Mirage Block Sealed Events

This week, Mirage block sealed events are available.  They use tournament packs, and are NIX TIX.  The tournament packs are discounted - $9.99 for the rough equivalent of three boosters.  The event also calls for a Visions and Weatherlight booster pack, which are once again available in the store.  This is your last chance to buy Mirage product, so have at it.

The tournaments are also a good deal.  The eight-man events are Swiss, so you get to play at all three rounds.  The price is slightly higher than the price for a Swiss draft - a total of $16 instead of the $14, but you wind up with 78 cards, plus 22 basic lands from the Mirage set, and the prizes are double those of a Swiss draft.  Personally, I like the old Mirage lands, with the original borders.  Even if you don't value the Mirage lands, the packs may contain some really valuable rares.  Lions' Eye Diamond, Phyrexian Dreadnought, Vampiric Tutor, Null Rod are all over $30 TIX apiece, and even some of the commons, like Thunderbolt are quite expensive.  With any luck, Hammie will include the expected value of Mirage, Visions and Weatherlight packs in his State of the Program article, which should be up as you read this.

After the downtime, and getting home from work, I entered the Mirage Sealed Swiss queue (in the Sealed Swiss Room), and was part of the second Mirage sealed event to fire.  I had to wait about 30 minutes from entry (fourth or fifth in the queue), until it fired.  Not too bad.  Here's the pool.  No big money cards, but Cad. Bloom isn't bad, and Dark Ritual is worth a buck.

In Mirage block limited, more so than modern formats, removal, evasion and, to a lesser extend, fat are even more valuable.  The first thing to look for is removal.  I have two and a half burn spells: double Fireblast and a Chaos Charm which will deal one damage to a creature.  Black has Dark Banishing, and, if I play enough swamps, Drain Life can double as removal or finisher.  White has Pacifism, which is always good.  Blue has Apathy, which is a bad Pacifism, and Thirst, which is good.  Green has no good combat tricks.

Not exciting.

The creature mix is not real good, either.  Way too many of my creatures are tiny, and most of the creatures with better than 2 power have drawbacks.

The first color I threw out was blue.  It has one bad flier: Timid Drake, which leaves play whenever another creature "enters the battlefield."  Knight of the Mists is the only decent creature, and he can destroy himself if you play him on turn three.  Merfolk Seer...  let's just not play blue, unless we splash for Thrist and Power Sink.

Green isn't bad, but it isn't good.  There is an 8/4 for eight mana - and almost everything else in green either costs life or forces you to much up your mana development. The only combat "trick" is Briar Shield, and you have to telegraph that.  Time to move on.

Black is not awful.  It has a couple fliers, and Dark Banishing.  If I run enough black, Drain Life can become both removal and a finisher.  Gallowbraid is fat.  Fetid Horror pumps - and that's about it.

White is pretty good, too.  It has one really good flier in Melesse Spirit, and a mediocre flier in Terenko Griffin.  Pacifism is great.  Miraculous Recovery can live up to its name.  The rest is just okay.

My only real options are BW or BW splashing green.  I can't really splash red - the cards I want to splash all cost RR.  The same with blue - the knight costs UU unless I'm lucky enough to have an opponent with a knight.  I could splash for Thirst, but I would be adding a removal spell at the cost of making my Drain Life less effective.  Not stellar.

Here's my deck:

Mirage block sealed deck

 

Creatures 1 Basalt Golem 1 Benevolent Unicorn 1 Femeref Scouts 1 Fetid Horror 1 Fledgling Djinn 1 Gallowbraid 1 Melesse Spirit 1 Noble Elephant 1 Pacifism 1 Python 1 Skulking Ghost 1 Tar Pit Warrior 1 Teremko Griffin 1 Tin-Wing Chimera 1 Vigilant Martyr 1 Zombie Scavengers 16 cards Other Spells 1 Angelic Renewal 1 Chimeric Sphere 1 Dark Banishing 1 Drain Life 1 Grave Servitude 1 Guided Strike 1 Miraculous Recovery 7 cards

Lands 8 Plains 9 Swamp 17 cards Relevant Sideboard 1 Mana Prism 1 Righteous Aura 1 Cursed Totem 1 Dark Ritual 1 Razor Pendulum 1 Sun Clasp 1 Ritual of Steel 1 Binding Agony 1 Dazzling Beauty 1 Disempower 1 Jangling Automaton 11 cards

A few notes on the cards that I chose.  First off, (Benevolet Unicorn) is a highly marginal card in most cases, but the most common removal spell in the set is Incinerate - and without Benevolent Unicorn's influence, it kills my Melesse Spirit.  Melesse Spirit is my most likely win condition, so that is important.   Beyond that, I just grabbed every flier I could find, plus some ground-pounders to muck things up.

It also says a lot about my deck that I was thinking this way.  This is not a good card pool.  About my only advantage is that I am two colors.  Most Mirage block sealed decks are three colors - two and a splash.  Mana fixing in Mirage is weak.

