I’m pretty excited this week. While I love to share tales from the Pro Scene, or more esoteric pieces on the nature of the game and the human condition, I must confess to a little bit of envy when I look at the weekly offerings of people like Patrick Chapin. I mean, let’s be honest, if you want to win a Pro Tour, or even a Pro Tour Qualifier, here’s a good bet that Mr C’s column is a 100% Appointment To Read each week, and I’m not foolish enough to think that’s the case with this here column. I like to think of you, my noble readers, as true connossieurs of the game, people who appreciate the journey as much as the outcome, and who actually genuinely think that imagining a world with no countermagic, a sixth color, and five free mulligans per game to be a bountiful use of one’s free time.
Therefore it is with a mixture of surprise and pride that I bring you this week an offering that I am almost certain will improve your understanding of Shards of Alara Sealed Play. My confidence is based not on some devastating insight into the format using my skill and judgement, but rather my access to a highly tasty set of numbers. Specifically, I have by my side no fewer than 53 decklists, representing 100% of the Pro Tour Qualifier field that I judged last weekend. This missive will therefore, unlike most weeks in my company, be short on opinion and long on cold, hard fact.
Statistics, that’s what I’m bringing you this week, tastefully and artfully subdivided into all sorts of questions that you either wished you knew the answers to, or at the very least should have the answers to. Facts and figures coming your way today include the prevalence of:
Removal spells
Countermagic
Tap Lands
Panoramas
Mythic Rares
Planeswalkers
Mana Fixing and Acceleration
The Battlemages
Artifact and Enchantment Destruction
5-Power Fatties
Play-Me Rares
Basic Land Use
Shard Archetypes
For each section, I’ll explain what I was looking for, and why it might be useful to you next time you sit down to play for a place in a PTQ Top 8. However, like all good statisticians, I need to tell you a little bit about my data sample. I’ll get the joke out of the way by reminding you that this was an English Pro Tour Qualifier, and that therefore only 3 of the 53 attendees had any clue how to play the game at anything even approaching FNM level. Whilst this is a grotesque exaggeration (in my experience the standard might be a little lower than a Pan-European Grand Prix, but not by a significant amount) it is true that some of the people in the sample were playing at their first PTQ, and indeed only their second tournament ever, following the Shards Prerelease a few weeks ago. Does that make their contribution to the overall data invalid? World-class data management companies might argue so, and weight the ‘answers’ given by my constituents against a whole range of factors, including age, longevity in the game, DCI ranking, Pro Tour appearances, and so on. I don’t propose to do this. The former National Champion gets exactly the same attention paid to his deck as the 14 year old just starting in the game. You should bear this in mind. Equally, there are any number of choices made during deckbuilding that most of us would regard as Mistakes. One player majoring in Red elected to play only one of his two Resounding Thunders. I think we can all admit we might have been tempted by the second, just in case another removal spell turned out to be good. One player who made the Top 8 was also majoring in Red with eight spells, yet couldn’t squeeze in a ninth, Magma Spray. Frankly, this seems to me to be almost certainly a deck registration error, since I can’t actually imagine a scenario where the Magma Spray doesn’t make the cut. Still, in the stats it goes down as unplayed. You should bear this sort of thing in mind too. Finally, almost anything can be proved by statistics, provided you choose to massage the data in the right way. It will only give you the right answers if you ask it the right questions. So let me spell this out. Here’s what these numbers truly represent:
These numbers are the raw data compiled from what 53 unique people thought about the Shards of Alara Sealed Format at the first Pro Tour Qualifier for Kyoto in the UK at Bradford on the 11th October 2008, using their own skill, judgement, and unique perspectives on the game.
That’s it. These numbers don’t tell you what cards are playable, or good, or what wins, or won, nor do they tell you how to correctly build your next Sealed pool. They are, however, to anyone with an interest in getting under the hood of a large sample, extremely interesting, sometimes illuminating, sometimes puzzling. Having studied the numbers for the last couple of days, I can say with absolute certainty that I know a ton more about Shards Sealed than I did on Saturday morning.
