Subject: Sealed deck: some tips Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 15:50:09 -0700 From: Lance Conrad The most important overall factor in a good sealed deck is the number and quality of creatures. A deck with a ton of creature removal will not win consistently without muscle behing it. Example-some friends and I did a "crap draft" for fun one day. Each player had an amount of money in which to buy cards. The object being to get the worse deck possible, give it to your opponent, constrct the best deck out of the pile of crap you were given. My friend Lars drafted cards like ray of commands, fireblast, thirst, and a ton of other creature removal cards shunned by the rest of us. And he managed to draft the worst deck. Why? All his creatures were 1/1 and he had only twelve of them spread through out the five colors. No one got him below fifteen life in any of the games he played. Lesson to all-creatures win limited environment games. Hill giants and craw wurms may suck in consturcted deck, but they are your best friends here. When choosing colors, it is reccomended to go with the ones with the most creatures which are large, fly, or have special abilities. The second most important factor is creature removal. While rampant in the Mirage block (pacifism, thirst, dark banishing, afterlife, ray of command, and about a hundred red spells), the creature elimination cards have been trimmed out of white and blue, making red (I should say remainging) the most effective in this catagory-surprise? and black as the runner up. Creature elimination has become less obvious and must be achieved indirecty sometines. Example-healing salve is often overlooked in sealed deck. In a format where creature exchange is common and encouraged, this card will save a creature taking lethal damage while it can still deal damage to another. thus you have traded a healing salve for one of your opponents creatures- creature elimination is achieved. the vissions card remedy can be used similarly, often removing more than one creature in the process. Giant growth and feral instinct are examples of other indirect removal. One of the biggest causes of loss in sealed deck is often lack of sufficient mana. Due to the variety of cards, three colors are the most often used. I discussed this with Bruce Swiney and he told me 18 land-bare minimum. I didn't think this was wise to overfill a deck with land, but how do you argue with a guy who won six sealed deck tournaments in a row last year? (PTQ's, mirage prerealease, and others). Off the topic-what the hell happend to Bruce anyways? Did he just drop off the face of the earth or what? In this format, you want to be able to cast whatever is in your hand as soon as possible. A deck with three colors is succeptible to color screw and the only way to ease the problem is a lot of land. It helps if most of your cards require one colored mana to cast, but often the big creatures or other gamebreakers will require two or more. Try to stay away from single creature enhancers. Firebreathing, for example, does little good on a creature which your opponent can simply block and kill. It merely encourages your opponent to block and you lose two cards to your opponent's one. While sometimes gamewinning on flying and landwalking creatures, creature enhancers often create a bigger target for your opponent's removal spells. Most of you probably know this already, but I've had a ton of people write me saying they suck at sealed deck, so I've been inspired to write this. I suck at sealed too, but I do manage to do well at it from time to time... If you can, I reccomend using decksealer programs to practice. Find some friends, print some decklists up, and play. It's also fun to trade decklists after playing to see what someone else would do with a deck and can be a learning experience. Later, Lance Conrad no longer the necrobastard now that I'm in school again