Just for kicks, I also built a RGb deck.  Here that one is, as well.  I ended up playing the WB version

Mirage block RGb sealed deck

 

Creatures 1 Basalt Golem 1 Bloodrock Cyclops 1 Bull Elephant 1 Burning Shield Askari 1 Crash of Rhinos 1 Fledgling Djinn 1 Giant Mantis 1 Goblin Tinkerer 1 Jolrael's Centaur 1 Nettletooth Djinn 1 Rogue Elephant 1 Searing Spear Askari 1 Skulking Ghost 1 Tin-Wing Chimera 14 cards Other Spells 1 Briar Shield 1 Chaos Charm 1 Chimeric Sphere 1 Dark Banishing 2 Fireblast 1 Gaea's Blessing 1 Lightning Reflexes 1 Sandstorm 9 cards

Lands 1 Mountain Valley 7 Forest 6 Mountain 3 Swamp 17 cards

The RGb deck is also a pretty decent build.  I am still slightly more partial to the WB build, because it is a bit less likely to have mana issues, and it has a few more fliers.  What this red build does have is flankers - and Flanking is a pretty good ability.  When a non-flanker blocks a flanker, the non-flanker gets -1/-1.  This is important - as I learned years ago when I tried to block a flanker with a River Boa.  Regeneration does not stop death to being a 1/0, and flanking means that a 3/3 Hill Giant trades with a 2/2 flanker.  Be careful - Flanking can take you by surprise.   

An even trickier ability is Banding.  My Elephant had banding, and I won a match pretty much entirely by banding my elephant with a regenerator.  Banding means that the two creatures attack or block as a team, and as the captain of that team, I get to assign damage to my creatures.  I assigned all the damage to the regenerator and regenerated.  Creatures that were not supposed to live, at least not in the mind of my opponent, lived.

Phasing is another MIrage block ability.  It basically creates creatures that are underpriced, but that disappear every other turn.  The most relevant creatures are a couple blue fliers and Sandbar Crocodile, a cheap 5/5.  The easiest way to think about flanking is to cut the power in half.  That's what the card will beating for - full power every other turn, or half power.  If you think that's worth it, play it.

I'll move on to the tournament.  I'll keep the game play short, both because some games are missing, and because they were not all that remarkable.

Tournament Play

I was not too pleased with my deck.  I'm pretty sure he felt good about his.  He was UW splashing red for a bunch of removal:  Incinerate, foil Incinerate, Flare (think of a red Afflict), etc.  He even had Cinder Cloud, which can destroy  pretty much any creature and is especially effective against my white dudes.  Game one I mulligan and he rolled me quickly.  He had a lot of fliers:  Azimaet Drake, a regular and foil Hazerider Drake, Fog Elemental, and even a Bone Harvest to get them back in case I killed some of them.  He even had Heavy Ballista.  That kills pretty much everything I have in my deck.  Game one, though, I got a very fast start, and beat him down to 4 life before he managed a comeback.  I stayed in as long as I could, hoping to draw the Drain Life for the win, but no soap.

Game two, IIRC, I did manage to race him and squeaked it out.  I managed to get him to tap his Heavy Ballista on his turn, the Miraculous Recovery got me a flier at the end of his turn, and I could just get him down to zero.  Game three, though, he wasn't having it, and I got crushed again.  His removal was better, his fliers were better, and Heavy Ballista is insane.

Round two was not much of a contest.  My opponent was unfamiliar with the cards and, probably, with Magic.  He missed some tricks and options, and I managed to come back from a mulligan to four despite playing a rather unexciting set of creatures.  In the end, Miraculous Recovery won the game, again.  Game two was like game one, but without the mulligan to four.

Round three my opponent played a Spirit of the Night on turn 6 one game, thanks to some nifty mana acceleration.  In the other two games, he didn't.  That was the difference.  My fliers flew, and I reduced his life total a bit too quickly for him to recover.  I sided in Dazzling Beauty - it is a fog, but it is also a slowtrip.  (A slowtrip is a cantrip that doesn't give you the card until the next upkeep phase.)  After all, nothing but Pacifism can deal with Spirit of the Night, and  the slowtrip gave me a chance to draw it.  In the end, the games came down to my fast beaters, especially the two power fliers for two mana,  that let me get past his better deck.

I was quite happy to go 2-1 with this deck, and to escape the tournament with 4 packs in winnings.  That was a lot better than I had expected.  I was seriously considering dropping after round one, but that might be because I have played too many Alara drafts recently.  I have to remind myself that all old-time limited card pools look much, much worse than Alara pools.  

Overall, the format is still pretty good.  The price is right, and the EV of the cards alone is close to the entry costs.  If you win even one match, you probably at least break even - and my round three opponent, with his Vampiric Tutor, did far better than that.  

PRJ

"one million words" in the Mirage limited queues.