Sealed Deck has a special place in my heart. Many moons ago, well before the advent of Magic Online, the ability to play Limited Magic at the drop of a hat was a luxury that few people had. When I wanted to play some Limited, I’d have to make a series of calls and pages to try to organize a group of players to show up to a store, often hours or a day later. If those calls and pages couldn’t produce enough people to draft, there was always Sealed Deck.
Given the unreliability of Magic players in general, there was a lot of Sealed Deck.
Unlike players who maligned the format as “Sealed luck,” I took the time to study it and lose countless Tempest and Urza’s Saga rares to players who were better than me. Over time, I learned a lot about the format.
The store where I played, and eventually worked at, was a big proponent of the format (how else do you get rid of starters?) and always had good deals on a tournament pack and two boosters. The owner would even play heads-up matches against customers for the rares. Through Invasion and Odyssey, I probably did a hundred Sealed Decks.
Over time, people have largely given up on Sealed Deck because of the cheaper cost of Draft, and the fact that Draft is viewed as a higher skill format. But I think Sealed Deck has its place, and I wish I could play it more than I currently do. A lot of the skills I learned in Sealed Deck, most notably finding those odd and undervalued cards that work well in your deck, have helped me immensely when drafting, especially when things go wrong. I’m very good at switching gears in the middle of pack two and finding a way to turn my failing deck into a successful one. Sealed Deck has also given me a very good sense of mana bases for three-color decks, curve concerns, and maximizing sub-par cards.
More so than any other Limited format, Sealed Deck is a puzzle. You have all of the pieces in front of you, and it’s up to you to find out where they all go. It’s rare that you can just take the two best colors, cut a few cards, and end up with a great deck. It usually takes time to figure out exactly what you want your deck to do, and how to shape it to that goal. The card evaluations are similar to that of Draft, but off by just enough to make things interesting. You can’t force synergies that aren’t in your initial card pool, so you have to find new ones or find normally suboptimal cards that help bridge different aspects of your pool together into one cohesive structure.
Six-pack Sealed is a slightly different beast than the old Sealed. The nice thing about tournament packs was that you received three rares, ten uncommons, and thirty commons that didn’t repeat. You could see multiples in the booster packs, but it was rare for a pool to ever have more than two of a card. It evened out your Sealed pool, as it’s pretty hard to get an unplayable or a super-busted tournament pack because you’d see about a third of all of the commons in the set. Six boosters will get you a similar distribution and chance to see any single card in the set – but your odds of getting multiples, especially triples or higher, increases significantly.
Because of this, the average six-pack Sealed is very similar to the old tournament pack with two boosters. However, the ends of the bell curve of the “exceptionally good” and “exceptionally bad” decks become a bit higher, and the truly busted decks are even more busted.
I can’t blame Wizards of the Coast for doing away with tournament packs – the logistics of large Sealed tournaments are much easier now, and the tournament packs were much harder to sell than booster packs.
But changing the distribution does influence Sealed Deck. When you are playing a Sealed Deck event with a large number of players, the number of truly busted decks is going to be higher now than in previous years. This may not affect a forty-person event, but a two or three hundred-person event is going to see a lot of decks with five to six great removal spells and a few bomb equipments/creatures.
If your goal in a Sealed Deck tournament is to do better than X-2, you need to either open a good deck or have a plan on making a “middle of the pack” pool competitive. Because of the inherent advantage to opening well, the top tables will be made up of good players, players with ridiculous decks, and the dreaded “good player with a ridiculous deck.” It’s almost a certainty that, for a number of rounds, you’ll play against players with better decks than you. This is why many players chalk Sealed Deck up to luck – because they feel like they have no control over the way their deck and tournament turns out.
There are ways to defeat better card pools, but it’ll require some work on your part.
The most obvious way is to simply outplay your opponent, but you’re going to have to include cards in your deck that let you do that. Twenty creatures, two Overruns, and a Fireball may be a great deck and will probably muscle you a long way into the tournament, but you’ve no way to outplay your opponent. You’re relying on the cards in your deck to do the work for you.
What happens when you run into the guy with eighteen creatures,
three
Overruns, and
two
Fireballs? Put all your chips into winning the die roll? Having a good number of combat tricks and utility cards is going to be required if you plan on outplaying your opponent instead of just playing better than them.
People have a tendency to look at their pool and try to optimize it to make it the most streamlined and powerful deck it can be. That’s great if you have an awesome pool -Â but if you have a middling pool, you need to put more work into it. You aren’t building the best collection of twenty-three out of eighty-four random cards, you’re building a deck that’ll put you into the Top 8 of the event. You’re building while in competition with the other players seated in the event.
While you may not be able to affect their card pools like you can in Draft, there’s a lot you can do by taking the givens of the format and crafting a deck that’s well suited in that particular Sealed Deck environment. The Sealed metagame is far less cohesive than a Constructed metagame, but it does exist.
