you’ve had a good long look at just how much colored mana your deck is asking for before you decide you can splash just that little extra bit further. A solid mana curve and a good mix of creatures, removal and tricks that you can cast with reasonable ease will probably take you further than adding in a Mountain plus Flame Fusillade combo in your Blue/Black/White deck. It’s a new format with a lot of different interactions and rules, and it looks like things have changed so drastically from what we once knew that you can get away with anything if you count the mana carefully and tweak the deck to squeeze in all the bombs. The lessons of the past still apply here, however… and those lessons can be powerful with all the comes-into-play-tapped lands and heavily colored requirements in all of the decks. Beat down on a curve and apply pressure aggressively, and build your deck to do so instead of nudging in that one Blue bomb or the one splash of White for Lightning Helix as your fourth color, and you will be glad that you did. Consistency is key, and the format is not forgiving on your mana to begin with.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“In 1812, Madison was mad,
He was the President, you know.
Well, he thought he’d tell the British where they ought to go.
He thought he’d invade Canada,
He thought that he was tough.
Instead we went to Washington,
And burned down all his stuff…”
~~the Arrogant Worms, “The War of 1812”