I’ve been thinking recently about the differences between
Draft play and Sealed, because I think that there are a lot of misconceptions
about the two formats and how similar they are. Notably, there are a ton of
people who seem to think that the same decks are viable in both – while this
can occasionally be true, the vast majority of the time, the rules of the
format tend to build very different decks.
Sealed
When playing Sealed, a player opens six packs and must
assemble a deck from those packs alone. Because there is no interaction with
the actual opening process – like there is in draft – the cards you receive are
fairly random and it’s difficult to get significant synergy in the format, or occasionally
even reasonable removal spells. The result is significantly more emphasis
placed on bombs and other stall-breaking cards.
Draft
For those who don’t know, when playing Draft, you open
three packs, taking a card out of each pack, and then passing them round-robin
around the table. As a result, you have control over the cards that you’re
going to be playing with to some degree. You also have a much smaller pool of
cards to work with than you would in sealed. This has two major effects – the first
is making the format much more dependent on player skill, and the second is
that the decks are generally more focused and honed than their sealed
counterparts.
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How to: Sealed
When you open a sealed pool, it can be a little
overwhelming to look at a pile of unsorted cards and have no idea what to do
with them. What do you do when you have a pile with no discernible goal? At
least during draft, you can craft your strategy based on what you’re seeing –
but with sealed, you’re given a heap. Luckily, there are some simple ways to
start to narrow things down.
1) Play to your
bombs: Sealed is naturally a format that doesn’t have a pleathora of removal. One
or two spells is often the most that people will be running with – and oftentimes,
even those will be conditional. In a format where Turn to Slag could be
considered a premium spell, it’s actually very difficult to deal with a large
number of threats. Keep this in mind when designing your deck. If people aren’t
going to have reliable removal spells, then playing hard-to-stop creatures can
give you a powerful advantage. Creatures with Hexproof are very difficult to
stop, and high-toughness will often be able to blank Red removal altogether. A
single unanswered card often can end games in Sealed – so try to pick colors
where you have that single card.
2) Play the colors you have the strongest plan in: This
one is a little more tricky. While playing bombs like Krenko, Mob Boss can
often be the obvious play, there are other strategies that abuse the nature of
the set much more effectively. In M13, Exalted is one of the major keywords,
and it synergizes extremely well with itself. The more of it you have, the
stronger each individual piece becomes. Look at your cards, and determine what
kind of plan you could accomplish with this.
3) Count your playables: One of the easiest methods of
building a deck is to go through your pool, find all the cards you would never
want to play, and set them aside. Then make a pile of each color out of the
remaining cards. It should be fairly obvious which colors you just can’t
support playing. Figure out your land base and go from here.
4) BREAK: For those who don’t know it, BREAK stands for “Bombs,
Removal, Evasive Creatures, Abilities, and Krud.” (It’s not a…perfect…acronym…)
Originally designed for Drafts to
explain a rough order of desirable card types, the BREAK model works well for
Sealed as well – to tell you what kind of cards you should be aiming to grab. While
you obviously don’t have the luxury of picking cards in sealed, you should
still prioritize cards in relatively that order.
Then again, sometimes, you just need a Fire Elemental to
beat someone’s face in.
5) SIDEBOARD: Seriously, this is something that drives me
crazy every time I see someone not doing it. Between games, you are permitted
to sideboard your deck to become better acclimated to combating theirs. Players
who do this WILL have an advantage if they do it right. After you’re done
building your deck, set aside some cards from the rest that you could see being
useful in various matchups. Building an aggressive blue deck? Maybe adding that
fog bank to your sideboard could give you the edge against an opposing bomb, or
a hyper aggressive deck where you need extra early blockers. Perhaps it’s not
the best option for your initial deck to have enchantment removal, but after
seeing an Oblivion Ring, Pacifism and a Mark of the Vampire, an Erase might not
seem like such a bad choice for you. Just because you cut a card from your main
deck doesn’t mean it couldn’t earn a spot there in the right situation.
While often maligned for the random nature of opening
packs and playing from that pool, Sealed Deck can be a fun and rewarding
experience that highlights a solid cross-section of a set. With solid play and good
deck building skills, almost any set of six packs can make a reasonable deck to
battle with.
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Are you going to GP Boston-Worcester this weekend? I am
too! If you’d like to meet up, chat for a bit, or grab something to eat – look me
up. Name is Andrew Rula, and I’ll likely be on the Q-S match sheet. Too shy to
do that? Send me a message with your name and I’ll see what I can do about
looking you up. It should be a good
time!
If you live in the Boston-Worcester area and you’re not
going – seriously, reconsider. GP’s are an incredible experience, not to be
missed!
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on quite a few
projects. For those of you who know me, you know that every November, I’m very
involved in a process known as NaNoWriMo – or National Novel Writing Month.
This year, I’ll be taking a leading role in the Philadelphia community for
this, and it’s eating up a decent amount of my time. I’m also planning on
moving next weekend, in addition to working on the Shard War decks and another
major project that will (ideally) be publically unveiled at GP Philly in
October. Stay tuned here for some other information about that in the coming
weeks.
Next week, we’re going to have my GP Boston tournament
report, and on Thursday, a guest post by Marshall, detailing a custom multiplayer
format that’s a ton of fun to play with friends.
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