MarcosPMA's picture
By: MarcosPMA, nn
Sep 09 2014 12:00pm
0
Login to post comments
1752 views


Hello and welcome to another edition of Sealed Success!  This week we'll be talking about Khans of Tarkir and the last mechanic that has been spoiled, along with going over an M15 8-4/Daily!  Spoiler season is in full gear and the prerelease is less than 2 weeks away!  This is my first multicolored set since Return to Ravnica block, so it'll be interesting to see how a 3 color set works and how decks look like and operate with manabases that might be sketchy at best.  But first, the Temur (RUG) mechanic has been spoiled!  Let's take a look at a card that has already been spoiled: Heir of the Wilds.

The Temur are ferocious!  Other cards have been spoiled with the mechanic that work a little differently than this one, but the concept is still the same: If you control a creature with 4 or more power, do X or get Y bonus.  The Temur care about being the biggest out there and have cards that get more powerful as you summon bigger creatures to the battlefield.  It's very straightforward and simple enough to understand and apply in Limited.  Green wants to have big fatties and this mechanic encourages you to draft more powerful creatures to make your other cards better.  You do have to find a right balance of ferocious creatures and enablers, but I imagine if you stick to drafting a good mana curve that it won't be a problem to get your cards to function the way you want them to.

I want to talk more about Morph, especially since I just got done drafting/playing triple Legions draft (never thought I'd say that).  Legions was in 2003, and that set had a lot of Morph cards/creatures in general.  That entire set was nothing but creatures, so a lot of the morph cards had spell effects on them!  Drafting Morph cards was interesting since the power level of the cards were less than they are now, not to mention the whole tribal thing going on along with the Morph cards.  A lot of Morph cards had an ability when turned face up, so you had to decide if you wanted a 2/2 now and pay some amount of mana later for an effect, or just curve out and not play your Morph card.  There are some cards that you will play as a Morph card then pay the cost, but there are some like Abzan Guide that don't give you a "benefit" when you turn them face up, so those are cards you might just play normally.

Something that will be different this time than it has been before is guessing what Morph card your opponent has and how bad it is to attack into it/block one.  When I played the Legions draft, I had to think about combat more and decide whether I wanted to risk my Morph or if I thought my Morph could beat theirs.  I didn't want to attack and end up having chump attacked into a really good Morph.  In this article on the mothership, they lay out how Morph works and how combat will work with them.  With 4 or less open mana, no Morph will trump another Morph.  That makes it easier to attack and block if you don't have a bomb Morph, but if you don't trade than it signals that you value your Morph highly, which may lead to the conclusion that your Moprh card costs 5 or more mana and has a good effect.  Time will tell how Morph plays out in this set and I'm excited to see what happens as we start played Khans of Tarkir Limited.  But for now, let's play M15!

M15 8-4 Draft

 

M15 Sealed Daily

Conclusion

I really liked my draft deck and thought it was the perfect example of what an Ensoul Artifact deck should look like.  You do get free wins with a turn 2 Ensoul Artifact, but there will be games when you don't draw both parts, or you draw them too late and you're dead before you can even take advantage of it.  You want your artifacts to have some use other than being used with Ensoul Artifact, such as fueling your Scrapyard Mongrels and Aeronaut Tinkerers.  And you also want to be able to win the game if you don't get your cheap 5/5 every game.  It's important to draft a deck, not just a two card combo and hope you get it every single time.  It's almost like drafting Heroic in Theros Block.  You won't always have the Bestow creature for your Heroic creature, so you need to be able to do things besides that.  While I liked my draft deck, I didn't really like my sealed deck.  It just felt underpowered in some spots and I felt I wasn't doing anything really powerful while playing the matches.  I was a bit frustrated with the whole session that after Round 3 I dropped.  I wasn't in the right frame to play another match with my deck and didn't feel you guys would want to watch me not play optimally even if the match is meaningless.  Sorry about that.

Next week will hopefully be the Khans of Tarkir set review, then the week after that I'll talk about the Prerelease and Khans of Tarkir Limited.

Thank you for reading/watching!