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By: MarcosPMA, nn
Apr 29 2014 12:00pm
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Hello, and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  This past weekend was the Born of the Gods Limited Championship along with the Journey into Nyx Prerelease, so there was certainly a lot of Magic to be had!  Last week I said I'd cover my thoughts on JOU/BNG/THS Sealed and Draft, but I'll be doing the Prerelease on Saturday and want enough time to hash out my thoughts, so I decided to do that next week.  This week I'll be saying good-bye to BNG/THS Limited and giving my impressions of the format as a whole.

I don't think I've made it a secret that I did not enjoy BNG/THS Limited.  My win rate aside, I just felt that the ideas and cards introduced in Born of the Gods didn't do much to add to the format in a positive manner.  I think we all thought that Tribute would be good, but in the end it ended up being pretty mediocre and only a select few Tribute cards were picked highly.  Pharagax Giant went from 4th-6th pick to just unplayable.  Thunder Brute went from top 3 to 7th/8th pick at best.  Fanatic of Xenagos was probably the best Tribute card in the set, and even then I could see it go 4th, 5th, or 6th pick.  Inspired was a complete miss.  The best Inspired creatures were ones that you would naturally play anyway, cards like Oreskos Sun Guide and Kragma Butcher.  Cards that needed help to get "inspired" were pretty much unplayable outside some fringe scenarios, and the Inspired enablers diluted packs enough that it made the Sealed environment much much worse.  Now, I know it sounds like I'm harping on the set without giving it any credit, but my criticism is not unfounded.  I did a few exercises on my own that examined how many playables you got in a BNG/THS Sealed pool and how many unplayables were from what set.  On average, BNG was at least double the amount of unplayables than THS was.  In one particular instance I had so many BNG unplayables that my playables only added up to 4 boosters.  Needless to say I did not do well in that event.  What this meant was that while half of your pool was from BNG, most of your deck was full of THS cards.  In essence, the format came down to you playing a strictly worse 6x THS Sealed deck with a few upgrades from BNG.

All that said, there were some good things to come out of Born of the Gods.  Red got the kickstart it needed to become a playable color, which lead to some interesting decisions in pack 1.  You could draft red and pick up a lot of good cards in pack 1, but you wouldn't really be rewarded at all in packs 2 and 3.  This meant that even if you picked early red cards, you couldn't be base red unless you picked up extremely good uncommons in packs 2 and 3.  What this meant was that red got drafted more, which leads to the other colors being a little more distributed among the other drafters at the table.  Born of the Gods also made black a little weak, so it made the format a little bit better by not having so many people force Gray Merchant.dek and end up with mediocre decks because black is so strong in the Theros packs.  While Born is miserable as the first pack to draft, I think it was better designed to be the second pack drafted.  This is just my theory, but with JOU having no weak color in the set, BNG lets the format correct itself by not having so many white based/black based decks.  White and black were the two strongest colors in Theros, and if that trend continued in BNG, JBT draft would just be either forcing white or black and hoping to reap the benefits of 3 strong packs.  Regardless, I think JBT draft will be a fairly balanced draft environment where any color can be drafted and paired with another color, so I'm definitely looking forward to that.

Now, let's give BNG/THS a warm good-bye with the BNG Limited Championship Qualifier and 8-4 Draft!

BNG Limited Championship Qualifier

BNG/THS 8-4 Draft


 Conclusion

Well, we couldn't end on a high note like I had hoped for.  Instead, we get more of the same in having an average record in Sealed (~50% win rate) and the usual first round exit in 8-4 draft.  As I said in the deckbuilding process of the qualifier, we were seriously lacking on 2 drops.  While the format isn't extremely fast, it's still important to have early plays so that you don't fall behind to the fast Heroic decks.  Our deck just ended up being a bit too slow for what was expected out of other pools and there's nothing that can be done about that.  My play wasn't that stellar either, but I think I played decently enough to put myself in a winning position but just ended up coming a bit short in the end.  As far as the draft goes, I think we just had a bad matchup in Round 1.  I think we would have to have drawn perfectly to in order to have a chance, but that didn't happen and we couldn't beat his bigger creatures.  It felt like even though we were the aggro deck, we were on the backfoot constantly and there wasn't really a point in the match where we could press any sort of advantage and not die the following turn.  Our opponent just had the right cards to beat us and there wasn't much we could do about it given the plays we had available to us.

As always, if you have any comments, questions, or concerns please leave them in the comments section below.  If you'd like, you can check out my YouTube channel or my Tumblr blog in the links below.  Also, I know it's a long ways away but I'll be putting a reminder at the end of my articles for you to think about who you'd like to nominate for the Magic Online Community Cup.  I know several writers from this website have represented the community, and I'd like that trend to continue if possible.  Nominations start in about 2 months time, but 2 months go by quickly!  Better to be aware of it now than later.  Next week I'll be back with my thoughts on JBT Sealed and Draft!

Thank you guys for reading/watching!

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2 Comments

I am with you on the by IYankemDDS at Tue, 04/29/2014 - 17:50
IYankemDDS's picture

I am with you on the unplayables.

I literally ran 0 BNG cards in my pre release deck at the LSG last weekend.

I think Journey is going to spike things up a lot.

Last year, it was important to cut your guild/shard in the Dragon's Maze pack so that you could get rewarded in the Gatecrash pack. This year I think it'll be more important to properly read signals in the Journey pack so that you can be rewarded in the Theros pack.

Well, BNG only had 1 pack so by MarcosPMA at Thu, 05/01/2014 - 00:57
MarcosPMA's picture

Well, BNG only had 1 pack so not having any cards make your deck isn't a surprise. The JOU cards are more playable anyway, so I could see the same happening in JBT Sealed.