Last week was tough. Saturday offered up one of the few sealed PPTQs in Colorado, but I struggled to get excited for it. It takes a lot to dissuade me from playing a sealed tournament, but I was close to skipping it. That morning, I actually turned off my alarm and went back to sleep. But after a while, I got up and went to play some Magic.
Turns out, that was a good decision. I won the whole thing, and have another shot to get back to the Pro Tour when the regional rolls around in March. Long before the final match, I knew I made the right choice. My sealed pool was excellent. It was one of the best pools I’ve ever opened. One of the six packs featured both Aetherstorm Roc and a masterpiece Verdurous Gearhulk. Pretty good. It turned out all seven of my rares were on color or artifacts, so the deck mostly built itself.
A Rare Sealed Deck
Yeah, that should be good enough to make the top eight of a five round tournament. The field was small but full of the best players in town, minus those who already qualified or are preparing for the World Magic Cup. I lost a close round three to Shawn Sloan doing some mean things with Pia Nalaar and a lot of vehicles, but otherwise won out to claim the first seed going into the top eight.
Over the last couple years I have gotten quite good at sealed Magic, but my draft game has been slipping. Leaving Brooklyn and the Team Draft League cut my access to regular, high-level drafting. I play online a bit, but that’s nowhere near as much fun. I still do well enough, but I think my ability to read a draft has slipped a bit, making my decks just weak enough to cost me in high stakes drafts in PPTQ top eights or day two of grand prix.
I set out to bring my drafting up to where I want to be, with a good mix of paper and online Kaladesh drafts. I found my in-game decisions were getting better, but my decks didn’t seem strong enough. I felt like my grasp of the format was strong, but that wasn’t translating into how I navigated my picks from draft to draft.
While reading the fantastic limited write-ups from Ben Stark and Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, I realized my mistake. I actually agreed with most of what both Ben and Paulo said about the format, despite them conflicting heavily. The format feels very balanced around being able to play either strong aggro or a midrange/control powerhouse. It’s an impressive feat for Wizards R&D, to make a limited environment that is powerful, complex, and balanced. I had been waffling between different styles too often in my drafts, grabbing the good cards going late whether they fit my style or not. Instead I needed to understand what type of deck I was drafting and how to assemble the pieces.
Sitting down for the top eight draft, I vowed to focus on my role throughout the draft. I was going to read signals and find the best deck that could come my way. This was the result:
Renegade Tactics
Pia Nalaar came first. Great card, but not the best pairing with the Arborback Stomper that I took second. Red and green were both sorta open in pack one, but not the cards that are good in a red-green energy deck. I saw no white, and mediocre blue and black. As I was starting to get nervous, a Dhund Operative showed up seventh or eighth pick. I took that as a strong signal that nobody on my right was fighting too hard for black, and settled in to draft red-black artifacts, which fit well with my early red picks. Pack two sent a lot of green, which sucked a little, but they still weren’t the best red-green cards. Red flowed in both directions, and sure enough pack three was a deluge of powerful black cards.
Panharmonicon showed up late in pack three. I was short on artifacts and said why not. As I built the deck, adding the trigger-doubler helped me fit the Fireforger’s Puzzleknots into the deck, and gave me some late game combo potential. Mostly, I just wanted to make sure my Foundry Screecher and friends would be turned on by turn four. Maybe Die Young would have been better, but I felt the deck needed more synergy and less dudes-plus-removal.
It turned out everyone drafted white. I plowed through two green-white decks and a white-red deck to win the RPTQ invite. It’s reassuring to face the same color every round of a draft, as that usually means none of the decks is too loaded with powerful cards. That was mostly the case, although I did survive the Skysovereign in the finals (which gave me my only game loss in the top eight) and dodge the Nissa, Vital Force in the quarters against Brandon Nelson.
All the rares and usual suspects showed up for me when I needed them, but the absolute star of the deck was Ovalchase Dragster. I took it third overall, and it won many games, including game three of the finals. I love being able to hold it in my hand to sculpt a surprise hit, but it can actually stick around and do more! It’s hard to lose a game where dragster hits them twice. So you sit back, waiting to drop the death blow with dragster, but if a spot opens before that, you can smack away and still have it back for the final attack. An artifact Ball Lightning that survives? I love it.
And that’s that. After a lot of second and third place finishes in PPTQs, I’m heading back to the regional. Just in time to get the lame new Emrakul, the Aeons Torn promo. Way to screw that up, Wizards. At least it’s better than the laughable Progenitus grand prix promo. I guess I better make the top four!
Carrie O’Hara is Editor-in-Chief of Hipsters of the Coast.