Their are a number of rare and mythic cards in this set that are so disproportionately powerful as compared to the rest that not getting one basically means your screwed.
At my second sealed event I pulled a Kalonian Hydra. After arguing with my friend about how stupid it was to print such a card, we ended up making a bet. I would play 39 lands and the hydra for the whole tournament, and if I placed higher than him I would get $200. I won of course, going 4-2 which was good enough for 17th out of about 50 or so players. I just mulled until I had him in hand, played him on curve and won most of the time.
And Black... Poor Black. Utterly awful. The creatures are terrible. Most of the rares are terrible. The mytihcs are terrible. Its Avacyn Restored all over again.
A proper sealed deck should have SOME removal to deal with such bombs. Honestly that's kinda the nature of every sealed format. Whoever lands their bomb first has a huge advantage. But if you have a deck stacked with removal, then it usually isn't a problem.
I am however impressed you were able to 4-2 with that set up. Haha. That must have been kinda cool.
At my second sealed event I pulled a Kalonian Hydra. After arguing with my friend about how stupid it was to print such a card, we ended up making a bet. I would play 39 lands and the hydra for the whole tournament, and if I placed higher than him I would get $200. I won of course, going 4-2 which was good enough for 17th out of about 50 or so players. I just mulled until I had him in hand, played him on curve and won most of the time.
Kalonian Hydra is good but all your opponent needed was 1 removal spell and you lost the game. I'm guessing you went 0-2 then started playing all the players who didn't know to put removal in their decks and then cleaned house against all the scrubs.
Seems like you lucked out with your opponents not being very good and/or being very unlucky. Plus not getting DQ'd for wagering was very fortunate on your part.
What was the % chance of actually being able to mulligan into Lost in the Woods? I remember someone did the math for that. There was other math for having two copies and I don't know which of those I am remembering.
To your point though, you have named one mythic. How does that have anything to do with whether or not Sealed is good or not? How do any mythics have this property? A 5-mana creature is very possible for other decks to interact with.
And Black... Poor Black. Utterly awful. The creatures are terrible. Most of the rares are terrible. The mytihcs are terrible. Its Avacyn Restored all over again.
That's every black creature. Aside from Shadowborn Apostle, which ones exactly are terrible? A few are borderline, but almost none are terrible and quite a few are very good.
I was pretty unimpressed by this Sealed format. There are a couple of interesting interactions (several of them involving Tenacious D), but they were few and far between. The pace of Sealed in this set is glacial, barring something silly like someone perfectly curving out with slivers, even compared with other Sealed formats. Slivers were kinda neat the first time I saw them, but became increasingly tiresome as I saw how many people were trying to force that strategy despite better options in their pool.
And Black... Poor Black. Utterly awful. The creatures are terrible. Most of the rares are terrible. The mytihcs are terrible. Its Avacyn Restored all over again.
This I think I have to disagree with. Black did fairly well at the 3 prereleases I saw. It still had the best removal of any other color. It had a good amount of evasion (Deathgaze Cockatrice in particular did a lot of work). It may not have had too much in the way of OMFG bombs, but I definitely saw it pull its weight.
Oh, and with regard to the mythics, Rise of the Dark Realms does silly good things in such a slow Sealed format. You play the game out as you normally would, allowing attrition to grind down both sides then you take a turn where you make some normally disadvantageous trades to clear their board as much as necessary. Cast Rise. Profit. I never saw someone lose when they cast it, and I rarely saw someone just have it rotting in their hand the whole game due to the speed of the games (unless they were already mana screwed).
I crushed two Kalonian Hydra decks en route to winning a Sealed event today. Doom Blade and Chandra's Outrage are pretty good answers, and the look of dismay on the face of someone whose 8/8 Hydra just got Act of Treason'd is priceless. The card is obviously a huge bomb (you're winning a majority of the time you resolve it on turn 5) but it's nowhere close to the likes of Pack Rat and Aetherling in the outgoing block.
I think Black is quite a bit worse than Green and Blue but it's still pretty solid -- similar to Red in power level and better than White.
For what it's worth, I took first at our local prerelease with a UB deck, and didn't drop a single game. I had no rares worth mentioning apart from Haunted Plate Mail and Xathrid Necromancer; the deck ran on seven evasive blue/black flyers and two Accursed Spirits, with three auras to pump them up. That was it. Most rounds were over in basically fifteen minutes. I also argue about the format being terribly slow; red, blue, green all have ways of busting right out of the gates with tremendous damage potential.
Yeah. I haven't seen the absurd slowness that some people are claiming is endemic in this format. Maybe just a hangover from Gatecrash makes it seems slow.
