Look at your Sealed deck, now back to me, now back to your Sealed deck, now back to me. Sadly, that deck isn’t going to win this PTQ — but if you had figured out how to build that Sealed pool correctly, it could have.
Look down, back up, where are you? You’re in the middle of deck construction, trying to figure out how to win. What’s in your hand? Back at me. You have it! The Unholy Strength your deck needs. Look again. The Unholy Strength is an envelope with a ticket to Pro Tour Paris. Anything is possible when you build correctly.
I’m in an article.
But wait — what do I mean by figuring out how to win? Isn’t that what you do during
the crunch portion of game?
Sure, you can do it then. But by that point, it may already be too late.
A few years ago, Michael Flores proposed a unique way of thinking about winning in an impromptu discussion. He was on a streak of wins locally, both in Constructed and Limited. His run was nothing too spectacular — just a moderate uptick in wins that, looking over his long-term statistical analysis, would render as a blip. His wisdom, though, was invaluable:
“Every turn of the game, I figure out what the board state is going to look like on the turn I win the game.”
Take that in for a second.
Soon, this notion began to rule my play.
Some of you might be thinking, “So what? We all think ahead.” Well, that’s true. You should be crafting out turns in advance with a precise mental edge. There’s a noted difference, though, between merely thinking ahead and Mike’s nugget of knowledge.
Planning out only does you so much good. What matters is winning the game.
Imagine this board state. The game has gone long, and the battlefield is clogged up. You both have three vanilla 2/2s on the battlefield, but you have an Assault Griffin and an Infantry Veteran. He has a Palace Guard and two Cloud Crusaders holding back your Griffin each turn.
You’re not really in a planning state here. At present, there are no profitable attacks. But look ahead to how you’re going to win. The board when you win this game is likely going to be a tapped Infantry Veteran, an additional flier or two, possibly a combat trick, and a removal spell/countermagic for whatever they draw. The life total here isn’t even all that important, for the most part. What’s important is realizing what you need to have in order to win so you don’t just throw away the necessary resources you need to do so. It is also deck dependent — as if you have a Day of Judgment or something in your deck, you can craft your entire winning situation around that card.
That situation is pretty even, though. Maybe you feel like you can just make the right play in every situation and end up on top. But how about this? You have a Goblin Balloon Brigade on the battlefield and nothing but a couple random creatures in your hand. Your opponent casts a Baneslayer Angel.
Awkward.
In any case, what is the board going to look like
when
you win this game?
Think about how you can win, find that hole, and exploit it. For example, if you have a couple of Thunder Strikes, the ending game state might have several more lands in play for your opponent, your Brigade and your tricks in your graveyard, and several tapped creatures for you in a very narrow race from his Baneslayer life buffer. This means you need to trade with his random Barony Vampires despite the hopeless looking situation, because you will have the beatdown advantage if you can just kill that Baneslayer.
Speaking of Baneslayer…
What I really want to talk about is how else I applied this idea. Sure, it’s great to use inside actual games. However, where it has actually benefitted me more than any other area is in deckbuilding.
At Grand Prix Portland a little over a week ago, my Sealed pool was a tricky little one. It had a lot of good card draw and removal, but that looked like it was going to do little more than draw into more random creatures. I cut the deckbuilding period close timewise — but after a lot of experimenting, I finally figured out how I was going to win. The actual pool isn’t as important, but let me show you how I turned a confusing hodgepodge of good cards into a deck with a clear plan.
1 Aether Adept
1 Augury Owl
1 Baneslayer Angel
1 Blinding Mage
1 Clone
1 Cloud Crusader
1 Cloud Elemental
1 Palace Guard
1 Roc Egg
1 Scroll Thief
1 Stormfront Pegasus
1 Water Servant
2 Doom Blade
2 Foresee
1 Jace’s Ingenuity
2 Mana Leak
1 Pacifism
1 Preordain
1 Rise from the Grave
1 Solemn Offering
I looked ahead to every game I played and figured out how I was going to win with this pool. Every game was going to be won with Baneslayer Angel. Between Clone and Rise from the Grave, I could beat Doom Blade
and
Pacifism. I could attrition them out with the rest of my cards and clog the ground. I always had enough card manipulation to find my bomb. I knew my plan would be to trade at every opportunity and win with Baneslayer each time.
