Smokespew Invoker
I used to be aware that every post I made on Strava when I lived in Juneau said something about the weather. "Not too rainy today!" "Surprisingly nice out today." It's been my experience that weather dictates a lot of mindspace in Alaska because it can change everything in an instant: add in some much needed spice, make a paddle way more dangerous, or turn a mundane Tuesday night into a psychedelic hit of serotonin via a sunsoaked peak adventure.
Iz and I have joked about how nobody pays attention to the weather here because it's almost always the same during the summer: Hot, sunny, not too humid, and 90 degrees. Our jokes were a little early because we are now experiencing a weather variation and I am once again posting about it on Strava: "not too smoky this morning!" "AQI was surprisingly decent this morning." Wildfire season is here and it has meaningfully changed how I look at spending time outside. This weekend is supposed to be particularly bad so instead of planning which trails to run, I have been looking into gym memberships and doing a lot more self directed yoga. But this weekend is also the Hobbit Magic the Gathering prerelease, so my head is once again in the retail limited mindspace.
I have never done very well at the sealed deck format. I love it and I think it's a lot of fun, but I think it exposes some of my bad heuristics of deckbuilding. To be quite honest, long ago somehow I missed whatever the beginner lessons you are supposed to get on building a deck. (I have drafted enough to have built the muscle memory for 40 card decks, but for something like 60 card, the only way I can innovate is by taking someone else's decklist, assuming they have a decent mix of creatures, removal, lands, etc, and going from there.) So sealed is a weak spot for me and I enjoy trying to get better at it.
Sam Pratt's Rough Drafts podcast had a recent episode called I used to be bad at Sealed. It wasn't perfect in helping me diagnose my challenges, but I think his core point is spot on: sealed decks are not draft decks and you can't build a draft deck out of your sealed pool and expect it to perform well. The question that sealed format is asking is: "How do you squeeze the maximum amount of value out of this pile, knowing that you get nothing else?" Forget every draft archetype, forget card rankings. Look at the whole pool and literally make your decisions inside a vacuum. No more packs are coming to save you. (see footnote 1 at the bottom)
Tolarian Community College does a prerelease video for every set, and something that they have started doing that I think is really savvy is give the viewer a sealed pool and asking you, the viewer, what you think you would build out of it. Then, at the end of the episode, they show what they built and why they decided to build that way. This little exercise helped me to see one of my gaps and I am hopeful I can use it during this (smoky) weekend to do a little better at my prerelease.
Looking through this pile, I was immediately drawn to the fixing lands, the boros cards, and some of the blue options, like the Bilbo cards and Plunder the Trollshaws (the premodern gamer in me wants to cast Deep Analysis whenever I can). Red had some good removal and all of a sudden, I was off to the races building a jeskai deck (or really, Boros splashing blue for some card advantage and a sick eagle that I could maybe get a discount on casting from some of my fliers). I think this deck is cool, but I also think it lacks any sort of fast start and, like a lot of my decks, could easily get out-midranged too. If it's not fast, it's not amazing at midrange, and it's not good at being grindy late, well, it's probably not going to perform that well.
After going through the episode, I was surprised to see that the TCC team build a Red/Black sacrifice deck. I had been pretty myopic and had totally missed how deep the black cards were in this pool. When I finally sorted the pool by rarity, it was almost embarrassing: my Jeskai deck was nearly all commons and uncommons, and the best rares/mythics were sitting right there in black and red. The pool had been pointing at the TCC deck the whole time and I just hadn't looked. There are a ton of red and black goblins, plenty of sacrifice fodder, and some good removal too. I am not sure I totally understand why they used Desolation of Smaug in this low to the ground goblin deck though. A 3 damage sweeper kills a lot of your own dudes too. My best bet is that any kind of sweeper can dig you out of a hole and help to reestablish your gameplan?
edit: Ok, I've been thinking about this more and realizing that this is a more clever card to play here than I realized. You build up a big Goblin Army so it doesn't die, you pay life to pump up your Desolation Prowler to 4 power. Your Porch Sentries die and help remove bigger threats with their triggers. This is a sweeper than you can make into a one sided wipe with some thoughtfulness around it. This is actually a great example of my blind spots that I talk about below
I tend to do this and get pretty fixated on my plan and miss whatever else is going on. I sometimes struggle to zoom out. I really value consistency in my cards and tend to eschew cards that seem needlessly complicated. I think this means that I am sometimes going for a C+ level common because I understand the effect and it doesn't seem finicky. I end up missing a ton of synergy because those more complex cards are also more powerful.
Most of the cubes I design are in the low-complexity space. I think the game is fun enough without explaining to a new person how to hold priority to respond to your own trigger or something like that. And it's OK for me to not care for the complicated cards, but it means I am playing from a disadvantage in these types of formats and I am losing out on powerful plays. I either need to become an expert of squeezing blood from a stone and winning limited games with decks full of commons (unlikely) or I need to get comfortable using these more complicated cards to my advantage.
So what does it all mean for my Hobbit prerelease? In my mind (and this seems very obvious, but I am trying to go back to first principles here), I need to start with the 5 draft archetypes: Black/Red Goblins, Red/White Dwarves, Blue/White Humans, Green/Black Wolves-Spiders-Bears, and Blue/Green Elves. Look through all of the cards and figure out which one those archetypes is well supported, which uncommons support that theme, and where are any bomb rares that fit there too. Don't start by trying to figure out how to splash something unique. Don't try to get too cute with it. Draft around 16 creatures/7 other spells, 2 1drops, 7 2drops, 6 3drops, 4 4drops, 3e 5drops, 1 6+drop. More three drops, I think I am always light on that part of the curve. Try to doublespell where possible. Save your removal longer than you think. I am literally typing out lessons I know from best practice, but when I get into the moment, I tend to ignore them. So my main goal is: don't forget that shit. Stick to the basics.
So that's my plan for a prerelease this weekend. I know it's a low pressure environment, I know it's not about winning. But this part of Magic is really interesting to me, and I think I can approach it sort of academically as opposed to trying to spike on people who are new to the game. Getting better at this game is a long process and getting into the nitty gritty is definitely some of the appeal. I didn't even get a chance to write about lord of the rings cards more broadly, my issue with "The ring tempts you" (thank god they didn't continue with that), and what it feels like to have a UB product that actually speaks to your sensibilities.
I suppose that is all a story for another time.
Footnote 1:
Reading back, I can see that I fall into my own trap while trying to extract a lesson from Sam's podcast. In making a plan for "first principles" sealed deckbuilding, I immediately went to "look at the five set archetypes" after saying you can't get stuck on archetypes in sealed. I think the old "BREAD" (Bombs, Removal, Evasion, Aggro, and Duds) acronym is probably the thing to follow to remember Sam's lesson. Nobody is going to have a tuned deck, so you need to be ready to leverage good bombs and removal and prepare for a longer, grindy style game.
Footnote 2:
All of these lessons are true for me regardless of how the deck I built actually performed and it's my thought process that I'm really trying to improve. That said, it's also possible I built a perfectly fine deck here and I'm not giving myself enough credit.