BOTG Sealed. What Can be Expected?

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Spootyone

21 February 2014

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I had originally planned to have this out much earlier, but hopefully you can still take something away from it. I know, for example, that MTGO has an event much like the prerelease event so perhaps you can use this information there. In any case, thanks for reading!

Hello all! My name is Spooty and today I have for you an article on the Born of the Gods prerelease sealed event. In this, I hope to help you learn what you can expect from this sort of event, reveal how I prepared, and finally tell you what I learned from the prep and the actual event. In case you haven't figured this out already, this is an article for limited players. IF you don't enjoy limited, it probably won't be for you. Alternatively, if you are a hardcore limited player you probably know much more than I do. I'll be completely honest here -- this was my first time competing in a limited event where I spent time preparing beforehand. In fact...I have a bit of a bad reputation in limited...

I occasionally get people coming to me and asking me for advice on their decks or otherwise wanting help in this card game we all love. I must say, the idea of that is humbling. Why? I'm still a relatively new player. I started learning how to play right before Gatecrash was released from a friend who was also pretty much just learning how to play. Perhaps I'm rolling back the curtain a bit by saying all this or otherwise discrediting myself, but I thought it was worth mentioning. No, in many ways, I'm right here with all of you doing what I can to increase my knowledge of this game and perfect the strategies many have perfected before me. You want to know where one of my weakest points lay? Limited. As I mentioned earlier, I have a bit of a bad reputation in the limited environment. Seeing as I started playing right before Gatecrash was released, my first experience with limited was a gatecrash draft. And boy did that one not go as planned.

How to be a Bad Drafter

In my early days of magic, I was a Dimir mill player. What kinds of cards was a looking out for? Man, I wanted a few of those Clinging Anemones. 4 toughness and it just keeps getting better?? Oh and you KNOW I'm picking up anything with a jellyfish on it (Jellies are my favorite animal). Psychic Strike. Whoa wait. It can counter ANY spell AND mill my opponent?? Wow! What's this? Consuming Aberration?? OH MY GOODNESS IT'S LIKE THE BEST MILL CARD EVER. Why in all the planes of the universe is this thing not Mythic-Freakin-Rare!? (patent pending) ...I was still learning. My plan for the draft was to create the sickest mill deck that no one had ever wanted to play. And so we began.

I couldn't even tell you what my rare was in pack one. I think I opened it up and saw a Deathcult Rogue or something and first-picked it. I started passing packs. I found a couple Clinging Anemones (Score!) and grabbed them quickly before anyone caught on. I even found a sweet Thrull Parasite! A one drop that can slowly kill my opponent using a method the rest of my deck isn't built for?? Sign. Me. Up. I had a pretty sick Dimir nobodywantedanyofthisstuff-stuff deck in the making going into pack two. We began going through the next set of packs and I continued finding random stuff I wanted to maybe use in my real-life deck like Cloudfin Raptor (In my mill deck) and Grisly Spectacle. I even got passed this really amazing looking pack filled with Dimir goodies. It was insane. I had a hard time choosing something from that pack...

...oops...

A few passes later and I realized I didn't know where my cards had gone. I looked on the floor below me and nothing. None of my older picks were anywhere to be found. Certainly they couldn't have gone too fa-- Oh no. I passed my cards along as a pack. I just distributed my entire deck to the entire table and I don't even remember everything that was in it -- not that I could have convinced anyone to give me their cards. That table's draft was completely broken. To fix the problem, everyone gave me their worst card to even out the numbers and then we finished the draft. And my card pool was disgusting. Five-color bad stuff is not the deck you want to be playing in a draft. I decided to do what I could to make it Dimir still, and somehow I managed to have enough cards in those colors to create an actual deck. But it was so bad. So very, very bad. I ended up losing every single game except for one (that guy was not the happiest I've seen someone, btw). And I even got to play against a Dimir mill deck. They had pulled a Consuming Aberration and proceeded to mill me out with it....because, you know...irony and stuff.