So it’s almost time for the words to stop and the numbers to take center stage. But just before, let me ask you some questions about the Format, and let’s see if your perceptions mirror my sample of 53.
1.What was the most played Shard?
2.Are there any removal spells so powerful that every single copy in the building got played, regardless of the colors the player was majoring in?
3.How many Panorama should you play as filters, rather than fixing?
4.Are Obelisks auto-includes as acceleration?
5.Should you be watching out for Mythic Rares?
6.Are tap lands more popular than Panoramas?
7.Should you run Artifact or Enchantment removal?
8.How ‘fat’ is the Format?
9.Which rares scream Play Me?
10.Was triple Red enough to stop Predator Dragon being played?
That should give you something to think about. And now my friends, over to the Arabic system of numerals for top quality information.
Basic Land Use and Shard Archetypes
It seems like a good place to start, since the colors people play totally underpin the prevalence of the cards within those colors. First, the actual number of basic lands played:
Forest – 219
Mountain — 197
Plains — 175
Swamp — 98
Island — 70
Let’s start out by reminding ourselves that with so much fixing around there are going to be far fewer basic lands around than normal. This total, 759, works out at 14.3 basics per person, a full 3 lands fewer than in a typical 17/23 ratio in a 40 card deck. Here are the averages across the lands:
Forest — 4.13
Mountain — 3.71
Plains — 3.30
Swamp — 1.84
Island — 1.41
Let’s break down the numbers a bit further. Of course it’s entirely possible to splash colors without a single appropriate basic, via Obelisks or Tap Lands. However, the Panorama cycle tends to lend itself to a scenario of one basic plus two Panorama as a 4th/5th color splash.
Forests — The most prevalent, with only 12 of the 53 players running fewer than 3. 11 used 3 or 4 (which depending on other land configuration could be heading towards a Major color) and a full 57% of the field (30/53) ran 5 or more. We can say that 77% of the field ran Green as more than a splash, which takes us into the territory of Ravnica Sealed, where at one early all-Rav Grand Prix a mighty 87% of the field ran Green in some fashion. Shame there’s no Forestwalk around really…
Mountain — 41.5% majored in Red (22) with a further 19 players running 3 or 4 basics, taking the ‘more than a splash’ total to 77%, exactly the same total as for forests. As we might expect with splashable removal, only 4/53 (7.5%) of the field considered it was worth running 0 Mountains, comfortably the lowest figure among basics. That incidentally raises the viability of Goblin Mountaineer, who should be gash, but may not be on this evidence.
Plains — Despite the presence of splashable removal like Oblivion Ring and Resounding Silence, 17/53 (32%) ran 2 or fewer Plains, including 9 who didn’t use any. 16 (30%) used White as a support color, while a further 20 ran 5 or more, sitting it just behind Mountains as a major color, but a long way behind the undisputed champion forests.
Swamp — Gulp. Traditionally the second color of removal with Red, Black fared very badly, with a surprisingly high number (43.3%) refusing to run a single Swamp. Another 14 ran a miserly 1 or 2, fuelling presumably splash removal, while only 10 used Black as a major color.
Island — Blue may be the best color in Magic, but it sure isn’t in Alara Sealed, at least according to these numbers. A straightforward majority of players (27/53) didn’t touch the color for basics, and whilst 23 played between 1 and 4, only 3/53 (5.6%) put Islands front and center as a major deck component. With Kathari Screecher and Cloudheath Drake the big two at Common (and yes I do use that term slightly ironically) it’s not a major surprise that so few Islands came to play.
