Writing a weekly column about the seasons of tournament Magic is pretty easy, at least for me. The work it takes to be informed about an article is the kind of work I want to be doing anyway, to be heads-up on the latest formats. Having worked my way back the game again after a long absence, my level of seriousness about tournament Magic is higher than when I stepped away. It’s a self-perpetuating thing, once you get reasonably motivated. Having had another week since writing my last article to play with more Guildpact cards, I’ve formed some stronger opinions on what’s going on. With the first week of Ravnica-Guildpact Sealed Deck kicking off, the time for preparation and in-depth thought is upon us. People who have figured out the puzzle will be at the advantage in the early weeks with the new set.
Guildpact brings two distinct stresses to the Limited environment: the interaction of new mechanics with the ones we are already familiar, and the strain of unaffiliated guilds pulling your options in even more directions than before. A lot of people are saying that Ravnica-only Sealed Deck and Draft was among the most banal formats ever. Stick to your colors, get your thirteen to sixteen creatures, your seven to ten spells, and a clean manabase. Those people were wrong before they said a word, or put a finger to the keyboard: this past weekend’s Grand Prix is the proof. Yes, in the end the only Boros deck in the Draft table won, because Boros can just do that. This pleases me, as I was one of the few happy Boros drafters who stuck to their guns throughout.
The final Draft was indicative of a “banal” format, with a lot of double-guild Green blends floating around and some solid action from the non-Golgari, non-Selesnya decks that avoided the six-man struggle to have the winning Forests in their deck. If you look further through the coverage, though, you’ll see some bizarre and wacky stuff, such as solid Blue/Green draft decks and enchantment-oriented control decks abusing Drake Familiar, with only eight creatures in the deck… two of which were Familiars, unable to come into play without some help first, and at least one more was a 1/1 while yet another was a Wall.
The following deck went 2-1 at the Draft tables of Grand Prix Hasselt… but that is two more matches won than would be expected by conventional thinkers:
Creatures (8)
- 2 Drake Familiar
- 1 Junktroller
- 1 Mindleech Mass
- 1 Sparkmage Apprentice
- 1 Surveilling Sprite
- 1 Tidewater Minion
- 1 Vedalken Dismisser
Lands (16)
Spells (16)
[Raphael himself explains this Draft strategy his Premium article, published today. — Craig]
More unexpected perhaps is the 3-0 deck drafted by Quentin Martin to get him into the Top 8. It too abused Auras, the class of card that we are going to see even more of with Guildpact’s Magemark cycle in the mix. It’s a deck with exactly three cards that can remove an opponent’s card from play: one Peel From Reality, one Elvish Skysweeper, and one Vedalken Dismisser.
Creatures (18)
- 1 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Snapping Drake
- 1 Auratouched Mage
- 1 Belltower Sphinx
- 2 Civic Wayfinder
- 3 Drake Familiar
- 1 Drift of Phantasms
- 1 Elvish Skysweeper
- 3 Selesnya Evangel
- 1 Selesnya Guildmage
- 1 Siege Wurm
- 1 Vedalken Dismisser
- 1 Vinelasher Kudzu
Lands (16)
- 9 Forest
- 3 Plains
- 3 Island
- 1 Dimir Aqueduct
Spells (6)
Ravnica by itself is already an interesting format that rewards creative thought and a willingness to look at things from a lot of different angles. Guildpact goes one step further by ensuring your deck will almost always be working with those different angles; the Green decks have a hearty mix of Dredge, Bloodthirst and Convoke mixed in among their creatures, for example. All reward you for different styles of play, from balls-to-the-wall aggression to grinding exhaustion strategies. Take this for every color and square it, because things just got a whole lot more complicated, kemosabe.
Looking at each of the colors in a vacuum, regardless of the Gold cards that drive the decision to mix one color with another, there are some very interesting things playing out. White’s trio of abilities are Radiance, Convoke, and Haunt.
The White Radiance spells provide a small bonus (Wojek Siren), destroy enchantments (Leave No Trace), or are a bomb-level effect that can enable an alpha-strike or gain a totally one-sided advantage in combat (Bathe in Light). White’s Radiance cards alone are somewhat controlling, about waiting for the right moment, which meshes nicely with the ‘slowed down’ feel of the other two mechanics, Convoke and Haunt. White can’t really power out its own Convoke cards, but the few it has by itself don’t require an unusual strategy to make them work; Conclave Equenaut can come down on the fourth turn regularly if you’ve played two creatures or accelerated your mana, while Conclave Phalanx rewards a board that involves quite a bit of creature stalling.