And that was my first draft. It was a really bad experience and I pretty much left that night feeling embarrassed and disheartened to play anymore. But I did. I just stayed away from anything resembling a draft for a long time. I did compete in the Dragon's Maze prerelease twice. The first time I lost the first game in an elimination round. The second time I did okay but not well-enough to get any prizes. And I stopped doing paper limited after that. But once the BOTG prerelease was announced I decided to make a trip down to my old LGS and do everything I could to redeem myself. Here is my story.

My plan

I can be a very calculated person. Actually, let me rephrase that. I can be a very obsessive person. Once I have my mind set on something I will pursue it until I make headway. This prerelease was no exception. In fact, I haven't prepared so hard for something Magic-related in quite a long time. I began by sharpening my skills as a limited player. Many of you may already be familiar with the Limited Resources podcast with Marshall Sutcliffe and Brian Wong. If not, here is a link to the site. I began listening to their podcast religiously, spending hours a day with their voices in the background or foreground and paying close attention to every bit of advice they had to offer. I paid close attention to cards as they were spoiled, debating their efficacy with my friends who are more knowledgeable with the limited environment. And when the full set was revealed, I made sure to listen to the entire set review done by Marshall and Brian. Then I listened to the cast featuring rules explanations for BOTG to hone my skills involving that. I also went back and listened to everything from Theros. And even from stuff before then, just trying desperately to create a web of knowledge in my head that I could use to my advantage on the event day. I really encourage anyone who wants to improve their limited play to check out the podcast and give it a shot. I don't think you could go wrong with it.

While this was going on, the sealed event generator was created and I spent many additional hours playtesting decks of varying types with my friends in an attempt to get some initial feel with deck building and what I would likely be choosing as my sealed pack. I learned from the LRcast that both U/B and U/W were incredibly strong in Theros limited, and for that reason I tried using decks like that first. I was incredibly impressed by the results. I was winning a good majority of my games and was making some very nice decks. I decided I wanted to choose the blue prerelease pack for a couple reasons. One, the prerelease promo, Arbiter of the Ideal, looked to be one of the best choices to me. I wanted it to be a flier. It was one of the two 6-drop fliers. And between it and the red promo, Forgestoker Dragon, it had more toughness and could survive something like Lash of the Whip, not to mention a battle with the white promo, Silent Sentinel. I also felt like it's ability was relevant, and could quickly become abusable.

In addition to this, I really wanted to be playing cards like Nullify, Vaporkin, and even Chorus of the Tides. Going with a blue focus meant that (depending on the cards pulled) I could slip into either the U/B fliers archetype or the U/W heroic archetype which had previously been so powerful. I knew sealed was an event that many times left you with very little of a card pool for the colors you wanted, so I wanted to maximize my chances to get those cards I desired by doing whatever I could. However, I then hit a bit of a speed bump.

Turns out the sealed generator was actually not correctly generating and I was receiving a ton more on-color cards than what was to be expected. When I tried afterwards to create the same types of decks I'd been making before, the results were much more abysmal. I just wasn't getting enough playables in my colors (especially in U/B). That just wasn't going to fly with me. If there was any chance that I was going to lose simply because I didn't have enough playable cards, you can bet anything I was not going down without a fight. And this is when the obsessive part of me really kicked in...

I opened up Excel and created a spreadsheet. And I ran trial after trial after trial for each and every color I could choose from. I stayed on that sealed pool generator for probably 6 hours straight. My original plan was to run 100 trials, or 20 for each individual color, in order to see which color gave me the most playables the most often. In addition to this, I wanted to see which color combinations were the best and most viable when deck building, based on the knowledge I had gained through the past week of studying the metagame, studying the cards, and listening to the several podcasts I have previously mentioned. For each trial, I created a sealed pool and made a deck from scratch. After deck building, I marked one of the following boxes:

• "Went with chosen color, was 1 or 2 colors, deck went well"

• "Went with chosen color, was 1 or 2 colors, deck did not go well"

• "Went with the chosen color, but was unable to get less than 3 colors"

• "Chose other colors to go with"

In addition, I noted the color combination I chose to go with, as well as noting any important details about my pulls or the deck itself. After 20 trials of the white selection, I cut the trials down to 10 for each of the remaining colors, to save time (and sanity).