How about Shard Archetypes then? With the three leading lands being Forest, Mountain and Plains, we could expect Naya to lead the field, and of course it does. Even so, the numbers that were strictly three-color Naya builds was extremely high, at 41% (22/53). Here’s how the Shards stack up:
Naya — 22
Jund — 5
Grixis — 5
Esper — 5
Bant — 3
Yep, Naya had more decks in the tournament than the other four Shards combined. Of the rest, 5 decks ran at least one of all five basic lands, harking back to Domain days in Invasion. A further 6 were spread across at least four colors (with a fifth sometimes available via fixing). The most extreme example of this was the player who relied on just 9 basic land in his deck — 4 Mountain, 3 Forest, and a singleton Plains and Island. That’s some serious fixing going on in that one, my friends. The stats are rounded out by an old school two-color special, featuring 8 Forest and 8 Plains. Whilst this may demonstrate that a base-two color deck is viable, that doesn’t show that it’s a good idea, just that somebody somewhere thought it was. With our overall map of the format established, and understanding the implications for individual cards, let’s turn to some specific areas of the Format.
Removal Spells
Quite how we define Removal is an interesting question. So interesting, that I’m not going to address it here. Clearly there are few absolutes. Vindicate is about as pure as Removal gets, since it has minimal situations where it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin. However, even something like Vindicate can make you look stupid as you aim it at an Algae Gharial or Empyrial Archangel. I suppose Wrath Of God tends to take most of the guesswork out of whether creatures are actually going to the bin, but then, as usual, there’s an answer to everything, in that case having a Darksteel Colossus or other Indestructible. In short, second-guessing whether a piece of removal will actually get the job done is a fool’s errand. I’ve tended therefore to be generous with marginal cards that may only infrequently directly destroy a monster. Equally, there are some cards that are quasi-removal without actually removing the creature from play. I’ve always considered Pacifism as broadly removal, despite the fact that playing it against Vithian Stinger is less than stellar. However, the oh-so-marvellous Coma Veil doesn’t make it into my list. Yes, I could have collated every single card in all 53 pools, but I chose not to. My next sentence was going to be ‘so sue me’, but some of you are American, and therefore might. Here’s the list of ‘removal’ I’ve examined:
White — Oblivion Ring, Resounding Silence, Scourglass.
Black — Blister Beetle, Bone Splinters, Executioner’s Capsule, Fleshbag Marauder, Infest.
Red — Bloodpyre Elemental, Magma Spray, Resounding Thunder, Skeletonize, Soul’s Fire, Vithian Stinger.
Multicolor — Agony Warp, Blood Cultist, Branching Bolt, Cruel Ultimatum, Violent Ultimatum.
I’m sure if you think about it for a moment, you can understand that we have a decreasing amount of data to work with by Rarity, with Common cards most likely to reflect their statistical average in terms of appearance within pools, and allowing for the least individual quirkery in deck selection. Mythic Rares are vastly more susceptible to random choice, individual skill level, a secret hatred of the word Elspeth, and so on. That said, here are the numbers:
90% + played — Resounding Thunder, Vithian Stinger, Branching Bolt.
80-90% – Oblivion Ring, Resounding Silence, Bloodpyre Elemental, Magma Spray, Soul’s Fire.
70-80% – Skeletonize.
60-70% – Executioner’s Capsule, Cruel Ultimatum.
50-60% – Scourglass, Bone Splinters, Violent Ultimatum, Fleshbag Marauder.
40-50% – Blood Cultist.
30-40% – Blister Beetle, Infest, Agony Warp.