Haunt is a card-advantage mechanic that lets something good happen twice, like Absolver Thrull’s destroy-enchantment effect. The longer the game goes, the better chance you have of being able to capitalize on your Haunt effects in a profitable fashion.
White’s role previously was in a pair of decks that liked to provide beatdown pressure fairly consistently, with one fast pressure deck archetype (Boros) and one slow-building deck archetype that provided more threats than could easily be handled (Selesnya). The ability to get pressure on early is still present, but Guildpact rewards a deck with a slower game-plan. A few things have changed about White now that we’re adding Guildpact, and the first thing that has completely flip-flopped is the playability of Leave No Trace. In Sealed Deck, the enchantment theme of the block is going to play out pretty consistently in one deck or another, with Pillory of the Sleepless adding another Pacifism-type enchantment at Common that people will seek to play. Also, the Magemark cycle rewards over-use of enchantments by providing a boost to go with each Galvanic Arc or Flight of Fancy. There are obvious bombs, like Halcyon Glaze and Glare of Subdual, which definitely warrant attention out of the sideboard… but with at least two and often three color decks in Sealed, it’s quite likely that there will be a pesky enchantment that you’d be happy to kill. Some of them are quite nasty, as anyone can tell you after having three creatures Pilloried at the prerelease. If you have a choice between Sundering Vitae and Leave No Trace, the more flexible card is clearly better, but Leave No Trace may be just good enough to play in Sealed Deck now. Absolver Thrull is better, but if you don’t get one and are going White, Leave No Trace might be worthy of your consideration as it can do an awful lot for two mana. If Leave No Trace can be good, then Seed Spark is probably quite a bit better, Green mana or not.
Another thing that has changed has been the ‘correct’ value of Caregiver. Having played with this little man in more Boros and Selesnya draft decks than I can even begin to recall, I can say with fair certainty that he is better than the world gives him credit for. He aids Convoke, helping to drop Equenauts quickly, and as a 1/1 for one mana with a combat-relevant ability he can attack for a few points early, contribute to the game as it goes longer, and enable your Haunt cards. I thought Caregiver was sorely underrated before it became clever to put creatures in your graveyard at a time of your choosing, and with that added role it is definitely one of White’s quality support cards.
Green has a likewise complicated role, sharing the Convoke mechanic with White (and getting the better portion of it), sharing Bloodthirst with Red, and Dredge with Black. Green’s Convoke cards work very well together, and enable each other while still doing good things for your deck. A turn 3 Scatter the Seeds into turn 4 Siege Wurm can still be quite unpleasant. Bloodthirst is happily enabled by Green’s tendency to have early drops and a swarm of token creatures, with Silhana Ledgewalker and Dryad Sophisticate being the two best additions to Green’s early drops thanks to how well they can help enable your Bloodthirst cards. Red’s Bloodthirst cards are on the margin of playability by themselves, like a 3/1 for three that can be an undercosted Giant Cockroach if you try hard enough. Green gets things like a 5/6 for five mana, if you connect to the face first.
The addition of Dredge to this makes for an interesting counterbalance; Green gets started early, and if things work out right it’s going to be difficult for you to stop the trees that are pointed your way from connecting with your noggin. This gives us a few early points of damage and a solid mid-range beatdown strategy, with the pressure building after the first three turns are over and continuing to be quite dangerous so long as a few weenies are left unhindered… or for so long as you can’t afford to block the tree coming at your face. Dredge adds very few mono-Green cards to this, but two of the four are absolutely ridiculous. “Draw a 3/3 every turn” or “draw Moldervine Cloak every turn” are options that allow for some very solid beatdown pressure as you keep throwing your fat monsters into the grist mill and seeing what survives. Moldervine Cloak: fair and balanced, just like The O’Reilly Factor.
Using the same logic of “enchantments are taking over the world,” Sundering Vitae may actually be good, and Nullmage Shepherd is officially the stone cold nuts in Sealed Deck, innocent-seeming as she may be. Nobody innocent dresses like that, though. Speaking of Magic cheesecake and an odd shift in the world thanks to a continuing theme focusing on enchanting your creatures, have you seen Gatherer of Graces yet? Stick any of the five Magemark enchantments on her, and we’re talking about an attacking 3/4 on turn three. Maybe unblockable, perhaps with First Strike, or even a 4/5 when blocked might just be good enough. Nobody is giving this little lass credit, but sooner or later they are going to have to. It’s amusing that the flavor text seems to be talking about not wearing clothes on a card where the woman’s clothes look like they could have been painted on, but hey… I’m easily amused.