Yeah. I haven't seen the absurd slowness that some people are claiming is endemic in this format. Maybe just a hangover from Gatecrash makes it seems slow.
I ran green/white beatdown (with 2 banisher priests and a pacifism for removal), along with 6 of the playable on their own slivers (2 of the 1/1 with +1/+1, 2 of the 2/2 vigilance, and 2 of the 2/2 +0/+1 ones) along with other efficient creatures, and the deck was fairly quick. I think people are saying it seems slow because they are playing sealed for the first time in awhile, which is inherently slower. Draft should have some fast decks, GW or GB, GR or GW slivers, naya slivers, RW are combos I expect to be fast.
So there is no way you went 4-2 with just a single kalonian hydra. Either your opponents wrecked you before you could get it out, are they could easily chump it, or they had removal. Plus there is no way you would actually bet 200 dollars on that. This was a really bad example to explain your dislike for how bombs affect sealed. Even though it was already explained that most sealed events are affected by bombs.
Their are a number of rare and mythic cards in this set that are so disproportionately powerful as compared to the rest that not getting one basically means your screwed.
Most of the rares are terrible. The mytihcs are terrible.
Which is it? Are there a number of overpowered rares and mythics, or are they all terrible??? At least be internally consistent with your baseless, childish ranting.
Also, the incredible thing about your gambling story is that whether it's 100% true or 100% false...it makes you seem like a fool and a sore loser.
Their are a number of rare and mythic cards in this set that are so disproportionately powerful as compared to the rest that not getting one basically means your screwed.
Hooray! I'm glad to see this post again, as we get it for every single format that's ever existed!
I'm sorry but if you managed to place higher than your friend with 39 land one hydra then either :
1: Your friend is garbage and came last
2: Your store is garbage and people are pathetically awful
3: You are the luckiest in the world and none of your opponents played any cards
I would agree that pre releases of course attract the super casuals who don't shuffle properly and can't build a deck very well but even then if they don't play ANY removal then of course you've got a chance.
I've played 3 of the pre releases and I saw some relatively fast tempo decks, and a lot of stalley type decks. Fantastic format if you ask me.
At the end of the day, I fail to see why you winning with 1 creature 39 land against a group of monkeys proves anything about how "m14 sealed is awful"...
We can do some maths to work out roughly how lucky the 4-2 result was.
There's around a 50% chance of being able to find a starting hand with Hydra in it if you're prepared to mulligan to 1. If you don't, you have about 13% chance of drawing the Hydra in your first five draws.
So overall you get a Hydra in a timely fashion about 60% of the time. If that literally always meant a game win you'd get a match win rate of 65% or so.
In other words: yes, 4-2 is an unexpectedly good win rate even if removal never happened and no enemy deck ever raced you.
How often will the opponent be able to either race or kill the Hydra? Broadly speaking, the majority of hands with a castable 2-drop will be able to do it and most hands without one will need bounce, removal, a counter or some other trump some kind to get there. A brief glance through Sealed decks posted so far suggests at least one game in three will end badly for the Hydra. That's game one. In game two things get much worse if the opponent either sideboards against the strategy or mulligans aggressively. How likely this might be is difficult to quantify, but I venture to suggest the chances go up the better your win/loss record gets.
But suppose we assume that the opponents are unwary and take no special measures in later games. That leaves us with a game win percentage of around 40% and therefore a match win percentage of 35% or so.
A 4-2 record with a match win percentage of 35% is clearly quite unexpected. As such, I think we can safely conclude that 2nickelstripper's bet was extremely unwise as even given our very conservative assumptions the odds of winning the $200 were under 12%.
(I note as an aside that if 2nickelstripper's username is accurate we're talking about 2000 strips' worth of cash at stake. That's a lot of stripping! Gamble responsibly, kids. ;))
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Now that we have the mathematical proof out of the way, let's go back to how stupid that 39 land deck story is.
Case #1) Assuming the story is false.
The only reason anyone ever posts a rant about an overpowered rare on a forum is because of a bad beat. Someone beat you with a Hydra in a frustrating way, and you channeled that frustration into anger. You blamed the set designers ("how stupid it was to print such a card") but you didn't have any objective evidence. So you made up a story to prove to all of us how dastardly this Hydra is -- you likened it to Pack Rat. Pack Rat was notoriously reviled, and "coincidentally" was one of the only cards in memory where 39_lands.dec was discussed at length. If you can just prove Hydra = Pack Rat, then the conclusion is Hydra = terrible format-warping design mistake...
Unfortunately, the part about betting $200 on a silly Magic argument sounded very strange so people started poking holes in your story.
Case #2) We assume the story is completely true, which is far worse.
