Introduction
This is it. What I’ve been working towards these last three weeks and wouldn’t you know? I completely wasted all my testing because I failed to realise that the sealed deck format is completely and utterly different from what I thought it was. The reason for this is that all my impressions where gleaned from prerelease style events with three boosters and a tourney pack rather than just two boosters. Sure, I built and played around with some proper sealed decks, but not in a real tournament setting. There is a world of difference between having that third booster or not, and many misconceptions come from the lack of realization thereof. I feel like such a fool, and a ticking time bomb of fury. I just want to rant all day and all night and at everything.
However, I’ve decided to leave the 3000-word Jon Becker-esque rant for some other time and instead deliver a calm and collected report of the happenings at GP: Nottingham with teddy bear smiles and fluffy bunnies. I shall think positive, and every time that rage returns I’ll just have to get back to the squash court. Best. Rage. Dump. Ever.
Let’s start with the venue. What kind of insane person would even begin to consider an ice hockey stadium as a venue for a magic tournament? There was no parking, the lighting was so awful, you couldn’t even…Oh, sorry. I remember now, positive thinking. The floorboards were great and springy, sort of like a big bouncy castle, that was fun, and it was very accessible by public transport. While Nottingham isn’t the greatest place in the world in some respects, the masses of women in miniskirts so short they’re practically non-existent on Saturday night is a definite bonus for the eyes. So I guess the venue can be called passable, if it wasn’t for the ridiculous closing time of 10pm, meaning there were no side events available after 6pm! What kind of demented… Sorry, I’ll dig right into my card pool at the GP as soon as I return from the squash courts.
Card Pool and Deck
Red
2 War-Torch Goblin
1 Viashino Slasher
1 Sabertooth Alley Cat
2 Barbarian Riftcutter
2 Fiery Conclusion
1 Rain of Embers
1 Reroute
1 Incite Hysteria
1 Galvanic Arc
1 Smash
2 Seismic Spike
Black
2 Thoughtpicker Witch
1 Infectious Host
1 Dimir House Guard
1 Woebringer Demon
1 Strands of Undeath
Blue
1 Surveiling Sprite
2 Drift of Phantasms
1 Wizened Snitches
1 Vedalken Entrancer
1 Tattered Drake
1 Dizzy Spell
1 Quickchange
1 Peel from Reality
1 Mnemonic Nexus
1 Flow of Ideas
White
2 Votary of the Conclave
1 Sandsower
1 Screeching Griffin
1 Dromad Purebred
1 Auratouched Mage
2 Conclave Equenaut
1 Boros Fury-Shield
Green
2 Elvish Skysweeper
1 Elves of Deep Shadow
1 Stone-Seeder Hierophant
1 Nullmage Shepherd
2 Scatter the Seeds
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Rolling Spoil
Gold and Hybrid
1 Boros Recruit
2 Skynight Legionnaire
1 Lightning Helix
1 Rally the Righteous
1 Razia’s Purification
1 Circu, Dimir Lobotomist
1 Moroii
1 Consult the Necrosages
1 Sisters of Stone Death
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Shambling Shell
1 Selesnya Sagittars
2 Selesnya Evangel
1 Pollenbright Wings
Artifacts and Lands
1 Leashling
2 Terrarion
1 Peregrine Mask
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Plague Boiler (Foil!)
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
I don’t like white space in sealed deck articles. In fact, I hate white. Some people, however, like empty space so they don’t see the decklist and random thoughts of the author immediately before they can have a go at building the deck for themselves. I was criticized for the lack of empty spaces by fellow recently-made-Featured-Writer-writing-mostly-about-Limited-mostly Eli Kaplan, but I refuse to include white space. So instead I bring you pink fluffy bunnies and the like.
Fluffy Bunnies…
…and lovely frothy clouds…
…with just the slightest hint of grey…
…because I hate white …
…against the backdrop of a lovely blue sky.
Right, enough of the pure love, time for some dissection of the card pool. The first port of call is of course the gold cards. We find that all guilds have some rather solid gold cards. G/B has the single-handed game winner Sisters of Stone Death, as well as the awesome Golgari Rotwurm and the solid Shambling Shell. Of course, the art of Sisters depicts three gorgons, so that should be sextuple-handed. Or is it just triple-handed? Moving onwards, House Dimir brings a great creature for a slow milling deck to the party in the form of Circu, Dimir Lobotomist, as well as an even more awesome creature for a beatdown deck in Moroii, with some backup from the good but unspectacular Consult the Necrosages. Looks like the internal struggles of this secretive bunch will once again leave them on the sidelines. The two white guilds just take the biscuit with gold cards. Double Selesnya Evangel. Double Skynight Legionnaire. Not to mention Pollenbright Wings, Lightning Helix and Rally the Righteous.
