Hello all, it’s good to be back. I’ll give my excuses as to why I haven’t been writing for awhile, but if you don’t care you can just skip to the next paragraph. I got hit with an atrocious respiratory infection that had me laid up for almost the whole of January, and caused me to flunk one of my grad school qualification exams. I finally got better just in time for Grand Prix: Richmond, but when I got home from the GP my Internet access had been inexplicably cut off by my provider. So, I was forced to write at work, which causes the articles to come out a lot slower since, y’know, I occasionally have to do some working.
Anyway, something interesting happened to me at the last Maryland Pro Tour Qualifier, which motivated me to write faster. Normally, my PTQ procedure is no different than most people: I play until I have two losses, and then decide if I should stay in based on several factors (will an X-2 have a shot? Do I think I can make it to a prize or Top 8 slot given my deck? Am I tired of playing in this tournament? Is there a draft starting up that I would prefer to be in? Etc).
Sometimes this means I drop right after the second loss, sometimes it means I stay in until my third loss, sometimes it means I go on full-blown tilt and drop ratings points roughly equivalent to my father’s age. (Sadly, that last is what happened at GP: Richmond.) On rare occasions, such as the Maryland Ravnica/Guildpact Sealed PTQ in question, I decide to drop at 2-1. I’ve only done this twice, and in both cases it was because I simply hated, hated, hated the card pool I opened.
While building this deck I felt pulled in the direction of several different color combinations at once, which should not be an uncommon phenomenon to the PTQ veterans reading out there. It’s the nature of Sealed that sometimes some very spicy gumbo has to be left on the sideline: maybe in Onslaught Block you opened Rorix and literally no other remotely playable Red cards, or in Kamigawa Block you felt your deck was too fast to try and fit in some absurdly expensive legend. It’s always a tough decision to leave some off-color hotness on the sideline, but it’s especially tough these days because you’ll usually open plenty of playable cards in all five colors, along with just enough mana fixing to tempt you to splash them together in various combinations.
Sadly, my PTQ card pool got mixed up with some cards from my Richmond pool, so I can’t just list everything I opened for you. However, I can tell you the highlights of the Black/Green/White deck I ended up settling on:
My best creatures: Golgari Rotwurm, Shambling Shell
Fliers: Screeching Griffin, Conclave Equenaut
Removal/Tricks: Gaze of the Gorgon, Douse in Gloom
Late-game lockdown combo: Selesnya Evangel plus Thoughtpicker Witch
Mana-fixing: Golgari Signet, Orzhov Signet, Orzhov Basilica, Godless Shrine, Silhana Starfletcher
Interlude: Thou Shalt Not Worship at thy Godless Shrine
If anyone says, “at least he made his money back” because I opened a B/W dual land, I’m gonna hunt you down. I mean, it’s good to open expensive rares, no question, but I would have much preferred a non-money Limited bomb such as Skeletal Vampire, something that would have given me a better chance to win games. If I really need the duals that bad for Constructed I can borrow, trade, or buy; you can’t get match wins in a PTQ via those methods without risking a DCI ban. To paraphrase Tim Aten about Umezawa’s Jitte: I don’t look for dual lands in the pack like they’re freakin’ Golden Tickets, and it annoys me when people do. </Rant>
Back to the deck.
So of course, with three non-land cards and two lands devoted to working my mana out, I was mana screwed in my very first game of the tournament, stalling on two lands with a Starfletcher in hand while my opponent went turn 1 Elves of Deep Shadow, turn 2 Daggerclaw Imp. This put me in an especially rough position, because when I finally did topdeck my needed third land, I was already in a danger zone (life wise) and I needed to trade my Starfletcher for the Imp soon afterward. A sarcastic “nice deck” for me, and an actual “nice deck” for him.
The problem with my deck is that I didn’t have any of the cards in those colors you’d really like to open – no busted rares, the Rotwurm as my only creature with power or toughness at four or greater, no quality four-drops other than Screeching Griffin. My twenty-fourth card was actually Carrion Hunter, who is so bad a four-drop that just having him in my deck drives me to drink. I felt that it would have been impossible for me to win three in a row – or even go 2-1 for an amateur prize – against the bomb-laden decks that you see in the later rounds of a Sealed PTQ.
Now, that’s not to say that I think Ravnica Sealed is all about bombs, which is an opinion I’ve heard in the forums. I actually think the opposite: it’s all about building your deck correctly. With the right curve and the right spells, a good player can overcome an opposing deck that resolves a bomb or two. I actually think that my deck was very close to being one of those “no bombs, but all-around good” decks. With slightly better tricks or removal (say, a single copy of Pillory of the Sleepless) or some reasonable creatures to fill out my four-slot (say, Blind Hunter and Dimir House Guard), or even a too-costly rare like Sisters of Stone Death, I might have been positive enough about my deck to stay in the tournament. As it was, I just wasn’t very confident.
