With Innistrad being the new kid on the block, and brews being rampant, everyone is wanting to focus on how sweet the new Standard is and/or look for ways in which to break it in half. That is all well and good, and with States being this past weekend, it was quite relevant. But, let us not forget that there is a PTQ season upon us, and there, no one cares what your 60 card decks look like!
Sealed PTQ seasons are always some of the best in terms of allowing the cream to rise to the top. Sure, there are those pools that showcase insane rares, mythics, and synergy, but usually they end up getting filtered out when it comes to the top 8 draft, if they are fortunate enough to make it there. The trick to showcasing your skill in the draft portion though, is milking your pool for everything that you can during the sealed portion, allowing your superior skill to take over. If you were fortunate enough to open up the best bombs all in one color, this article is not for you, but if you opened up an average pool, or even one lacking in anything special, today, we talk about how to maximize your success with just that sort of thing.
People tend to assume that sealed deck is about luck more than any other format, and in some ways, they have a point. It is possible to just open up better cards than someone else. But sealed pools never build themselves, despite what some may say, and plenty of people fail to capitalize on their good fortune by improperly building such pools. It is your job to prevent this from happening to yourself, no matter how many good cards you opened. Building your sealed pool is the area you have the most control over and has the potential for the most swings, one way or another.
Maximize Your Bombs
If you have ever watched a sealed video of mine, or Luis, or any other video producer, you will generally find that the first thing we do is sort our pool into rarity before going over the colors. Now, this might seem strange, because the depth of each color generally steers the direction of your sealed pool, but I think maximizing your bombs is even more important.
You see, because sealed is a limited format that you have less control over, unlike draft, which allows for archetype sculpting, the games are much more generic in nature. They play some creatures, you play some creatures, some removal enters the mix and so on. Rarely do you get to build an archetype that has a more crafted game plan, like the self-mill deck, or a Burning Vengeance strategy. This means that in this more generic style of sealed, cards or actions that produce huge swingy effects are that much more back breaking. If I untap and play a Garruk Relentless, or Olivia Voldaren, after a bunch of normal limited turns have gone by, I have produced an advantage that must immediately be answered or rivaled, or the game spirals out of control for my opponent.
Compare this to draft, where this effect still can occur, but can also be circumvented. If my opponent is busy milling himself like crazy, and then I play a Garruk to kill his Civilized Scholar (for example) he doesn't need to kill Garruk or play some bomb of his own necessarily. Instead, his crafted game plan could just be to mill a little more, cast a Spider Spawning, and then play Stitched Drake. None of the cards he played are particularly alarming (although they are good of course) but because he was able to enhance them with a finely tuned game plan, my Garruk, while the best card in play, is hardly enough to win by itself. The same could be true for Olivia Voldaren depending on how much mana I have available. Of course, Garruk can take over a draft game, but there is a larger chance it can be worked around.
Back to sealed.
If you open your sealed pool, sort by rarity, and notice a Garruk staring back at you, you would be well placed to find any and every way to work that into your deck. If Green is one of your stronger colors, play it, but even if it requires a splash, he is worth the effort. Or, as in one of my release sealed pools, I played red for Heretic's Punishment, 2 Into the Maw of Hell, and a Brimstone Volley, despite other colors providing a much deeper set of cards. Those cards are just so much more powerful than the most powerful thing a different color could be doing, even if there is not another playable Red card in sight.
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Find Your Strengths
So you have looked through your standout rares, mythics, and anything else that be considered a bomb, but you don't have enough there to really carry you. There are a few good cards, but hardly enough to take you through to a top 8. What do you do? Well it is at this point that you need to pinpoint what your pool can do best.
This will often confuse players, as they see limited at this stale format, where you play your good cards, ignore the bad ones, and the run some guys head first into other guys, but that is hardly the case at all. Your pool has some strengths and weaknesses. Even the worst pool does something better than another thing, and in order for you to maximize your chances of making it out of the Swiss alive, you need to figure out what that thing is.
