Practice Session #2: Building a Shards of Alara Sealed Deck
October 28, 2008
Welcome to another practice session in building a Shards of Alara sealed deck.
I’ve got a PTQ to go to this weekend so I opened five Shards of Alara booster packs, set the timer for 30 minutes, and tried to build a good sealed decklist.
Here was my card pool.
| Practice Session #2: Shards of Alara Sealed Card Pool | |||||||||||
Green (11)
White (11)
Blue (8) | Black (12)
Red (6) White/Blue (2) White/Blue/Black (2) Blue/Black (2) Blue/Black/Red (2) Black/Red (2) Black/Red/Green (1) Red/Green (1) Red/Green/White (2) Colorless Artifacts (5) Lands (3) |
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I’ve had some success building aggressive sealed decks. However, I didn’t think I could do that with this card pool.
Aggro Decks Need Many Cheap Creatures
Aggro decks work if you have enough good cheap creatures in a shard. For example, if you have Rhox Charger, Hissing Iguanar, Topan Ascetic, Qasali Ambusher, Rip-Clan Crasher, Knight of the Skyward Eye, Wild Nacatl, and Akrasan Squire, you could build an aggro Naya deck.
Unless you were lucky enough to open a lot of land mana fixers, aggro decks should stick to three colors or three colors with 1-2 splashes. One of the main strengths of aggro decks is having a solid mana base that allows it to play its one-drop and two-drop creatures reliably on turns one and two. If you play too many cards in all five colors, your mana base will not be as solid in the early game and you’ll miss your important creature plays on turns one and two.
The early creatures drops are super important because aggro decks want to win by speed and tempo instead of raw power. If the game goes too long, the aggro deck oftentimes loses because it runs out of gas. Its 1/1s and 2/2s get outclassed by bigger, more expensive creatures.
In this card pool, I don’t have enough good cheap creatures within a shard. I have enough good cheap creatures but they are found in all five colors.
Aggro Decks Need Proactive Removal
Another ingredient to a good aggro sealed deck is proactive removal. Proactive removal are cards that kill creatures whenever you want. Most removal is proactive, but two of my best removal are not proactive. I have two Resounding Silence, which are definitely good removal. However, they are defensive in nature.
Think about this way. If you’re trying to beat your opponent with 2/2s and 3/3s, you’re trying to win quickly by playing a lot of creatures early and then clearing the way from them to attack with removal. Resounding Silence doesn’t fit this strategy. Your opponent will play a 4/4 or a 5/5 and you have to stop attacking. And your opponent probably won’t attack for awhile because he needs his creature as a blocker.
In this circumstance, I would rather have proactive removal like Resounding Thunder or Branching Bolt. Even pump spells like Resounding Roar and Sigil Blessing would function as proactive removal, because the opponent has to block. Yes, you may have to trade two cards to kill a bigger creature, but many times that’s the right play.
Building the Deck
Back to the card pool.
I had good creatures and removal in all five colors. Plus, I had three mana fixing lands and four different Obelisks. Because of these things, I just played my best cards and cards that comboed with those cards.
Here’s what I came up with.
| 5 Color Control | |||||||||||
Creatures (16) | Spells (7) Lands (17) |
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With this deck, I’m not trying to kill my opponent quickly. Instead, I’ll play defense with cards like Tidehollow Strix, Puppet Conjurer, Jund Battlemage, Kederekt Creeper, Agony Warp, and Resounding Silence.
Then, I try to setup one of my powerful combos. This could be using Godtoucher with one of my five-power creatures. Or I could try to make Scavenger Drake really big with the creature tokens from Scavenger Drake and Puppet Conjurer. Or I could play Archdemon of Unx and trade the 0/1 and 1/1 creature tokens for 2/2s.
9 Responses to “Practice Session #2: Building a Shards of Alara Sealed Deck”
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That is an ugly card pool. I stopped after the pool, built my own deck from it, then moved on to the rest of your post. I chose to go for consistency in my control, because none of the red or green cards felt like they merited a splash. Here’s my build:
Creatures: (10)
Etherium Sculptor
Jhessian Lookout
Blister Beetle
Glaze Fiend
Puppet Conjurer
Tidehollow Strix
Esper Battlemage
Viscera Dragger
Tower Gargoyle
Archdemon of Unx
Spells: (13)
Agony Warp
Hindering Light
Obelisk of Bant
Obelisk of Esper
Obelisk of Grixis
Excommunicate
Oblivion Ring
2 Resounding Wave
Onyx Goblet
2 Resounding Silence
Kiss of the Amesha
Land: (17)
1 Bant Panorama
1 Crumbling Necropolis
1 Esper Panorama
4 Plains
5 Island
5 Swamp
My goal is to control the heck out of things, keep their bombs off the board, and then beat them to death with little dorks, as the only vaguely aggressive creatures here are the Gargoyle and the Archdemon.
