The Weekly Guild Build: Just Like Starting Over

One of the dirty little secrets of StarCityGames.com is that its emperor Â— or, in this case, editor-in-chief Â— has no clothes.

“You know that about Ferrett, don’t you?” Ted whispers in IRC chats when somebody complains about me… And all the in-the-know players nod their heads sagely. My Magic-playing friends treat me as if I had a mild case of retardation, congratulating me for doing things that normal people do without thinking.

“You won a draft, Ferrett?” they say, giving me a big, artificial grin. “Why, that’s great! Good for you!” And then they pat me on the head and give me a biscuit.

Yes, the Big Secret Of SCG is that the editor-in-chief stopped playing Magic almost eighteen months ago.* I have retained enough knowledge from reading articles to know what the must-picks are in Draft, and I have some general idea of the trends in every Constructed format… But that’s all from reading Magic articles, and Magic articles are no substitute for experience. I’ve played maybe one game every five weeks.

I’ve wanted to play, mind you; I just don’t have the time. My numerous attempts to round my friends up for a casual Thursday haven’t panned out, and I don’t have three or four hours free on Fridays and Saturdays to go sit down and lose a lot to strangers. Heck, I don’t even have two hours free in a day to go lose in a MODO draft.

So I’ve been stuck. Every time I logged onto StarCityGames, I felt that weird sting of guilt that comes when you know you should be working out and eating vegetables, but once again you’re playing World of Warcraft and eating Pocky.

But this weekend was different. I vowed that I would get into a draft on Magic Online! And so I created my account, logged in, paid my $20, got in the draft queue…

And lost with an abysmal Boros Guild deck.** All within forty-eight minutes.

Hmm. Maybe this Magic thing wouldn’t take too much of my time.

I wanted to learn the basics of the format Â— but when you suck as badly as I do, dropping $13 for a 1-2 game isn’t viable. I have a wife, you see, who foolishly insists I spend my hard-earned money on frivolous things like “the mortgage payment” and “heating bills.” I try to explain to her that the majority of MODO players live in their parents’ basement to pay for their habit and that we could do likewise, but she was having none of that.

Thus, I needed another solution to at least get the flavor of Ravnica Sealed. Fortunately, there is one: Magic Leagues. They’re cheap, they’re filled with 1600 players like me, and they allow me to jigger with a card pool, building a different deck to see what approach works the best.

Thus, I vowed that to get back into the game, I would play in a different league every week, getting a new card pool and slowly learning what makes Ravnica tick.

And I would do so anonymously. Because I am a huge freakin’ coward.

See, when I sit down across from you at a tournament, my least favorite words are, “Are you the guy from StarCityGames?” Whenever I say “yes,” novice players immediately expect that I’m going to trounce them. After all, they think. He edits a Magic website! He must be very good! More than once I’ve had my opponent call their friends over to witness my amazing skills in action, which was a little humiliating when they began to point out the procedural errors that I was making.

It’s a fact that Grand Masters of chess routinely lose to newbies, since they’re trained to look at every opponents’ move as if it were a multi-layered gambit instead of the random, “Look, the horsie goes here!” that a novice chess player has. They wind up assuming strategies that aren’t there. Likewise, one of the worst games of my life was against a guy with an 1850 rating, for whom my blatant mistakes were part of some grand plan. He kept muttering things like, “Wow, that’d be a really bad move if you weren’t The Editor-in-Chief of StarCityGames.com. So what are you trying to set up for?”

My eventual loss, as it turns out.

Right now, since I’ve been effectively out of the game since Odyssey, I’m a little challenged and I don’t want to deal with either of the current assumptions of Amazing Player or Mild Case Of Magic-Related Down Syndrome. So I chose one of my classic nom de plumes Â— and if I ever stop stinking up the aether I’ll make my name public.***

In the meantime, I’ll share the card pools I get, the decks that I build, and the lessons that I’m learning about Ravnica along the way. It’s not the most competitive environment, and I may be sharing a few obvious caveats…. But hopefully, y’all will tell me where I went wrong in the forums.

The articles will follow this format: I’ll give you the card pool I received, tell you how strong I think it is for Sealed on a scale of 1 (Gabriel Nassif would go 0-2 drop) to 10 (The Ferrett would 6-0 the tourney). Then I’ll tell you what I built, what I learned, and discuss any alternate builds.