Enchantments are a much stronger theme now that Guildpact is around. There is a common enchantment in every color to reward you for enchanting your creatures in bulk, some of them providing strong incentives. As the format is slowing down in general, Gaze of the Gorgon is going to be better than before overall, as you will have more opportunities to make good use of it. Thanks to Green’s mounting aggressive tendencies — Bloodthirst — the game of “do you block?” just got a lot harder for the opponent. You’ll see a lot more early blocking that will expose good creatures to the Gaze, without mana up or any means of protecting against a trick. By that same logic, Gather Courage’s stock has risen, because it’s the most efficient trick you can squeeze into your beatdown curve. There will be more bad early blocks than before that will let you capitalize on this spell.
Green plays out well when clogging the board to control the ground, or when attacking with everything to squeeze the opponent for their life points. It can generate token swarms and use them for early damage, turn on fatter-than-average creatures thanks to Bloodthirst, or tap them like Elves to power out fat earlier than you have a right to. All of this is backed up by a card-quality option, and drawing a decent card every turn is generally better than drawing off the top of your deck when you’re trying to beat your opponent in a war of attrition.
Moving on to Red, you share the aggressive nature of the Bloodthirst ability, but the rewards for doing so are not as clear-cut as they were with some of the simply Green bloodthirsty creatures. Red’s bloodthirst men are small, and don’t get an impressive bonus for the work you put in, but then it’s just rewarding what you want to do anyway so it’s not like there is great cause for complaint. When this ability gets to Rare instead of just talking about the common and uncommon slots, it gets downright insane. Green has more Bloodthirst effects all told, and it also uses them better, so for the most part your Red might as well not have Bloodthirst at all until you add the rest of the Gruul clan on top of the one common, uncommon and Rare that Red gets with that particular mechanic. Red shares Radiance with White, and gets a better deal on Radiance than White does with both Incite Hysteria and Cleansing Beam ending games out of the blue. Nullifying blockers for a turn is usually good enough to finish an opponent, even when they are at a decently respectable life total. Radiance card number three is Wojek Embermage, who has always been secretly good but didn’t look so because of his misalignment with the Boros Legion — he’s a control creature, rather than part of an elite beatdown team. Radiance card number four of four doesn’t exist. Move along, nothing to see here.
From Blue, Red gets a taste of the Replicate pie, and Pyromatics by itself changes things drastically by offering direct damage that can be split up as you need it. This lends both versatility and an option for card advantage that isn’t usually seen in most Red decks these days. Like with Bloodthirst, Red gets the smaller part of the Replicate pie, but just Pyromatics is good enough for me.
Radiance and Replicate work together unexpectedly, in that they accomplish similar things that work well side by side even if they themselves don’t combine well. Hold onto a Cleansing Beam and Pyromatics and you’ll see what I mean, when both of the cards in your hand can kill more than one worthwhile creature each. If used at just the right time, you can cause an opponent’s board to fold. They both call for you to pay attention to the things that matter most, to maximize your use of the card. leaving one color of creatures as non-problems is key, so you can use the rest of your cards to worry about the things that your Radiance spell won’t hit. Specifically killing only higher-toughness creatures with your creatures and other spells, clearing out the weak ones with one Replicated spell, is another option. Either that or just sweep away all the one- and two-toughness problem creatures in play, leaving you more room for the big ones to fight in. Both of these classes of spells are quite powerful, and that is something Red doesn’t usually get to see, because their power is subtle and intelligent instead of “just” aggressively efficient.
Bloodthirst goes very well for Red, who, regardless of its partnered color, has access to the most pinging effects and the most efficient little beaters. War-Torch Goblin and Frenzied Goblin are both excellent Red cards, and they start the aggressive curve that enables your Bloodthirst cards just by turning sideways. The Gruul-oriented cards mesh well with the Boros-oriented cards, in that they all want to be attacking; the Izzet cards provide the hint of control and complexity that can finish off an opponent who seems to have survived your first attempts to cave their skull in with a really big rock.