The mental aberration of playing only one of the two Resounding Thunders apart, the Red removal spell topped the pile with 26/27 in the room finding their way into main decks. At 93% (26/28) Vithian Stinger was undoubtedly one of the most popular 0/1s since the last one (Tarmogoyf!). With Forests leading the way, it’s understandable that Branching Bolt, despite being multi-colored, took third place. With 23/27 (85%) I am astonished that four players couldn’t find a reason to play Oblivion Ring. Somebody explain to me the circumstances in which making a space for this in either spells or manabase is going to be the wrong call. Please. Mind you, I value removal super-high, and therefore I’m pretty surprised that 5 people ignored Magma Spray (20/25). The Bloodpyre Elemental was correctly identified as a 5 casting cost sorcery speed removal spell, rather than a bad bad monster, and across 6 rounds I never saw a player physically let go of one after casting it before sending it direct to the bin. 11/15 players used Skeletonize, and that also feels on the skinny side for a removal+guy package. Executioner’s Capsule suffered, one presumes, from being Black, rather than one suggestion I heard that there were so many Black monsters around that it was rendered sub-optimal. I don’t buy this, and neither should you. Cruel Ultimatum only had 3 copies in the room, and 2 got played. Although this is a tiny sample, I suspect the numbers won’t be far off true, since you really do have to shoehorn it into those three colors, and as we know, finding reasons to play Blue are right up there with finding reasons to move to Baghdad. I think the numbers on Bone Splinters are light, since I saw it do a ton of good work, especially in collaboration with tiny homonculi, Battlemage tokens or even Goblin Assault tokens. Fleshbag Marauder also seemed to be good whenever I saw it in action. Perhaps this is the kind of card to run as a splash, something that’s fairly counter-intuitive, but nonetheless possibly correct. The three at the bottom of the list are puzzling. In total there are 36 X/1s in the set, meaning Blister Beetle is unlikely to be missing a target, especially when you consider dropping him post-combat to turn a trade. Yet only 8/21 (38%) were played. Infest is potentially awesome, although only 5/13 (38%) thought sufficiently so to justify the double black. In some sets, that double mana commitment would be a hurdle, but a single swamp plus any number of tap lands and Obelisks make this less of a stretch than normal. Frankly, I would work quite hard to get a boardsweeper into my deck. As for Agony Warp, the two least popular colors combined, so that explains only 9/26 getting played, but if you can you really should, since this basically reads, ‘Kill your guy, wait a moment for combat damage to resolve, kill your other guy’ for two mana at instant speed. That’s a vastly superior deal to the often only one monster killer at 3 mana at sorcery speed Branching Bolt, which was played almost always.
In total, 263 removal spells were played out of a possible 361. That’s 72.8% of the available resources. On average that stacks up as 4.96 pieces of removal per player. If we call it five, we’re looking at roughly 1 piece of removal per eight cards drawn. Put in those terms, it’s easy to see why threats are easier to find than answers. If the game lasts somewhere in the region of 7-10 turns, you can expect your typical opponent in this format to have no more than 2-3 pieces of removal, and that figure goes down even further if we talk about authentic quality removal (this is a movable line as previously discussed, but I think we all understand that Resounding Thunder is quality removal while Blister Beetle is not). Of the top eight removal spells by popularity, there were a total of 179 played, averaging out at 3.37 per player. That’s roughly 1 card in 12, so you can expect only 1-2 of these spells to factor into any given Sealed game. That suggests that within a single game framework, removal is going to be very scarce, and that cards which help you reach those removal spells (Elvish Visionary, Gift Of The Gargantuan, cycling etc) are good times.
Countermagic
Remove Soul sometimes sees play in base set Draft and Sealed play, because it’s cheap, not a double color commitment, deals with monsters infinitely more expensive, and doesn’t often require you to skip a turn to keep the mana available. Here our options are the infrequently a hard counter Spell Snip, the double blue Cancel and the rare, double Blue and tri-color Punish Ignorance. All of these have sound reasons for not playing them, and yet on the other side of the coin there are an avalanche of spells that want countering. Planeswalkers, mythic rares, gigantic fatties, even Goblin Mountaineer can be a worthwhile target (don’t ask.) So how many counters got played? I think you’ll be surprised:
Cancel — 2/29
Punish Ignorance — 1/6
Spell Snip — 0/23
That’s a combined 3/58 or 5%. More importantly that translates into only 1 in 17 players running any form of permission. Make no mistake, this is a format where you can cast your spells with a statistical near-certainty of having them resolve. Of course, that makes the case for including counters rather better, since nobody outside the rarefied air of Pro Magic (‘hmm, we both know permission is hideous. You have left two Blue sources open to represent your ability to Cancel, yet all sense dictates you can’t be playing it. You are French, which means you probably value it higher than you should, but you are not Guillaume, which means I should assume you are not running it. But I can afford to play around it, despite the near-certainty that you are not running it. Unless you are. Your turn.’) will see it coming in any way. I should point out that Force Spike for three mana continues to be utter toiletry under all but the most peculiar circumstances. Nonetheless, if I’m playing blue at my next PTQ, I will make room for Cancel, since it will be the hardest of hard counters.