Enough shenanigans! On with the deckbuilding!

Green:
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Elves of Deep Shadow
1 Gather Courage
1 Golgari Brownscale
1 Greater Mossdog
1 Ivy Dancer
1 Stone-Seeder Hierophant
1 Sundering Vitae

Red:
1 Coalhauler Swine
1 Dogpile
1 Fiery Conclusion
1 Flame Fusillade
1 Galvanic Arc
1 Goblin Fire Fiend
1 Goblin Spelunkers
1 Incite Hysteria
1 Indentured Oaf
1 Sabertooth Alley Cat
1 Seismic Spike
1 Sparkmage Apprentice

White:
1 Bathe in Light
1 Benevolent Ancestor
1 Chant of Vitu-Ghazi
1 Conclave Equenaut
1 Conclave’s Blessing
1 Courier Hawk
1 Leave No Trace
1 Nightguard Patrol
1 Suppression Field
1 Votary of the Conclave

Black:
1 Carrion Howler
1 Clinging Darkness
1 Disembowel
1 Helldozer
2 Last Gasp
1 Nightmare Void
1 Roofstalker Wight
1 Sewerdreg
1 Shred Memory

Blue:
1 Convolute
1 Flight of Fancy
1 Grayscaled Gharial
1 Mnemonic Nexus
1 Peel from Reality
1 Quickchange
1 Spawnbroker
1 Stasis Cell
1 Terraformer
1 Vedalken Dismisser
1 Vedalken Entrancer
1 Zephyr Spirit

Boros:
1 Boros Recruit
1 Boros Swiftblade
1 Brightflame
1 Skyknight Legionnaire
1 Thundersong Trumpeter

Dimir:
1 Dimir Infiltrator

Golgari:
1 Putrefy
1 Shambling Shell

Selesnya:
1 Privileged Position
1 Selesnya Evangel
1 Selesnya Sagittars

Land and Artifacts:
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Duskmantle, House of Shadow
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Golgari Signet
1 Peregrine Mask
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree

Well, that’s certainly a card pool. It had some real bombs and classic commons on first look Â— Flame Fusillade, Helldozer, Brightflame, double-Last Gasp, Galvanic Arc Â— but when I went to build it, I was having problems making it work because there weren’t that many good creatures to carry these bombs on. I wanted some large finishers, and didn’t see any, so on The Ferrett Scale, I’ll rate this a six.

Or maybe I don’t know the format yet.

The real question is this: what colors should I go into? I think Green’s a must-have Â— but given that two of the guilds in this block are Green, when isn’t green a must-have? I’ve played at least twelve matches in my League, and every one of them has used Green as at least a tertiary color.

So. Green’s in. Red’s in, because we want that delightful bomb of the Fusillade. That leaves either White, with its lovely little Selesnya-enabler Selesnya Evangel (and the semi-sweet chocolate of the Boros guilds), or Black with its Putrefy, Disembowel, and double-Gasp.

I went with Black. Now, I didn’t save my first builds (I’ll do that in the future), but my first stab looked something like this:

Build #1

1 Goblin Spelunkers
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Carrion Howler
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Disembowel
1 Flame Fusillade
1 Galvanic Arc
1 Gather Courage
1 Golgari Brownscale
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Golgari Signet
1 Greater Mossdog
1 Helldozer
1 Indentured Oaf
2 Last Gasp
1 Putrefy
1 Roofstalker Wight
1 Sabertooth Alley Cat
1 Shambling Shell
1 Sparkmage Apprentice
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Sundering Vitae
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree

6 Forest
3 Mountain
5 Swamp

I played my five ranked games in the league, and went an abysmal 1-4. But I did learn some valuable things along the way:

Flame Fusillade
Not that big of a bomb, surprisingly. I mean, there were definitely a few games where it completely turned the board around Â— but more often I was sitting there with eight or nine permanents on the board, and I’d have to tap four of them to cast the Fusillade and then tap everything else to do four or five damage. I spent whole games trying to set up for the perfect Fusillade, and it only happened once.

In the most frustrating game of all time for me, I got a guy down to seven life and had ten permanents. I debated going for it… But in the end, I held off for that final land. The next turn, he Faith’s Fettered my Greater Mossdog, and then a few turns later went into a slow infinite-life loop with Flickerform and Conclave Phalanx.