It starts the same -- bad beat, anger, etc. Then you open a Hydra in your next tournament. You're so enraged about this card, that you decide you'd rather prove a point than enjoy the however-many rounds of Limited you paid for. (At a CASUAL prerelease tournament.) You offer a friend a wager of $200, which frankly means you have too much disposable cash relative to your maturity level in terms of handling it. And for whatever reason, your friend matches your recklessness and accepts the bet -- he also has far too much spendin' money if he thinks a casual $200 bet on a card game is no biggie. This is not how mature, reasonable people settle anything. Bets like this are for spoiled rich kids or gambling addicts.
Now in your pursuit of $200, you've become a Magic Griefer. You've built a deck that might win or might lose, but the only guaranteed outcome is neither you nor your opponent will enjoy the match! Congratulations, you ruined each round not just for yourself but also for your opponent, over a stupid bet you made in anger to prove a point that no one cares about because:
It was just one tournament.
The skill level of your opponents cannot be verified.
Frankly none of your story can be verified.
You've proven nothing except some details about your sportsmanship.
The only actual result was that you annoyed some opponents and cost them a round of interesting gameplay. And you're acting proud of this accomplishment! Do us all a favor and find another hobby if you're going to act so childishly.
M14 sealed seems pretty good. More interesting construction choices than M13 since they're not pushing themes quite as hard, lots of in-game tricks, and lots of good removal. We'll see, but it was fun enough for the pre-re.
My biggest issue with M14 was running into Haunted Plate Mail THREE out of four matches. It's strong, it's only rare, and everyone who opens it will run it. Got kind of sick of it.
My biggest issue with M14 was running into Haunted Plate Mail THREE out of four matches. It's strong, it's only rare, and everyone who opens it will run it. Got kind of sick of it.
Really? I ask because I ran that card all day in my deck, and I always felt like I was falling behind when I had to waste a turn casting it, then wait till the next to equip it (or later, if they decided to leave mana open). I felt like I got more mileage out of Mark of the Vampire, to be honest. My deck was so evasive that I normally always had a way of getting someone through their defenses, and unlike the Mail, Mark was easier to sneak in on a turn after they tapped out for something. The boost was alwasy significant from equipping Mail of course, but it just felt slow.
The man-equipment part of the card never came up for me.
Yeah. I haven't seen the absurd slowness that some people are claiming is endemic in this format. Maybe just a hangover from Gatecrash makes it seems slow.
My Pre Release deck had 3 games that curved
Kalonian Tusker
Advocate of the Beast
Whatever Baloth (the 4/4)
11 power on the board by the end of turn 4 didn't seem slow.
Just to pile on to Bateleur's (and others') deconstruction of the 39 Forests story, that deck can literally - and hilariously - never beat a Deadly Recluse or Deathgaze Cockatrice.
Sure it's possible to get lucky and get a lot of good 2 drops in your pool, but on average that isn't going to happen. This set has very few 2 power two drops (only nine at common/uncommon, and five of those are 2/1s). In an average draft you will have about two per player.
There are only two cards with power >= 3 and cmc <= 3 (Kalonian Tusker and Regathan Firecat). Compare to some recent sets:
Set / 2+ power 1 or 2 drops / 3+ power 2 or 3 drops
AVR / 8 / 8
M13 / 13 / 4 (more if you count the ally color creature cycle)
RTR / 16 / 10 (counting unleash creatures)
GTC / 17 / 5
DGM / 7 / 1 (a small set!)
M14 / 9 / 2
Based on that it's going to be much harder to draft aggressive strategies than any other recent set. I'm sure it will still be possible, especially in green (but oddly enough, not red, who get the terrible 0/1 for their 2 drop common). Blue is even better than otherwise based on this, because their creatures have the same power as non-flying creatures of the same CMC! So you can't even get outraced easily.
Overall the creatures in this set seem fairly bad. There are a few standouts (mostly at uncommon) but mostly you are going to be playing 2/1s, 2/3s, and 2/4s. It feels like they are really pushing enchantments as a way to get your creatures through.
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At my second sealed event I pulled a Kalonian Hydra. After arguing with my friend about how stupid it was to print such a card, we ended up making a bet. I would play 39 lands and the hydra for the whole tournament, and if I placed higher than him I would get $200. I won of course, going 4-2 which was good enough for 17th out of about 50 or so players. I just mulled until I had him in hand, played him on curve and won most of the time.
And Black... Poor Black. Utterly awful. The creatures are terrible. Most of the rares are terrible. The mytihcs are terrible. Its Avacyn Restored all over again.
