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By: MarcosPMA, nn
Dec 16 2016 1:00pm
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  Christmas and the New Year are almost upon us and it feels like 2016 went by quickly.  A lot of products came out and a lot of drafts happened in this column.

The Year of Modem Flashbacks was nice and something I kept up with week after week for over half the year but after a while drafting and losing in unknown formats lost its luster.  Oath of the Gatewatch draft was something I enjoyed after the train wreck that as Battle for Zendikar.  Green got better so we actually had 5 (or 6) colors this time around.  That was followed up by Shadows over Innistrad, a format I liked and disliked at the same time.  The Werewolf mechanic is unnecessarily punishing in sealed and sometimes draft.  It forces you to commit to a curve because otherwise your opponent will get a big advantage just by playing what would now be an under costed creature.  I liked the Delirium mechanic a lot since it gave you an extra bonus to cards while letting you play a normal game of Magic.

Eldritch Moon changed the format up a little bit but not so much that it completely changed.  Emerge Eldrazi were a thing now, but those cards were fairly limited and you wanted the higher rarity ones to actually impress you.  Eternal Masters was Eternal Masters.  I didn't like that format and I still don't.  I did do a draft primer on it and even after that I felt like I didn't know what I was doing.  Most of it has to do with the fact that I never played those sets when they were Standard legal.  Conspiracy 2 was fun, so much fun that I made a Conspiracy cube just because I wanted that play experience any time I felt the need to play casually.

Kaladesh came out and is still here.  I do like this format, although it is a little swingy because of Vehicles and that's something I don't like.  Cheap powerful effects are just too hard to do in my opinion.  Vehicles being mostly immune to sorcery speed removal limits how many of those spells you can play while making sure that you're able to interact instant speed.  It's very telling that there is no Naturalize effect in Standard.  It's either conditional or it costs more than you want to pay.  Everything else about Kaladesh is great, I just wish Vehicles weren't as strong as they are right now.

This week I'm going to finish my VS Sealed and then do a Kaladesh Draft League.  Once those are over I'll finish up with a Kaladesh practice sealed. Let's jump right in! 

Vs Sealed

Like I said last week we decided to play a tiebreaker match to see which deck was stronger than the other.  Going into the deciding match I made a change in my deck that I was a mistake from the start.  Splashing Fortuitous Find was a very grave mistake.  The deck I built doesn't want to trade creatures and get them back, it wants to go wide and win with one or two attacks.  Fortuitous Find is a card for more midrangey decks, which mine was certainly not.  Regardless of the mistake I corrected, the match ultimately did not fall in my favor.  I must have a good start otherwise I'm going to lose to my opponent's better cards.  In the end it's not a good matchup.  Removal plus better creatures is going to make my little creatures and Inspired Charge seem rather weak.  I did consider the option of playing black for better removal but I didn't gain better creatures because of it.  I'd have to rely on Fortuitous Find and come sort of card advantage to get ahead, which seemed rather unlikely.  It almost feels like a cop-out to say that it's just a bad matchup, but you have to face reality sometimes.  There are variables in Magic that are outside of your control and you have to be okay with that.

Kaladesh Draft League

For many reasons this draft has been a long time coming.  I recorded this near the beginning of the month and it took almost two full weeks for it to actually finish.  I started out this draft being fairly open to what I wanted to draft.  Deadlock Trap and Sky Skiff are two cards that are going to be in my deck no matter what.  By taking colorless cards first I gave myself the opportunity to see what the table was going to do and react once I saw an opening.   I ended up in a white/black deck that had removal and ways to recur threats.  I expected a decent performance, but wasn't overly impressed by it.  There's no free win factor, but it won't just fold to other decks either.  It's one of those decks where you have to use your cards effectively to get more out of them than you should.  Getting the maximum value out of Gonti, Wispweaver Angel, and Restoration Gearsmith is going to be a way the deck wins.

I did finally manage to 3-0 a draft, even if the last round in my opinion didn't count.  I've been wanting to 3-0 a draft league for quite some time now and the fact that it happened should be a good thing, but I'm disappointed.  The concept of "trophies" was something I didn't explore too much because I didn't want to see it until it happened to me.  The thought was that I would see a draft trophy when I actually won a draft, so I didn't want to ruin the surprise until then.  Turns out there is not actual trophy!  Why call it such if there no icon or screen that shows a digital representation of said trophy?  Am I just too late to the party and these existed before?  What gives?  I'm not trying to make it seem that I'm unhappy about going 3-0, I just thought it would be more special than it turned out to be.  If you call it a trophy you should be able to look at something that resembles a trophy.  Otherwise it's a word that doesn't mean anything to anyone outside the game because there's nothing to show for it.

Practice Sealed

Once again I'm presenting this in the playlist but all you need to watch is the first video.  So this pool is pretty simple once you take a look at it.  White and green go nowhere fast so it really comes down to blue, black, and red.  Black is pretty close to a shoo-in given how strong it is, so the major question is what color to pair it with.  Blue has nice top end, but that's all it has.  The rest of blue just doesn't have enough strength to keep it in the pool since it has to rely on the other color too much to help the deck out in other areas.  It is a shame that I can't play with Confiscation Coup, but it's something that I have to deal with.  To me the best deck is red/black.  It has removal and creatures to help Smuggler's Copter be the best it can be. It utilizes that card much better than the other decks I had.

Conclusion

Trophy snafu aside I think I did alright this week.  Next week is the week of Christmas and I'll have part of my new Kaladesh Sealed League up along with another Kaladesh Draft League and practice sealed videos.  If you have any comments, questions, or concerns leave them in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading/watching!