Good luck at your PTQ!
I like to do what you did. It’s good practice to build sealed decks out of other people’s card pools and compare your deck to theirs.
You have an interesting build. I can see some great draws with an early Glaze Fiend and then a flurry of artifacts.
I do think it is a mistake to have less than 14 creatures. My theory is that you need a lot of creatures in this format because there are a lot of common removal spells.
Also, in my experience, 20 non-creature mana sources is too much unless you have a lot of card draw. It’s too easy to get mana flooded.
But anyways, thanks for your comment.
By the way, are you going to another limited PTQ this season?
That is a great feature you have that allows me to highlight a card and see it display. Is that a wordpress plugin?
Yep. Here is the link to the plugin: WP MtG-Helper.
I do think I went a little low in creatures on that build, but I was just that unenthused with the creatures in the pool.
In my first PTQ of this season, I ran 17 land, 12 creatures, 7 general-purpose spells, and 4 obelisks. Although that is 21 non-creature mana sources, I didn’t find flooding an issue, and I did find the obelisk-based acceleration pretty valuable.
I’ll be attending at least one more PTQ toward the latter end of this season, schedule permitting. There’s one about 2 hours away in early December, and another locally in late December.
Yeah, the creatures in this pool were pretty bad lol.
I did see your deck in your PTQ tournament report. I didn’t realize this before. You had multiple Resounding spells and you cycled them a bunch of times. Plus, you had an eight drop, Prince of Thralls.
Having 20 or more mana sources may be the right call with 3 or more Resounding spells.
It’s weird. I’ve played many Resounding spells but I’ve cycled them only three times. And that’s over 30+ matches!
In your deck of this pool, you included both Resounding Waves while I didn’t. This means you have 2 extra cards that can be played at eight mana. I’ve never played Resounding Wave. It doesn’t seem that strong to me, but I could be wrong. There was always a better card imo whenever I played blue.
Anyways, good luck at your PTQ! I hope you write another tournament report. The first one was great.
1x feral Hydra
1x Knight of the Skyward Eye
1x Agony Warp
1x Puppet Conjurer
1x Jund Battlemage
1x Wolly Thoctar
1x Naya Charm
1x Exuberant Firestoker
1x Oblivion Ring
1x Gift of the Gargantuan
1 each of Obelisk of Esper/Naya/Grixis
1x Fire-Fiend Ogre
1x Tower Gargoyle
2x Resounding Silence
2x Bloodpyre Elemental
1x Kiss of the Amesha
1x Cavern Thoctar
1x Ridge Rannet
1x Archdemon of Unx
1x Bant Panorama
1x Esper Panorama
1x Crumbling Necropolis
My 5-color build
Decided on 3x Obelisk.
Defending some of my card exclusions…
Jund Charm-Not good enough for sealed.
2x Resounding wave-Silence is just better
Tidehollow Strix-meh not gonna win you the game
Scavenger Drake and Viscera were my last cuts. And I really want to play both of them.
Godtoucher should never see play in any deck…ever. Ever.
However, you and I ended up with very similar builds…but thats to be expected with 5-color.
Was fun.
2x Resounding Silence
1x Knight of the Skyward Eye
1x Excomunicate
1x Oblivion Ring
1x Gift of the Gargantuan
1x Feral Hydra
2x Resounding Wave
1x Tidehollow Strix
1x Agony Warp
1x Tower Gargoyle
1x Ethersworn Cannonist
1x Steelclad Serpent
1x Puppet Conjurer
1x Scavenger Drake
1x Esper Battlemage
1x Dredgescape Zombie
1x Viscera Dragger
1x Blister Beetle
1x Jhessian Lookout
1x Obelisk of Esper
1x Obelisk of Bant
1x Esper Panorama
1x Crumbling Necropolis
Running 5-color control in seald is just to risky. When you’re playing 7-8 rounds in a PTQ with a 5c deck, you have a much higher chance of getting screwed on land in crucial games, and losing. I’ve done well building a consistent 3 or 3c with a splash as my registered deck, and making a greedier deck that I can sideboard into if I feel an opponents deck is to slow, or just bad. Thats my 2 cents on it.