My most successful color choice (i.e., the one with the most check marks in the first box) was blue. This honestly wasn't very surprising to me. I already knew the potential blue contained by having small efficient creatures backed up by disruption and other means of closing out the game. What I wasn't expecting, however, was my most chosen color combo -- Simic. I went Simic a staggering 25% of the time, and ended up going Simic in each and every one of the chosen original colors at some point or another. And in a way, it kind of made sense. Going with those two colors meant having potential access to disruption, tempo advantage, evasion, cheap creatures, big beaters, removal, and combat tricks. Not to mention the fact that those colors seemed to have the most number of generic playables even without the deck being in a strict archetype.

The color I found to have the least number of playables was Red. Black was a close second. The problem I found was that these two colors contained a few REALLY good cards, but the rest of the pool was garbage. It is important to note I'm speaking only of sealed and not draft -- things change dramatically when changing to draft. Red was therefore my least successful color to select in sealed (i.e. had the least number of checks in the first box + the most checks in the last 2 boxes).

Other important facts I learned: Red only seemed to work when paired with green. This was especially true when pulling Xenagos, the Reveler or another one of the Gruul bomb rares. Access to a good green pool with solid red allowed the deck to do quite well, but it required some luck.

Black only seemed to work when paired with blue. This was very similar to how red and green worked out. Black has access to some of the best utility cards in the format, be it removal or what-have-you, but without another supporting color for creatures and other cards, it just couldn't cut it. This really surprised me heavily, given how good black can be in draft.

White worked best with blue, but sometimes worked well as Bant. In my testing, U/W heroic was really easy to pull off once you get a couple select cards. And other times, there was actually enough fixing and support to allow for a Bant heroics deck. I thought this was pretty cool. Note: my friend has had some serious success since then with W/R, which is something I never seemed to pick up on during my tests. It was perhaps due to a coincidence or just the fact that I hardly ever play red.

Green worked best with blue, but sometimes worked well as BUG. This was a very similar situation to the above one. Green paired really well with blue for the already-mentioned reasons, but sometimes splashing black for powerful removal spells was not only viable, but advisable. Given my pool, this was one situation I saw myself going in.

After everything was said and done, I tallied up the above results, found the aforementioned conclusions, and decided that my plan was to choose the "destined to outwit" (blue) pack and be looking for good green pulls to go Simic. If that was not possible, the next choices I'd be looking for were good white to go into U/W heroics or enough good black and blue to go into U/B fliers. Basically, I wanted to stay away from red as much as I could. I had just hoped I was correct in my judgments. There was only one way to find out, though. I got some sleep and boarded my bus the next morning for my trip.

The Battle for Redemption

By the time we entered that shop for the prerelease, I felt unstoppable. I had spent the previous night watching Evan Erwin and Brad Nelson's set review (can be found here), and my previous meal discussing just what could Eye Gouge kill? As we readied ourselves for our boxes, I took one last deep breath and relaxed my nerves to concentrate fully. The opening began. My sealed pack rare was Mindreaver, immediately putting a sour taste in my mouth. But I pressed forward, knowing the biggest strength comes from the commons and uncommons, and I still had plenty of those to go through. I did manage to pull a nullify so I was happy about that. Pack 2. After casually flipping through the rest of the pack, I saw my rare: Fated Intervention. Very nice! It was in the colors I desired and was quite a powerful card. My third pack rare was Plea for Guidance. That one sucked pretty terribly. I had my heart set of U/G and was determined to make it work somehow...

...until pack 4. My first pack of Theros was opened and once I flipped through the normal stuff I felt a wave of joy seeing a delightful Stormbreath Dragon ready for use. I knew I now had to go red if at all possible. I continued breaking through packs. Pack 5 contained Curse of the Swine. Twas a bit of a dud as well. But it was technically removal and it was in color so there was at least that (My friend even pulled a boar token!). Pack six made my day though. Ember Swallower. Yet another incredibly powerful rare in limited. I was overjoyed and felt like there was no way I could lose.