Red cards that, for some reason, don’t seem to get enough respect are Sell-Sword Brute and War-Torch Goblin. They start beating down hard early in the game. White and Green get 2/2’s for two in the common slot with a special ability, and even Black gets a 2/1 with a bonus for the same price. Red doesn’t care, turning sideways as fast as they can, and the actual downside on Sell-Sword Brute is that it takes people so long to realize they should be playing them and attacking as fast as they can. Red has the tricky cards to follow up an early attack and seal the deal when the opponent thinks they’ve stolen the game away from you, and these two common creatures help that plan immensely.
Smash may just be good enough for Sealed Deck, with everyone playing Signets, but nothing has changed to increase its value. It’s acceptable but not good as card twenty-thee, but Tin Street Hooligan is about a hundred times better. Speaking of underrated little beaters, the Hooligan packs a lot of potential, mixing an early beater with an Uktabi Orangutan, and the tempo swing of killing your opponent’s turn-two Signet and getting a 2/1 to attack with later may not happen often… but when it does, it’s devastating.
Rain of Embers is likewise much better than it gets credit for, single-handedly killing an entire swarm of token creatures. Every Green deck is going to have either at least some element for creating token creatures or some one-toughness creatures in their deck, and there are a lot of one-toughness guys in the other colors too. Mix with Wojek Embermage or Viashino Fangtail, or combine with Pyromatics to kill multiple creatures for less than usual, or maybe just go crazy with Black’s Orzhov Euthanist. As I said last week, the Euthanist is a highly underrated card, and that’s even after the fact that some people besides myself have perked their ears up and decided it’s really good. Viashino Fangtail has jumped from reasonably good to downright insane, now that it’s attached to more than just the one guild. Sparkmage Apprentice works well with the Blue/Red cards because every pinging effect adds up in an Izzet deck that gets stacked with them, as they combine to form something greater than each individual part of the puzzle. Most surprising of all is the value of a Torpid Moloch, because Blue/Red based decks have terrible early-game attacking creatures, and this is a very cheap blocker that can trade with four or five mana cards, so it negates early attacks and is very easily saved by Repeal… as the attacking player who’s going to smash their two-drop and three-drop into it are probably all too aware.
Black is next, and gets Transmute, Dredge, and Haunt as its key mechanics. Transmute is an excellent way of increasing your deck’s consistency, drawing your most important cards over and over again, while Dredge is an excellent way of drawing your best cards over and over again… how convenient. Black also has two graveyard-centric themes, so it can focus on a type of resource management that is somewhat different from the normal idea of ‘good’, throwing Stinkweed Imp in front of everything and taking excellent advantage of sacrifice effects like the Rusalka, Thoughtpicker Witch or Caregiver.
Black’s key dredge cards, Stinkweed Imp and Darkblast, are pretty solidly rocking, but don’t play anything close to the same role as Green’s Greater Mossdog or Moldervine Cloak. Along with the situationally-good Nightmare Void, you have recurring creature removal effects that can spend cards in your deck to kill creatures in play; often impressive in a close resource war. Green’s Dredge likes to attack, while Black’s likes to defend, or at least make living things into dead things. Transmute provides the ability to find the best cards over and over again, at a reasonable cost. The two Transmute spells with the most promising casting-cost to try and replace, Dimir Machinations and Shred Memory, are otherwise absolutely useless except in unusual corner-cases of the game, but such is the cost to having additional virtual copies of Last Gasp or Stinkweed Imp in your deck by Tutoring for them. Both of these abilities improve the consistency of your draw, letting you play the same cards over and over again, winning resource wars thanks to their inexhaustible Dredge cards while the opponent is stuck drawing useless lands.
Dredge already offered the reward for being able to sacrifice things for fun and profit, and more than one close Limited match has been won by a Golgari Rotwurm recurring anything at all. Haunt takes that occasional advantage and pushes it well into the next level.
Haunt is all about tricky effects based on creatures dying, and getting to choose exactly when that will actually happen, so much like White’s surprise use of Caregiver, Black’s Thoughtpicker Witch and Dimir House Guard becomes even more important thanks to their ability. Black doesn’t have Bloodthirst straining its conceptual abilities, and so there is not the same mad rush to block in the early game that let Gaze of the Gorgon move up in the eyes of the world in Green decks, but then Black has far easier ways to kill creatures. Carrion Howler also probably squeaks up in value thanks to the cycle of Magemark enchantments, with the Black Magemark being reasonable with this Hatred-spewing creature and both Blue and Red making life downright unpleasant for the defending player.
Haunt lends card advantage options if you can harness it properly, while Dredge and Transmute offer card consistency as the game goes longer. This is before you give the color some of the best removal spells available in the format. Black is a pretty solid winner here, whatever your second color is.
