I wanted to end on a little bit of Time Spiral Sealed, since I’ve been building decks for people over the last several weeks and noticed a few recurring themes.
First off, though, I encourage anyone who is PTQing this season to actually make use of the Wizards PTQ Top 8 lists that are up on the official website. I know it seems incredibly counter-intuitive to study lists of draft decks, but the fact is that some color combinations keep winning more than others—U/W and U/R, for example. But perhaps even more importantly, you want to get an idea of which decks keep 2-1ing top-8s. Those are the decks that look really good on paper, and which you’re quite comfortable with when you draft them, but don’t seem to be picking up envelopes.
I’m looking at you, Black-Red.
I understand that there are a couple of problems with this system — whether, for example, it’s not the archetype itself that’s racking up more 3-0s but rather is the tendency of better players to draft U/R. That’s fair. I’m not trying to say that you should always always always avoid a sick B/W deck if the cards come your way; I just think that there are some very telling trends in that database that you’d be doing yourself a disservice to be ignorant of.
Okay, back to Sealed.
This format, more than any Sealed format in recent memory, is defined by bombs. There are twice as many rare slots to open something ridiculous, so you can be sure that pretty much everyone you’re up against is going to have at least one card that will be a complete blowout if it resolves. It’s a double-edged sword, though, because that means chances are you have a nuts guy yourself.
The existence of a lot of bombs entails a couple of different things, but what it boils down to is that in the good old “power-consistency” continuum, you’re going to have to shift towards power. This is because, in a nutshell, you’ll go up against power more consistently.
I’m sure everyone’s familiar with this, but it bears repeating just for the sake of clarity: The idea behind running a more consistent build versus a more powerful one is that you want to minimize your chances of beating yourself through things like manascrew, and maximize your chances of capitalizing on an opponent’s bad draw. With a higher average quality of decks, though, beating yourself doesn’t really become that big of a problem. After all, if you sacrifice too much quality, your opponent’s going to beat you regardless. Similarly, even comparatively bad draws from the opponent are going to smash your sick curve-out if he’s got a couple of bombs and you’re casting redundant Ashcoat Bears.
It’s also more important than ever to make sure to splash your off-color removal. There are just too many cards that absolutely positively must be dealt with. Not all of them are Stormbind, either; even the 5/6 flash Wurm is going to become a problem if all you have in the way of getting past it are one or two combat tricks.
(Incidentally, I like that guy a whole lot.)
But this principle is the reason that Alex Kim just 0-Xed a PTQ this past weekend despite having what appeared to be on the surface a decent G/W deck. He had an incredible mana curve, Thrill of the Hunt, two Fortifies, and a Tromp the Domains. But barring Tromp, his card quality was just so far inferior to his opponents that they’d always manage to get back in the game even though their back was against the wall the entire time. By contrast, I qualified for Prague in RRG Sealed playing straight G/W without dropping a game all day. Obviously, Ravnica is different from Time Spiral – but that’s exactly my point! The types of decks that might have worked in the past aren’t necessarily going to cut it any more. Ravnica had its fair share of bombs, but not nearly as many as TS and not nearly as many of which just flat out won the game by themselves.
Also, I think the fast-paced speed of the TS draft format has led people to assume that TS sealed must be similarly quick. That’s not entirely true, both because you can’t draft a curve when you’re handed a sealed deck and because lots of the combinations that are plenty fine in draft aren’t all that tight in sealed. For instance, I love the aforementioned straight G/W deck in draft, but it’s also a lot easier to find fixers to splash removal and bombs. The R/U deck, too, is a lot more difficult to make work in Sealed because you can’t engineer a giant ridiculous Storm turn unless the cards are plopped down into your lap. So you’ve got a little bit more time and margin for error.
Finally, there are Slivers. These guys are so awkward in Sealed because everybody has a couple, and you absolutely don’t want to blow yourself out with them. At the same time, some (like Spinneret) are good on their own, and some (Watcher) you’ll need for your deck regardless of what they might do for the opponent. What this means, though, is that the generic normally-non-exciting guys like Basal Sliver and Venser’s Sliver actually become pretty good. They’ll usually have a couple of randomly relevant abilities, and occasionally your opponent just won’t be able to cast his normally-great Might Sliver or Fury Sliver because your men will be even better!
All right, that does it for me this week. Feel free to mail me with questions (or anything else) and good luck to America at Worlds. I’ve done a little work with these guys, but fob/neon/LennyB have been hounding their asses off at Tim’s and I’m hoping the effort’s going to pay off. Everybody’s talking about Japan and the Dutch, but I still think our good ol’ boys can bring home the Gold.
Well, unless our esteemed Editor has other plans. (No, he’s all for the USA – The Ferrett, speaking as the other white meat)
“YOU ESS AI! YOU ESS AI!”
-Zac