Only time I went Temur out of the 5 seeded packs I had, all other 4 were Abzan.
With the variety of fixing here, I went Temur splashing some of the flashy gold cards - Duneblast, Villainous Wealth and the two Efreets, as well as pretty much everything that said "draw a card". I forced those two as much as possible because the previous flight I saw how insane those two could be. I'll come up with the decklist later, because at the moment I can't remember the manabase I worked with.
Looking back I probably should've played a Banner instead of the Ascendancy, because my big dudes (save Colossodon) enter the battlefield as morph anyway. I didn't play Force Away because I'd rather spend the early turns playing tapped lands/fetching with Embodiment/laying down morph dudes. Most games were won either via Duneblast/a HUGE Villainous Wealth (6 seems to be the sweet spot so you can nab those common morph guys), leaving behind a large dude (Glacial Stalker most of the time, actually) and hitting anything the opponent tried to play afterward with removal.
Plus you can run 3-4 Banners, Seek the Horizons and 2 of the blue walls that ramp you. Heck, you have 2 sweepers and 2 X spells so 5 color ramp seems perfect.
You have some strong top-end. You should just be able to play ramp + removal + fat and win.
e.g. with a UG base and splashing everything else:
EDITED -- Made final cuts, removed banners and cards in unwanted colors
Basically, you spend turns 1 and 2 playing tapped lands and/or playing Embodiment. Turn 3 is morph (seems better than banner). After that you play spells and unmorph your big guns.
Spells are demanding on manabase on paper, but most of the tricolor stuff are lategame spells or morphs. Also, there are draw spells and 3 cards that search for basic lands.
Coloured Sources
R 8 for 8 cards
B 6 for 8 cards
G 4 for 4 cards
W 3 for 1 card
U 3 for 0 cards (only morphs)
This is a deck that wants to curve out T2 Tormenting Voice, T3 Morph, T4 Dragonscale Boon.
I see that there is quite a different 5C deck immediately above mine. FTW basically built around Embodiment of Spring (which is decent) and banners (which are bad). In fact, I'm going to go back and * the cards which we have in common in our two different 5-colour decks. Crazy that there is so little overlap, a mere 10 cards out of 22.
Edit: Changed out pet and behemoth for 2 weaponmasters, per suggestions below.
Yeah, I may have overdone the ramp. With so many duals and the 2 Embodiments and Seek, the banners are probably unnecessary.
The big differences are I included the blue bombs and built around a blue-green early game (Embodiment ramp, blue tempo spells and card draw) and Merl built around a red-black early game (Voice filtering and early removal). My list cares less about dropping things as morphs and more on just ramping to all your powerful big spells and getting card and board advantage that way. His has much more of a focus on morph and winning the morph board states.
I chose a U core largely based on your selection of dual lands. Your duals have the best support for blue and the worst support for red, which made me favor a blue early game and blue bombs over the red early game. That lets you max out on duals (for a smoother 5cc manabase) and exploit your powerful blue spells, but since you won't have much red mana it leaves out the red spells. But if you only play 4 colors and cut down on multicolor costs, then you can afford to just run a bunch of basic mountains and exploit your strong red spells. So there's that. And Dragonscale Boon is quite powerful in this format. I don't know about playing stuff like Sidisi's Pet and War Behemoth though...Efreet Weaponmaster is just so strong.
Just one additional comment FTW, Seek the Horizon isn't really ramp since it doesn't let you cast a 6-drop on turn 5 or anything. It's actually a card drawing spell.
I don't know about playing stuff like Sidisi's Pet and War Behemoth though...Efreet Weaponmaster is just so strong.
Yeah, you can easily change these morphs out for each other. I'm just a sucker for blockers, although a 4 power first striker makes a pretty good blocker.
Just one additional comment FTW, Seek the Horizon isn't really ramp since it doesn't let you cast a 6-drop on turn 5 or anything.
It does pseudo-ramp to the X spells in that you're more likely to hit your next few land drops. But yeah I'm just being lazy and lumping it with the others, it's really just color fixing.
