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By: MarcosPMA, nn
Jan 12 2016 1:00pm
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  The Oath of the Gatewatch paper prerelease will be happening this weekend and I'm quite excited to be playing a new Limited format and hopefully opening an Expedition.  Last prerelease it took me 3 tries to open an Expedition - (Temple Garden - and sadly I've been unable to open another in the months since then even though I've probably opened the equivalent to 4-5 boxes.  Let's hope my luck is a bit better this time!

Thoughts on Oath Pt. 1

For the prerelease we will be battling with 4 OGW packs and 2 BFZ packs.  This means a majority of cards you play with/against will be from the new set.  Generally speaking you should be less vigilant for tricks that would you normally would expect in 6x BFZ and instead try and play around the playable instants in OGW.  For example, if your opponent passes with 3 open mana that could represent a counterspell, it's far more likely that they have Abstruse Interference (counter unless you pay 1) as opposed to Spell Shrivel (counter unless you pay 4).  Similarly in situations where you might play around Gideon's Reproach you're more likely to run into a Immolating Glare (although it's much harder to play around Glare).  Another thing to keep in mind is that while there are still cards that exile in Oath, there are not any ingest creatures in this new set.  This makes processors slightly worse and it limits how many ingest creatures are going to be played.  Your blue opponent is less likely to have Benthic Infiltrator and Mist Intruder while your black opponent won't have as many Sludge Crawlers as they normally would.

Something that I think is going to take center stage this upcoming weekend is how adding a 6th color is going to influence deckbuilding.  There are about 30 cards that either need colorless mana to be cast and/or have abilities that need to be paid in colorless mana.  If you open Kozilek, do you "splash" for that card?  How do you get colorless mana in your deck while still being able to cast your colored spells?  Are there going to be enough colorless sources that colorless spells are basically a freeroll in most decks?  These are the questions that are going to have to be answered this weekend and at the moment I don't know how it's going to pan out.  I suspect that there will be enough colorless sources in each pool to make it so that if you want to cast/play a colorless card you're able to do so.  I do like how Eldrazi Scions become better in this set because not only do they help ramp you they also cast their own spells as well.

With all that said, let's go ahead and take a look at Oath of the Gatewatch!

Oath of the Gatewatch Sealed Set Review

Thoughts on Oath Pt. 2

Overall I find Oath of the Gatewatch to be a good set.  Once again we're blessed to have avoided another Born of the Gods so you won't see me complain/whine about a horrible small set again.  Most of the cards are playable and there's relatively few cards I would not play at all (Call the Gatewatch comes to mind).  I generally like any card with Support on it since that makes you more likely to have an advantage in combat (especially if it's instant speed Support).

Cohort I like a little bit less because it requires a little more setup than Support because it's easier to have random creatures in play as opposed to those creatures having to be Allies.  The best Cohort creature is likely to be Munda's Vanguard because putting 1 +1/+1 counter on each creature you control is hard to beat much like any deck playing Gavony Township gets out of hand if they're left to their own devices.  

The multicolored creatures are all playable in their respective decks, although Jori En is the one card where you'd have to want a 3 mana 2/3 to actually be happy about playing it.  Baloth Null and Joraga Auxiliary stand out to me as extremely strong cards that can have an immediate impact on the board.  I also believe Joraga Auxiliary is a must kill on sight otherwise it will run away with the game.  It's not as strong as Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage but it's close enough.

I believe that green got a little bit better with this set because there's less generic Eldrazi running around. This allows green to step back into the role of having big creatures so now it's doing something "unique" as opposed to be the bad landfall deck that I personally viewed it as.  It also stepped away from Converge and embraced Support which is something that fits green more as opposed to being a multicolor strategy in a block defined by colorless creatures.  

Triple Mirrodin Draft

I drafted like I didn't know what I was doing and I ended up with a deck that could have turned out better if I actually had some experience with the format.  I declined to take cards that would be good in the lategame because I didn't think I would need those but if I'm drafting a deck with the idea of having a bunch of Terminates then isn't it logical that the game would go long?  Sadly I was punished (rightfully so) by being paired up with the person who took those cards and beat me in a match where my strategy didn't do anything.  Maybe we'll do better next week?

Conclusion

Next week I'll be back with another Flashback draft and I'll talk about my experiences at the Oath prerelease.  If you have any comments, questions, or concerns please leave them in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading/watching!