Tap Lands
Coming soon, the Common cycle of Panoramas, but first their Uncommon brethren. How inconvenient is it that they come into play tapped, effectively robbing you of your land drop for the turn? According to the numbers, hardly at all. In total, 70 tap lands were opened, and 59 (84.2%) were played. Here’s the breakdown:
Arcane Sanctum — 9/14
Crumbling Necropolis — 13/15
Jungle Shrine — 12/14
Savage Lands — 10/11
Seaside Citadel — 15/16
With only one of the big three colors represented, Arcane Sanctum suffers, and although that’s true of Crumbling Sanctuary (only red of the big three) that has the added virtue of aiding a Black splash. It seems that however Aggressive decks might be, there’s almost always room for these uber-fixers.
Panoramas
The good news is that these don’t come into play tapped. More good news is that you can use them for mana straight away, albeit of the generic kind. They offer excellent flexibility, whilst occasionally presenting a player with a difficult choice — do I fetch my one and only swamp, or a second forest for my double mana cards in my main color, or do I let that take care of itself? Often overlooked by newer players is the ‘thinning’ aspect of such cards, taking out another blank from your deck and increasing the chances of drawing gas. On the face of it, the only reason not to play with these is if you’re concerned that finding initially generic mana is going to hurt you. Thing is, that would suggest your manabase is stretched, and therefore you need all the fixing you can get, which in turn means playing the Panoramas. In short, I can find few reasons not to play them. The numbers somewhat disagree:
Bant Panorama — 15/24 (62.5%)
Esper Panorama — 16/27 (59.2%)
Grixis Panorama — 19/27 (70.3%)
Jund Panorama — 23/26 (88.4%)
Naya Panorama — 21/26 (80.7%)
In total, of the 130 available Panoramas, only 94, or 72.3% were played. This seems far too low to be correct. Disabuse me of my illusions in the forums, by all means. You might expect Naya to be top of the pile, but with those three colors being predominantly main rather than splash, there was a tendency towards making splashes work rather than finding additional main colors, hence the prevalence of Jund, which features not only the highly-splashed red removal, but also the hardly-played as main islands and swamps. Again, something for you to hypothesise about. When should you not play any Panoramas that you have in your pool?
Mythic Rares and Planeswalkers
As usual, let’s start with the statistical reliability warning. These are all very fragile numbers, and we would probably need a sample the size of Grand Prix: Paris this coming weekend to get reliable numbers. Here’s the snapshot however. Including the Planeswalkers, there were 27 Mythic Rares opened on the day. Of these, 15 saw play maindeck (55%). Godsire (1/1), Hellkite Overlord (2/2), Sharuum The Hegemon (1/1), Sarkhan Vol (2/2) and Ajani Vengeant (2/2) were all impossible to resist, while lone copies of Elspeth, Knight-Errant and Tezzeret The Seeker were left on the bench. All the others saw a mixture of playability, with Kresh The Bloodbraided, Prince Of Thralls and Sedris The Traitor King all suffering from their particular tri-colorness. Whilst many of these 15 are exciting in Sealed play, their statistical rarity suggests that you should rarely (no pun intended) factor them in to your thinking. A possible glaring exception to this is Hellkite Overlord. Red and Green are both extremely popular, and the Hellkite only requires a lone black, something frequently accomplished almost ‘accidentally’ via Obelisk or tap land, without recourse to a Panorama plus swamp combo. Maybe Magic players are in part romantically hardwired into playing with Dragons, or maybe it’s something more rational like 8/8 flying, trample and most crucially haste that forces the hand. Either way, mythic or not, this is one rare that you should be aware of as you pass the turn on 8 life or less. One other note here. With only 4 planeswalkers in maindecks, the authentic flavor of the super-men and women coming to your aid was definitely preserved, and because they are genuinely new to the game, the wow factor was definitely present. Perhaps down the line we’ll come to view Tezzeret and Co as just yet another (yawn) Garruk in Elves or Ajani (the original) in Kithkin, but for now, players were leaning across to see what the freshly-summoned mythic planeswalker was going to do to them, and that’s a nice touch. Good job R&D yet again.