I have to admit, those five-color builds made me wish I played those. So it seems like I was on the way towards an Embodiment of Spring ramp build (which is true), but FTW ended up with Butcher (I thought it was too greedy, probably could have gotten away with it) and less morphs (but with Abzan Guide) while I went towards having morphs that I could consistently turn face up (Glacial Stalker and Mistfire). In hindsight, I wasn't a fan of the Mistfire and the Stalker was unspectacular, if alright, so I think I should have played Abzan Guide. He also has Jeskai Charm where I have Temur.
magicmerl ended up with something very different, though, and for that I'm curious as to how you approached building this deck/your thought process that led to this. I'd never have thought to play Tormented Voice, actually.
Out of all the Sealed Pools I have I posted this because of the amount of fixing available is just a lot - 5 banners, 9 colored nonbasics and 2 Embodiment of Spring - so there's definitely a lot of options.
I start sealed pools by looking at the gold cards, so see what colours I want to run, then the mana fixing, to see what colours I can run. This pool, the most exciting gold cards were Azban, and with a whole bunch of morphs the next thing was making sure we had enough fixers and proactive things to do on turn 2.
In this cardpool TOrmenting Voice and Debilitiating Injury are good things to do on turn 2 to stop you falling too far behind an aggro deck, and from there we know we want to transition into the Azban gold cards. The only real question is whether we want to run blue cards at all (in the end I went for just one blue morph splashed for free off non-basics).
It may well be that the base UG version is better, although it would of course facilitate dropping the red down from the main colour to the merest splash. And the thing I like about my build is that it's all morphs and quality 4-drops, and the spells all draw you cards or kill things. 3-4 mana is the dangerpoint for the RBxxx deck, while the UGxxx build kinda wants to ramp to infinity, which means that it will be more prone to inconsistent draws like topdecking ramp late, having cards like Villainous Wealth early, plus just having far fewer 'core' plays to make on the turn 3-4-5 that are the make of break points of the game.
Vs a slow powerful deck the UG build is slightly better. vs a more conventional deck (that curves out) I think that my build will be better.
I am far more conservative than the rest of you. I look at your pool and see horrible B and W, so I go straight Temur and ignore the gold rares that I can't cast. Maybe something like this:
I wouldn't exactly say that it's 'conservative' to build a deck with Highland Game, Wetland Sambar and Valley Dasher in it, all without actually constructing an actual manabase. I think I can categorically say that there's no format ever where it would be correct to run all three of those cards together in the same deck. Valley Dasher additionally is an appallingly bad card.
so I go straight Temur and ignore the gold rares that I can't cast. Maybe something like this:
Yeah, unfortunately that tradeoff doesn't work. You get much lower card power by restricting yourself to 3 colours, and have to play stinkers like Become Immense and Temur Ascendancy (in addition to the 2-drops I listed above) over actually good cards like Butcher of the Horde and Duneblast, but you also reduce the number of on-colour mana fixers from 7 nonbasics to 3. You basically have the devil's manabase in your sealed deck (hint: you need to reduce one of the three colours to a splash, and make sure you're not trying to cast 2-drops in that colour).
Can you please show the manabase you'd run this pool with?
Its hard to multiquote right now, so I will try to address your points:
1) I have not played with the set yet, but I assumed that bears would be ok in a set filled with morph, thus I included 3 2-drop bears. If this is wrong, how can you know that already?
2)The decklist is just a suggestion. The become immense could become another dragonscale boon or another creature easily. Is BI really that bad anyway?
3) Here is a mana I would use, seems ok to me:
Its hard to multiquote right now, so I will try to address your points:
1) I have not played with the set yet, but I assumed that bears would be ok in a set filled with morph, thus I included 3 2-drop bears. If this is wrong, how can you know that already?
For sure, we're all theorycrafting a bit right now because the set is so new. Of course, this is also the fun time, since we're trying to understand what make the set tick
Bears are quite playable. But a creature like Wetland Sambar is going to be pretty bad on turn 5, which means that you can only run it in your 'main' colours, which have a lot of blue sources to be able to consistently have enough U to play it on turn 2. I'm not saying that those cards are bad and you can't play them. Just that I don't think you can realistically play all three of them in 3 different colours since your manabase doesn't really support it (and of course, Valley Dasher is still terrible).
