I’ll be honest with you all today. I wasn’t expecting to make it through the first stage of the Talent Search, so I was rather surprised when I was informed of my steady progress in the competition. I suppose it would be an act of treason on my behalf to deprive my audience of my punishing fire. However, in the interest of not being a one-trick pony, I’m going to try and regress the pun count this time and focus more on the content, which I hope will help cultivate your knowledge.
In response to audience requests, today I shall talk about how exactly I go about building my decks in Scars of Mirrodin Sealed. This format presents a different challenge each time you open those booster packs. In both Sealed and Draft, the board states can be incredibly complex to navigate, like trying to stumble through a fog thick as pea soup, and if you want to emerge unscathed, then you have to be prepared to think a lot about your deck and the interactions within. Everyone, it’s time for a treasure hunt.
This is a Sealed pool I recently opened in a Magic Online Sealed PE event:
I’m still trying to get my head around how to best present these Sealed pools to you, so please don’t condemn me in the comments.
First of all, I like to sort my card pool by rarity and see what powerful/awesome rares I’ll be required to utilize. So, we have two Asceticisms, Argent Sphinx, Shape Anew, Strata Scythe, Argentum Armor (Armour), and Wurmcoil Engine. The Asceticisms don’t particularly excite me, although I’d play them if I were to be in green. Argent Sphinx is a very solid 4/3 flier even without its metalcraft ability letting it dodge anything nasty pointing its way. Shape Anew is bad juju, and I wouldn’t play it ever. The real power in this pool comes from the three artifact rares.
Strata Scythe and Argentum Armor are just absolutely bonkers equipment giving insane bonuses which the opponent must answer as soon as possible. These will make my deck regardless of what colors I find myself in. However, the real star of the pool definitely has to be the Wurmcoil Engine. This guy just demolishes opponents and can turn a losing race into a profitable one. Extremely hard to kill, this guy always makes my deck unless I can find a compelling reason not to play him.
Our rares aren’t very telling in what color we should be playing. Argent Sphinx is nice enough and all, but he isn’t going to force us to play blue. One of the big things about Scars of Mirrodin Sealed that makes it different from previous (non-Mirrodin) sets is the lack of rares that provide a magnetic attraction to their color. Another issue is that because of the artifact-heavy nature of the set, you could have a solid unsplashable bomb in one color, but the rest of the cards in that color stink to high heaven. So these dilemmas cause a fair amount of duress for people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Now that we know what rares we have, it’s time to look at the rest of the cards that we could see ourselves playing. For this I choose to use the “sort by color” option in the dropdown menu. The only white card that I could see myself playing at all is the Revoke Existence, which is easily splashable. Black has some solid three-drops, but Flesh Allergy is pretty average on the whole. We want power not solid beaters. Green, despite having two Asceticisms, can’t back it up with the quality of its other cards. Red has some very solid spells with Embersmith, Shatter, and Turn to Slag, with an honourable mention to Bloodshot Trainee (I also spell honour with a ‘u’; once again, deal with it).
Blue provides us with a solid control base with some bounce and manipulation enchantments and lets us play Argent Sphinx. If we’re heavier on the artifacts, then Vedalken Certarch also becomes a solid playable. From my preliminary evaluation of the colors, I feel like blue and red are going to be our best options for our two playable colors. However, we still need to take into account our artifacts, which provide the bulk of our card pool. One thing I like to do is sort the artifacts that have a colored cost or synergy in with the same colors and evaluate them as a whole. So if we look back on each of our colors but include their related artifacts, we find that nothing really changes. Sylvok Replica is a splashable card, but aside from that, the artifacts haven’t changed my mind from trying to play blue and red.
In our artifacts, we can see two Copper Myr which enables the Sylvok Replica splash, two Tumble Magnets (which I have an extreme magnetic attraction to), Replicas of the Vulshok and Neurok variety (I find it rather strange that a lot of the racial groups on Mirrodin end with the letter ‘k’), and Golem Artisan. Golem Artisan is another great creature that I certainly will want to play because of his abilities which can swing a game very quickly if left unchecked. From there, though, the quality of the cards declines swiftly. We have some decent equipment such as Strider Harness and Bladed Pinions to help our guys survive combat, as well as enabling our larger creatures such as the Argent Sphinx and Wurmcoil Engine to become weapons of destructive force.