Mana Fixing and Acceleration
I thought quite carefully about whether to separate these out, since they are of course two different things. A Panorama is definitely a mana fixer, but doesn’t accelerate you in any way. An Obelisk will mostly be a fixer, though not always, whilst it will always accelerate you by a turn (even if it takes you from 13 mana to 14). There are circumstances under which a card like Lush Growth could be ‘acceleration’ if, for example, you enabled a second mana of a color that let you cast a double-cost spell that turn. It seemed sensible therefore to group all mana issues together. First, the non-Obelisks:
Drumhunter — 10/12 (83%)
Druid Of The Anima — 21/27 (78%)
Exuberant Firestoker — 7/13 (54%)
Sacellum Godspeaker — 2/4 (50%)
Lush Growth — 4/20 (20%)
Keeper Of Progenitus – 0/5 (0%)
No real surprises here. It’s almost certain that the acceleration that comes with Drumhunter and Exuberant Firestoker is entirely incidental to the reason for playing either of them. Drumhunter has the three best words in Magic (‘Rich Hagon Wins’, sorry, ‘Draw A Card’) while the Exuberant Firestoker has rather fine synergy with anything beginning with 5. The Druid is of course the holy grail of mana fixing for the most popular archetype, providing as it does all of the big three colors in one neat package. A certain illustrious Editor of our mutual acquaintance is happy to submit that Lush Growth should never be as high as a 23rd card, so four people failed the Ed Test (‘What would Craig do?’). As for the rare Keeper, it’s no surprise that none of the five ‘lucky’ recipients attempted to break his inherent balance. Now on to the Obelisks:
Bant — 8/26 (31%)
Esper — 13/26 (50%)
Grixis — 11/20 (55%)
Jund — 12/23 (52%)
Naya — 12/25 (48%)
Apart from Obelisk Of Bant, these are all broadly similar in usage. As for Bant, we’ve already established the reasons behind a lack of popularity. However, I believe all these numbers are on the low side. The total here is 56/120, and that’s 46.6%, or just 1.05 per player. In a Format positively foaming at the mouth with gigantic monsters and spells, wouldn’t you want to make room in most decks for more than one of these? Of course there are builds that actively don’t want or need them, especially highly curved Aggro decks with things to do on turn three, not that there are that many candidates in that slot — perhaps more another two-drop plus Magma Spray. Still, to me these feel underutilised, since the face to the fatties seemed to define many, many games. Your opinions actively sought.
The Battlemages
These intrigue me. As 2/2s for 3 mana, they’re poor, so you’re only playing them for their abilities. But which abilities? And do you play the Battlemages if you’re only using them for one ability rather than both? And are any of them worth splashing for, always assuming that somehow they are indeed a splash, whilst allowing free access to the ability colors? Here’s what the players made of them:
Bant Battlemage — 6/12 (50%)
Esper Battlemage — 3/15 (20%)
Grixis Battlemage — 4/14 (28%)
Jund Battlemage — 8/11 (73%)
Naya Battlemage — 10/14 (71%)
Two clear divides. In truth the Naya Battlemage isn’t super-exciting, but benefits from being in the big three colors, and the red ability is frequently moot, since a 2/2 tapper for three is more than acceptable. The Jund Battlemage also has a preferred mode, generating Saprolings far more often than whittling away a dwindling life total. The Bant Battlemage does surprisingly well, but benefits from two abilities that are both straightforwardly good. Grixis Battlemage looks at its best while pretending to be a Merfolk Looter, but that demands access to both the least popular colors, a problem that besets the Esper Battlemage, who also really shines when activating off black rather than white. I believe that the Battlemages are one area where the stats are misleading, because they tell you nothing about how useful the cards were once in play. Whilst their smallness, cost, and awkwardness of ability-managing count against them, the white ability on Naya and green ability on Bant to name but two were frequent game winners. An overall played percentage of 47% (31/66) might be a little on the low side.