A good example of this is building the aggro deck, made up mostly of poor sealed cards otherwise, but it is the best place to turn in some cases. Let's take Innistrad for example. If your pool has very poor White, along with nothing special in most other colors, do you play the White if it happens to have Angelic Overseer and a Tapper or two? What if those are the only playables? What if you had the following cards in Red/Black
None of those cards are particularly amazing. In fact, in most pools, many of them would not even make the cut, save for the Reckless Waif and Falkenrath Noble. However, with a lack of blatant power elsewhere in the pool, chucking that core group of creatures into your deck gives you a definitive direction to take your games. You are the beat down, and you plan on punishing opposing players for their slow builds and bad mana bases. Head to head, none of your cards may match up well with theirs, but your game plan does. Throw in a few more filler cards into the mix (or even your few above average cards, like a Morkut Banshee and Kruin Outlaw) along with some removal, and you have a solid game plan that takes advantage of your deck's strength. You even get to use other otherwise useless cards, like Bump in the Night, or Furor of the Bitten, to really cement your strategy nicely.
It is not about making the most powerful deck in a vacuum. I am sure if you were to build the White deck that was available, with its 2 tappers, Angelic Overseer, and then filler creatures like Elder Cathar and Abbey Griffin, your deck would be more powerful, but it likely would not be as powerful as opposing strategies that are going for the same concept. Instead, utilize your strength and attack fast and efficiently!
Dangerous Curves Ahead
Your curve can often make or break your deck with it comes to draft. In draft, there is a much heavier emphasis on tempo and providing pressure while steadily increasing the power level of your threats. This is created partly because your opponent is expected to do the same - so if either player slips up, the opposing player gains a huge advantage - and partly because you get to hand select cards to do this (for the most part). Sealed is a different animal in my mind.
There are certainly decks, like the above BR aggro deck, where your curve is vitally important and helps to define the identity of what your deck wants to be doing. Beyond those aggro or tempo decks, which are much less common than in draft, I believe curve emphasis to be overrated. Obviously you cannot go running around with zero 2-drops and zero 3-drops in your deck at all, but you do not have to have this bell shape of creatures to keep you in a game.
If you play one or two 2-drops, that's fine, there is not any need for more than that. Most other decks are doing clunky and slow things anyway, and your two drop dramatically lessens the power level of late game top decks if you have not drawn it yet. I think you can reasonably get away without a single 2-drop creature in the right deck, say one that has a few Pyroclasm effects, or a bunch of more generic removal. At the 3-drop slot, you cannot skimp quite as much, because at this point you really want to be playing something, but you do not need 4 or 5 creatures here in every case like some people want to have you believe.
Werewolves make for particularly great 2 and 3 drops in small numbers as well, because they have a much bigger impact late on the game (when they flip) than the typical Walking Corpse or Hamlet Captain. Obviously there are a ton of typical 2 drops like this as well, from Avacynian Priests to Silverchase Fox. These are all good examples though, because I think in sealed, maximizing your draws in the late game for any non-aggressive deck, is vital to your chances of winning. This means that any 2-drop or 3-drop with added value later on in the game, like a Ghoulraiser or evasive creature, is going to do that much more toward improving the quality of your draw steps and therefore your chances of winning.
Gimmick a Sec...
When you draft, specifically when you draft a format as diverse as Innistrad, gimmick decks can and will work, because you have the tools at your disposal to construct them as you go. There are Burning Vengeance decks and self-mill decks etc. In sealed however, almost never do you open the type of pool that lends itself to this sort of deck building. There are the rare times when you will open a Vampire theme deck or the 3 Intangible Virtue token monstrosity, but consider those the exceptions and not the rule.
Therefore, it is typically in your best interest to avoid watering down your deck by moving all in on these types of decks. Focus rather, on building a deck with synergies, preferably composed of cards that are powerful on their own or with the group. If you water your deck down too much with fancy combos and a backwater strategy, you have a good shot at that plan just never coming together and your deck actually beating itself, which is never a good thing. Aggro versus control should be a question you ask yourself of your pool, but combo should generally be left for the draft tables.
Wrap Up
Sealed deck play is its own Beast and I began to realize that many players just do not know how to do it properly. The format goes untalked about most of the time, and players feel like they can just take their draft skills and transfer them over without worry. This became quite apparent when I saw tweet after tweet of poorly built pools and poorly built logic behind certain card choices when they were questioned. With at least one limited PTQ season a year, you would think it would be a more understood format. Well, hopefully this gets some people on the right track at least, as explaining the entire format in one article is impossible, and we will revisit the idea in a future discussion! Good luck at all of your PTQs, online and off, and as always, thanks for reading!
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