SCG Daily: Ravnica Sealed Vivisected, Day Five
The thrilling conclusion! Five builds later, Eli reviews his work and tries to judge which is the best color combination in Ravnica Sealed.

The thrilling conclusion! Five builds later, Eli reviews his work and tries to judge which is the best color combination in Ravnica Sealed.
Wondering what people are going to be playing at States? Ben takes at look at the StarCityGames.com sales database to make some startling predictions! Find which cards have been selling the best from Standard and which are falling behind.
Also in Ben’s Corner: Which new pieces of original Magic artwork has Star City added to its inventory? Hark, do I spy with my eye nifty new Magic carrying bags? Where can I go this weekend to sell my cards to StarCityGames.com in person? The answers to all these questions are just a click away!
Haven’t found a deck you like for States? Don’t want to be among the countless hordes playing Red/White, Mono-Blue Control, Gifts Ungiven or Black/Green? Then read this article to see Ben’s ramblings about a slew of cards being overlooked in Standard right now. Editor’s Warning: Following any of this advice might be dangerous to your health, sanity and chances of winning!
Going to play in Champs this weekend? Josh Silvestri has some important reminders that you should definitely think through before you sit down for round 1 on Saturday.
Dark Confidant (henceforth “Bob”) provides one main function – card drawing. It can also beat, and can hold a Jitte, but card drawing is what it does best. However, that card drawing comes at a price – a significant price if you draw something like Ink-Eyes or Kokusho. I found myself wondering if it was possible to build a winning deck around The Great One and his abilities.
My goal for this week is to weave all of these things together for a look at the States metagame and the choices that are going to be present and inherent in each archetype. I’ll also give a few hints as to how the key contenders match up against each other, and we can go from there into creating an assumed picture of the metagame as well as the suggestions that can come from it as to how to succeed. I like looking at the whole picture and figuring out the so-called “rules of the format”, and that’s something that may be profitable here as well. It may also be highly premature, so we’ll see how firm our conclusions are before taking that particular step.
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Metagame Clock. Anyone? Bueller? The Metagame Clock is what’ll help me get a grip on things. Maybe it’ll help you as well, as some last-minute reading that puts things in perspective.
When I sit down to play a game of Magic, nothing delivers the goods like Super Grow. Because the things I enjoy doing the most in this fine game, namely, drawing tons of cards, countering everything thrown at me, and beating my opponent bloody with cheap and arbitrarily large creatures is what 3cThreshold does best.
Another day, another Sealed pool. With than two weeks for Ravnica, are you ready for the Prerelease tournaments? Polish your skills and see how your thoughts stack up to Eli’s. As a bonus to today’s offering you also get an incredibly Japanese Vulturous Zombie combo deck to ponder for States. Wild tech? Yesiree!
“What the hell is that?” You’d be surprised how often those five words have scrolled across my mental marquee in the last few weeks. As a rough estimate, I’d say four thousand. That’s slightly less than the amount of years it feels like I’ve been in the land of the Magic dead.
Before we examine today’s card pool, let’s take a look at how one of the rules of Limited has shifted.
The master of wacky decks arrives once again with some casual decks that abuse the latest cards in fascinating ways! Want an infinite Tolsimir deck? How about a way to abuse Grozoth? Abe provides the goods, starting now!
This is the next installment of what promises to be an interminably long series. You never know how many days may be in a week, after all. Cutting up these Ravnica sealed decks should unlock greater wisdom and understanding of the format.
After my last article, I was criticized in the forums for talking about the guild pairs as basic archetypes of Ravnica Sealed, since actual Sealed decks are almost always three or more colors. And it’s true that the three types of archetypes are all in some way related to the guilds, as not harnessing their power would just be foolish. Let’s take a look at them,. and see how they apply to drafts.
Eli Kaplan, resident Magic gawker in Japan, makes his leap to Featured Writer status with a stint on SCG Daily. In this series, he promises to smash you over the head with Sealed deck builds, to get you ready for Magic Online’s Ravnica prerelease.