Artifact and Enchantment Destruction
Those four words neatly get summed up by one word — Narrow. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Narrow is used for a class of card that generally does something pretty well, but where that thing has only a small niche of usefulness. Shadowfeed would be a good example of a Narrow card. It won’t generally kill your opponent (Immortal Coil humor excepted), impact the board, change your opponent’s hand or life total etc. It will, however, remove exactly one card in a graveyard at a highly efficient cost, and give you a side bonus of gaining three life, which might or might not be relevant. It may not be Extirpate, but it certainly does what it’s meant to, nine times out of ten, or better. In Shards we have two cards in the A&E department. (that’s a joke reference to British hospitals, which 96.4% of readers won’t understand, and 2.45% of the remaining 3.6% will find funny, thus me providing a joke for, at a rough estimate +/-3%, 0.07 people.) New to Shards we have Dispeller’s Capsule, and coming back for more is Naturalize. While the Capsule has clunky written all over it, Naturalize has been a tournament staple for yonks in Constructed, so the question remains, does Artifact and Enchantment removal make the cut here? The numbers are interesting, but first, let’s see for ourselves via the spoiler list. Enchantments? At Rare we have Where Ancients Tread and possibly Goblin Assault, but since they’re Rare we’re not going to encounter them much (and incidentally only 1 out of 4 Where Ancients Tread got played this time around.) Uncommon only really has Necrogenesis, again marginal, while Common brings just one, but it’s a whopper — Oblivion Ring, a card you want to dispose of close to 100% of the time. Even so, hardly a reason to apply a narrow answer, just in case an Oblivion Ring comes calling. How about Artifacts? Well, in case you’d forgotten, we’ve got a much bigger list here, thanks to Etherium. Yep, every Esper monster is an Artifact. Of the 43 cards in the set that are Artifacts, here are the ones that I wouldn’t mind spending a card to put in the bin:
Common — Cloudheath Drake, Courier’s Capsule, Executioner’s Capsule, Glaze Fiend, Obelisk Of Everything, Sanctum Gargoyle, Steelclad Serpent, Tidehollow Strix, Windwright Mage.
Uncommon — Esper Battlemage, Filigree Sages, Metallurgeon, Puppet Conjurer, Tidehollow Sculler, Tower Gargoyle.
Rare — Quietus Spike, Salvage Titan, Scourglass, Sharding Sphinx, Sigil Of Distinction.
Mythic — Sharuum The Hegemon, Sphinx Sovereign.
Add in Oblivion Ring and you have 27 targets for a Naturalize or Dispeller’s Capsule. I believe that’s plenty to justify inclusion of an on-color Naturalize, although I’m less excited by the Capsule. Yes, it can be a dead card, but there are plenty of these Artifacts that can make a dead you, and even without getting greedy, dispensing with the services of an opposing Tidehollow Strix for two mana at instant speed seems fine. My friends, apparently I know nothing:
Dispeller’s Capsule — 2/27 (7.4%)
Naturalize — 3/23 (13%)
That’s a mighty 5 out of 50. If you like to play with Artifacts and Enchantments, you’d have loved this PTQ, because they were s-a-f-e spells safe. Help me be a better player, and tell me why what looks so wrong is actually so right. Are there really 23 cards better than Naturalize that often?
5-Power Fatties
Five Matters is one of the keys to this set, so let’s see how the enormous men fared.
