I’ve played in quite a few Sealed events on Magic Online in the past week. Unless you have a local store that regularly runs Sealed tournaments, you’re probably not going to find a better place to practice the format. While many people dismiss Sealed as being extremely luck-based, you’ll find that players who regularly play the format on Magic Online tend to consistently perform very well. Paul Rietzl, for instance, plays in Sealed Daily Events all the time, and he’s had an incredible string of performances on day 1 of Limited Grand Prix over the past few years. While opening bombs and removal can certainly give you an easier road to a good record, the challenge comes in knowing what to do to make the best of a less powerful pool.

The current Limited environment is particularly challenging because the differences between Sealed and Draft are very stark. Let’s take a look at the two of them more in depth.

Draft

In most Draft formats, I think the concept of signaling to players on your left is vastly overrated. But because of the nature of the guild structure in this format, signaling is the key to success in Dragon’s Maze-Gatecrash-Return to Ravnica Draft. The most important thing to pay attention to during a full block RTR Draft is what pack the various guilds are in. The best decks in the format tend to be focused two-color decks. Drafting a solid two-color deck in a format in which you’re only going to see gold cards for your deck in one of the last two packs means you need to be pretty damn sure that those cards are going to be coming.

There are two different ways to do this. The one that I prefer is picking a Gatecrash guild and cutting it hard. It helps that all of the best gold commons in Dragon’s Maze belong to Gatecrash guilds. The best commons, in approximate order, are Beetleform Mage, Zhur-Taa Druid, and Tithe Drinker. Viashino Firstblade is up there as well, with the only Gatecrash guild that doesn’t have a powerhouse common being Dimir—Pilfered Plans is fine, but it just doesn’t stack up to the cream of the crop. Compare these to Drown in Filth, Deputy of Acquittals, Armored Wolf-Rider, Morgue Burst, and Nivix Cyclops. While the Wolf, Cyclops, and Deputy are all pretty good, none of them are on the level of the Simic, Gruul, and Orzhov commons.

Because of this, my preferred strategy is to pick one of these early and then cut that guild hard, trying to avoid passing any quality cards that might put my neighbor into my guild. Doing this can reap massive rewards and give you an incredibly powerful deck with the cream of the crop from the second pack. Being able to pick up the lion’s share of the Kingpin’s Pets, Skyknight Legionnaires, or Shamblesharks at the table can give you an aggressive deck that is hard to keep up with.

It’s important to note that trying to cut a guild is a high risk, high reward strategy. It’s entirely possible that the player to your left first picks a card in the same guild as you and sticks with it through the dregs you’re passing them. You may never see the reward you were hoping for. Exactly this happened to me in a draft tonight. I first picked a Maw of the Obzedat and then picked up a pair of Tithe Drinkers, never passing any other great Orzhov cards, and still barely got anything out of pack 2. I was fortunately able to salvage things by picking up a red splash in pack 3 for not one but two Carnival Hellsteeds, but my deck was still not nearly as powerful as it might have been if my plan had worked successfully. My Hellsteeds weren’t enough to carry my otherwise mediocre deck, and I found myself exiting in the first round.

The other effective strategy for the format is to draft reactively and try to identify which guilds are open ahead of you in pack 1. The catch to this is that what really matters are the Return to Ravnica guilds that are open. If you get a fourth pick Beetleform Mage and you’ve already passed two good Simic cards, that signal isn’t worth anything to you because that’s probably the last good Simic card you’re going to see—from either direction. If you see a late Carnage Gladiator or Ascended Lawmage, however, those are good signs that Rakdos and Azorius might be open, and those are actually guilds that will be passed to you from that direction in pack 3.

The principle is the same as with forcing a Gatecrash guild, only reversed. The bulk of the best cards for Azorius, Rakdos, Golgari, Izzet, and Selesnya are in the final pack, so you want to ensure that you can get as many of their cards from that pack as you can. The most effective way to do that is to try to move into a guild that no one on your right seems to be drafting. See a late Unflinching Courage? It might be a good idea to jump into Selesnya, even if you’ve been dabbling in other guilds so far. As a result, if you’re going this route, you’re best served by trying to pick up the best monocolored cards you can in the early packs, giving you enough flexibility to move in on whatever Return to Ravnica guild seems to be open late.