Gah!

Now, it’s not a bad card Â— but I built this deck largely around the strength of the Fusillade, and it’s not a card that should pull you into a color by itself. Which leads me to the next problem….

Life Gain
Damn, there’s a lot of it in this block. I’m used to Limited environments where the life total only goes in one direction… But Ravnica’s rife with cheap life gain cards as staples in the most popular colors, like Faith’s Fetters, Centaur Safeguard, and Golgari Brownscale (and that’s not even counting uncommons and rares like Lightning Helix, Conclave Phalanx, and Loxodon Hierarch). Furthermore, the lands are all bounce-lands and not painlands, so you can’t even count on some self-made damage to balance out the gain.

The net result was that I found myself consistently needing to do twenty-four damage for the win, not twenty. Everyone went up a few points somewhere, which made Red a little less enticing. (I expect this phenomenon is less common in Draft, where you choose your two colors and stay, but in the three-color environment of Sealed you’re gonna see Green and you’re probably going to see White.)

Helldozer
Another card-I-thought-was-a-bomb-but-was-just-strong, by the time I got this out it usually wasn’t enough to turn the game around. I loved the idea of a huge land-eater, but if I was behind I needed its huge ass to save me, and if I was in front it was a lot easier just to send it to the dome.

Plus, its mana requirements proved surprisingly tricky even in a black-heavy deck.

Selesnya Guild
I remember reading the early reviews of Ravnica and hearing how Convoke was the worst guild mechanic. But seeing it in action, I finally understand why it’s such a popular draft choice; there were a lot of games where I almost had it in the bag, baby, and then the damned tokens started popping out everywhere.

There are just more creatures in Ravnica Sealed, which means you’ve gotta have good quality critters or good quality evasion. And speaking of which….

Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
When you are old as me one day and your eyes are going, you too will look at a new card and think it’s in your colors. Until then, pity me. Anonymously.

Sabertooth Alley Cat
I thought this card might qualify as “filler” in Sealed deck, but the double-mana requirements meant that it never came out until late enough in the game that it was useless. It might be better in a Red-heavy deck, but even then the fact that you have to keep feeding it mana makes it a non-player for me.

Indentured Oaf
The fact that I was surprised that it worked well shows you how long I’ve been out of the game. I did nearly blow it, however, by almost attacking into a Viashino Fangtail Â— what a n00b I am! Â— but on the bright side, humiliation teaches you lessons that you’ll never forget.

Sewerdreg
I left this out in favor of the Roofstalker Wight, just because I thought I was low on early-game bodies. As it turned out, the abundance of 1/1s in this format make larger late-game bodies a must, since if you’re not playing Boros there’s almost no possibility of an early-game swarm, but you will almost certainly be facing gigantic Convoke critters and hordes of 1/2s. Shutting the occasional Dredge down is a happy bonus.

Dredge
A surprisingly tricky mechanic. I’m almost certain that I lost games to Dredging at the wrong time, or vice versa. Figuring out when to get rid of your draw is going to be one of the lessons I must learn over the next few weeks.

Gather Courage
When you’ve got all little guys, as this build does, a +2/+2 boost doesn’t do nearly as much as it should. I kept casting it and falling short.

Ivy Dancer
Since everyone had Forests I wound up siding this in a fair amount (and it’s very nice in conjunction with the Shambling Shell and a third beater in the late game, if you have the blockers to hold the ground), but I’m not really sure it’s good enough to move up to the main deck.

Spectral Searchlight
I’m still torn on this one, and I mostly put it in because I saw it in the draft deck that beat me and I wanted to see whether it was any good. It didn’t help much in this build aside from throwing a few points of mana burn to someone’s dome, and it actually worked to my disadvantage once with a Scatter the Seeds. On the other hand, it worked well in a W/R build, so it may be that this is a guild-specific card.

In this creature-low build, however, it almost certainly should have been a big butt.

Sparkmage Apprentice
I put this in as a complete filler card, nothing more than a warm body…. And to my surprise, it worked much more often than I thought it would, taking out annoying Safeguards and Saproling tokens or completing a hard combat.

