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By: MarcosPMA, nn
Jan 05 2016 7:41am
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  I hope you all had a good Christmas/New Year and hopefully we can all stick to our resolutions (if any were made).  BFZ is basically a dead format now due to Oath of the Gatewatch spoilers heating up so I'm not going to do too much more BFZ content anymore.   Expect to see the Oath of the Gatewatch Sealed Set Review next week if the entire set is spoiled by then, which I'm fairly confident it should be.

This week I'd like to take a look at 8th Edition draft.  Flashback formats are generally tougher on me than they would be for most players since I started playing during Dark Ascension and for the most part never played with those cards.  I didn't do too much preparation for the format since there's only so much to be gained by reading articles and looking over the set as opposed to playing the games out.  It's nice to try and prepare yourself for an unknown format but I find the best way to learn something is to actually do it.

That said I did look over the set in order to get a general sense of what the cards did and what strategy I might want to draft.  The thing that I took away from looking at the set is that there's a lot of random hate cards floating around that can win games for you if you manage to draft them.  Take Story Circle for instance.  If you can cast that card then there's almost no way you can lose the game, especially if you can protect it with counterspells. The Circle of Protection cycle makes an appearance and those can shut down decks quite hard if they get out reasonably early.  This is also a format of Remove Soul and Mana Leak which makes playing creatures a little more dubious than it already is.  The creatures are pretty bad by today's standards and everything is basically a 2/2 which makes board stalls pretty common.  The set is pretty bland and generic compared to recent core sets.  There's not really any mechanics that the cards are based on so you're drafting generic creatures and archetypes that most of the time don't do anything special.

8th Edition Draft #1

I drafted poorly here and I feel bad about it.  Mana Leak and Rewind are good blue cards but they're not the payoff that you want if you want to be blue.  They're nice if you have a payoff/win condition you want to get to but when you don't have that then you're putting dead cards in your deck that don't do anything after a certain point.  The blue cards I drafted didn't work well with the green cards I had which meant that I was going to have draws where I'm floundering about trying to get something going.  You know your deck is bad when you're playing Fodder Cannon in a deck with only 13 creatures, 2 of which can reliably attack with more than 2 power!

8th Edition Draft #2

This draft went a lot better even though I was waffling between colors for most of the draft.  I consider myself lucky to have gotten back Urza's Armor after passing it the first time I saw it.  Even though I knew that the format was a lot of 2/2 creatures it didn't occur to me that a Dampening Pulse effect would be really strong.  I took it because rare drafting and it over performed given how little I thought of it at the time.  White was open the entire draft and red was open enough after getting the Inferno that I was able to cobble together a decent RW deck that could play the control role with removal spells, defensive creatures, and a wrath in Inferno.

I said that there were random hate cards in the set that could win games if you got the right matchups, and boy did I get the right ones!  Round 1 was against a RG deck and I just happened to have Circle of Protection: Green and Sanctimony in my sideboard!  It really felt dirty being able to bring those cards in and have such a huge advantage in the game.  Half of my opponent's deck is shut down with CoP: Green in play and the other half gains me life when they cast red spells.  Now I didn't win because of those spells, rather I had more powerful plays to make (Urza's Armor, Jayemdae Tome, Inferno) but it's nice to still have those high impact narrow cards to bring in the matchup.

Round 2 I also felt dirty, but this time because of Anaba Shaman.  My opponent came out swinging with a lot of 1 mana 1/1 creatures and I had a bit of a slower draw that would have lost me the game if not for Anaba Shaman.  We were both screwed for a bit but I was able to accumulate card advantage by having my Anaba Shaman be a 3 for 1 against the 1/1 creatures, which gave me enough time to draw lands and take over with the spells in my hand.  Game 2 was a GRIND.  I had to use a lot of resources just to stay alive and give me the best chance to draw the spells I needed to win the game.  Urza's Armor prevented a lot of damage and in conjunction with Sanctimony allowed me to live despite my opponent's attempts to throw lethal burn spells at my face.  Because of the security of Urza's Armor I was able to draw enough cards with Jayemdae Tome to where I was able to mount an offense to win the game.

BFZ Phantom Sealed

This was a pretty tough pool in my opinion once you narrow it down to 3 colors.  Red and Green are bad so you automatically take them out of consideration which leaves with you the other 3 colors to contend with.  White has playables but most of them are fairly underwhelming.  It's a whole lot of 2/2 and 3/3 with very little upside and that's not where you want to be in BFZ.  Blue has Guardian of Tazeem and Exert Influence which are 2 good rares but the rest of blue doesn't have too much meat on it.  Black has good cards in Grip of Desolation, Demon's Grasp, and Mire's Malice but like blue it doesn't have much meat as well.  In the end I went with a 3 color option that "splashed" Sheer Drop, Smite the Monstrous, and Quarantine Field.  The double white is hard to manage but the effect is really worth it once you can cast it and you're perfectly content casting it later on in the game.

Conclusion

8th Edition is weird.  It's underpowered but it also has overpowered effects for the Limited format (hate cards).  If given the choice I probably wouldn't draft it again because of how weird it is.  I'm glad I was able to draft it though and experience playing with cards I'll likely never play with again. Next week is triple Mirrodin and that will be paired with the set review (assuming the entire set is spoiled).  If you have any comments, questions, or concerns leave them in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading/watching!