Hey folks,
I first played with Scars of Mirrodin like many of you at the Prerelease a week and a half ago. Again like many of you, I searched my card pool for good cards with potential synergy and for a way to understand the format at first sight. It took me a while to figure out how to build my first deck. When I finished building it, I had absolutely no clue how good my deck was.
I had mixed feelings. I thought: artifacts again… we’ve been through that already. The cards were weak; nothing seemed to go together. Can’t mix poison guys with the rest, can’t mix metalcraft cards with too many colored cards, so few color fixers, no card drawing spells. How are we supposed to build a deck when there are so many building restrictions?
Then I thought it was like Shards of Alara again: how colors’ strategies didn’t mix very well, how there were lots of mana restrictions, and how you wanted to open as many cards of the same “family” as you could to build the best deck…
…But my deck was so hard to build, and I was hearing everyone around me saying the same thing. I rebuilt a dozen+ decks during the day; very few of them looked like the original builds. I started noticing that most pools had the same power level; bombs weren’t as powerful as usual. There was definitely a way to outsmart all of the other players if you could manage to figure it out.
Sealed deck is my favorite format, and I think building and rebuilding pools is one of the most interesting things to discuss and to learn from. However, I know it’s neither convenient nor fun to have a pool of cards in .txt format and try to build a deck out of it. Maybe StarCityGames.com could eventually implement a cool feature that helps readers build their own Sealed pools online.
Therefore I’m not going to list the pool of my Sealed deck, but I’m going to give you the deck I built:
Carapace Forger
2 Clone Shell
Darksteel Sentinel
Engulfing Slagwurm
Kuldotha Forgemaster
Leaden Myr
Lumengrid Drake
Neurok Replica
Palladium Myr
Perilous Myr
Scrapdiver Serpent
Silver Myr
Sylvok Replica
Vedalken Certarch
2 Bonds of Quicksilver
Disperse
Genesis Wave
Horizon Spellbomb
Mimic Vat
Slice in Twain
Volition Reins
Relevant Sideboard Cards:
Neurok Invisimancer
Stoic Rebuttal
Tel-Jilad Defiance
Neurok Replica
The deck didn’t look impressive. I really had no clue when I sleeved it up. It seemed very slow. I was packing all my good cards but had very few ways to end the game. My creatures were weak except for a few of them (Darksteel Sentinel, Scrapdiver Serpent, Engulfing Slagwurm).
It turned out to be a very good deck, and there’s a reason for that: the deck answered the problems of the Sealed Deck format.
1. Win conditions
There are few creatures in the format that can win the game on their own. Scrapdiver Serpent is the most impressive of them all, because it’s a common, and you’ll be facing it often. I can think of Kuldotha Phoenix, Hoard-Smelter Dragon, Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon, Engulfing Slagwurm… all of them are rare. You also have the artifact bombs you can open like Myr Battlesphere, Steel Hellkite, or Wurmcoil Engine. These however are a lot more vulnerable since they die to a lot more commons.
Engulfing Slagwurm, Scrapdiver Serpent
Alternative win conditions: Volition Reins, Mimic Vat
I had to read the Slagwurm a couple of times to make sure it did what it did. Reach seven mana, slam it down, and see what happens. It stops any non-flying threats, laughs at infect creatures, and regains the life you’ve lost while waiting for your seventh mana. Fortunately it’s a rare and a reason good enough to make you play green when you open one.
Scrapdiver Serpent is a virtually unblockable, hard-to-kill 5/5 monster. The best part is that tapping out in this format to play such a threat is not that a big deal. Unless you want to block and risk losing it to a pump spell, it should survive the next turn to do its job.
I’m pretty sure Engulfing Slagwurm is a first pick in Draft. The fact that it doesn’t trample (can’t have it all) nor has any evasion (yup, Wurms still don’t fly…) doesn’t assure you to win in the next few turns. It still makes an awesome blocker if you aren’t in a position to attack.
Volition Reins is a potential win condition, given the fact you’re stealing your opponent’s win condition. It’s a fragile threat, taken care of by all aura removal (bounce spells and Disenchant).
Mimic Vat is a card that can do a lot but needs setup to take the most advantage of it. The most obvious combo is with Neurok and Sylvok Replicas. You’ll need a lot of mana to spend, but a five-mana bounce spell every turn is usually worth it. Same goes for Naturalize at four mana.
It keeps your opponent from sending and trading his best guys in battle, as he won’t be able to deal with a huge threat to attack or block every turn. The Vat is at its best when you have creatures to back it up, but at times, Myr just aren’t good enough. You need to be able to trade to imprint the most efficient creature. When you play it, it usually creates a stalemate and gives some time to your opponent to find an answer. Don’t forget it’s an artifact, and it’s very vulnerable. When he can’t find one, you need to imprint something big enough to keep your opponent from attacking and attack on your turn. If you’re not attacked, activate it during your opponent’s end step to keep the creature until the end of your turn. Swing, sac it, and pass until you find a better plan. Too bad it doesn’t work too well with Clone Shells and Perilous Myr…
2. Â Creature and artifact removal (and game management cards)
There’s no Terror in this format. Black has Grasp of Darkness, Instill Infection, and Fume Spitter, blue has Bonds of Quicksilver, white has Arrest, and red has Galvanic Blast and Turn to Slag. That’s it in the common slot. Turn to Slag takes out a Scrapdiver Serpent. Arrest and Bonds of Quicksilver are also fine options, but the format offers a lot of maindeck options to take care of the auras (Neurok Replica, Disperse, Sylvok Replica, Revoke Existence…).
