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Happy New Year, everybody! I'm sure my fan is wondering why I've been gone so long. I didn't drop off the face of the earth, but during my last few Magic tournaments, I wished that I had - more than once.

To be honest, I haven't been writing because I my Magic game has been [censored - implies carnal knowledge of barnyard animals]. I went 1-3 in each of my last two Extended PTQs, and I have lost in the first round in each of my last four 8-man drafts. During a visit to Neutral Ground in New York, I blundered my way through a pair of six-man drafts in such fashion that Brian David-Marshall announced "we may have just found a new winner for 'Worst Drafter Among Star City Writers.'" BDM did mention who held the title before me, but out of respect for George Lucas I will spare him the embarrassment of being named.

The point is, I am just in a really bad slump right now. However, I remain optimistic; maybe it's because I'm still drunk from New Year's Eve, or possibly because I am a fool, but I think that I can turn things around. I hope to start at Grand Prix: Richmond, where the format will be Ravnica/Guildpact Limited. Although I can't seem to buy a win at draft these days, building a Sealed Deck is quite a bit different. If (like me), you want to start a new winning streak, here are some things you might want to look for.

(1) Black is the new black.
The first point is hardly surprising; although there are three colors in Ravnica that share two different guilds, Black is the one with the most removal. However, once Guildpact comes in, every color except Blue will be in three guilds, and I still expect Black to be most heavily played by a mile. The reason is simple: that's almost always the way it is in Sealed.

Black removal is too tempting; even if all of your good creatures are in two non-Black colors, the removal is often worth splashing for. Even in Mirrodin Block sealed, where Black had mostly one-toughness Nim creatures and no way to deal with artifacts, you could open a Betrayal of Flesh and some artifact mana and be tempted to run the easy splash.

With Disembowel and Last Gasp at common, not to mention several strong uncommons, Ravnica block is no different. Judging from what I've seen from Guildpact spoilers so far, for example...

Mortify - 1BW
Instant, Uncommon
Destroy target creature or enchantment.

...I would expect the same once that set enters the format.

(2) Guilds are overrated.
Once Guildpact enters the field, every color but Blue will belong to three different guilds in the format. It will be literally impossible to build a three-color deck without at least one guild combination, and you're not likely to build a two-color deck without being teamed up using some guilds. As a result, the synergy between guild cards will almost always give you at least an okay deck.

However, you don't want to overdo it if the card pool demands otherwise. This actually happened to me on multiple occasions during the prerelease weekend; in a couple of flights I had a deck okay enough to win product going B/U/G or G/W/B, but I would have done much better had I gone B/G/R with the first deck or G/W/U with the second.

Actually, that second example is worth expanding upon because it will still apply once Guildpact enters the picture. One draft deck I have seen recently splashes Blue cards into the W/G Convoke strategy. The idea is that almost all of the power Blue commons are splashable and can be played at the right time; i.e., you use your White and Green core to explode into an early Siege Wurm, and then...

• Vedalken Dismisser clears out blockers
• Flight of Fancy makes the Wurm pretty much unstoppable
• Compulsive Research reloads with more convoking goodness, etc.

It's equally so in Sealed, except that sometimes not even the best commons will help you out. You might open a lot of saucy White and Green commons in Ravnica and Guildpact, but Drift of Phantasms can help you out of those times when your opponent mounts a counterattack through the air. You might have a quick Conclave Equenaut, but Vedalken Entrancer can serve as a nice alternate win condition should your opponent have his own air defense. It's all about having the best deck, and if your best deck draws you into some non-intuitive color combinations, so be it.

One thing you definitely should not be worried about is assembling the mana for your third (fourth?) color. Even if Guildpact were to bring nothing to the table here - and I would expect that it will bring something - thanks to Farseek, Civic Wayfinder, Terraformer, Terrarion, and even off-color Signets, splashing is as much a breeze now as it was during Invasion Block, no matter what your base colors may be.

(3) Brokeback Mountains, or Red Deck Blows.
I assume there will be at least a couple good White and White/X cards in Guildpact, and there are some hot Red and Red/X cards already spoiled, such as...

Electrolyze - 1UR
Instant, Uncommon
Electrolyze deals 2 damage divided as you choose among any number of target creatures and/or players.
Draw a card.

...but the majority of your Sealed deck still comes from the Ravnica pack, and the Red cards in Ravnica are awful. You may think that you already know this, and you may have read the Gadiel Szleifer Worlds article where he compared drafting Boros to the exploits of ethnic crack whores. The Red cards in a Ravnica Sealed deck are even worse than that.

I'm talking there are two Red commons that I want to be running (Viashino Fangtail and Galvanic Arc) and two more common Red/White cards I'd like to open (Thundersong Trumpeter and Skyknight Legionnaire). Playing with other cards, like Fiery Conclusion and Sabertooth Alley Cat, is like cheating at Solitaire: half the time it doesn't put you any closer to winning.

Red seems best served as a splash color: a way to fit some more removal into your U/B deck, or a nice Flash Conscription surprise out of a G/W/B build. Unless you mise a bomb rare, or you somehow open multiple Skyknight Legionnaires, I would take a pass.

(4) Cards change value.
The difference between playing Sealed and Drafting is a little like the difference between playing limit hold 'em and no-limit.

(Tired of Magic writers using poker references? Well, I apologize, but I'm probably not going to stop doing it. After all, my poker habit pays for my Magic habit.)