The majority of the card pools opened in the room are well within the area around the baseline in most regards. They’ll all have some bombs, some evasion, some removal, and some acceleration, and so on. They’ll have a similar number of creatures, spells, and lands, as well as a similar color distribution.
While what individual cards do may vary, colors tend to do very specific things in each set:
1. If one or two colors have a higher number of quality commons, and people are gravitated towards those colors, their decks will be doing the same things.
2. Set mechanics are pushed, and some are a good deal better than others.
3. The cost and quality of removal and combat tricks end up determining how profitable creature-to-creature combat is. The power level and answers for the bombs in the format determine whether the format is based on power or consistency.
All of these factors create Sealed environments that can feel wildly different from year to year, or even set to set, but are pretty similar within each individual tournament.
Color depth is one of the keys to the Sealed metagame.
By “depth,” I mean “how many quality cards there are in the color,” particularly the commons. In Draft, color depth helps players decide what they want to draft. I mean, who doesn’t want to go blue in M11? The quality of the commons are higher, and there are a greater number of them. The problem is that a very popular color also means you’ll be fighting people for it, which can lead to your deck being short on playables.
It’s often the correct choice to take an under-drafted color to get higher quality picks later than you’d see them in a deeper color. Your odds of getting passed several first-pick green cards, for instance, is higher in M11 than in Rise of the Eldrazi because of each color’s position in terms of power and depth in each environment.
Sealed Deck is shaped by a similar issue. The colors with a higher raw number of quality commons are going to be the most popular colors for a random Sealed Deck on any given day because they tend to concentrate a player’s Sealed pool with lots of good cards.
If everyone wants to be blue in M11 Draft, then it stands to reason that most people will try to go blue in M11 Sealed. This offers you a lot of opportunities. A card that’s normally a sideboard card, like Plummet, gains a lot of value in your maindeck, as do color hosers. Giant Spider is an auto-include in every green deck. A card like Stormfront Pegasus, who’s still good, goes down in value in a format where there are a lot of larger, common fliers in almost every deck. Any plans to clog up the ground and dominate the air will be less reliable when everyone already has a good number of flyers at their disposal.
The “Power vs. Consistency” dilemma is perhaps the most well known of these three factors. Do you want a deck with less powerful cards that are very reliable? Or do you want a deck that’s greedier with its mana with cards that are more situational, but will win the game if it draws well?
The truth is this is often defined in the format by just how fast the format is, and how many answers there are to bombs. If there’s a lot of removal that will kill anything, then relying on a six- to seven-mana creature to win the game for you is a risky proposition. If, however, the removal is very poor, and you can slam that creature down on turn 6 with little worry of it immediately dying, then it’s a valid strategy.
You wouldn’t want to risk stumbling early on mana to splash a few more removal spells in Zendikar… but it
was
the go-to strategy in Shards of Alara. There isn’t anything inherently better about either one, but knowing where the format is pushing your deckbuilding is important if you want to really succeed at it.
The question you should be asking yourself well before you open up your packs is, “What does this format want me to do?” The power of cards in Limited is directly tied to the other cards in the environment.
One of the most fun things about the original Mirrodin was that it created an environment where Shatter was more powerful than Terror. That’s because Terror doesn’t kill many of the creatures you’re worried about, and equipment could turn any Myr into an unstoppable killing machine. The format wanted you to play more artifacts, and therefore made artifact kill spells stronger. Shatter variants have outclassed it in Constructed since Tempest, but for the first time ever, the card was a top pick for Limited.
Lorwyn wanted you to play tribal decks, so evaluating your pool based on what creature types you had became important. A card like Amoeboid Changeling’s ability to both boost your tribal and weaken your opponent’s tribal was therefore a much more reasonable card than it would’ve been in any sets surrounding Lorwyn.
How does all this theory apply to the real world?
Zendikar Sealed Deck was an aggressive format. Landfall provided ways for creatures to come out quickly and remain relevant for a long period of time – as long as you kept playing lands.
By the time the Limited Pro Tour Qualifier season came around, the Zendikar Sealed Deck environment was simply dominated by B/R. Anyone reading the spoiler should’ve been able to figure that out.
You had a large amount of powerful removal starting at one mana and going up to three, aggressive two-drops like Plated Geopede, Goblin Shortcutter, and Surrakar Marauder, and mid- to late-game removal like Heartstabber Mosquito. That also meant that in Zendikar Sealed, a black or red creature with intimidate wouldn’t be as powerful as it would’ve been in a different set. It meant that “destroy target non-black creature” would be a more restrictive removal spell than it’d be in say, M11 Sealed.
Not surprisingly, the decks trended towards being very aggressive and had curves that petered off at four to five mana, with six mana generally reserved for huge game-winning effects or creatures.