For example, in game 2 of the match I lost, my opponent simply played Moroii and suddenly I needed to draw runner-runner (one of my two fliers followed by Douse/Gaze) just to trade for it and stay in the game. Of course, I did not do so. It would have been the same if he had played Guardian of Vitu-Ghazi, or Viashino Fangtail, or Belltower Sphinx, or Streetbreaker Wurm, et cetera. The matches I won, my opponents simply did not come up with reasonable threats, either due to mana-screw or having bad decks. If they had, I would have been in a very bad way indeed.
Thus, I dropped and drafted – but not before I enlisted the opinion of other players. Former Maryland state champ Sean Vandover suggested that I had misbuilt and that U/R/G was probably the answer. Friend and teammate Rick Rust thought I couldn’t be faulted for playing the B/G/W deck because I had on-color Signets and bounce-lands, which works along the lines he laid out in his article It’s The Mana, Stupid! Eventual PTQ finalist Morgan Douglass told me to go away somewhere and die.
(That last one is a joke. I didn’t ask Morgan about my card pool because I figured his response would be something along the lines of, “Go away somewhere and die.”)
Interlude: Poker? I Hardly Knew Her!
I fully expect my earlier use of the phrases “full-blown tilt” and “runner-runner” to trigger some backlash in the forums about the overuse of poker slang. It’s a fair criticism. Poker is definitely overexposed right now, and if the backlash hasn’t already started, I would expect it to begin soon.
However, we can also embrace some aspects of poker in order to improve ourselves as card game players. I would argue that the word “outs” perfectly summarizes the concept of “possible cards to draw that would resolve this problematic board position in my favor.” The same goes for “tilt” to describe the situation where “My emotions are having a negative impact upon my play, even if I am unaware of it or unwilling to admit it.”
Also, hey, I like playing poker and I make a little money doing so. So if you don’t like the slang … well, one of your outs is the Back button.
Back to the deck.
When I went back to look at my card pool, some other cards caught my eye: Tidewater Minion with some juicy targets, such as Gelectrode and Thundersong Trumpeter; Izzet Chronarch times two, with instants and sorceries including Peel From Reality, Repeal, and Fiery Conclusion; and Vedalken Dismisser. I had noticed the possibility of U/R/x during the build period, of course, but I didn’t like it for a few reasons:
*Mana fixing, or the lack thereof. Of the various ways to support your mana in the Ravnica block, the only one this color combination would support was Izzet Boilerworks. I didn’t have any other signets or bounce-lands with the colors Blue and Red on them, and I had no generic mana-fixing such as Terrarion or Spectral Searchlight. This was an especially important factor because of all the double-color costs; besides the Minion, I tend to treat Boros cards like Trumpeter and Skyknight Legionnaire as though they have WW or RR in the casting cost for purposes of building my mana base, so that I’m sure to hit them early in the game when they’re at their best.
*What’s the third color going to be? This was a pretty important question, because I didn’t have nearly enough quality Blue, Red, and Izzet cards to go two-color. As I mentioned above, Sean Vandover suggested running U/R/G, but I couldn’t figure out what motivated him to say this. I had almost no mono-Green guys who were any good; I literally opened just two Green cards in the Ravnica part of the card pool, both of them awful, and Guildpact was only better because it had a Starfletcher. Similarly, my best Gruul creatures were Scab-Clan Mauler and Burning-Tree Bloodscale, who are good support guys but not exactly the lynchpins for a deck. Plus, my early curve was pretty lame even in G/B/W, and would have been even lamer in the U/R/G build, so those Gruul creatures would almost never have been bloodthirsted. If I had opened a Streetbreaker Wurm or similarly fat men, I might have agreed with Sean.
U/R/W was a better possibility, because I had the aforementioned Screeching Griffin, Equenaut, and Trumpeter, plus a Skyknight Legionnaire and a Boros Guildmage. However, I really dislike playing most Boros cards in Sealed because they don’t have any staying power – that Boros Guildmage may be a hot one on turns 2 or 3, but when the opponent plays Bramble Elemental or something similarly fat and I have only Peel, Repeal, and Fiery Conclusion to answer it, my two-drop doesn’t seem as special anymore.
*The creatures have gotten weaker. In the deck that I ended up running, at least Golgari Rotwurm is huge and Shambling Shell can make stuff huge. The biggest man in any U/R/X build would have been the Minion, and none of the other creatures would have had power or toughness greater than three, which is a problem. Some decks can overcome that problem with an amazing early game or good tricks, but I wasn’t sure my potential U/R/W deck was one of those.