With either of these strategies, you’re going to end up with one bad pack during the draft. Don’t panic. While the very best cards are gold, there are a lot of quality monocolored cards out there, and you should focus on picking them up. While you will occasionally want to splash and sometimes you’ll have to splash when things go awry, try to resist the temptation to jump ship and dive into another guild entirely if you haven’t properly set up for it with signaling. That Prime Speaker Zegana may look sweet, but if you’ve been drafting Selesnya and passing Beetleform Mages in the first pack, there’s basically no way it’s going to end up in your deck without turning it into a complete disaster.

Sealed

So how does all of this change when you’re playing Sealed? Well, the biggest difference is that you don’t get to pick any of the cards that you end up with in your pool. It may seem obvious, but it has significant implications. In Draft, you can spend your picks in Gatecrash taking Slaughterhorns and Syndic of Tithes for your Selesnya deck while passing along the Skyknight Legionnaires and Kingpin’s Pets. This gives you a disproportionate number of monocolored cards in a Draft deck, which makes you much better suited to putting together an actual two-colored deck. In Sealed, though, you’re at the mercy of your packs, which means you’re almost always going to have to play three colors (or at least two splashing a third).

This means that perhaps the most important thing to pay attention to in full block Return to Ravnica Sealed is your mana. What does it let you do? Sure, you may have Niv-Mizzet and Armada Wurm in your pool, but you’re probably going to be hard-pressed to play both of them. That’s an extreme example, of course, but the same situation can come up with Centaur Healer and Viashino Firstblade. If you have both of them in your pool, can you realistically play them both?

The answer, of course, is "it depends." Healer and Firstblade are both early-game cards, so you wouldn’t want to play either of them off of a light splash of just a few lands. Good splash cards are those that have a significant impact whenever you can play them in a game. Cards like Explosive Impact and Stab Wound are excellent splashes because they’re good even when you draw your third color on turn 8. But cards like Centaur Healer and Viashino Firstblade go down dramatically once the ground is cluttered and you no longer get much value out of it being oversized for its mana cost.

Most of the time, I won’t want both of those cards in the same deck. You’re going to end up with too many hands that you can’t cast one of them on time. But if you have two or three dual lands between the three colors, the situation changes dramatically. If you can play three Mountains alongside two Boros Guildgates and a Stomping Ground, it becomes much more realistic to hope to curve out with your splashed red cards in your Selesnya deck. If you don’t have the right lands, you really shouldn’t be trying to force those kinds of cards in the same deck. You have to follow your mana.

On a related note, while the Cluestones are not very popular in Draft, they’re much better in Sealed. Because decks are less streamlined and their mana is  typically worse, the format is considerably slower, which means the mana  fixing and acceleration of a Cluestone are both very welcome when you can afford to take your third turn off from playing a creature. I’m totally happy to play even two or three Cluestones in a deck depending on how powerful the cards I have to ramp into are. The Cluestones aren’t quite as good as dual lands for enabling splashes—and certainly not as good for enabling early splashes—but they’re very good at letting you play more expensive and powerful cards.

For reference, let’s look at some of the undefeated decks from Grand Prix Gothenburg, the most recent full block Return to Ravnica Grand Prix.

