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Sealed Sadness – an RPTQ Adventure

Recently I was fortunate enough to play in an RPTQ to try and make the Pro Tour. I had two things going against me: It was Sealed, and it was online. A friend had mentioned that the 13 hour trip wasn’t worthwhile with the format being really swingy and while I would have liked to go, my travel companions were not all up for the trip. I had very little practice with the Sealed format and my only competitive draft consisted of me getting smacked by Doug Potter so there was a long way to go in the learning process. I’ll dive right into things:

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This was definitely not the best pool I’ve ever opened and this was definitely not the correct build either. A lot of sub-optimal decision making went into this but I think it’s a good learning experience.

I knew that without any bombs, I wanted to be really aggressive. However, this was not the way to do it. I didn’t realize how bad the red early drops would be. [card]Falkenrath Gorger[/card], [card]Insolent Neonate[/card], and [card]Sanguinary Mage[/card] weren’t even close to good enough and were frequently dead draws that in a perfect scenario would hit for a few points of damage. [card]Mad Prophet[/card] was great but I already had a lot of 4-drops and the spells were all medium. With only twenty minutes to build and not a lot of experience – this is what I registered.

The black cards were really strong and double [card]Accursed Witch[/card] let me know that was the place to be. [card]Heir of Falkenrath[/card] and [card]Crow of Dark Tidings[/card] were solid fliers. [card]Gisa’s Bidding[/card] was another card that really overperformed for me as I got to madness it into play at instant speed multiple times for crazy blowouts. The removal spells were great as expected.

I will point out that after every game 1, I sided as follows:

OUT

[sbplan]
8 Mountain
1 Falkenrath Gorger
1 Insolent Neonate
1 Sanguinary Mage
1 Rush of Adrenaline
1 Tormenting Voice
1 Dance with Devils
1 Stallion of Ashmouth
1 Mad Prophet
1 Spiteful Motives
1 Inner Struggle
1 Gatstaf Arsonists
1 Incorrigible Youths
[/sbplan]

IN

[sbplan]
8 Plains
1 Devilthorn Fox
1 Angelic Purge
1 Anguished Unmaking
1 Dauntless Cathar
2 Spectral Shepherd
3 Apothecary Geist
1 Emissary of the Sleepless
1 Vessel of Ephemera
1 Cathar’s Companion
[/sbplan]

The white cards were much more aggressive compared to the red ones than I initially anticipated. The flyers really did a lot of work and the bigger ground creatures gummed up the board quite effectively. I was able to deal with multiple planeswalkers out of my opponents because they would get an activation and then I could fly over for 6 or so. I quickly learned that [card]Apothecary Geist[/card] was very good and I should have respected it more. I thought that a 2/3 flyer for 4 wasn’t a great rate but gaining 3 was actually relevant and I won a lot of races. I played out the whole RPTQ for prizes since it paid out to top 32 and managed to go a measly 4-3.

A few people asked me about some individual card choices so I hope I can clear that up now.

[card]Neglected Heirloom[/card] with [card]Heir of Falkenrath[/card] is basically a free win if you get it online early. You get to flip both at the cost of a card and win the game in short order. However, I didn’t play the [card]Neglected Heirloom[/card] as it would only flip with that individual card and the [card]Gatstaf Arsonists[/card] which I boarded out all of the time.

[card]Triskaidekaphobia[/card] is another card I’ve heard mixed feedback on. Personally it wasn’t a card I ever wanted to be playing and I think that it’s not where you want to be. I’ve heard more stories of people losing to their own than actually winning because of this card. It was also an easy cut as I was already glutted on four drops pre and post board.

[card]Call the Bloodline[/card] was probably my most polar card. It did an amazing amount of work or did absolutely nothing. It was great with madness and extra lands but often I just cast it and then cast 3-drop into 4-drop.

[card]Warped Landscape[/card] is a card that a lot of people also weren’t big on. I think the card is fine. It lets you splash a third colour at a cost but in a two-color deck it makes it easier to keep double [card]Plains[/card] and double [card]Swamp[/card] hands with the [card]Warped Landscape[/card] in case you don’t draw out of it. It also enables Delirium if you need it.

[card]Vessel of Ephemera[/card] is another card I thought was really underwhelming. It felt like a lot of 5 mana for 2 1/1 flyers. I think it’s better in decks that can take advantage of Delirium as it definitely has a role there but for the aggro plan it simply did not do enough.

[card]Thalia’s Lieutenant[/card] is a fantastic card but unfortunately I did not have enough humans. My opponent had two of them and kind of ran me over but it wasn’t a card considered for this deck.

[card]Anguished Unmaking[/card] and to a lesser extent – [card]Angelic Purge[/card]. People were surprised that I wasn’t splashing these in my original BR deck and after playing with it, I don’t blame them. These two cards were incredible and were frequently the best card in my deck by a lot. Sometimes you needed to kill a 7/7 but quite often there was an enchantment or planeswalker that threatened to run away with the game. These cards are clean cheap answers and I definitely should have been playing in the maindeck.

I do think that the BW deck was the best iteration for the pool and I would have done much better if I had started with this. It’s hard to say how much better as an earlier win would have put me in a significantly harder bracket. This format is pretty tricky for a few reasons. The first being that flip cards don’t count towards normal rarity so every one you see with an [card]Archangel Avacyn[/card] or [card]Arlinn Kord[/card] just has more rares than you as well as better rares.

The second thing I noticed about Sealed compared to draft was how hard it was to get a solid theme in your deck. I had a few cards that interacted with clues and no way to make any. I had a [card]Trail of Evidence[/card] and almost no instants or sorceries. On the other hand I had a ton of ways to enable delirium and no good delirium cards whereas a lot of other decks had the opposite problem. My opponents would play sweet cards like [card]Soul Swallower[/card] and go through most of the game without getting delirium. Something important to look at when building your deck overall.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about combat tricks as I noticed a lot of people seemed to be playing these either awkwardly or incorrectly. [card]Survive the Night[/card], [card]Tenacity[/card], [card]Grotesque Mutation[/card], [card]Uncaged Fury[/card], [card]Confront the Unknown[/card], and [card]Moonlight Hunt[/card] are all very powerful cards when used correctly. Some of them are better than others but it’s important to note that all of these can be quite good. They are also relatively common in a Sealed event to run into so this will come up quite a bit.

I saw people constantly attacking a 2/2 into a 3/3 and then after blocks slamming one of these spells to try and blow their opponent out. However, trading a tenacity for a slightly bigger creature didn’t seem like the best use of the ability. These tricks allow you to make very profitable blocks, or attack for much better value but people were snapping them off like it was nothing. Maybe they didn’t expect their opponent to block but when the ground was gummed up, I thought this was just a waste of a card that could maybe break the game open.

On the same note, people that had these tricks weren’t bluffing when they should have. There were lots of times when I could never block in case my opponent had a trick that would 4 for 1 me. [card]Tenacity[/card] and Caged Fury meant that either making lots of blocks or gang-blocking would lead to absolute disaster. With this in mind I could never block in a lot of board states in case my opponent had those cards. But they never attacked.

Something to keep in mind for the future. If your opponent can’t afford to call your bluff, then you need to bluff more. Just remember you don’t have to use your trick even if they block them all. You can trade instead of saving your minion and you’ll still have your trick for later.

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