The last of the five colors is Blue, sharing Transmute with Black, getting the lion’s share of the Replicate cards, and… that’s it so far. Transmute finds the same thing over and over, while Replicate casts the same thing over and over. These two abilities work together to combine card quality and card advantage, finding your threats with consistency and using your most powerful spells for obvious card advantage. Dizzy Spell can fetch “fair” cards, or it can fetch Mark of Eviction. The reasonably-playable Muddle the Mixture turns into two-mana creatures or spells, and Drift of Phantasms turns into three-mana things if you don’t need a flying five-butt blocker.
As far as synergy with Ravnica cards, Peel from Reality got better by a reasonable margin and should be treated accordingly, thanks to a decent chunk of Guildpact creatures with excellent comes-into-play abilities. Maybe you’ll go nutty with Izzet Guildmage, spending three mana to bounce one additional creature of theirs, and the same creature of yours, for a fake copy of Vacuumelt. Likewise with all of the Replicate options, Remand has gone clearly up in value, simply because of the ability to play your Replicate spell, make copies, and return the original to your hand to repeat the process for fun and profit. Flight of Fancy goes up in value because it is the best of the cycle (that doesn’t negate an opposing permanent) in the same color as the most aggressive Magemark aura, and Lurking Informant remains under-appreciated, despite the many harsh lessons that have been given by his mystical ability to summon nothing but lands to the top of the opponent’s deck.
Blue was already strong in Ravnica, though it was under-utilized, and the cards that work best with Guildpact Blue are obvious for setting up a Blue/Red deck. In case it hasn’t been said already, Lurking Informant is awesome if you can spare the mana, offering an alternative win condition if you hold the board. Far more importantly, the Informant neuters your opponent’s draws if he is left unchecked. This is good in Black’s colors, but Blue/Red can have serious problems dealing with a Green deck that gets to draw normally from its deck, simply due to the difficulty that Red removal faces when killing a tree… never mind the second or third Tree to come down.
For the Gold cards, you’re on your own for the moment. I don’t consider them as important to discuss when it comes to knowing how the colors play out, because the guild cards all follow the parent guild’s theme and philosophy (and often use its mechanics). Knowing how each color stands and interacts with itself is more important, because by looking at the color as a whole you can see where they might have common cause even without the Gold cards gluing them together. Black is about deck consistency and the potential for card advantage, while Red is about manipulating the situation to use its power; Red’s pingers work very well with Black’s toughness-reducing effects and Orzhov Euthanists, for example, while your average Sealed Deck will normally draw your eye away from the three remaining off-Guild color teams of U/W, U/G and B/R. Knowing these synergies beforehand could help if your Sealed Deck start with Viashino Fangtail, Wojek Embermage, Rain of Embers, Sparkmage Apprentice, Darkblast, two Pyromatics, two Orzhov Enthusiast, Plagued Rusalka. Natural synergies will occur even without Guild influence. Different abilities share a natural affinity for each other’s strengths in maximizing their potential, like the mutually synergistic Dredge and Haunt mechanics. Both are very Black and have things in common… but one is also found on White cards while the other is on Green cards, so you could have some Dredge/Haunt action going on in your Selesnya deck.
Sealed Deck is always difficult to begin with, but with Ravnica Block’s overload on new mechanics and unexpected interactions, things are more difficult than before. It’s hard to know which Lands to play in your deck, and how to correctly gauge the power level of the “double lands” that each Guild has in its common slot (or the cycle of “Karoos” as they are coming to be known). In Sealed Deck, you have starter and two boosters to work with, but in Draft you control your fate. Draft lets you pull off truly wacky things, like drafting a base Orzhov (B/W) deck splashing two-color bombs like Savage Twister (R/G) using only Gruul Turfs and Gruul Signets. Perhaps that is a bit of an outrageous example of what you can do with Signets and Karoo-lands, but it’s generally accepted that Signets are good and can smooth your mana and even replace real lands sometimes… but people seem scared to include more than one or two Karoo-lands in their decks.
Recently, I’ve had as many as six.
