MarcosPMA's picture
By: MarcosPMA, nn
Aug 04 2016 12:00pm
0
Login to post comments
1816 views


Hello and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  The Pro Tour is today and I'm quite excited to see how the tournament turns out.  I don't play much Standard so I'm not particularly interested in what archetypes show up and what wins, I'm more so interested in what Eldritch Moon draft looks like as the pros have been hard at it trying to figure out the format.  Thankfully for me I have very late nights so I'm able to naturally stay awake and watch the Pro Tour happen all the way in Australia.

With no flashback drafts available due to the Eldritch Moon release I have only today a prerelease draft and a prerelease sealed league.  Normally I would break up the league into 3 weeks, but since I had to complete the league before yesterday I figured I might as well upload the entire league all at once.  Something that irks me is that even though I get the experience of being in a league, I don't get the convenience of it.  Due to the time limit of prerelease sealed leagues, I feel I'm better off doing my matches all at once rather than take my time with it.  It took me 4 days to do the league, but part of me would have preferred a 4 round event to be done in one sitting.  The one upside is that you get something for every match win, something I didn't realize until after I had completed the league.  I'm so used to the competitive leagues that I thought the prerelease league would be the same.

With all that said, let's jump into the league!

 

Eldritch Moon Prerelease Sealed League

 

When I first opened this pool and saw I got a Tamiyo, my first instinct was to build a Tamiyo deck.  Tamiyo, Field Researcher is quite the powerful card if you can support her so it's in my best interest to see if I can do so.  Unfortunately for Tamiyo, my Bant deck wasn't very good.  I did have very strong red cards so I knew I had to end up R/x to take advantage of Nahiri's Wrath and 2 Spreading Flames.  Spreading Flames would be a good card regardless of the format, but in Eldritch Moon the creature sizing is a bit small.  Spreading Flames is likely going to be a 3 for 1, or 1 for 1 with their best card.  In either case you're still happy with either scenario happening so you're going to play it if you can.  Once I settled into the idea of playing red I needed to find the other color to pair it with.  Blue is the obvious choice given the Mercurial Geists I opened, but green was pretty powerful in its own right.  Tireless Tracker, Clear Shot, and Ulvenwald Mysteries are extremely good cards to have access to in sealed deck.  Tireless Tracker and Ulvenwald Mysteries work well together, and they let me have a chance going late against control decks.

Since I had some time to wait, I figured I'd build the two decks and come back to it and see what I thought would be best.  In the end I realized that all my blue cards weren't as good as Tireless Tracker and Ulvenwald Mysteries, so I decided to play the G/R deck.  In that deck I also "splashed" two Eldrazi with Emerge and I believe that was the correct decision.  I have card advantage and I have a Wild-Field Scarecrow to let me find my blue sources.  The deck also has light mana requirements, making it so drawing an Island early on isn't quite as punishing as it could be.  I liked being able to play Vexing Scuttler in general since I could get back a card I discarded to Nahiri's Wrath, or get back a removal spell.  Generally speaking, being able to generate value and/or 2 for 1's is a great way to push a match in your favor.

One thing to note about the Eldrazi if you're splashing them: you must be okay with hard casting them from time to time.  Just because you can emerge them doesn't always mean you should.  It's one thing to get a spell on the cheap, it's another to handicap your board presence just for mana efficiency.  Emerge is just an option.  You should consider every option you have before casting these creatures.

I went 5-0 with the deck I made, largely on the back of Nahiri's Wrath.  When I first evaluated it, I believed that it would deal damage equal to the highest CMC card you discarded and not the total CMC that you discard.  So I thought you had to have a good card in hand for Nahiri's Wrath to do anything, which I didn't want to discard my best card.  Now, sometimes you will have to do that, but being able to discards two low cost creatures and deal 4-5 damage to two creatures is quite the good deal.  Nahiri's Wrath is a card that is good when you already have a board presence because now your opponent is pressured to deploy more creatures otherwise they will die to the creatures you have on board.  If you have to use Nahiri's Wrath to not die while you have no creatures in play, you're at the mercy of any creature they play afterwards.  Of course, you have to do what you have to do, but you'd prefer to be able to attack after you cast Nahiri's Wrath.

Eldritch Moon Prerelease Draft

A few weeks earlier I talked about how I drafted a value G/B Delirium deck in triple Eldritch Moon and how well it had worked out for me.  In this draft I decided to see if the archetype would be as viable when you draft the set properly.  So yes, I did force colors beside the fact that it's not the best draft strategy to have.  I drafted what I could with the idea I had in mind, but it did not work as intended.  I was lacking removal and should have taken Boon of Emrakul as opposed to ignoring it.  Distended Mindbender can act as pseudo removal, but if it doesn't come down on turn 3-4 it's not going to take what I need it to take.  I know what cards I'd like in the archetype, but I feel I shouldn't take them earlier than I should.  Bloodbriar, Grapple with the Past, and Midnight Scavengers are not 1st-6th picks.  They have the potential to wheel so I'm better served taking other cards instead.

I don't think I drafted a 1-2 deck (due to a bye), but I don't think I would have gone 3-0 either.  I needed removal and I needed a better curve.  In reality I needed to not force it and let it come to me.  If the deck happened organically I believe it would have been much stronger.

Conclusion

Going 5-0 in the league does help offset the 1-2 mark I got in in the draft so I'm happy about that.  EMN Sealed feels like creature sizing is very important.  If you can find a way to beat X/2s then you're golden.  Creatures at 3/3 and better hold the ground pretty well and are solid attackers. You'll be able to hit your lands drops to hard cast the Eldrazi, so I wouldn't worry about if you're going to be able to cast them.  I don't know much about the draft format, but I should have a better idea after this weekend.  I'll be looking over the drafts and trying to glean any information I can from them.

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns leave them in the comments section below!

Thanks for reading and watching!