Practice Session #1: Building a Shards of Alara Sealed Deck
October 17, 2008 | Posted by Dee
One of the best ways to prepare for a Pro Tour Qualifier (PTQ) sealed deck tournament is to practice building a sealed deck. You can do this by opening a tournament pack and two booster packs (or five booster packs, which is basically the same thing). Then, just try to build a 40 card deck in 30 minutes.
Yesterday, I cracked five Shards of Alara booster packs and built a sealed deck to practice for tomorrow’s PTQ. Here were the Magic: The Gathering cards in my card pool.
| Practice Session #1: Shards of Alara Sealed Card Pool | |||||||||||
Green (11)
White (7)
Blue (7)
Black (10) | Red (11)
Green/White/Blue (1) White/Blue (2) White/Black (1) Blue/Black (3) Blue/Black/Red (2) Black/Red/Green (3) Black/Green (1) Red/Green (4) Colorless Artifacts (4) Lands (3) |
| |||||||||
After I separated the cards by color, I looked for the bombs, or the most powerful cards. Here are the bombs in this card pool with their casting costs:
Elspeth, Knight-Errant 2WW
Sharding Sphinx 4UU
Flameblast Dragon 4RR
Predator Dragon 3RRR
Broodmate Dragon 3GRB
Elspeth, Knight-Errant is a bomb because she gives you free creatures, grants your creatures evasion, and ultimate ability is super powerful. The other four cards are bombs because of their big bodies, evasion, and powerful abilities.
Next, I looked for the quality removal. Here’s what I found:
Resounding Roar 1G
Angelic Benediction 3W
Bone Splinters B
Executioners Capsule B
2 Skeletonize 4R
Magma Spray R
Bloodpyre Elemental 4R
Vithian Stinger 2R
Bant Charm GWU
2 Agony Warp UB
2 Jund Charm BRG
Branching Bolt 1RG
I didn’t include Blister Beetle because it’s too situational. Resounding Roar and Angelic Benediction are quasi-removal that work well in aggressive decks with a lot of cheap creatures. Jund Charm is good if you don’t have a lot of two-toughness creatures.
You want to play the most bombs and removal without wrecking your mana base while still having a solid creature base of 13+ creatures.
Two of my bombs require multiple red mana and I have a lot of good red removal, so I’m definitely playing red. I have good black removal that deals with the big fatties of the popular Naya sealed deck. Also, one of my bombs costs 3BRG. With my mana fixing, it shouldn’t be hard to splash for green if I don’t decide to make it one of my main colors.
So, here’s what we have so far:
You can click on the image to see the larger version.
It’s important to come up with a core of bombs and removal before you flesh out the rest of your deck. This core of cards will help you stay focused.
As you can see, we need creatures. Red is definitely a main color so I’ll add the playable red creatures. Sadly, there is only one: Hissing Iguanar. I might add Exuberant Firestoker if I have at least four 5-power creatures.
We have some good green and red/green creatures and red/green removal so I’ll try that direction.
I’ve laid out the cards based on spell or creature and casting cost.
I added a couple black cards because it will be easy to splash a good amount of black mana with 2 Grixis Panorama and 1 Obelisk of Jund. Necrogenesis and Scavenger Drake work well together. They also combo with Bone Splinters, Hissing Iguanar, Bloodpyre Elemental, and Predator Dragon.
I cut one Skeletonize for Resound Roar because I have a good number of cheap creatures. Plus, Skeletonize is pretty expensive for the damage it deals.
Here is the final deck in text format with the lands.
| Jund Beatdown (And Three Dragons) | |||||||||||
Creatures (15) | Spells (8)
Lands (17) |
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You may be wondering about the Wild Nacatl without any Plains. In an aggro deck like this, a one mana 2/2 is definitely okay.
With mana, my usual configuration is 17 lands and 1 Obelisk. In this decklist, here is how the mana worked out:
5 black cards
5 black mana sources
12 red cards including a card with triple red casting cost
9 red mana sources
12 green cards including a card with double green casting cost
8 green mana sources
The manabase seems pretty stable to me, which is a good thing when playing three colors.
To play this deck, you want to be the aggressor. You want to get a lot of damage in early through your cheap creatures and removal. If they are able to stop your early rush, you just drop a dragon and win anyways.
I also built a Grixis deck since Agony Warp and Kederekt Creeper are pretty good cards. Here’s what I came up with – in image and text format:
| Grixis Flyers (Including Three Dragons) | |||||||||||
Creatures (15) | Spells (8) Lands (17) |
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This deck may seem more powerful than the Jund deck since it has another bomb in Sharding Sphinx. However, I would play the Jund deck over this deck because this deck has too many expensive cards.
Actually, for fun, I played both decks against each other and the Jund deck won 4-0. The games were not even close. The Jund deck comes out too fast. The Grixis deck can’t keep up. Even when it is able to play it’s bombs, the Jund deck has removal for them.
Over To You
How would you have built my sealed card pool?
I’ll be posting a tournament report for the PTQ I’m attending tomorrow. If you’d like to receive an update whenever this report is published, subscribe to free email updates to my blog posts.
6 Responses to “Practice Session #1: Building a Shards of Alara Sealed Deck”
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Is this really a real card pool or is it from MWS ??
It’s a real card pool from 5 boosters, which is basically the same card pool as a tournament pack and 2 boosters. It’s just short 3 commons and an uncommon, I think.
I recently read that 90+ percent of pros play all their skeletonizes if it is in their pool. Not even close on resounding roar, which is actually a lot worse in practice than you’d think, and almost all the time 3 damage and a dredge skeleton would be better than saving your creature and killing theirs. So I definetly would have cut resounding roar for skeletonize. Also, Im not sure wild nactl is ever good… it just seems like he gets outclassed quick in this format and sometimes hes not even a 2/2 until turn 3 or so. Idk your card pool was extremely weak but i would have also not used necrogenesis.. its a stall card that will never win the game.
I think you’re under-valuing Necrogenesis. It stops unearth, which can be a problem for a cheap, beatdown deck since Vithian Stinger is common and has unearth. It helps devour creatures. It makes creatures like Algae Gharial and Scavenger Drake bigger. It combos with Hissing Iguanar.
Also, Necrogenesis gives you something to do with your mana if you draw too many lands. It gives a beatdown deck a lategame threat while not being too expensive.
Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, who has a Pro Tour Hollywood Top 8 this year, really likes Necrogenesis.
I like Wild Nacatl because many decks can’t handle a one drop that attacks for two on turn 2. I have 8 ways to get a Mountain so it’s usually a 2/2.
Ur card pool was powerful, and a lot, Obelisks are not as good as u think.
I would first like to say thanks I have been looking for a good magic web-site, that was free, and i found a bomb seeing how tomorrow I have a PTQ to attend and have been looking for anything relevant to a sealed article, and also I would have to agree with Dee necrogensis is a very useful card in many ways, one that wasn’t mentioned or zoned in on is the predator dragon, which can be a Big win condition, so all those creatures don;t just go to waste. once again thanks for the article.
P.S. i have also been looking for any sealed pool articles that have plainswalkers in them, I have done three practice sealed pools this week and gotten one every time twice being tezzert, i wanted to see some one else’s take on it.