2)The decklist is just a suggestion. The become immense could become another dragonscale boon or another creature easily. Is BI really that bad anyway?
I think it's a clear level below Dragonscale Boon because the counters stick around. I'm more than happy to trump their morph with mine and have a 4/4 stick around. Delve as a mechanic suffers from incredible diminishing returns (think of the BW lifeloss decks in M15, but even moreso). I'd rather be playing undercosted 3/3 flyers and 4/4 tramplers, not a giant growth effect.
Sure, so let's dissect that a little bit, in conjunction with the coloured cards in your decklist:
U 7 sources for 7 cards
G 7 sources for 6 cards
R 7 sources for 7 cards
That's acutally not bad, although I regard 7 as the *minimum* number of sources for a core colour (and 3 to be the minimum for a splash colour).
Compared to my manabase of
Coloured Sources
R 8 for 8 cards
B 6 for 8 cards
G 4 for 4 cards
W 3 for 1 card
U 3 for 0 cards (only morphs)
Can you see how despite only being 3 colours, you don't actually have a more stable manabase? In addition, I have 3 Tormenting Voice, which can act as a pseudo-fixer by drawing you into more cards.
And it just dawned on me that you are arguing that a 3 colour deck has worse fixing then your 5C monstrosity. Seriously?
I realise that it's counterintuitive, but please take a look at the numbers above. And also realise that the 5-colour deck clearly has a higher card quality as well.
I'm not saying that my deck has better mana than yours, it doesn't. It has a comparable manabase while having higher card quality. Usually when you add colours, you get increased power at the expense of manabase instability. That's not really the case with this cardpool.
Hi Merl: appreciate your analysis, and we both missed that I don't have white for weapon masters! In that case, I hope I don't open such a crap pool and I guess you would need to go 5c here.
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1 Erase
1 Firehoof Cavalry
1 Salt Road Patrol
1 Siegecraft
1 War Behemoth
1 Watcher of the Roost
1 Crippling Chill
1 Disdainful Stroke
2 Embodiment of Spring
1 Force Away
2 Glacial Stalker
1 Jeskai Windscout
1 Mistfire Weaver
1 Taigam's Scheming
1 Weave Fate
1 Wetland Sambar
2 Debilitating Injury
1 Dutiful Return
1 Molting Snakeskin
1 Sidisi's Pet
1 Throttle
1 Unyielding Krumar
1 Bring Low
1 Canyon Lurkers
1 Crater's Claws
1 Dragon Grip
1 Hordeling Outburst
1 Mardu Heart-Piercer (FOIL)
1 Summit Prowler
3 Tormenting Voice
2 Trumpet Blast
1 Valley Dasher
1 Alpine Grizzly
2 Become Immense
2 Dragonscale Boon
1 Highland Game
1 Naturalize
1 Pine Walker
1 Sagu Archer
1 Seek the Horizon
1 Temur Charger
2 Tusked Colossodon
1 Abzan Ascendancy
1 Abzan Guide
1 Duneblast
1 Kin-Tree Invocation (FOIL)
1 Villainous Wealth
1 Snowhorn Rider
1 Temur Ascendancy
1 Temur Charm
1 Master the Way
2 Efreet Weaponmaster
1 Jeskai Charm
1 Butcher of the Horde
3 Abzan Banner
1 Mardu Banner
1 Temur Banner
1 Blossoming Sands
2 Dismal Backwater
1 Frontier Bivouac
1 Nomad Outpost
1 Scoured Barren
1 Swiftwater Cliff
1 Thornwood Falls
2 Tomb of the Spirit Dragon
1 Tranquil Cove
Only time I went Temur out of the 5 seeded packs I had, all other 4 were Abzan.