Pacifism, Doom Blade, Claustrophobia, Banisher Priest, Chandra's Outrage (for one turn).
A proper sealed deck should have SOME removal to deal with such bombs. Honestly that's kinda the nature of every sealed format. Whoever lands their bomb first has a huge advantage. But if you have a deck stacked with removal, then it usually isn't a problem.
I am however impressed you were able to 4-2 with that set up. Haha. That must have been kinda cool.
Kalonian Hydra is good but all your opponent needed was 1 removal spell and you lost the game. I'm guessing you went 0-2 then started playing all the players who didn't know to put removal in their decks and then cleaned house against all the scrubs.
Act of Treason
Celestial Flare
Corrupt (possible)
Disperse
Hunt the Weak
Liturgy of Blood
Time Ebb
Quag Sickness (possible)
Not to mention any creature with Deathtouch.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
To your point though, you have named one mythic. How does that have anything to do with whether or not Sealed is good or not? How do any mythics have this property? A 5-mana creature is very possible for other decks to interact with.
Older Magic as a Board Game: Panglacial Wurm , Mill
Eh.....
That's every black creature. Aside from Shadowborn Apostle, which ones exactly are terrible? A few are borderline, but almost none are terrible and quite a few are very good.
This I think I have to disagree with. Black did fairly well at the 3 prereleases I saw. It still had the best removal of any other color. It had a good amount of evasion (Deathgaze Cockatrice in particular did a lot of work). It may not have had too much in the way of OMFG bombs, but I definitely saw it pull its weight.
Oh, and with regard to the mythics, Rise of the Dark Realms does silly good things in such a slow Sealed format. You play the game out as you normally would, allowing attrition to grind down both sides then you take a turn where you make some normally disadvantageous trades to clear their board as much as necessary. Cast Rise. Profit. I never saw someone lose when they cast it, and I rarely saw someone just have it rotting in their hand the whole game due to the speed of the games (unless they were already mana screwed).
Casual EDH Player
I think Black is quite a bit worse than Green and Blue but it's still pretty solid -- similar to Red in power level and better than White.
I ran green/white beatdown (with 2 banisher priests and a pacifism for removal), along with 6 of the playable on their own slivers (2 of the 1/1 with +1/+1, 2 of the 2/2 vigilance, and 2 of the 2/2 +0/+1 ones) along with other efficient creatures, and the deck was fairly quick. I think people are saying it seems slow because they are playing sealed for the first time in awhile, which is inherently slower. Draft should have some fast decks, GW or GB, GR or GW slivers, naya slivers, RW are combos I expect to be fast.
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Which is it? Are there a number of overpowered rares and mythics, or are they all terrible??? At least be internally consistent with your baseless, childish ranting.
Also, the incredible thing about your gambling story is that whether it's 100% true or 100% false...it makes you seem like a fool and a sore loser.
Hooray! I'm glad to see this post again, as we get it for every single format that's ever existed!
*DCI Rules Advisor*
It's a fair comment... as long as he's speaking relatively.
There are definitely some formats that feel more "bomby" than others.
(I haven't drafted or done a sealed of M14 yet.)
Thread | Draft
1: Your friend is garbage and came last
2: Your store is garbage and people are pathetically awful
3: You are the luckiest in the world and none of your opponents played any cards
I would agree that pre releases of course attract the super casuals who don't shuffle properly and can't build a deck very well but even then if they don't play ANY removal then of course you've got a chance.
I've played 3 of the pre releases and I saw some relatively fast tempo decks, and a lot of stalley type decks. Fantastic format if you ask me.
At the end of the day, I fail to see why you winning with 1 creature 39 land against a group of monkeys proves anything about how "m14 sealed is awful"...
P.S Your friend must really be bad :/
There's around a 50% chance of being able to find a starting hand with Hydra in it if you're prepared to mulligan to 1. If you don't, you have about 13% chance of drawing the Hydra in your first five draws.
So overall you get a Hydra in a timely fashion about 60% of the time. If that literally always meant a game win you'd get a match win rate of 65% or so.
In other words: yes, 4-2 is an unexpectedly good win rate even if removal never happened and no enemy deck ever raced you.
How often will the opponent be able to either race or kill the Hydra? Broadly speaking, the majority of hands with a castable 2-drop will be able to do it and most hands without one will need bounce, removal, a counter or some other trump some kind to get there. A brief glance through Sealed decks posted so far suggests at least one game in three will end badly for the Hydra. That's game one. In game two things get much worse if the opponent either sideboards against the strategy or mulligans aggressively. How likely this might be is difficult to quantify, but I venture to suggest the chances go up the better your win/loss record gets.
