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By: MarcosPMA, nn
May 20 2014 12:00pm
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  As I'm writing this, Day 1 of Pro Tour Journey into Nyx is over and I actually watched it live via Twitch instead of the replay, which I'll get into in my opinion section below.  The portion of relevance to this article series is the 2 drafts that will happen, and it'll be interesting to dissect the drafts and see what the pros think of JBT draft and how that lines up with what we've experienced so far.

As for myself, I've been doing reasonably well in JBT draft after starting out winless in my first 2 drafts.  My last draft was a 10 person pod and I went 3-0 and split in the final round to what would have been a very unfavorable matchup unless I had a nut draw.  I feel good about the sealed format, it's a lot better than BNG/THS sealed and it's slow enough to where the decks I like to play in this block (G/x B/x) are strong and can perform quite well.  Now, I've said it's slower but that doesn't mean you can't just curve out and go Voltron on a dude just like you normally could in THS, it's just not as likely to happen now.  Theros has creatures with Bestow at common, giving you a way to make your creature huge and end the game faster than you normally would be able to.  Born of the Gods had common Bestow creatures but those didn't add any sort of special ability, just +X/+X.  Journey into Nyx has none of them at common, meaning that your Bestow creatures must come from BNG/THS, and only having 4 packs of Bestow makes it far more unlikely that you'll find them in your colors, which makes your small threats just small threats.  Without looking at the numbers, I feel like you had at least 2-4 Bestow creatures per deck in BNG/THS and THS Sealed, and now you average 1-3 in JBT Sealed.  This shift in power level might make 6/7 drops more playable since they'll naturally come with the bigger body that you're looking for Vulpine Goliath and Benthic Giant come to mind.

Opinion Section: Anonymity on the Internet

If you don't already know, there's a website called Twitch.tv where you can watch people stream themselves playing various video games, and it's also the site where you can watch PT/GP coverage live.  Normally I don't watch the official Magic coverage account for high level events, I generally just prefer to watch SCGLive since I like their commentating crew and in my opinion it's far better than the PT/GP commentating team for WOTC.  However this time around there was no SCG Open to watch so I decided to watch the PT coverage live since I had time to spare and I wanted to see if anybody broke block or if it was just Elspeth.dek all over the place (as of now it just seems like Elspeth.dek).  I usually don't see the chat since I like to maximize the video but I was uploading my videos to YouTube so I this time around I was able to see the chat and some of the comments there were a bit disturbing.  This was Round 8 of 8 and Patrick Chapin was playing Andrea Mengucci to see who would advance to 8-0 after Day 1.  Andrea has a pretty commanding lead in Game 1 and has several different lines of play that can take Chapin down to 5 and win on his next turn with Magma Jet and Lightning Strike.  He takes a line that ends up giving up a lot of board presence to do so, and is "blown out" by Chapin dropping Courser of Kruphix and a land to go to 6 with an Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Soldier tokens, and a Brimaz, King of Oreskos on his side.  Andrea ends up losing the game and is visibly rattled after the loss, which is understandable given the fact that he had the win so close to him.  While this is going on, the Twitch chat is poking fun at him, mocking him for taking a line that ends up backfiring and being on tilt afterwards.  It's incredible to see people praise the community and say that Magic players and kind and respectable then go into a Twitch chat and see that same community say that this guy threw the game way when they clearly would have taken the line that would have won the game.  Instead of commenting on the match itself, the chat felt the need to berate the player, make fun of his name, and speak in such a manner that they come off like they think they're better than him.  Of course, not everyone is like this, but what really just turned me off from the stream was this comment after someone tried to get a viewer to understand how Andrea was feeling after losing Game 1: "I totally get it, I get nervous too, I once hit the shady heights of table 2 in a pre-release, damn right I was shaking!"

If this was an isolated incident, I wouldn't mind it as much, but I see this come up in a lot of streams and it just irritates me.  People will come into a stream and say "You should play X deck, your deck is trash" "Omg, I can't stand this terrible play", "You just threw that game away, you should be feel bad".  Worse are the comments whenever the streamer is a female or there is a female playing a match of Magic.  Half that chat turns into sexist pigs and the other half turn into "white knights", when we should really all be talking about Magic, not whether someone has breasts or not.  Of course all of this stems from the fact that they're anonymous.  It's quite easy to make an account on Twitch, use a fake e-mail and fake name, and go into a stream and be a jerk.  We all know this would never happen in real life, as people who act like that would be kicked out immediately and looked down upon, with good reason.  So why is it that we're "allowed" to be jerks once we get behind a computer screen?  Why is this okay when we all know it's not okay in real life?  It's cowardly and childish, and there's no place for that anywhere, not just Magic.  We've all dealt with this problem on Magic Online where an opponent will rage quit and start insulting you for no good reason at all.  You'll get called a luck sack, that you didn't earn the win, the shuffler screwed them over, etc.  It's quite sad really to see how people change once they get on the Internet and there's no fear of consequences.  So, how do we change the culture of Internet anonymity?  How do we make sure that there's an actual consequence for these actions?  

Personally, I don't have the faintest idea.  All I know is next PT I'll be watching with the chat closed.

Having said all of that, let's move on and open some packs!

Sealed

8-4 Draft 

Conclusion

I knew the sealed environment would slow down, but I didn't think it would slow that THAT much!  Our first 2 rounds took 20+ turns per game and our opponent actually timed out in the 2nd round.  As I said in the beginning of the article, this may be due to the fact that decks will have less common Bestow creatures, not to mention the fact that JOU is a set where the average toughness of a creatures is much higher than its power.  This leads to a lot of stalled board states where you need a big creatures to actually initiate combat once you get towards the late game.  I definitely misbuilt the deck and it should have been obvious to me while I was doing it, especially when I laid out G/B and commented that it would be a better choice over G/U.  I guess that I just got pulled in by the lure of Sage of Hours and the fact that it's a mythic rare.  I honestly can't remember what made me pick G/U over G/B, but I'm glad I had enough foresight to realize my error and board into G/B for every postboard game.  As far as the draft goes, I feel like I had a very good chance to win it, but I threw away game 1 and in game 3 I had a heartbreaking Riddle of Lightning that just turned over 4 lands and there was nothing I could have done about it.  It's quite unlikely that I miss on my Riddle of Lightning, and even if I do there's good odds that the 4th card will do something.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  As for my drafting strategy, I've been drafting either base red or green decks to great success, so I'll continue to do that unless I open a bomb in another color.  I won my last draft with RW Heroic, which is something I never thought I'd do in this format.

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 Tumblr and YouTube using 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.  Let your voice be heard!  If you care about Magic Online at all please nominate someone that will represent what the community wants from Magic Online.

Thank you for reading/watching!

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1 Comments

Thanks for the videos! I by IYankemDDS at Thu, 05/22/2014 - 12:58
IYankemDDS's picture

Thanks for the videos! I agree that G/B was the deck there. I think Sage is not very good, especially with very few heroic enablers. That pool certainly left something to be desired.

Thanks again!