I wouldn’t value this that highly, but it’s a card I’m much more likely to put in.

Sundering Vitae
I sided this in so much, and I was never at a loss for targets Â— the Signets and “comes into play” enchantments were everywhere. Which leads me to wonder whether we have a second block where artifact/enchantment removal is maindeckable. The jury’s still out on that one, but for the time being I’m gonna say no.

Putrefy, Last Gasp, Disembowel
They didn’t help me as much as they should have Â— but then again, I suspect my unfamiliarity with the format was leading me to misvalue which creatures were the most dangerous. Plus, Dredge brought a lot of the bad ones back again.

Still, the games I won were mostly due to the insane amount of removal I had.

MODO In General
I probably lost two games due to misclicking, and took more than a few points of mana burn before I remembered the Alt-U “Undo” trick. I can’t say that I would have won the games where I blew it, except for one where a mistimed “damage on the stack” understanding collapsed a whole combat.

Ravnica In General
Everyone complains about the Guild-lock on colors, but actually this seems to be a Limited format that rewards creativity. In Kamigawa, I was looking for Arcane and Spirit synergy, but I saw a lot of creative recursion of everything Â— critters, “comes into play” effects, enchantments with “comes into play” effects.

I have to look at the deck as a whole, and weight it depending on what works together best… Which is, admittedly, what I should have been doing all along, but it’s only my third game of Ravnica Limited, dammit!

So that was a disaster, but at least I got a better understanding of how the flow of Ravnica worked. But then I thought, “Gee, Selesnya is sure powerful, and I have some Selesnya cards; why not see how the White does?” That meant taking out the Red, but aside from Galvanic Arc (which never worked as anything more than a Lightning Bolt, since I never had the time to play it on a big critter) and the Indentured Oaf.

Plus, if I went Selesnya, I could actually play the ability on my Vhitu-Ghazi. D’oh!

What I got was this:

Build #2
5 Forest
4 Plains
4 Swamp
1 Elves of Deep Shadow
1 Bathe in Light
1 Benevolent Ancestor
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Carrion Howler
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Conclave Equenaut
1 Courier Hawk
1 Disembowel
1 Golgari Brownscale
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Greater Mossdog
1 Helldozer
1 Ivy Dancer
2 Last Gasp
1 Nightguard Patrol
1 Putrefy
1 Selesnya Evangel
1 Selesnya Sagittars
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Sewerdreg
1 Shambling Shell
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Svogthos, the Restless Tomb
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree

This one went 2-1 in matches Â— a little better, but one of the matches was against a guy with a 1525 rating who played as if he had a 1525 rating, and I felt like I was stepping on a puppy. That said, the games felt closer, if you know what I’m saying, even if I was battling manascrew the entire time.

(Before you critique the mana base, which could probably use it, realize that this wasn’t the exact mana base I used. I just rebuilt this deck from memory.)

Some notes:

Selesnya Evangel
Every bit as good as advertised. When I got this and the City-Tree going, I won games, no problem.

Svogthos, The Restless Tomb
More like “Svogthos, the Endless Target of Faith’s Fetters.” It was useless in the early game, and every time I got to the late game when I had a yard full of scary Svogthos-bait to withstand a few Siege Wurm hits, it’d get Shackled post-haste. By all three players. Gah.

Nightguard Patrol
The Patrol rules a number of early-game critters in this format Â— and as such proved to be a positive house, moving considerably up in my rankings to a solid if unexceptional common.

Or maybe that was just the synergy with the Evangel speaking. “Attack, hit you, free guy, Bingo! Goooooaaaaaaaallll!”

Bramble Elemental
He was nothing more than a generic 4/4 body in this deck Â— but given the number of toughness-boosters/lowererers in this format, that’s good enough for him to move up from “pretty good” to “absolutely staple” critter in my mind. Combine with Shambling Shell for maximum fun, but what can’t you say that about?

Votary of the Conclave
Given how many of my games came down to “I race you while some gigantamous critter takes chunks out of my life,” I wound up siding this in on a regular basis. I don’t actually know whether it’s any good, but I suspect it’s probably either a) better than I think it is, or b) there are other ways to handle humongous critters and this is a poor stopgap strategy. I’m sure someone will tell me.

Clinging Darkness
This should probably have been in there. But what should I have taken out?