But suppose we assume that the opponents are unwary and take no special measures in later games. That leaves us with a game win percentage of around 40% and therefore a match win percentage of 35% or so.
A 4-2 record with a match win percentage of 35% is clearly quite unexpected. As such, I think we can safely conclude that 2nickelstripper's bet was extremely unwise as even given our very conservative assumptions the odds of winning the $200 were under 12%.
(I note as an aside that if 2nickelstripper's username is accurate we're talking about 2000 strips' worth of cash at stake. That's a lot of stripping! Gamble responsibly, kids. ;))
(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
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<Limited Clan>
Case #1) Assuming the story is false.
The only reason anyone ever posts a rant about an overpowered rare on a forum is because of a bad beat. Someone beat you with a Hydra in a frustrating way, and you channeled that frustration into anger. You blamed the set designers ("how stupid it was to print such a card") but you didn't have any objective evidence. So you made up a story to prove to all of us how dastardly this Hydra is -- you likened it to Pack Rat. Pack Rat was notoriously reviled, and "coincidentally" was one of the only cards in memory where 39_lands.dec was discussed at length. If you can just prove Hydra = Pack Rat, then the conclusion is Hydra = terrible format-warping design mistake...
Unfortunately, the part about betting $200 on a silly Magic argument sounded very strange so people started poking holes in your story.
Case #2) We assume the story is completely true, which is far worse.
It starts the same -- bad beat, anger, etc. Then you open a Hydra in your next tournament. You're so enraged about this card, that you decide you'd rather prove a point than enjoy the however-many rounds of Limited you paid for. (At a CASUAL prerelease tournament.) You offer a friend a wager of $200, which frankly means you have too much disposable cash relative to your maturity level in terms of handling it. And for whatever reason, your friend matches your recklessness and accepts the bet -- he also has far too much spendin' money if he thinks a casual $200 bet on a card game is no biggie. This is not how mature, reasonable people settle anything. Bets like this are for spoiled rich kids or gambling addicts.
Now in your pursuit of $200, you've become a Magic Griefer. You've built a deck that might win or might lose, but the only guaranteed outcome is neither you nor your opponent will enjoy the match! Congratulations, you ruined each round not just for yourself but also for your opponent, over a stupid bet you made in anger to prove a point that no one cares about because:
It was just one tournament.
The skill level of your opponents cannot be verified.
Frankly none of your story can be verified.
You've proven nothing except some details about your sportsmanship.
The only actual result was that you annoyed some opponents and cost them a round of interesting gameplay. And you're acting proud of this accomplishment! Do us all a favor and find another hobby if you're going to act so childishly.
My biggest issue with M14 was running into Haunted Plate Mail THREE out of four matches. It's strong, it's only rare, and everyone who opens it will run it. Got kind of sick of it.
Really? I ask because I ran that card all day in my deck, and I always felt like I was falling behind when I had to waste a turn casting it, then wait till the next to equip it (or later, if they decided to leave mana open). I felt like I got more mileage out of Mark of the Vampire, to be honest. My deck was so evasive that I normally always had a way of getting someone through their defenses, and unlike the Mail, Mark was easier to sneak in on a turn after they tapped out for something. The boost was alwasy significant from equipping Mail of course, but it just felt slow.
The man-equipment part of the card never came up for me.
My Pre Release deck had 3 games that curved
Kalonian Tusker
Advocate of the Beast
Whatever Baloth (the 4/4)
11 power on the board by the end of turn 4 didn't seem slow.
Just to pile on to Bateleur's (and others') deconstruction of the 39 Forests story, that deck can literally - and hilariously - never beat a Deadly Recluse or Deathgaze Cockatrice.
There are only two cards with power >= 3 and cmc <= 3 (Kalonian Tusker and Regathan Firecat). Compare to some recent sets:
Set / 2+ power 1 or 2 drops / 3+ power 2 or 3 drops
AVR / 8 / 8
M13 / 13 / 4 (more if you count the ally color creature cycle)
RTR / 16 / 10 (counting unleash creatures)
GTC / 17 / 5
DGM / 7 / 1 (a small set!)
M14 / 9 / 2
Based on that it's going to be much harder to draft aggressive strategies than any other recent set. I'm sure it will still be possible, especially in green (but oddly enough, not red, who get the terrible 0/1 for their 2 drop common). Blue is even better than otherwise based on this, because their creatures have the same power as non-flying creatures of the same CMC! So you can't even get outraced easily.
Overall the creatures in this set seem fairly bad. There are a few standouts (mostly at uncommon) but mostly you are going to be playing 2/1s, 2/3s, and 2/4s. It feels like they are really pushing enchantments as a way to get your creatures through.