The very first thing I noticed about this card pool is that it has next to no mana fixers. One Rot Farm and a Searchlight and an elf and some Terrarions and that’s it. Now, if this was three-booster Limited, it wouldn’t matter, because you can always play straight two colors with a minute late-game splash. Not here, though, no siree, there just aren’t enough playables. Welcome to horrible mana base country! This stupid, bloody… okay, with a warm fuzzy feeling inside and an absolutely, completely, utterly and unquestionably genuine smile on my face I shall now present the lovely options for three color decks in this exquisite, superb card pool.
The deck I put together was G/W/B. This was because that way I could at least use the few mana fixers I did have and it had a superb late game with bombs like Sisters of Stone Death, Woebringer Demon and Plague Boiler. Let’s have a look at this beauty.
Creatures (19)
1 Sisters of Stone Death
2 Conclave Equenaut
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Woebringer Demon
1 Selesnya Sagittars
2 Scatter the Seeds
1 Dimir House Guard
1 Nullmage Shepherd
1 Sandsower
1 Screeching Griffin
1 Shambling Shell
2 Selesnya Evangel
1 Elves of Deep Shadow
1 Elvish Skysweeper
1 Thoughtpicker Witch
Other Spells (4)
1 Pollenbright Wings
1 Plague Boiler
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Terrarion
Lands (17)
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
1 Golgari Rot Farm
3 Swamp
5 Plains
7 Forest
Just look at that lovely mana curve. Who doesn’t dream of a creature curve like this one?
1: 3
2: 2
3: 1
4: 6
5: 6
8: 1
That’s being generous and subtracting one mana for Convoke, which doesn’t necessarily happen on your five-mana stuff when your curve contains little before turn four. Nice deck, retard. Sorry. Nice deck, you wonderful man. The format may be slow, but there are limits to what you can get away with. The really damning thing about this deck, though, is that it has no removal whatsoever. Sure, it can sweep flyers out of the sky and has a nice shiny laboratory in which they brew some bubonic stuff, but it’s absolutely splendid and no problem at all that the only way of dealing with ground pounders takes about one million years to cook up.
I love Plague Boiler. It deals with all problems in a timely fashion.
The alternative would of course be a R/W/g deck, something along these lines:
Creatures (16)
1 Auratouched Mage
2 Conclave Equenaut
1 Selesnya Sagittars
1 Nullmage Shepherd
1 Sandsower
1 Screeching Griffin
2 Skynight Legionnaire
1 Sabertooth Alley Cat
2 Selesnya Evangel
1 Viashino Slasher
1 Boros Recruit
2 War-Torch Goblin
Other Spells (8)
1 Pollenbright Wings
1 Rally the Righteous
1 Galvanic Arc
1 Incite Hysteria
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Lighting Helix
2 Fiery Conclusion
Lands (16)
3 Forest
7 Plains
6 Mountain
So, you ask, why didn’t I run this? I’ll tell you why, it’s because I’m a moron. Or maybe it was that I wanted to feel most like the underdog. Let’s make a comparison of these two builds.
B/W/G
+ Mana fixing
+ Better late game bombs
R/W/g
+ Some semblance of a mana curve
+ Some actual removal
+ Win conditions, i.e. flyers, that come into play early enough to matter
+ Fits my play style
+ Not an evenly split 3-color deck
What do you think? Looking at it now it seems so obvious. Sitting there in that ice hockey stadium, though, the Red option somehow seemed less hot, mainly because the Green cards worked against mindless aggression and there was no mana fixing apart from the Spectral Searchlight. The latter deck may be a disparate bunch splicing together a R/W deck and a G/W deck that don’t work very well together, chances are at least they’ll all come out to play, and have some removal back up. Five flyers + Pollenbright Wings should really have been as enticing as those Sisters, that Demon and that stupid Boiler that I wouldn’t use to make tea, let alone Plague. We loveses the Boiler, honest. Well, it’s time to have a look at what actually happened at the GP. No, let’s see what would have happened if I had played the other deck.
