Jan 17 2011

Sealed Practice 1

dastels @ 6:35 pm

I had a box of Zendikar to open and figured that I’d do it 6 packs at a time, treating them like sealed deck pools. It might be good practice for the upcoming sealed league I’m running at work. And why not write it up while I was at it. It might be interesting to look back at my thoughts later.

I’m writing this in flow, with minimal editing. I’m trying to capture my thoughts in as they presented themselves.

So after opening 6 packs, here’s my pool:

15 White, 16 Blue, 18 Black, 16 Red, 9 Green. My first thoughts looking through the pool went to Day of Judgment, Chandra Ablaze

While Chandra Ablaze looks spicy (planeswalker!), she really needs more red spells.

Day of Judgment is nice removal, and there’s some point removal in black.

There’s a few vamps, but not enough to be a theme, certainly not enough to power Malakir Bloodwitch, although she’s not too bad without her CIP effect. Discard may be a usable side theme: Desecrated Earth, and Mind Sludge could serve to strip the opponent’s hand and power up Guul Draz Specter.

Let’s look at some other Zendikar mechanics to see if there’s enough to build a deck around.

Allies:

Six allies over 4 colors are likely not worth paying much attention to.

Landfall:

Harrow and Explorer’s Scope add to the landfall package.

Ten landfall cards with a couple of boosts might be worth looking at, possibly as a RG build. White has several other cards that work well with landfall, with CIP effects to return lands to be replayed, or to fetch additional land, so maybe WRG. White also has a bit of removal. A WG dual helps make this more feasible. Blue and Black just have expeditions.

So let’s look at a WRG build:

That’s 16 playables, which leaves room for at most 5 more cards. I want to run 18 land for the landfall triggers as well as handling the color requirements. What’s the deck look like?

Nice curve, mostly white. It could use a few more creatures and some removal. How about adding some more red cards:

Now the stats are:

Now we’re at 12 creatures, which is probably ok. Some additional removal/burn. The color balance has shift from Wrg to WRg. With some lands we have:

It would be interesting to play this deck, and it seems I already have the cards in my MTGO collection, so if anyone fancies testing a bit with their own ZEN sealed deck, I’m game.