Another format within recent memory, Shards of Alara Sealed, was very different. The set focused on tri-color shards, so having a two-color deck was fairly rare. Generally you had two solid colors and a third or fourth as a splash.
There weren’t a lot of good aggressive two-drops in Shards, and the majority of the really good ones were multicolor, adding mana difficulties to any plans on getting an early start. While there were removal spells for one, two, and three mana, most of it tended to be on the higher end of that curve and had draconian mana requirements.
Throw in a cycle of mana accelerators/fixers for three mana that virtually everyone had a few copies of in their pool, and the Sealed Deck environment unsurprisingly trended towards decks with very few early drops with a large number of powerful five-, six-, and seven-drops.
Once you’ve identified what the Sealed Deck metagame is, you have to choose to either play with the environment, or fight it.
When opening a Zendikar Sealed pool, you can work on creating the best B/R deck that you can make, but that’s going to come with some baggage. The B/R mirror is going to be an attrition war because there are a million creatures with smaller butts and bigger swords. You need to be ready to play the control deck when you’re on the draw and save your removal for cards like Bog Tatters that won’t be easy to deal with. You might even include some less desirable cards like Soul Stair Expedition to help win the attrition war.
Even if a color combination is the most powerful in general, it doesn’t mean you should run it for your pool. If you do, you should at least have a strong sideboard plan that might involve a color or full deck swap. If you have a fairly good B/R pool with no way to win an attrition war for the mirror, you’ll be at a severe disadvantage in a half or two-thirds of the games where you play the mirror.
Sometimes you need to take a different approach and base your deck on the knowledge that a 2/3 in Zendikar is going to dodge a lot of B/R removal and profitably block most common creatures. You may include normally unimpressive maindeck cards like Cliff Threaders to take advantage of the fact that a very high number of people will be playing Mountains.
In Shards of Alara, you may open up a bomb-heavy deck that’s going to win every game when it hits six mana. But, if you can’t compete in the six-mana slugfest, you can often dodge the scenario entirely and focus on a deck that puts up a lot of pressure in the early turns and tries to mitigate your opponent’s six-drops by keeping them in their hand or keeping your opponent on defense. In an aggro-focused Sealed, you can plan on making your one-, two-, and three-drops with creatures that enter the red zone, and will often have a full board against an opponent who may only have an Obelisk in play.
They may have the objectively more powerful Sealed Deck, but you can have a better one for the matchup. You can take the givens of the format and craft a deck that exploits holes in the metagame.
I managed to do this for Grand Prix St. Louis several years ago. I opened a Ravnica Block Sealed pool that the person next to me laughed at. Not a single good rare, bad blue, and few two-for-ones. The common wisdom at the time was that you played midrange, incremental card advantage decks with a massive number of two-for-ones. I didn’t have that deck, or anything close to it. I had a lot of good removal and a bunch of mediocre creatures.
Instead of trying to fight the same fight everyone else was, I decided to play a different game. I built the fastest G/B/R deck that I could and threw in a few cards to deal with the bombs that I knew I would have to face down the line. I wish I had the whole Sealed pool to show you, but that has been lost to the ages.
1 Aquastrand Spider
1 Burning-Tree Bloodscale
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Cytoplast Root-Kin
1 Elves of Deep Shadow
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Gruul Guildmage
1 Gruul Scrapper
1 Nullmage Shepherd
1 Scab-Clan Mauler
1 Sell-Sword Brute
1 Skarrgan Pit-Skulk
1 Verdant Eidolon
1 Darkblast
1 Disembowel
1 Fists of Ironwood
1 Gaze of the Gorgon
1 Grifter’s Blade
1 Gruul Signet
1 Putrefy
1 Pyromatics
1 Scatter the Seeds
1 Seal of Doom
1 Twinstrike
1 Dimir Aqueduct
7 Forest
1 Golgari Rot Farm
5 Mountain
2 Swamp
A number of the cards in this deck would’ve been tenth picks in Draft. I included cards like Grifter’s Blade, Darkblast, and Gaze of the Gorgon to give my weak creatures some way to beat better ones in combat. I knew what my angle was, and did everything I could to exploit it.
I went 8-0 on Day 1.
One of the fundamental truths of Sealed Deck is that all pools aren’t created equal. There are times you’ll receive a deck that practically builds itself into an 8-0 monstrosity; there’ll be times where you’re debating putting in a fourth color to have more than two removal spells and possibly just running twenty land.
You can have success at individual tournaments if you open well. If you want to have success on a more regular basis, you’re going to have to work for it. It’s rare when you open a Sealed pool that can’t Top 8.
What matters is what you do with the pool you’re given. Sometimes you’ll need to take calculated risks in construction; sometimes you’ll need to play to unorthodox game states. The players who succeed regularly will figure out how to work every angle and push every pool further.
samstoddard at gmail dot com
samstod
on twitter