The thing is that creature removal is only as important as the quality/quantity of your opponent’s good creatures. Chances are that most decks won’t be packing a large number of quality guys. Since you won’t be packing a thousand removal spells either, you have to choose wisely what you want to be killing, keeping in mind that you might have to spend more than one card on a hard-to-kill creature. Except for Galvanic Blast, Vulshok Replica, and Necrogen Censer (which is unlikely to be played in Sealed), there isn’t a lot of direct damage in the format. That means you can use your life as a resource to give you time to stabilize, more so than in other formats. You can usually afford to go very low on life before casting your removal spells. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should let everything survive, especially if you don’t think you’ll have any way to deal later with a creature hitting you for many turns.
Sylvok Replica, Shatter, and Revoke Existence complete the removal arsenal for artifacts at common. Artifacts are overall a lot weaker than in good old Mirrodin. The management of artifact removal is also very different. You mostly want to save them for the late game for artifacts that are going to kill you, equipments in aggro decks, or to prevent your opponent from reaching metalcraft, or just the regular way, to open the window for your attackers.
2 Bonds of Quicksilver
Slice in Twain
Volition Reins
Neurok Replica
Sylvok Replica
Perilous Myr
Lumengrid Drake
Disperse
Vedalken Certarch
Bonds of Quicksilver is a fragile aura that forces you to get hit once unless you have a Vedalken Certarch to tap the creature first. It has the advantage of stopping monsters of any size and can be bounced with Disperse in case a better target shows up.
Slice in Twain is one of the best uncommons in the set because there are so few cards that gives you a two-for-one deal at instant speed without the need for a specific setup. It has so many good targets and draws you a card
almost
every time.
In my mind, Sylvok Replica is a 2/2. I repeated the same mistake a couple of times during the Prerelease that I felt the need to mark with a big black sharpie “
1/3
” on the card. Its Elvish predecessor, Elf Replica, could stack damage before being sacrificed, but there were no enchantments in Mirrodin — and it was a 2/2 with a picture very similar to that of Sylvok Replica (Has anyone had the same problem?). The upgrade it got makes it a huge card in Limited, an easy splash in a deck lacking artifact removal.
Vedalken Certarch is surprisingly annoying. Unlike aggro creatures that require metalcraft right away to have any impact on the game, this little guy is efficient at the stage you really need him, the mid/late game. Lumengrid Drake for example, is most often a 2/2 flier for four mana because you need metalcraft at a given time. Bouncing once in the late game isn’t as powerful as tapping a permanent every turn.
This is pretty much the greatest number of control cards you could get in G/U. It’s good enough to deal with the potential game ending threats your opponent can play.
3. Mana fixing
Myr and Horizon Spellbomb — that’s it for the mana fixing. The thing is, you don’t really need mana fixing in this format. You’ll rarely play more than 12-14 colored cards, and they won’t be needed in the first couple of turns anyway. A 9-8 mana base will support any two-color combination, and with the help of Myr, even off-color, you won’t be short on mana. Even two-color combinations with a splash are easily conceivable with a 7-7-3 or a 7-6-4 mana base.
Most slow decks need a lot mana. They don’t really fix anything, nor accelerate much. Myr are just extra mana that can chump. It’s all about having the option to either trade in combat, or save them to cast bigger spells. In R/W aggro decks, they provide you an extra artifact for metalcraft and help you with the mana you need to equip you guys quickly.
Silver Myr
Leaden Myr
Palladium Myr
Horizon Spellbomb
In my U/G deck, they replace the eighteenth land I would’ve played without them.
There’s a situation you’ll be often facing, and you ask yourself what to do:
Your opponent plays a Myr on turn 2; should you kill it right away?
My answer to that question is: No, almost never.
Myr become almost obsolete very fast in the game, and their “trading ability” is very limited. In the early game, they’ll help cast a slightly bigger guy a turn earlier. A bit later, they’ll help you reach the sixth or seventh mana to cast an even bigger thing that would come a turn or two later anyway, but you don’t think of that that early in the game. You don’t know what you opponent’s hand is about, how many lands he’s holding, or how important the Myr is for him.
Saving your removal and key spells is very important in this format. Bigger guys are only relevant if you can’t deal with them. Waste a removal on a Myr, and you won’t be able to deal with the bigger guys later.