Round 1
I gum up the ground with saprolings, Fiery Conclusion takes care of his best guy and my flyers take care of him in both games.
Rounds 2-8
See round 1.
Day 2
I do some drafts, and do well, or not.
I’m not bitter or anything, no, not me. I love you all, and want to give you pink fluffy bunny bears. Oh well, time to snap back to reality, oh, there goes gravity.
Round 1 vs. Christopher Harrold, B/G/W
Game 1 his deck is slow and he has no answer for Bramble Elemental with Pollenbright Wings. Game 2 looks similar but he has much more gas, including Tolsimir Wolfblood, and manages to deal with the flying Elemental. Game 3 is where things got interesting. He got a Vulturous Zombie out, which I hadn’t seen in the first two games; hence I didn’t side in the other Skysweeper. Fortunately I had the Sandsower to contain the zombie plant for a while. He eventually found a Disembowel to take care of the offending ‘sower, but I then managed to drop Sisters of Stone Death before he could get an attack in. Next turn he cast Rolling Spoils on my Golgari Rot Farm, which killed my horde of Saprolings and my Elves of Deep Shadow, completely depriving me of Black mana. He swung with his zombie, I swung back with all my remaining creatures provoking all his creatures which weren’t enough to kill the sisters. This is where he made the crucial mistake because he had Selesnya Sagittars out and could have blocked another creature with it. Instead though he took five extra damage and only reduced my life total to two on the counterattack. Then I swung in for the win. He put it down to not really remembering what all the cards do. Remember, Sagittars can block two creatures even if they’re being lured by the gorgons.
1-0
Round 2 vs. Alessandro Cappellini, G/R/B
This match was very straightforward. In game one some scattered seeds held him back a bit while the House Guard and one of the astronauts delivered the beats. In game two I just buried him under an avalanche of Pro Player Cards a.k.a. saprolings. Round 1 was close and I won due to my opponent’s play error, this one was a quick breather before the inevitable, I mean completely unexpected and undeserved, descent into the losers’ bracket.
2-0
Round 3 vs. Markus Jöbstl, W/R/B
Game 1 he got stuck on three mana for a long time, with nothing to play apart from a Benevolent Ancestor, while I had House Guards, astronauts, Pro Players and the 1989 Denver Broncos. At this point I felt like the king of the world, even if I didn’t get to enjoy Kate Winslet in the back of some ancient car. Unfortunately, game 2 was so intense that I didn’t manage to make any notes and game 3 consisted of me double-mulliganning and then doing absolutely nothing. Actually, I think I was color-crewed in game 2. That really annoyed me. Thinking about it, I need to head back to the squash courts.
2-1
Round 4 vs. Kevin Scott, U/G/B
Game 1 his hand is very slow, he has nothing but Elves of Deep Shadow and some 5-drops, so I overrun him quickly and easily. Game 2 is possibly the most nerve-wracking game of Magic I have ever played. He drops one creature and I play loads, which results in him getting a 5-for-2 with Hex to clear the board. He doesn’t have any Green mana and I don’t have any Black mana, both with a hand full of spells of that color, so we’re both playing draw-go for a while. Eventually he starts playing some dudes, so I drop the Plague Boiler and again we’re both holding back while I’m delaying the Boiler a bit. Eventually I blow up the world and attack with Svogthos, the Restless Tomb for six. But he held back a lot of the good stuff and dropped a horde the following turn that stopped Svogthos right in his tracks. I finally find Sisters of Stone Death, but thanks to Drooling Groodion I can’t use them to their full effect and all that happens is that again the entire board is cleared. Again he has a grip full of awesome awesomeness, but I manage to find a Woebringer Demon with him at seven life with no flying defense. I fly in once and then he uses Dream Leash to steal the Demon. He has such a huge army that the only way I can win this is if I get the Demon back, which required him to not sacrifice it to his Golgari Rotwurm and to not notice my Nullmage Shepherd. At this point time had been called and it was getting very tense. He attacks with everything, I throw some saprolings in the way of some creatures and block the Rotwurm with my 9/9 Svogthos. He then taps all his Black mana to sacrifice a bunch of creatures, not including the Woebringer, to the Rotwurm, to which I respond by tapping my four untapped creatures to kill the Dream Leash. He responds by conceding.
