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Sealed Strategy: Know Your Commons

Okay, so what is the point really of looking at all the different colours as commons? Other than annoying the Mr Suitcases of the world when you manage to squeeze out a 25% win ratio against them with a deck worth $1 tops! For some reason this is more psychologically damaging for them than being repeatedly thrashed by a net deck, fun as that may be.

For one thing, I don't know about anybody else, but I've noticed that in sealed deck there are hardly any rares (well, duh!). People who look at their 'bombs' and build a deck based around their rares almost always lose. Of course it occurs to me that as a general rule the vast majority of players do not make the top 8 and so 'lose' regardless of how they built their decks. So any assertion about how the majority of players that do X lose does not really say anything about whether doing X is a good strategy. Irrespective of that, my observation is that the people who wander around going on about their 'bombs' often end up going 1-2 drop. Which pretty much equates to the statistical chance of getting their so called 'bombs' out.

Know thy commons in order to know thy sealed. This is even more crucial in formats like rochester and booster draft which also rely on very fast visual recognition. A good (but expensive) way of preparing for those formats is to open half a box or so of boosters, taking time to think about the commons, not just flicking straight to the rares.

So lets say that you open a random sealed deck, what is your first question?

How about: what circles of protection did I get? Circle of Protection Green is just about enough to set you up for a win. Lets say you get CoP Green and a Panther Warriors, how are you going to clear the way for the Panther Warriors? White and Green are not exactly known for their removal. What about red and black, those are 'removal' colours?

Okay, good start, you've already realised that since Green has so many good common creatures that a lot of people are going to play Green as one of their primary colours. Being a creature combat based format, you now think about how the Panther Warriors is going to die quickly as soon as it gets into combat.

But now the thinking goes off the rails, because you now want to put your deck into a Sligh style burn the blockers, attack with the Ball Lightning kind of deck. To do so, you're going to spread yourself to a third colour. But don't all those Invasion sealed decks use three and four colours? Well yes, but you ain't in Kansas anymore, Toto. What applies to Classic, isn't necessarily going to apply to Invasion and vice versa. And even if you were going to splash a third colour, what about Blue?

Look at Flight for instance. A lot of people would think 'What a useless card. Most of blue's good creatures fly anyway. Duh'. And biff it. Whereas Flight is almost never going to be useless in Sealed *if* you have a good enough creature base. Flight is like 'unremoval'.

Or, why bother even looking outside of Green and White? Put Regeneration on the Panther Warriors and you now have something 'better than Ball Lightning'. With lots of little tricks from White, eg Infantry Veterans and Ballistae, you could make it really hard for them to figure out how they should block the Panther Warriors *without* generating massive card disadvantage.

Back to the Flight. Why not combine it with Femeref Archers and turn Flight into a removal spell? Better yet, what about Femeref Archers and Harmattan Efreet? That is going to completely wreck most other decks. Just don't get cocky and muck around trying to get total board control, because then you give them time to draw their bomb. Of course the nice thing about the above combo is that the Efreet can give something flying without that tapping the Efreet so it can still fly over for two every turn.

There are loads and loads of little tricks like that hidden in the commons and uncommons. Back to Green now: what are the two most horrible green creatures that are not worth playing? Well, there the Fyndhorn Brownie, which can give your best creature 'does not tap to attack'. It's generally bad in mono green because so few green creatures tap to do anything good. Combine it with another colour, or in sealed where you can't just play with four of your favourite things, and it sort of lets you duplicate your best creature. Then there's Pradesh Gypsies, which is just bad. It's an awful common, its plebian trash, and it may just be a great solution to the Panther Warriors problem. If you have the Gypsies out then they have to really think hard about how to block the Panther Warriors. If they let it through, you can still use the Gypsies on defense.

I remember playing in the final swiss round for top 8 of a Mirage Tournament where I had a Floodgate in play and a Teferi's Curse (40th pick) in hand, and I was trying to figure out which of my opponent's creatures to put the curse on. D'oh! One of my team-mates pointed out after the game that those two cards are a selective Wrath of God for the opponent every two turns, for no extra mana investment.

Think outside of the box. There are so many little synergies between cards, but we don't go looking for them because they are not 'game winning combos'. Okay, Femeref Archer, Harmattan Efreet isn't exactly going to rock the type 2 constructed environment, but in Sealed that's just pure Evil on a Stick (TM).

Okay, so what if your opponent isn't playing Green. If the CoP Green was your main reason for playing (or splashing) White, then what do you put in instead? The unthinking response is to do nothing. The knee jerk response is to switch to red, because everyone plays Fires in type 2. After all, White and Red are the 'complementary' colours for Green, right? But as I've already pointed out, there are some good synergies between Green and Blue, what about Green and Black? Black has flyers, creature removal, pump, mass creature removal and other disruption, all things that Green lacks. What about Gorilla Chieftain and Pestilence as a combo? Sure, you may not want to play your elves, but there are a lot of other ways to get non creature mana in Green, some of them can even go and get you some more Swamps to feed the Pestilence. In that kind of situation you might want to have some life gain (Stream of Life) on hand, even though conventional wisdom says that Stream of Life is bad.

Or you could put Fear on the Panther Warriors, another common that conventional wisdom says is 'sub par'.

In my next article, I seek to become more 'relevant' to modern times and look at Invasion through the same principle, that the commons make the Sealed.

Rick
(AWOL from Paradise)