We have a lot of artifacts that are tailored for the infect deck; however, as you can see from the rest of the pool, we don’t have the infect creatures to support the strategy at all. However, Necropede on his own is a very solid defender, able to threaten creatures much larger and take out a Myr on his way out. So, we’ll want to play Necropede if possible, as he can also wield a Strata Scythe rather well and threaten a poison victory. Golem Artisan can also send Necropede flying through the air and give him huge buffs if required as well.
Our Spellbombs don’t necessarily help pick our colors; however I do enjoy the uses of Panic Spellbomb as a cheap artifact for Embersmith, an easy card draw spell, and a way to help force a huge creature wielding a Strata Scythe through. Horizon Spellbomb is certainly a possibility for enabling a splash as well as general mana fixing; however I think we’ll be low on room for fudging around with too many Spellbombs or cute splashes.
As we look at the current cards we’ve selected, we seem to lean towards a U/R control-style deck. What we need to do next is cut down to our 22-24 cards for our land count. From here, one of the first cards I cut is the Bloodshot Trainee; now whilst he’s fantastic when you have him active, he’s a fairly average 2/4 dude when you don’t. Since we only have two pieces of equipment that will get his power over the minimum four-power threshold, he gets the boot.
An observation I made at this point is that since we have zero on-color Myr, we’re going to need the full seventeen land in this build. The Myr will help accelerate us into our fatties and equipment, whilst providing for metalcraft. I normally only cut land for my Myr if they’re on-color and/or enabling a splash.
Another reason for keeping the seventeen lands in the deck is Strata Scythe. We need to keep the land count reasonably high to help us curve into our Wurmcoil Engine and Argentum Armor, but we also need an extra land we’d be happy to throw under a Strata Scythe. The deck also has some pretty hefty mana requirements with the triple blue for Volition Reins and our colorless Wurmcoil Engine and Argentum Armor, so we don’t want to diminish our chances of hitting each land drop.
From here it looks as though we’re only playing three red cards, the Turn to Slag, the Embersmith, and the Shatter, which are all great reasons for being in red. Because of the splash nature of the red, I’m hesitant to run the Sylvok Replica and some Forests, which would dilute our mana base. Considering we want to play the red cards when necessary and our triple-blue requirements for Volition Reins, I think sticking to the two colors is fine. We can side in the green if we’re really desperate for more removal, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary. The amount of removal in the deck is acceptable.
Usually when I’m building my Sealed Decks online, I use their “Add Lands, Suggest” feature mostly to give myself a rough idea of the land distribution. In this case it was eleven Islands, five Mountains. Now, I’m sure you’re saying, “But Baz, you said you wanted to play seventeen lands,” and that’s true. I had 24 cards in my deck at the time I hit the suggest button; I decided 11-6 was perfectly acceptable, so I added an extra Mountain to my pool, and then I hit the submit button.
This is the deck I eventually registered:
Yes, I did indeed register 41 cards. Mostly because I’m a tad forgetful. I made the grim discovery when I started game 1 with a 41-card deck. The card I cut to get the deck down to forty was the second Disperse. I wasn’t terribly optimistic about my chances at making Top 8 with this pool. Sure I had awesome cards like Wurmcoil Engine, and the format is indeed slow enough that Argentum Armor can become relevant, but I’d need to draw and play well to join the ranks of the Top 8.
“Are you prepared to do what is necessary?”
In response to my first article last week, a lot of people commented on the mistakes I made in building my GP Trial Sealed pool. I know I made mistakes, and I never claimed to have built the pool perfectly in the first place. I don’t believe it’s possible to build a pool that everyone the world over will think is built correctly. Everyone has their own opinion on how the deck should have been built, whether or not they have the qualifications to back up their opinions, and everyone will think their way is the only correct way (I admit, I’m no different sometimes).