You shouldn't play a no-limit game as though it were just a limit game with bigger bets - or, more accurately, you should only play that way if you don't like money. Specifically, many holdings change value depending upon the game format; that which might be playable at a limit table could get you broke in a no-limit game against the same players, and some hands which aren't so hot at a limit table become very playable when you can put all of your opponents' chips at stake. They reason is that the no-limit game is usually much "faster," i.e., it's easier to assert the strength of your hand early on with a very large bet, whereas in limit you have a lot less control over whether your opponents want to call you or not.

Similarly, in a Sealed deck you don't have as much control over the contents of your deck, or your opponent's, as you do in draft. Thus, some cards become more valuable in Sealed simply because they fill the curve and are decent, if non-spectacular, threats or answers. Similarly, some cards get a lot worse either because you don't have control over your deck or because the so-called "bad" cards see a lot more play. Cards that get better or worse in this fashion in the Ravnica set include:

Sewerdreg: Better. Since the number of players running Swamps will be roughly infinite, this guy is pretty much a fatter Dimir Infiltrator. In those rare matches where he's not unblockable, you still have a 3/3 for five which can turn off Dredge or fizzle a Dowsing Shaman activation (I think he turns off Haunt also, but remember that I am not a judge and I haven't seen the final card wording yet). Of course, running him in a three-color deck won't always be pretty, but I didn't say he was great; just that he will improve.

The Guild Lands: Worse. If it were just triple-RAV, I would be aware of Rolling Spoil but not really concerned. However, there are two more land destruction cards on the Guildpact spoiler, including one in the Color Everyone Plays...

Caustic Rain - 3B
Sorcery, Uncommon
Remove target land from the game.

What's more, there is some good reason to run land destruction maindeck: many mana bases will be uneven, and lands like Vitu-Ghazi and Svogthos are pretty formidable threats in Sealed. I'm not sure if the uncommon lands in Guildpact are hot or not, but I can easily imagine a stalled board where this card comes back to kill me...

Orzhova, the Church of Deals
Land, Uncommon
T: Add 1 to your mana pool.
3BW, T: Target player loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.

I'm not saying you shouldn't run the guild lands; such a statement smacks of The Fear. However, it's dangerous to keep a hand that depends upon them, and you should not be surprised if you run one of them out there on turn 2 and disaster strikes. There is just enough LD in the format to make that kind of bad beat a reality.

Glass Golem: Better. I see this guy circle draft tables quite a bit, and for good reason; a five-drop that will usually trade with a two-drop deserves to ride the short bus. However, in Sealed your last couple of creatures are often unimpressive, and under that condition this guy can make the cut. He will trade for five- and six-drops quite a bit more when your opponent has less control over how many two- and three-drops he's able to put in his deck.

Plus, this fellow is a great target for many cards in this Aura-themed set. Apply Flight of Fancy and usually he's a three-turn clock; Pollenbright Wings does the same and generates plenty of dudes to gum up the ground. [Pollenbright in Sealed is just stupid. - Knut] An attached Strands of Undeath results in a wall that kills just about everything it blocks. Slap a Galvanic Arc on him and now he's more than a match for Siege Wurm. Of course, the Golem is also pretty easy to kill in response to any of those Auras being played on him, but that's why he's the 16^th or 17^th creature to make your deck; he'll usually be your worst man, but I'd rather have him as my worst man than, say, Woodwraith Strangler.

Stasis Cell: Better. I don't see this card played very often in draft because it is so slow. Normally, by the time you could play this card in draft, a typical Dimir deck wants to have a Tidewater Minion in play, or be able to cast Induce Paranoia with mana open to activate Vedalken Entrancer. However, you only get so much removal in a Sealed deck, and sometimes you absolutely can't wait for a better answer to, say, a Selesnya Evangel.

Plus, the Cell is good in those decks. You know those decks; you'll usually open at least one per PTQ season. I'm talking about the decks where you don't open any decent removal, or your colors are such a mess that you can't run your best removal alongside your best creatures. Contrary to popular opinion, a good player can make Top 8 of a PTQ with one of those decks, as long as he or she can wring the most use out of the lame pseudo-removal cards as possible. Stasis Cell is not the kind of removal I'd like to open, but it is removal, and beggars don't get to choose.

(Incidentally, Cyclopean Snare is another card that falls into this category, but it's ridiculously slow, even slower than the Cell, so I don't think it gets much better.)

Crown of Convergence: Worse. I've heard this card referred to as a bomb in the triple-RAV format, sort of a combination of Crusade and Sensei's Divining Top. I certainly regretted the time that I passed it to Mike Flores in one of the Neutral Ground team drafts; it turned his ragtag deck into a well-oiled fighting machine. I definitely agree that it was quite powerful... emphasis on was.

The issue is not the color requirements for the activated ability; you can still go G/W/X pretty easily, where X can practically be any one of the remaining three colors. The problem is that it's not as simple to do that and still play the best men you open. You'll see a lot of three- and four-color builds where the third color is not a splash, but is in fact a hefty chunk of the deck. It will be a lot more common that you flip over the top card with your Crown, and maybe one of your men will get the bonus... or maybe none.

Like I said above, you occasionally see those sealed decks which click as though they were drafted. Those decks could well get a ton of mileage out of the Crown. However, if I were to open this card in triple-RAV, it would be the sort of card that I would be a fool not to play. With the entrance of Guildpact... maybe not so much.

Until next time, here's hoping you can get out of whatever slumps you may be in.

This article written while watching the Vince Young show the Rose Bowl.

mmyoungster at aim dot com
mmyoungster on AIM

Later.