I took a second look through my cards and sadly confirmed that my green pool was completely hideous apart from my Fated Intervention. No Nessian Asp or even a lowly Sedge Scorpion...It was out. Black contained a removal spell or two but besides that it was also garbage. Out. White contained a couple okay cards. I think I may have pulled a Phalanx Leader. But the same problem remained -- not enough playables. And so, I knew for sure that I was going Izzet. My deck was not the greatest from the look of things. I had no Vaporkin or Sea God's Revenge, both quite important/good. My curve was also a bit high, but really there was no way to lower it given my cards. There was a little bit in the way of control elements, 2 Nyxborn Triton, 2 Crackling Triton, a few tiny red bestow guys, and then the curve topped out with my red rares. I also had a 1-of Portent of Betrayal which honestly was close to my favorite card in the deck. Things seemed okay at the very least!

I'm not even kidding. Complete last. The deck was surprisingly horrible. I had no way to hold off aggro, no way to hold off fliers, and no way to out-control other controlling decks. Match one was against a G/B deck that was quite good. I ended up winning that match in game three. I beat him game one with a surprise Portent of Betrayal. Game two he stomped me. And then game three, I scryed the same portent and kept it on top, to which he responded by tapping out to play his Nessian Wilds Ravager. Oh I will TOTALLY pay tribute and make your only creature a 12/12 smirk. The best moment of the night was right after I paid tribute. He looked down at his field and suddenly remarked "Oh no..I didn't play around portent"...as I casually flipped the top card of my deck over and smiled. It was beautiful. Spoilers: He actually made prizes. I still came in last.

Match two I played against a G/W player. I got destroyed. This guy had a Boon Satyr and pulled a Brimaz, King of Oreskos. Worth noting was the fact that he played incredibly quickly and spoke very quickly. While he may not have been doing so to throw me off, it did so anyway. At a very key point in the game, I had mana up for Stymied Hopes and passed the turn. He flash bestowed the Boon Satyr at the end of turn and because he did it all so quickly, I really didn't have time to process it in my mind and just let it happen. I was incredibly frustrated with myself after that. Don't let other players win games in ways that don't actually involve the cards you both are playing -- note to self and to all of you as well.

Match three was against a U/G player. This guy had the exact deck I wanted to play. 2 Nessian Asp, tons of tempo disrupters, a Nessian Demolok and more. I almost won a game with Stormbreath Dragon, but it's surprising how easily it just...dies to removal...He had the nerve to tell me afterwards that his deck wasn't even that good. I disagree, sir. I disagree. glares at Nessian Asp

Match 4 was more fun than the previous ones had been as I got to play against another friend of mine. This guy had a U/W deck and was lucky enough to pull 3 Vaporkin. I ended up having to turn them into boars and not too surprisingly they still killed me. I hate Curse of the Swine... Side note: in one game I was forced to turn my own guys into 2/2 boars in order to stabilize. Yeah. Yeah.

Match 5 came next, and by this point I was honestly feeling completely discouraged. I was well out of prizes and was beginning to see just how poor my deck was -- despite my best efforts to make the best out of what I was given. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was wasting potential after pulling those bomb rares. This match was against another G/W deck. I'm not going to lie -- I felt horrible losing to this deck. I don't mean any disrespect to the guy, but when your opponent starts telling you how their deck contains 47 cards and that they're playing Karametra, God of Harvests *f-etch* and 2 copies of Defend the Hearth, you kind of expect to at least do something. I didn't. I lost 0-2. And it was painful. I ended up just conceding game one once he had 7 creatures on board and somehow still hadn't killed me. I just really didn't want him to see I had portent.

And that was that! 1-4 was my record, and I turned out to be in last place. It...honestly felt pretty pitiful after all the effort I had put into preparing for the event. And despite my best efforts to be happy and shrug it off, it was very hard to hide the fact that I was severely disappointed in myself. But you know what? Sometimes blessings come in disguise. The store owner called me up and handed me a fat pack of dragon's maze. I pretty much just stared at him in amazement, wondering what he wanted me to do with it. He said that it was a consolation prize for staying through the entire tournament and having fun and being a good sport -- even though I was in last place. It was a really nice gesture and one that I was probably always remember. The best part? Me and my friends ended up buying a few packs of RTR block and drafted it as a group that night. I ended up drafting Jund and won every single game I played. And we pulled 2 Emmara Tandris. And we burned one of them. Because....tribute...to the gods...

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