It can be difficult to get true card advantage in Ravnica Limited. The most powerful creatures and spells in the format are the ones that take out another card with no additional cost, or draw a card to replace themselves. Wildsize is a ton better than Gather Courage, and it’s not because it gives Trample for two more mana. “Draw a card” is a magical word when your spell is already doing something else. Tin Street Hooligan, Steamcore Weird, Keening Banshee, and Vedalken Dismisser are all highly valued for their ability to remove a card from play, while providing a reasonable body and the potential to be re-used with bounce spells. Vedalken Dismisser/Mark of Eviction is one of the most powerful combos in the format, if you can get it to work. Hex is ridiculous if it ever does any better than killing three of your creatures and three of theirs. Extra cards are hard to find, and so we rely on things like card quality advantage (Dredge) or card velocity advantage (Convoke, Replicate) to make up for this. One subtle way to get card advantage is to play more double-lands than the opponent. This lets you make your eight-drop off six total lands, thus effectively being up plus-two cards. In some cases, as with the Replicate spells that are so hungry for mana, this can be turned into a literal card advantage, but otherwise you can make some sacrifices on time advantage with comes-into-play-tapped lands to enjoy another easy source of card quality advantage: feeding expensive spells with fewer land drops.
Some decks are just inherently greedy for mana. There are cards in every color and Guild combination that reward you for having mana at your disposal. Guildmages like having more mana around, if nothing else, and making your six-drop without drawing a sixth land is a very sweet way of cheating. Double-lands fix your mana, too! The common perspective is to play double-lands in your color combination, or to help enable a splash color, but if your card pool has nice Replicate spells or perhaps a seven- or eight-drop that otherwise wouldn’t make the cut, there are worse things you could do than shave a Forest out of your Gruul deck for a Golgari Rot Farm, and a Mountain out of your Gruul deck for a Boros Garrison. I’d happily do both, without any benefit for having access to the extra color, so long as my deck was not hyper-reliant on its beatdown curve flowing smoothly in the first three turns. The sacrifices made in earlier turns can easily be recouped when you can play Streetbreaker Wurm while you still haven’t drawn your fifth land.
By all means fix your mana with them, every time, but consider playing more than your usual two. A deck with six double-lands and ten basic lands still only needs to draw one basic land to cook, and can quite feasibly get to five mana off three lands, where other decks would be discarding five-drops spells with a grimace.
A word of advice: if you’re doing this, play first. You’ll need the tempo advantage swinging for you instead of against you, and if you end up drawing you’ll have to discard on turn two anyway.
There is synergy and interaction to be mined in Sealed Deck play that goes beyond (or sometimes against) what is currently accepted to be “wise” or “true”. Speed is killer, but consistency can be deadlier still, and any number of things that can provide card advantage (either virtual or actual) if used properly… but also if thought of properly. When Ravnica first came out, Last Gasp was clearly a powerhouse common, and the argument was strong and clear for “best common.” By the end of just-Ravnica limited, Selesnya Evangel was pretty much accepted as the most powerful and therefore best common in the set, and that’s a card that people dismissed as unplayable just for being Green/White when the set first came out… myself included. With the addition of Guildpact, the rules of the game have changed, because the format got a lot deeper and a lot more complicated.
Anything that requires a player to make a decision favors the better player, and every single Sealed Deck will be asking a half a dozen difficult questions. Some will be answerable only by player preference, like choosing between Izzet and Boros as your main Guild and splashing the other to complement the beatdown or tempo-control strategy of the first. Some will be about how crazy you are willing to go with your mana to get your best spells online, squeezing in legends and bombs across guild lines. Some will be about how you squeeze in your percentage points, adding in a double-land that doesn’t immediately seem like it will profit you because it doesn’t add a helpful second color of mana… or not doing so, when you have learned in general that it is a good idea but that this specific case doesn’t warrant it.
The best advice for Ravnica/Guildpact Limited is to work on a deck that has a lot of synergy, instead of just dropping in fatties and bombs, because finesse can work well. (So can fatties and bombs, for that matter, but you don’t always get those.) A deck that doesn’t work well with itself is in for a lot of trouble, while a deck that feeds off of its own synergy doesn’t have to play the best cards to get the best use out of them. Become familiar with what can be done, and under what conditions you’ll get away with things, because a lot of different situations can come up. A little bit of confidence from having faced such a problem in the past can help immensely.
One more thing to remember: it’s a race to twenty life points, not a race to fifty minutes. By all means try and finish your matches early… but don’t short-change yourself on deckbuilding time.
Sean McKeown
[email protected]
“I know that I will never be politically correct
And I don’t give a damn about my lack of etiquette
As far as I’m concerned the world could still be flat
And if the thrill is gone then it’s time to take it back
If the thrill is gone then it’s time to take it back…”
— Meat Loaf, “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”