Rockcaster Platoon — 5/13 (38%)
Yoked Plowbeast — 14/27 (52%)
Kederekt Leviathan — 2/5 (40%)
Archdemon Of Unx — 1/5 (20%)
Salvage Titan — 0/4 (0%)
Incurable Ogre — 7/29 (24%)
Ridge Rannet — 16/25 (64%)
Cavern Thoctar — 17/24 (71%)
Feral Hydra — 5/5 (100%)
Jungle Weaver — 20/26 (77%)
Mosstodon — 15/26 (58%)
Spearbreaker Behemoth — 2/3 (66%)
Bull Ceradon — 12/13 (92%)
Empyrial Archangel — 1/2 (50%)
Godsire — 1/1 (100%)
Hellkite Overlord — 2/2 (100%)
Prince Of Thralls — 1/3 (33%)
Rakeclaw Gargantuan — 15/25 (60%)
Sedris The Traitor King — 1/3 (33%)
Sharuum The Hegemon — 1/1 (100%)
Sphinx Sovereign — 1/2 (50%)
Woolly Thoctar — 11/14 (78%)
In total 150 of 256 fatties were played. That’s 58.5%, or 2.83 per player. Although 3 doesn’t sound like an especially significant number, other Sealed formats which had an average of closer to 2 fatties per player behave very differently. With two big men per deck, that’s effectively saying ‘one in each half’ (I know that’s not how any given game will necessarily work out, but that’s the gist), so a game that lasts 7-10 turns ie 14-17 cards deep may well not see a giant monster at all. With three in the deck, that’s one every 13 or 14 cards, so chances are that by turn 6 or 7 both players will have access to some big numbers. You simply must have a plan for dealing with improbably huge monsters, and that makes it all the more surprising that cards like Oblivion Ring and Resounding Silence were sometimes left on the bench, even allowing for white not being a main color for some. A few individual numbers that jump out:
Despite its fine ability, Rockcaster Platoon was seen as too slow and clunky.
One toughness put paid to Incurable Ogre.
Ridge Rannet benefitted from cycling, without which it would have been hideous. Nice design.
Despite double mana, Jungle Weaver was very popular.
Feral Hydra apparently screamed Play Me.
And so did Bull Ceradon.
Given its ability, the numbers on the admittedly tri-color Rakeclaw Gargantuan seem low.
Woolly Thoctar was great turn 3, but pretty good anytime.
And finally….
Play Me Rares
Which Rares simply would not be denied a place in the starting lineup, warping color choices their way? Here’s my esoteric little list. Some of them were obviously powerful, some I wanted to see what players made of them. You may find this collection a little irritating, since I’ve probably missed off your favorite. If you really, really care, drop me an email, and I’ll give you the numbers on a specific Rare of your choice. But only if you really, really (really) care.
Battlegrace Angel — 4/4 (100%)
Feral Hydra — 5/5 (100%)
Broodmate Dragon — 4/5 (80%)
Stoic Angel – 4/5 (80%)
Spearbreaker Behemoth — 2/3 (66%)
Cruel Ultimatum — 2/3 (66%)
Sigil Of Distinction — 2/3 (66%)
Tar Fiend — 3/5 (60%)
Scourglass — 2/4 (50%)
Sharding Sphinx — 2/4 (50%)
Violent Ultimatum — 2/4 (50%)
Quietus Spike — 3/6 (50%)
Hell’s Thunder — 2/5 (40%)
Vein Drinker — 1/3 (33%)
Where Ancients Tread — 1/4 (25%)
Gather Specimens — 1/5 (20%)
Archdemon Of Unx — 1/5 (20%)
Predator Dragon — 0/1 (0%)
Our sample is very small for many of these, but I do find it interesting that all four players presumably got about three cards into their pools for deckbuilding, saw Battlegrace Angel and went ‘that’ll be me playing White then’. Broodmate Dragon cropped up in a conversation about the value of Excommunicate (‘go on, put it on top of my library, I dare you’) while I saw all kinds of trickery with Quietus Spike, including the rather neat equipping a First Strike monster, resolving FS damage, then watching them lose half their life, before killing them with regular combat damage. Nasty.
Conclusions
None. That’s not what I’m here for. Sometimes.
As ever, thanks for reading,
R.