With the variety of fixing here, I went Temur splashing some of the flashy gold cards - Duneblast, Villainous Wealth and the two Efreets, as well as pretty much everything that said "draw a card". I forced those two as much as possible because the previous flight I saw how insane those two could be. I'll come up with the decklist later, because at the moment I can't remember the manabase I worked with.
How would you build this?
EDIT: Deck:
1 Highland Game
2 Glacial Stalker
1 Mistfire Weaver
1 Sagu Archer
1 Pine Walker
2 Efreet Weaponmaster
1 Snowhorn Rider
1 Tusked Colossodon
1 Mardu Heart-Piercer
1 Crippling Chill
1 Temur Charm
1 Weave Fate
1 Bring Low
1 Crater’s Claws
1 Master the Way
1 Duneblast
1 Villainous Wealth
1 Blossoming Sands
2 Dismal Backwater
1 Frontier Bivouac
1 Nomad Outpost
1 Swiftwater Cliff
1 Thornwood Falls
1 Tranquil Cove
3 Forest
3 Mountain
3 Island
1 Plains
Looking back I probably should've played a Banner instead of the Ascendancy, because my big dudes (save Colossodon) enter the battlefield as morph anyway. I didn't play Force Away because I'd rather spend the early turns playing tapped lands/fetching with Embodiment/laying down morph dudes. Most games were won either via Duneblast/a HUGE Villainous Wealth (6 seems to be the sweet spot so you can nab those common morph guys), leaving behind a large dude (Glacial Stalker most of the time, actually) and hitting anything the opponent tried to play afterward with removal.
Your 9 multilands support:
6U
4W
4B
3G
3R
Plus you can run 3-4 Banners, Seek the Horizons and 2 of the blue walls that ramp you. Heck, you have 2 sweepers and 2 X spells so 5 color ramp seems perfect.
You have some strong top-end. You should just be able to play ramp + removal + fat and win.
e.g. with a UG base and splashing everything else:
EDITED -- Made final cuts, removed banners and cards in unwanted colors
2 Embodiment of Spring
1 Highland Game
1 Pine Walker
1 Sagu Archer
1 Glacial Stalker
1 Abzan Guide
1 Snowhorn Rider
2 Efreet Weaponmaster
1 Butcher of the Horde
//Spells: 11
1 Force Away
1 Debilitating Injury
1 Crippling Chill
1 Weave Fate
2 Dragonscale Boon
1 Seek the Horizon
1 Master the Way
1 Death Frenzy
1 Duneblast
1 Villainous Wealth
1 Blossoming Sands
2 Dismal Backwater
1 Frontier Bivouac
1 Nomad Outpost
1 Scoured Barrens
1 Swiftwater Cliffs
1 Thornwood Falls
1 Tranquil Cove
4 Forest
2 Island
1 Swamp
1 Mountain
1 Plains
Curve:
1 - LLLLLLLLLCC
2 - SSC
3 - CCCCCCCS
4 - CSSSS
5+- SSSS+morph
Basically, you spend turns 1 and 2 playing tapped lands and/or playing Embodiment. Turn 3 is morph (seems better than banner). After that you play spells and unmorph your big guns.
Manabase supports:
8U (11 cards including early drops)
7G (11 cards)
5B (6 cards, mostly lategame)
5W (5 cards, 4 morphs)
4R (5 cards, 3 morphs)
Spells are demanding on manabase on paper, but most of the tricolor stuff are lategame spells or morphs. Also, there are draw spells and 3 cards that search for basic lands.
