Berto’s Beats
Delving into the Darkness of Innistrad Sealed
Happy Halloween!
Welcome back readers! As is customary, I take a break during Magic summers because Core sets suck dick. Drafting them is fine (and M12 was the best core to draft ever) but Sealed is such a pain in the ass that I generally rage for months after.
Luckily, Innistrad is the best rebound I’ve ever seen from a Fall set. The 250 cards are flavorful, artistic, balanced, and fun to play. I’ve never seen or experienced immersion in a set such like this one. At Pre-releases players were howling as their werewolves transformed, and the inclusion of Humans as a race finally makes us feel like we’re part of Magic. As a result, I’ve also been more excited about Halloween than I’ve been since I was an 8-year old Dracula.
Pro Tour Qualifiers and Grand Prixs are a different monster, though. Here the magicians and mad scientists work hard to create the perfectly sculpted deck, taking painstaking measures to craft their deck with precision. If I’ve learned anything about competing in these, it’s this: The most important round of any Sealed event is the Deckbuilding round.
Trivial Affairs
First, let’s look over the common tendencies of this Sealed format. Obvious to almost everyone is that White reigns supreme. Only two non-white decks have made the final ring of eight players in the events I’ve been too. A look at the good White commons:
Avacynian Priest – An auto-include that plays aggressive and defensive roles.
Chapel Geist – One of the best bodies at common. Wins all sorts of fights.
Bonds of Faith – Like Priest, can adopt an offensive role.
Thraben Sentry – A big body in White that really dictates tempo
Silverchase Fox – Bears with abilities? Always good.
Elder Cathar – A huge tempo swing when this card trades in combat.
Moment of Heroism – One of the best tricks in the set. Wins races all day.
Rebuke – Answer-all that only barely punishes your own tempo.
Smite the Monstruous – Skipped your turn to make a Werewolf? No thanks!
Urgent Exorcism – With White being the best color, you have three common targets.
Voiceless Spirit – Huge tempo play that blocks the turn it’s out.
Village Bell-Ringer – A good blocker while the flyers win… or a straight up GG.
Abbey Griffin – Even the par bodies can wear equipment and turn into Serra Angel.
Feeling of Dread – A simple Shimmering Grotto will bring this card back for the win.
We won’t go so deep into the other colors. The important thing to know is that 80% of your opponents will be playing White. What does this mean for you? Well, for starters, if your creatures are humans, you negate Priest, Bonds, Exorcism, and Smite as removal spells.
Another important factor to look at while building and playing is the Instant-speed tricks in the format. By color they are:
White[8]:
Village Bell-Ringer, Smite the Monstrous, Rebuke, Moment of Heroism, Spare from Evil, Rally the Peasants, Feeling of Dread, Midnight Haunting
Blue[6]:
Cackling Counterpart, 3 Counterspells, Hysterical Blindness, Snapcaster Mage
Black[3]:
Corpse Lunge, Tribute to Hunger, Victim of Night
Red[4]:
Ancient Grudge, Brimstone Volley, Geistflame, Harvest Pyre
Green[5]:
Ambush Viper, Moonmist, Rangers Guile, Spidery Grasp, Naturalize
Only twenty-six tricks in the format is especially low. Almost all of them are conditional, too, so oftentimes it’s easy to read your opponent for which trick they’re playing. Green/White decks with mana open threaten the most possible tricks, but still none of them matter if you aren’t engaging in combat!
When formats offer fewer tricks and removal spells, your threats becomes more important. With few ways for any deck to remove Stitched Drake, that card soars much higher than its 3/4 body would suggest. A look at the evasive commons:
Kessig Wolf – Mana open means this guy usually doesn’t get blocked.
Darkthicket Wolf – Ditto. Also, he’s amazing for transforming your Werewolves.
Remembering that there are only a few evasive creatures, and then only a few removal spells to deal with them, might help you win games! Bonds of Faith and Claustrophobia are two of the only removal spells that deal with all of these evasives. Save them against Blue and White decks because you’ll surely need to cover the skies. That, and Bonds isn’t going on any non-flying White guy.
White guys can’t jump!
Darker Matters
So we know that each color has only limited access to tricks, and the ones they have are often conditional. We also know that White will be the most played color. Blue and White offer the only substantial evasive squadron. How do we use this information to win? First we’ll delve into the cards that are mightier or meeker than they appear.
Losers:
Corpse Lunge- looks like removal, right? Wrong. You need another creature to die first, and you need that creature to be good enough to wipe out their 3/3 flyers. Wait. So I want my good creatures to die? No thanks. The best job I ever expect this spell to do is kill a Avacynian Priest… problem is I can’t figure out how to make creatures die against White.
Tribute to Hunger- This card hardly ever kills the guy you want it to, and the lifegain is negligible when they’re still poking you with flyers.
Equipment- There’s very little point in playing much of the equipment in this set. Hardly any of them give enough offensive advantage to your flyer, and if they do, it’s the first target your opponent will shoot down. If an equipment doesn’t help you win the ground game, it’s not good enough.
Winners:
Silent Departure- For one mana, you blow a hole in their tempo so big they can barely come back. And if they do, you get to cast it again.
Geistflame- While this card does go after Interlopers, Spirits, and Scholars, don’t forget that it’s absolutely fine at helping your Chapel Geist win a fight! Giving a creature +1 power is hardly great, but doing it twice to the targets that matter will swing games your way.
Travel Preparations- When everyone else is casting three-toughness flyers and 2/2 bears, this card breaks through.
Claustrophobia- Kill anything. Now. No graveyard interactions, and no re-forming into Human.
Villagers of Estwald- A fine body for three mana, and a house whenever you wish it to be. He (and his brethren) love playing against White and preying on their foolish human tendencies. Werewolves is a fantastic direction to go if you anticipate playing against mostly White decks.
A card that can go easily into both circles is Avacynian Priest. While he certainly deals with the flyers in the set, and the bombs, he loses to the very average draw of Hamlet Captain, Villagers of Estwald, Travel Preparations. Don’t be afraid to sideboard this card OUT against GW decks.
As you build your deck, in this format or the next, always think about the interactions of the format and what it means for evaluating cards. I’ll come back with Part 2 later this week and hopefully your Halloween was much more frightful than my stories.
havent had a chance to draft pr play sealed innistrad but looking forward to it. BTW 1st!
Corpse Lunge is not usually a great card, but it shows its potential in the blue black graveyard deck, where it is often a non restricted doom blade for the cost of three mana.
The problem with UB Graveyard is that there are only so many things you can do with the stuff that you mill. Having a makeshift mauler and a skaab goliath already takes 3 guys from your graveyard. And usually you’ll have some Ghoulraisers for card advantage, and so where does that leave corpse lunge? I bring it in if I absolutely have to, but it’s so situational. Harvest Pyre is much better.
Remember, this article is for sealed. While many of the stipulations will hold true between all Limited formats, Corpse Lunge is generally bad in a Sealed format where you can’t harvest your graveyard efficiently. Some pools will streamline it well enough, but even then it seems worse than just playing White.
I’ll be back with Part II soon, regarding metagaming and sideboarding.
Also, I apologize to everyone in the Northeast who actually had to live the frightful 2-5 days without power since October 30th! I didn’t mean it that way!
How do you feel about Demonmail synergies?
Hauberk is one of the strongest enablers for Morbid in the format. That being said, the combat step is better at it :-)
Cards like Invisible Stalker will make me play Hauberk (never more than 1) and enjoy it. If Doomed Traveler, et al. could use the Hauberk to equip its own Spirit, it’d be better. As is, I’m not a big fan of Hauberk unless you have real reasons to want graveyard interactions.