Basically, try to figure how important the Myr is for your opponent and how important the removal you’re about to spend on it is. In some very rare situations where your opponent is splashing a color (the color of the Myr) or desperately needs the colored mana (he’s stuck with two Swamps and a red Myr while running a lot of red spells), then you should reconsider sparing the Myr. Otherwise I believe sparing it and saving your spells is always better.
Palladium Myr is a different problem. A 2/2 is definitely a better “trader” and lets you skip two steps in mana ramping. Killing it could be a better option, depending on which spells you want to cast on it, what you have left in your hand, and what’s left in your deck.
4. Card advantage
At common, there’s only Moriok Replica and Horizon Spellbomb that give you a two-for-one on the spot, for five and four mana. Instill Infection might be considered card advantage as well, but you have to set it up a bit to gain a card from it.
Slice in Twain
Volition Reins
Genesis Wave
Clone Shell
Perilous Myr
Horizon Spellbomb is basically a free land for four mana, one of the few sources of card advantage in the deck. Slice in Twain and Volition Reins reliably provides you with a two-for-one. The rest of the card advantage usually comes less reliably from Mimic Vat, Clone Shell, and Genesis Wave (see below).
This is where things become really interesting and why I’ve got to love this Limited format. You have to fight every time you want to gain some card advantage…
5. The game plan
All of the above brings a whole new perspective to the game: weaker creatures, few mana fixing, and no “natural card advantage.” It’s also a much slower format where you can use your life much more efficiently as a resource (I’ve never finished a tournament with so little life remaining after each game).
The game plans mostly depend on the archetype of the deck you built:
Midrange/Control decks:
Just like the deck above. Not based on speed but on late game creatures and artifacts. This is, in my opinion, the most powerful and reliable option you can take in Sealed and the strategy you’ll be facing most of the time. This is why this article is focused on this strategy.
W/R Aggro:
Based on speed, fast, flying creatures, and metalcraft. The main flaw of this archetype is that it’s very vulnerable to artifact removal. If you kill the first equipment, the Auriok Sunchasers and Sunspear Shikari will be nothing but weak dorks…
G/B Poison:
I haven’t seen this archetype working very well in Sealed. At least, not the aggro version of it where the only real way to win is to play an Untamed Might on an unblocked infect creature. The deck is so hard to put together, as it requires so many infect creatures, and attacking on both fronts, life and poison, isn’t a very good option. However, I can see any deck winning with a Tel-Jilad Fallen going all the way, since it’s a pretty good card even in a non-poison deck.
Most cards crave synergy with others. They all look weird and weak, but finding synergy between them all needs skill. I’ve always loved playing
with bad cards with a lot of text, and now I have a whole format full of bad cards to play with. Hurray! 🙂 Remember
how much I loved
Drake Familiar back in Ravnica?
Attrition is no longer the most important game plan. Playing alchemist by turning bad cards into gold, that’s what it’s all about. Not only do you have to figure it out during the games, but before that when you’re drafting. I’ve been drafting for ten days, and I keep finding gems every time in cards I would never have thought of playing.
Most of the time, you’ll have to either wait for your bombs or make your cards work together. Creatures aren’t aggressive enough to rely on a fast draw.
In my deck, we have: ways to handle the early game with high-toughness creatures such as Sylvok Replica and Neurok Replica, Perilous Myr that could gain a lot of time, and a stable mana base that supports the early game and reaches the seven-mana breaking point reliably.
The plan is to get your threats on the board and finish the game with them. One plan is to hard-cast them for seven mana. The other plan is to cheat them into play.
Clone Shell isn’t a card I’m a big fan of in Limited. It’s expensive, doesn’t do much on its own with a virtually irrelevant body for five mana, and has no evasion. My deck definitely needed a sacrifice outlet to get rid of these guys. Having it bounced or exiled when imprinting a Slagwurm or a Serpent was heartbreaking. But it did a good job at blocking the board for a while and digging for the kill cards.
 Reach ten mana, and cast Genesis Wave for seven — that’s also a way to do it. You need a deck able to survive long enough to cast the Wave for the full amount for it to be playable. Casting it for less than seven would be a waste. Hitting three or four lands and Myr and a couple of dorks wouldn’t get me anywhere; storing my win condition on the bottom of my deck would be painful as well. But this deck could reach ten mana and needed a way to channel its mana into a potential game winner.
Overall, the deck worked great because it had the right approach and the right tools to dominate the format (I ran it to a 6-1 record). There are a bunch of color combinations that allow you to build similar decks that take advantage of your good cards, which are indeed, often rares. Filling all the holes is the key. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice and have to go with what your pool offers: a W/R aggro deck or a midrange deck short on removal and control cards. But there are so many options, so many ways to turn bad cards into potential game winners, that all it takes is a little more digging.
Scars of Mirrodin Sealed Deck and Draft are two different formats. You’ll see archetypes that work in Draft that you’ll never see in Sealed Deck. I’m mostly thinking of Red-Sac and other proliferate-based decks. Poison also works a lot better in Draft.
The cards rarely win on their own, and finding synergy and combos is key. Never has a game plan been so important in a Limited format.Â