Limited Resources: RTR Sealed Deck #3

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Limited Resources





You can follow Marshall on Twitter @Marshall_LR
or check out the Limited Resources podcast at lrcast.com

 

  1. Nice Sealed, nice deck…

    But M4G1, when dropping the Knightly Valour on Smiter, wouldn’t Ethereal Armour have been better? a 5/5 first striker is literally unblockable by him, with Knightly Valour he gets at least a 2 for 2 (minus the Knight Token) ;)

  3. M3G1 instead of putting Etheral Armor on the Decoy if it would have gone on the Healer the healer would have been 7/7 (3/3, +2/2, +2/2). Then he’s forced to double block Decoy, Giant Growth Healer for exactsies. (He’s tapped out and It ended up not mattering.) You almost caught it but you did the math wrong. For what it’s worth it also keeps the Mythic Uncommon Arrest a secret. (Not trying to be “that guy” but as you say Nuts & Bolts.)

    Keep up the great videos and the great podcast. :)

  4. Sad to say, you played match 4 rather poorley ( a vert uncharicharistic thing from an excellent player such as yourself).

    In game 1, you had 3 white cards in hand and a Korozda Monitor, it was turn 4, you had one plains on the battlefield and the rest of your lands were forests. Out of a desire to “use all of the avilabale mana”, you decided to cast your only 4 drop (the monitor), even though wayfaring temple was just as big.
    The problem with this play is that in cases of a color screw, you shouldn’t have been caring about mana, but about colors. The greatest constraint on getting cards out of your hand was not the amount of lands, but the amount of white sources. Given that, the correct play would have been to play the wayfaring temple, and then on turn five play your last forest, and cast Korozda Monitor and Ethereal Armor. That is a much faster board development which might have changed the course of the game.

    Game 2, you wanted to get rid of Keening Apparation, so you did that by casting Arrest on the guildmage, planning on your opponent sacrificing the 2/2 to free his guildmage. The problem with that play is that it allows your opponent an extra block with the Keening Apparation. Why not just go ahead and Arrest the Apparation itself? that’s an extra 4 damage.

  5. After the disaster of last draft it had to be sealed…
    M3G1 you miss the win as stated by tom3mtg, nothing wrong with that, but you see it, say ‘ow i could have won here’ and then you correct yourself… that just shows you’re not ‘in the zone’ at the moment…

  6. He is playing less optimal deliberately.

    This helps in increasing the learning curve for the newer player (larger motivation when seeing the better/best players do faults) whilst leaving an almost insignificant help to the average players.

    These vids primary function is to appeal to newer players who have a larger spend more potential than already established players.

  7. A lot of loose play in this one, buddy!

    I’m sure others will point out specifics, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the episode of LR where you were talking about the frustrations of failing to break through at the PTQ level. You effectively recognized that you have been the “X-3″ PTQ player for a while, yet guys like Brian Wong, Dan Hanson and other local notables seem to make T8 consistently. I think you were correct when you said “this is just where I am right now,” but how do you “level up” from here besides just playing more? I’m not entirely sure.

    If I think about what Brian Wong would have done in this Daily with your pool…well, I think he probably would have built the deck better, and then played tighter, specifically with what I would call a better “line awareness.”

    For deckbuilding, I think you didn’t properly address the low creature count given that your best card was an enchantment that wants you to have a ton of creatures out. Given fairly easy access to a splash, I would personally have splashed (probably blue) to increase the creature count to play to my bomb. Is that what Wong would have done? I don’t know, but would be very curious how both, say, Wong and GCB would have approached this pool.

    As for tight play, there were several times where you missed seeing a line that, if not obviously correct, should have at least been in the discussion. Sometimes these were seemingly small early choices that snowballed into larger issues in the mid/late game. It’s easy to miss how critical a decision on turn two or three can be to the options available to you on turn seven.

    Part of it may be the challenges of recording/talking while playing, but I think a big difference in the gap between where you are at and where Wong is at is in seeing all the lines, and then picking the optimal one. Easy to say, hard to address. I wonder what the best way to practice and improve line-seeing is besides just playing Magic, though. Hmmmm…

  8. Sealed is always relevent to anyone who wants to go to a PTQ or a GP. Far more relevant than draft since making day 2 is far more important of a proposition to most players than being prepared for day 2 *if* you get there.

  9. It seems to me that Sealed has much more a luck factor involved. You are given a limited number of cards from which to build an optimal deck. I tried two different ones yesterday and literally bombed at both; however, I opened no mythics and off-color dual lands in both. I wasn’t deep in enough colors either time to go 2-color decks, so I ended up playing 3 colors both times. In game play I did make a few mistakes relating to land drops and mana development, but I lost almost mainly to bombs and decks with perfect curve outs during game play. Draft gives skilled players a lot more control over their destiny as it were – I went right from those two lousy Sealeds to finish 2nd in an 8-4 with almost the same 3-color deck in my draft as in my 2nd sealed!