What most people fail to take into account are the results. What matters is this: “Did the deck get the necessary results?”
If the deck doesn’t get the necessary results, then it’s time to take a step back and reevaluate your pool, from the beginning. Don’t take the matches you’ve already played into account, because if you change your deck, you cause a cascade effect that makes every match already played irrelevant. If you decided to play a W/R Metalcraft deck and went 4-3, then you reevaluate the pool and decide you should’ve played U/R Metalcraft or G/B Infect instead; then you’re potentially altering every match you played that day, so the results become irrelevant. A changed deck means potentially changed results, which ends up possibly changing future pairings.
Saying, “Oh if I played the infect deck instead, I would’ve made Top 8 because I would’ve won rounds 1, 3 and 5” is a logical fallacy. Sure, you could’ve won rounds 1,3, and 5, but how do you know you still would’ve won rounds 2, 4, and 6 as well? You can never know for certain. If you think you should’ve played the infect deck, then why didn’t you sideboard into it? Players sideboard into entirely different decks all the time. I see players try to build multiple different decks from their Sealed pools and sleeve them up ready for action at a moment’s notice. It’s a common occurrence.
In the case of my GPT deck, I went 5-0 and got the byes I wanted. The deck helped me do what was necessary. Yes, there are always lessons to be learned even in victory, but there’s no point trying to criticize how a Sealed deck’s been built in retrospect. Sure, you can learn what you should do next time and become a better deckbuilder, but there’s no next time with Sealed pools. Once the tournament is over, that’s it. The pool gets packed up and sorted into random card boxes or left at the venue for the cleaners. Trying to figure out how to improve on a Sealed deck that won a tournament is a waste of resources. The deck performed and got you the results you needed. You can’t ask for more than that.
In the case of the Sealed PE pool I posted above and the deck I ended up registering, do you think I was able to do what was necessary? I lost my first round comprehensively; after that I rattled off four wins in a row, only losing again in the penultimate round. Once I lost that sixth round, I felt like I was almost certainly out of contention, and I spent the rest of the time nitpicking every single card choice, trying to figure out alternate builds.
After I won game 1 of round 7 I decided not to give into my traitorous instincts and just removed the Disperse like I had almost every other round. Soon enough, after a feral contest, I had a 5-2 result, which I figured would probably put me at about ninth place. I spent all this time obsessing over replays and card choices in that sixth round, figuring that if I’d won that round, I would’ve been in a better position to make Top 8 with a 5-2 result assuming I lost in the last round instead. I was so focused on this that I literally jumped out of my chair when this draft screen popped up, and I realized I’d made my second PE Top 8 in three days. (I made the finals of a Draft PE two days earlier.)
While I felt that the Top 8 draft was a total train wreck, I didn’t let that discourage me from trying to play the best Magic possible. I managed to draft R/W Metalcraft which is one of my favorite archetypes in Scars Draft; however I had to play cards like Necrogen Censer and Golem Foundry maindeck to make up my 24 playable cards. I ended up beating a G/U deck that wasn’t particularly focused, and my opponent wasn’t too happy about losing to Golem Foundry. I lost in the semifinals to the same person who beat me round 1 in the Swiss, who had a brutally sick infect deck with Mimic Vat and Fume Spitter to totally smother my weenies.
At the end of the day, you have to take a step back and try to find lessons in every tournament, whether you succeed or fail in your goals. There’s always something to learn in Magic, and you never ever stop learning. I’m certain that the pro players who dedicate more hours in a week to Magic than most players do in a month never stop learning about the game. Learning from your mistakes is one thing. Applying the lessons learnt to your next event is crucial if you want to get better at the game.
Until next time, see beyond the mistakes and focus on the results.
Baz
@thatdamnaussie
on Twitter
BazD on Magic Online
ThatDamnAussie on YouTube
P.S. I said I’d try to regress the pun count. I hope the content is still better than last time.