The result? Every game I won executed as expected. Though AJ Sacher ended up knocking me out of Day 2 contention, in every game but one I rode on the back of Baneslayer Angel while multiple opposing creatures were either dead via removal and trading or held off by my ground creatures. I built my deck, saw through to how I was going to win and made sure I played as such.
How about another example?
At the same Grand Prix, Conley Woods opened a pretty lackluster Sealed pool. The highlight of his pool? Three Scroll Thieve. So Conley cooked up a plan. Much like how I knew I was going to win every game with Baneslayer Angel, he knew he was going to win every game by drawing a ton of cards with Scroll Thief. As a result, he made the entire game about Scroll Thief. Two copies of Unholy Strength ended up in his deck just because it meant he would connect with Scroll Thief more often. While he lost in the last round playing for Day 2, his plan worked as expected. Every time I watched him win, he was connecting with Scroll Thieves and scrappily using cards to push creatures out of the way so he could draw cards.
This isn’t the first time Woods has used unique plans to win in Limited.
Last year at Grand Prix Tampa in the last pod of Day 2 with the elimination rounds on the line, he drafted a crazy lifegain Ally deck with Felidar Soverign that played the likes of Landbind Ritual (okay, he sideboarded it in every round and pegged it as a deckbuilding error to not include it—close enough). Others laughed at his cards, but he ended up winning and making it into one of the coveted eight spots.
How could you even consider playing
Landbind Ritual
when playing for the Top 8 of a Grand Prix?
Conley looked at his strategy and figured out what the board was going to look like the turn he won. Most often, it was going to involve a lot of blockers and a recurring Felidar Sovereign off his Emeria, the Sky Ruin or a World Queller/Emeria creature lock. Elaborate? Perhaps, but he knew it was how each game was going to end.
The same kind of ideas can be applied in Constructed.
Take any given matchup. For the sake of discussion, we’ll use the Mythic deck as the example, as the concept’s pretty easy to see when you see the cards that Mythic plays.
What is the game going to look like when you win?
Well, pretty much every winning board state is going to involve a handful of mana creatures and some big threat tapped. Most games where there is any kind of resistance will have something like a Mana Leak in your graveyard, but there isn’t a lot of time to act in general. When considering modifying your deck to contain any number of new cards, you have to ask yourself: how does this fit in to the game toward reaching the turn I win?
When looking at just a deck it can be as simple as considering a goldfish draw, but when you look at this in the context of matchups you start to discover how you should be playing and, consequently, sideboarding.
For example, look at the U/W Control versus Jund matchup. The way the board is going to look when Jund wins is very empty, possibly with one or two creatures at most. The game will have gone long, and you will both have a lot of lands in play. They will have no gas left, and you will be out of cards, but using your manlands to your advantage.
From the U/W side, a winning board is going to have an unopposed Baneslayer Angel, Sun Titan, or Sphinx of Jwar Isle. You will likely have presented it early, and you’llll have to deal your opponent casting Terminate or Doom Blade if it isn’t the Sphinx. There will be some Path to Exiles, Mana Leaks, or Condemns in your graveyard, hitting their first few threats while trying to run them out of cards.
With that in mind, you can make mulligan decisions appropriately (how is this hand going to help me reach that point?) and sideboard appropriately (I don’t need Jace in this matchup, while Flashfreeze is going to stem the early tide).
The last turn of the game is one you’re winning on. Everything up that point is just a flurry of spells heading in that direction. By figuring out how to best reach that point, you can both play
and
build decks better. As we go into Sealed qualifier season, I hope that some of this advice will help you build your decks with an eye toward victory and snag a trip to Paris. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.
If you have any comments about these ideas, please let me know in the forums, by e-mailing me at gavintriesagain at gmail dot com, or
on Twitter @GavinVerhey
. I’ll see you next week, when I have a pretty unique article that’s been months in the making. Until then, hopefully I’ll talk to you in the forums!
Gavin Verhey
Rabon on Magic Online, GavinVerhey on Twitter, Lesurgo everywhere else