Last cuts:
1 Seek the Horizon
1 Master the Way
1 Villainous Wealth
And then because they are the only blue cards (barring Snowhorn Rider):
2 Glacial Stalker
1 Sidisi's Pet
1 War Behemoth
Leaving this deck
1 Pine Walker (*)
1 Sagu Archer (*)
1 Snowhorn Rider (*)
1 Abzan Guide (*)
1 Mardu Heart-Piercer
1 Summit Prowler
1 Unyielding Krumar
1 Butcher of the Horde (*)
2 Debilitating Injury
2 Dragonscale Boon
1 Bring Low (*)
1 Throttle
1 Death Frenzy (*)
1 Crater's Claws (*)
1 Duneblast (*)
1 Frontier Bivouac
1 Nomad Outpost
1 Blossoming Sands
1 Scoured Barrens
1 Tranquil Cove
1 Thornwood Falls
1 Swiftwater Cliffs
6 Mountain
4 Swamp
1 Forest
Curve
1
2 sssss
3 cccccc
4 ccccsss
5 sss
6+s
Coloured Sources
R 8 for 8 cards
B 6 for 8 cards
G 4 for 4 cards
W 3 for 1 card
U 3 for 0 cards (only morphs)
This is a deck that wants to curve out T2 Tormenting Voice, T3 Morph, T4 Dragonscale Boon.
I see that there is quite a different 5C deck immediately above mine. FTW basically built around Embodiment of Spring (which is decent) and banners (which are bad). In fact, I'm going to go back and * the cards which we have in common in our two different 5-colour decks. Crazy that there is so little overlap, a mere 10 cards out of 22.
Edit: Changed out pet and behemoth for 2 weaponmasters, per suggestions below.
The big differences are I included the blue bombs and built around a blue-green early game (Embodiment ramp, blue tempo spells and card draw) and Merl built around a red-black early game (Voice filtering and early removal). My list cares less about dropping things as morphs and more on just ramping to all your powerful big spells and getting card and board advantage that way. His has much more of a focus on morph and winning the morph board states.
I chose a U core largely based on your selection of dual lands. Your duals have the best support for blue and the worst support for red, which made me favor a blue early game and blue bombs over the red early game. That lets you max out on duals (for a smoother 5cc manabase) and exploit your powerful blue spells, but since you won't have much red mana it leaves out the red spells. But if you only play 4 colors and cut down on multicolor costs, then you can afford to just run a bunch of basic mountains and exploit your strong red spells. So there's that. And Dragonscale Boon is quite powerful in this format. I don't know about playing stuff like Sidisi's Pet and War Behemoth though...Efreet Weaponmaster is just so strong.
Yeah, you can easily change these morphs out for each other. I'm just a sucker for blockers, although a 4 power first striker makes a pretty good blocker.
It does pseudo-ramp to the X spells in that you're more likely to hit your next few land drops. But yeah I'm just being lazy and lumping it with the others, it's really just color fixing.
1 War Behemoth
1 watcher of the roost
1 force away
2 glacial stalker
1 jeskai windscout
1 mistfire weaver
1 wetland sambar
1 bring low
1 crater's claws
1 mardu heart-piercer
1 summit prowler
1 valley dasher
1 master the way
2 efreet weaponmaster
1 jeskai charm
1 butcher of the horde
1 dismal backwater
1 nomad outpost
1 scoured barrens
6 mountain
5 island
4 plains
you get more creatures which i felt was more important in this format where everyone can play 2, 3, 4 drops.
I have to admit, those five-color builds made me wish I played those.
magicmerl ended up with something very different, though, and for that I'm curious as to how you approached building this deck/your thought process that led to this. I'd never have thought to play Tormented Voice, actually.
Out of all the Sealed Pools I have I posted this because of the amount of fixing available is just a lot - 5 banners, 9 colored nonbasics and 2 Embodiment of Spring - so there's definitely a lot of options.
In this cardpool TOrmenting Voice and Debilitiating Injury are good things to do on turn 2 to stop you falling too far behind an aggro deck, and from there we know we want to transition into the Azban gold cards. The only real question is whether we want to run blue cards at all (in the end I went for just one blue morph splashed for free off non-basics).
It may well be that the base UG version is better, although it would of course facilitate dropping the red down from the main colour to the merest splash. And the thing I like about my build is that it's all morphs and quality 4-drops, and the spells all draw you cards or kill things. 3-4 mana is the dangerpoint for the RBxxx deck, while the UGxxx build kinda wants to ramp to infinity, which means that it will be more prone to inconsistent draws like topdecking ramp late, having cards like Villainous Wealth early, plus just having far fewer 'core' plays to make on the turn 3-4-5 that are the make of break points of the game.