However, even taking all of that into account, the Blue deck might have been the better choice because…
*Fliers. In a U/R/W build especially, I would have had more fliers than I ended up running. In addition to the Skyknight, Screech, and Equenaut, I could run a Surveilling Sprite and even a non-regenerating Tattered Drake if I wanted to. One thing that I’ve seen good Limited players do with bad card pools is simply fit in every single even remotely playable flier they can, mana base be damned. The reason for this is that the alternative is to end up with a deck like the one I had – a bunch of middling-to-good ground-pounders which can easily lose to a Magemark-wearing Mourning Thrull.
*Combo! Of course I knew about the synergies of Peel/Chronarch and Minion/Gelectrode, but I didn’t give them their proper due – I figured that the synergies between Thoughtpicker, Rotwurm, and Evangel gave me an equally good late game as the U/R tricks would have. In reality, given how long it takes the Evangel to become truly savage, the U/R tricks are probably the better ones.
With Peel/Chronarch, the nice part is that you don’t even want to draw both parts of the combo at same time; you mise the Peel in the early game to break up your opponent’s attack or reuse a Dismisser, and then play the Chronarch several turns later, regrowing the Peel and basically announcing to the opponent that they have to play two creatures per turn for the rest of the game. If you can play the Chronarch with enough mana left over to Peel, then the number of common spells that are going to get your opponent out of the trouble he’s in goes down drastically.
As for Minion/Gelectrode, again both parts of the combo are amazing on their own and you don’t have to draw them close together. I shouldn’t have to point out the benefits of doing two damage anywhere per turn, except to say that once you can get a Chronarch down it will be even more ridiculous than that.
*Better to die on my feet than live on my knees. A U/R/x deck might have been right simply because the deck I played ended up so unimpressive. It fixed my mana, and it had some okay Green creatures, but what, really, was it going to do that scared anyone? If I get Thoughtpicker Witch plus Selesnya Evangel, all my opponent has to do is have in hand a way to remove a 1/2, or enough creature power on board to race a bunch of one-power dudes … even most bad decks can do that. Rotwurm plus Evangel is probably the most I could do, but again, decks that play removal spells will be saving them just to prevent that kind of nonsense from happening, and I don’t have many other strong creatures to draw removal away from my best threats.
At least the Blue deck can potentially do something utterly busted, even if the mana is a little ugly and a Last Gasp breaks the combos up pretty easily. Playing it safe with your cardpool is not always the right way to get to the coveted Blue Envelope.
Conclusion: Avoid the Green Trap
All my deck did was fix my mana and summon a couple of decent Green ground-pounders. This is the Green Trap that the article’s title refers to: in many of the Sealed formats of recent years playing Green/X/X will make your deck reasonably good. It will make your mana okay, it will summon a beefy creature or two, and your X colors will have a removal spell or two while the Green will often offer some sort of pump or Overrun effect.
Kamigawa Block is the perfect example: it was always easy to get a deck with some mana snakes, some worthwhile attackers such as Feral Deceiver and Kami of the Hunt, and a Kodama’s Might or similar trick. Then you could just fill out your curve and/or add removal, and have a decent deck. However, the really good Green decks were the ones that had a terrific curve, usually topped off by a very dangerous threat such as Moss Kami.
They would often be joined in the Top 8 by a couple of non-Green decks, which decided the best way to go was to play all of their best men and spells, regardless of color, and pray to Loki for a good mana draw. You can bet that these players opened some Green creatures, but they were savvy enough to avoid the Green Trap, and see that without worthwhile threats and a quality curve, the mana-fixing doesn’t accomplish much. Better to die mana-screwed than live for a few turns more while your lame creatures get outclassed by your opponents’ superior men.
Thus, there is a big difference between “reasonably good” and “good enough to be in contention when Round 6 of the PTQ rolls around.” If you want that second group, you may have to take some risks with your mana base, or avoid the safe play of running the big dumb Green fatties. I haven’t decided that I definitely should have gone non-Green with my Sealed Deck … but at the end of the build period I thought I had built the best possible deck out of the card pool I received, and now I think that I could have been wrong. It’s definitely possible that I fell into the Green Trap.
Finally, I’d just like to note that whenever I write about Limited, I tend to get forum complaints that the article is either too short or too … how do I put this … crappy. Again, that’s fair criticism: my best tournament results have come in Constructed, so I tend to write longer and better there. However, I thought The Green Trap is an important concept worth addressing, so I started this article right after the PTQ, putting on hold multiple Constructed articles regarding the post-Guildpact Standard that I had in the works. So if you didn’t like this one, just have some patience and I’ll be back to my old self in no time.
Until next time, here’s hoping your bounce-lands and Signets are all on-color.
This article written while listening to the podcasts at Top8Magic.com.
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