He had spotted the Shepherd, but in the complexity of the situation and the pressure of time he forgot about it. He complained to the judge that was standing behind me that he had put him off because he was constantly looking at his watch, to which the judge responded with a warning for unsportsmanlike conduct. This is of course not the nicest of incidences, so I’m not going to go on about it in this happy, joyful report, but I think Kevin definitely had a point that judges half staring at you and half staring at their watches do not help your concentration, and it seemed especially unnecessary considering announcements were made such as “You have now had five minutes of additional time”.
3-1
Round 5 vs. Phillippe Massart, G/B/W
Game 1 I get a Rotwurm with Pollenbright Wings but after the first hit he chump blocks it with Keening Banshee, untaps and uses his eight mana to shoot it out of the sky with a Trophy Hunter. I look at my hand full of Equenauts and feel kinda warm and fuzzy inside… He claims I could’ve won had I not blocked his Siege Wurm with my five saprolings, but I’m not so sure. In game 2 he made me discard my Woebringer Demon and kills me ’cause the Boiler is just too damn slow. It’s hilariously inefficient when you’re being beaten down by a Selesnya Guildmage and friends and you don’t have an awful lot of defense. This game felt so demoralizing…
3-2
Round 6 vs. Wim Vanrie, removal.dec
…but not half as demoralizing as playing against every single removal spell ever printed in the history of Magic, whilst having no removal of your own whatsoever. At this point I wanted to drop from the tournament and had built up quite an excitement about drafting. However, at the side event station I was informed by some lovely chaps that there were no more side events after 6pm and apparently there had been an announcement to this effect. Some genius, bless his/her heart, thought it was a great idea to hold a GP in a venue that kicks everyone out at ten. Superb planning, that. Maybe my brain just filtered the announcement out as it couldn’t get it to make sense. Then again, that’s the same brain that decided at this point that it was a good idea to go on with the main event.
3-3
Round 7 vs. Ross Jenkins, R/W/G
This is the match where I decided that I don’t really like Ravnica sealed anymore because every game seems to come down to someone being screwed. The mana fixers don’t seem to be as effective as they were in Invasion, making the multi-coloredness entirely too random for my liking.
3-4
Round 8 vs. Craig Neilson, U/B/g
It was late in the day, and we were both disappointed and fed up. I have no recollection what happened, but I won both games. Game 1 the final life totals are me 1, him 16. Hmmm, this may have been worth keeping track of…
4-4
There you have it, my worst ever GP result. That whole speed demon thing sure was a failure. I guess I need the pros to tell me what to do, really. Unfortunately, no matter how much I talk to them, no matter how many questions I ask those little pieces of cardboard, they impart no wisdom on me. Shame on them.
General Observations on the GP
I have none as all my observations belong into an article with a different tone than this candygirl sugar sweet affair. Aren’t 24-hour venues just the loveliest thing in the world? I love all those fancy flashy dangly venues, like you get all the time.
General Observations about the Format
I may be a bit harsh on the format, but I don’t think this is a particularly good one. For draft it’s great, but in sealed you just end up having to play three-color decks without overloading on land. This leads to the majority of games being decided on who is mana- and/or colorscrewed more. It is often difficult to get a proper mana-curve, leading to more randomness, especially in decks with a lot of convoke spells that sometimes bust out a Siege Wurm on turn 5 and sometimes have their hands chock full of uncastables. I have seen many a G/W deck die because their crappy one-drop was killed by an over-the-top removal spell, keeping them from busting out all of those convoke guys. Again, this is not a problem in draft because you can take early drops with extreme prejudice, but it sure ruins sealed deck.
Fortunately this particular sealed deck format isn’t going to be used in any PTQs or similar tournaments, so let’s hope that Guildpact has something to salvage it. I’m sure it will. It must. There is no other way.
Conclusion
Bill Johnson asked me at the end of the GP whether I was going to write a tournament report full of bitter sarcasm, and I said I would. At this point I would like to apologize to Bill and anyone else who was expecting bitter sarcasm for not delivering and instead writing such a lovey-touchy-feely piece. Sorry! I’m sure you’re all sickened by this saccharine kitsch. I promise one day I shall return with bitter, acidic, vile and twisted sarcasm. Perhaps sooner than you think.
Though not today.
I love you all!
Martin