Vs a slow powerful deck the UG build is slightly better. vs a more conventional deck (that curves out) I think that my build will be better.
1 Highland Game
1 Wetland Sambar
1 Temur Charger
1 Alpine Grizzly
1 Valley Dasher
1 Jeskai Windscout
1 Mistfire Weaver
1 Mardu Heart-Piercer (FOIL)
1 Summit Prowler
1 Sagu Archer
1 Pine Walker
1 Snowhorn Rider
2 Efreet Weaponmaster
1 Glacial Stalker
1 Become Immense
1 Temur Ascendancy
1 Dragonscale Boon
1 Temur Charm
1 Crater's Claws
1 Bring Low
1 Force Away
1 Crippling Chill
17 lands
I wouldn't exactly say that it's 'conservative' to build a deck with Highland Game, Wetland Sambar and Valley Dasher in it, all without actually constructing an actual manabase. I think I can categorically say that there's no format ever where it would be correct to run all three of those cards together in the same deck. Valley Dasher additionally is an appallingly bad card.
I agree that the W is very weak, but black is the deepest removal colour in this pool.
Yeah, unfortunately that tradeoff doesn't work. You get much lower card power by restricting yourself to 3 colours, and have to play stinkers like Become Immense and Temur Ascendancy (in addition to the 2-drops I listed above) over actually good cards like Butcher of the Horde and Duneblast, but you also reduce the number of on-colour mana fixers from 7 nonbasics to 3. You basically have the devil's manabase in your sealed deck (hint: you need to reduce one of the three colours to a splash, and make sure you're not trying to cast 2-drops in that colour).
Can you please show the manabase you'd run this pool with?
1) I have not played with the set yet, but I assumed that bears would be ok in a set filled with morph, thus I included 3 2-drop bears. If this is wrong, how can you know that already?
2)The decklist is just a suggestion. The become immense could become another dragonscale boon or another creature easily. Is BI really that bad anyway?
3) Here is a mana I would use, seems ok to me:
1 frontier bivouac
1 thornwood falls
1 swiftwater cliffs
5 forest
4 island
5 mountain
And it just dawned on me that you are arguing that a 3 colour deck has worse fixing then your 5C monstrosity. Seriously?
For sure, we're all theorycrafting a bit right now because the set is so new. Of course, this is also the fun time, since we're trying to understand what make the set tick
Bears are quite playable. But a creature like Wetland Sambar is going to be pretty bad on turn 5, which means that you can only run it in your 'main' colours, which have a lot of blue sources to be able to consistently have enough U to play it on turn 2. I'm not saying that those cards are bad and you can't play them. Just that I don't think you can realistically play all three of them in 3 different colours since your manabase doesn't really support it (and of course, Valley Dasher is still terrible).
I think it's a clear level below Dragonscale Boon because the counters stick around. I'm more than happy to trump their morph with mine and have a 4/4 stick around. Delve as a mechanic suffers from incredible diminishing returns (think of the BW lifeloss decks in M15, but even moreso). I'd rather be playing undercosted 3/3 flyers and 4/4 tramplers, not a giant growth effect.
Sure, so let's dissect that a little bit, in conjunction with the coloured cards in your decklist:
U 7 sources for 7 cards
G 7 sources for 6 cards
R 7 sources for 7 cards
That's acutally not bad, although I regard 7 as the *minimum* number of sources for a core colour (and 3 to be the minimum for a splash colour).
Compared to my manabase of
Can you see how despite only being 3 colours, you don't actually have a more stable manabase? In addition, I have 3 Tormenting Voice, which can act as a pseudo-fixer by drawing you into more cards.
I realise that it's counterintuitive, but please take a look at the numbers above. And also realise that the 5-colour deck clearly has a higher card quality as well.
I'm not saying that my deck has better mana than yours, it doesn't. It has a comparable manabase while having higher card quality. Usually when you add colours, you get increased power at the expense of manabase instability. That's not really the case with this cardpool.