Four-Color

Fredrik Persson

18th Place at Grand Prix on 06-09-2013

Return to Ravnica Limited

Creatures (15)

• 1 Hypersonic Dragon
• 1 Thrill-Kill Assassin
• 1 Stonefare Crocodile
• 1 Daggerdrome Imp
• 1 Sewer Shambler
• 1 Drudge Beetle
• 1 Cloudfin Raptor
• 1 Drakewing Krasis
• 1 Zameck Guildmage
• 1 Elusive Krasis
• 2 Diluvian Primordial
• 1 Gruul Ragebeast
• 1 Maze Abomination
• 1 Pontiff of Blight

Lands (6)

• 3 Swamp
• 1 Blood Crypt
• 1 Rakdos Guildgate
• 1 Gruul Guildgate

Spells (19)

• 4 Forest
• 1 Mountain
• 6 Island
• 1 Seek the Horizon
• 2 Putrefy
• 1 Hands of Binding
• 1 Far
• 1 Golgari Cluestone
• 1 Rakdos Cluestone
• 1 Down

Four-Color

Thoralf Severin

4th Place at Grand Prix on 06-09-2013

Return to Ravnica Limited

Creatures (16)

• 1 Tower Drake
• 1 Ember Beast
• 1 Goblin Electromancer
• 1 Lobber Crew
• 1 Isperia's Skywatch
• 1 Frostburn Weird
• 1 Cloudfin Raptor
• 1 Viashino Shanktail
• 1 Ghor-Clan Rampager
• 1 Boros Reckoner
• 1 Lavinia of the Tenth
• 1 Nivix Cyclops
• 1 Maze Glider
• 1 Maze Rusher
• 1 Rubblebelt Maaka
• 1 Species Gorger

Lands (3)

• 1 Simic Guildgate
• 1 Gruul Guildgate
• 1 Boros Guildgate

Spells (21)

• 1 Forest
• 1 Plains
• 6 Mountain
• 6 Island
• 1 Izzet Charm
• 1 Trostani's Judgment
• 1 Electrickery
• 1 Simic Charm
• 1 Turn
• 1 Azorius Cluestone
• 1 Selesnya Cluestone

Five-Color

Jan Van Der Vegt

5th Place at Grand Prix on 06-09-2013

Return to Ravnica Limited

Creatures (13)

• 1 Axebane Guardian
• 1 Gatecreeper Vine
• 1 Trestle Troll
• 1 Sewer Shambler
• 1 Balustrade Spy
• 1 Dinrova Horror
• 1 Ivy Lane Denizen
• 1 Greenside Watcher
• 1 Trostani's Summoner
• 1 Sire of Insanity
• 1 Aetherling
• 1 Armored Wolf-Rider
• 1 Kraul Warrior

Planeswalkers (1)

• 1 Domri Rade

Lands (7)

• 4 Swamp
• 1 Izzet Guildgate
• 1 Gruul Guildgate
• 1 Boros Guildgate

Spells (19)

• 8 Forest
• 1 Plains
• 1 Island
• 1 Chromatic Lantern
• 1 Explosive Impact
• 1 Devour Flesh
• 1 Killing Glare
• 1 Verdant Haven
• 1 Far
• 1 Down
• 1 Krasis Incubation
• 1 Pilfered Plans

It is no surprise to me that all three of the 9-0 decks are four or five colors and feature quality removal and high-impact creatures. You don’t see the same kind of curves and creature selection here that you find in Draft. You certainly don’t see any Riot Piker decks, for instance, and you’re unlikely to see Ember Beast either, even if both of those are excellent cards in the right Draft decks. But what you do see is a pair of Cluestones in two of the decks and a Chromatic Lantern and Verdant Haven in the other along with dual lands aplenty.

Don’t try to force your Sealed deck to look like a Draft deck—that’s almost always a mistake. In Sealed, especially in this format, you’re much better served trying to figure out which of your most powerful cards your mana allows you to play and finding the best way to fit them together. You’re better off playing a spread of high-impact creatures and removal in a wide range of colors than trying to cobble together a two-color aggro deck with three or four filler cards. These three 9-0 decks certainly don’t look like anything I’ve ever drafted in the format—not successfully, at least.

Hopefully this has been a helpful breakdown of the format both for Sealed and for Draft. These are the principles that I’m going to be putting into practice this weekend at Grand Prix Houston—if you’re going to be there, I suggest you do the same.

Until next time,

bmk