PlanetWalls' Sealed Pool
Click the arrow to download the above pool in .txt format.Deckbuilding
Click the arrow to download the above video in .mp4 format.Round 1
Click the arrow to download the above video in .mp4 format.Round 2
Click the arrow to download the above video in .mp4 format.Round 3
Click the arrow to download the above video in .mp4 format.Round 4
Click the arrow to download the above video in .mp4 format.
Could be wrong– But despite all the errors in building (and several in playing and sideboarding), I think my pool sucked.
Welp just realized Ghostly Possession gives the target flying. Shouldn’t have run that.
If I had to rebuilt this poor pool, this is what I’d do:
1 Mausoleum Guard
1 Hollowhenge Spirit
1 Elgaud Inquisitor
1 Abbey Griffin
1 Voiceless Spirit
1 Niblis of the Mist
1 Midnight Guard
1 Moment of Heroism
1 Niblis of the Urn
1 Champion of the Parish (mainly to keep werewolves from flipping)
1 Increasing Confusion
1 Geralf’s Mindcrusher
1 Skaab Goliath
1 Soul Seizer
1 Nephalia Seakite (yay 4-drops)
1 Claustrophobia
1 Lantern Spirit
1 Divination
1 Chant of the Skifsang
1 Sensory Deprivation
1 Butcher’s Cleaver
1 Traveler’s Amulet
1 One-Eyed Scarecrow
17 Land
G1G1 if you flash in the spirit it blanks the tokens on a neonate when it leaves play.
G1G1, I don’t think that’s how Hollowhenge Spirit works. Am I misunderstanding something?
Have you even read what Increasing confusion does? lol
Yea its late game but its great late game
as well as 13/13 flying intimidate tramplers
i heard 1 spell milling 21 for 14uu over 2 turns late game is pretty good
One of the issues this deck has (or so I would assume from trying to build the pool myself) is no way to reliably make it to the late game. I really wanted to look to green (and the double Ambush Vipers), but 3 of the green playables are pump spells AND it lacks any of the mid-to-late game green. Much of white is combat tricks and 2/2s for four mana. I hope my first pool isn’t like this one!
Your pool was pretty average. It is DKA that sucks. My pre-release pool had only two rares that were spells and those were Rooftop Storm and Lost in the Woods. I did get a Vault of the Archangel, but that went with five(!?) white cards and seven black cards.
You had a cool blue black zombie mill deck going for you, wish you hadn’t turned away from it. What’s the point of being control if you aren’t going to play bomb mythic win conditions?
Round 2: Other players don’t board out fireballs. Increasing confusion is always a kill condition in the land of forty card decks.
Your two main problems are not knowing the format, which is aggro beats to the extreme (after m12, which is as fast a format as ever has been and Scars block, which had infect, which started all this hyper aggro nonsense), and a total lack of self-confidence. Power creep means that every color gets to be GR now. What I mean is, while a 2/2 for two used to be a green thing and red was the color of aggressive creatures, now blue gets 2/2s for 1 and even black gets a grizzly bear. Control isn’t viable anymore, especially in a format with conditional removal, bad counterspells and travel preps.
@ Academy Rectum – I do not quite agree with you. the fact that aggresive strategies are playable in all color combinations does not nullify the possibility of playing control. It’s just a matter of shifting the priority of your picks according to a diffrent game plan. I think it was Simon (from the excellent Simon Says video series here in MTGO academy) who mentioned in one of his videos that even in m12, playing control is fine if you know what you are doing. The popular mono black deck that people came up with is but an example to this.
Innistrad was a fast format, but I found that drafting and winning with a control deck was not only possible but often a good way to go. Sure sometimes your opponent playes delver turn one, flips it on turn two, and reap you to shards, but that is rare enough to not be a concern. I didn’t have the chance to play with DA cards yet but so far I saw no reason to hurry about the format getting faster in a noticeable way.
So you said at one point ‘I guess that Increasing Confusion is insane in sealed?’ . You are partially correct with that statement. Amend it to Increasing Confusion is insane, and you have it right.
Do you not have a middle mouse button? Click on that when hovering over a card to enlarge the card and reveal the flip.
Your card pool was pretty poor, so don’t feel too bad about the deck you came up with being less than stellar.
I have taken the anchovy pizza challenge, and found it quite unpalatable.
CJ, kaos, Tokamak– Keep in mind, everyone, that Increasing Confusion is a ‘Fireball’ that takes two turns to kill the opponent and also demands at least one or two other cards that can mill your opponent (or that he mill himself). Plus it has no effect on the game state when you target your opponent, except for possibly making cards like Splinterfright bigger and putting flashback cards into their graveyard. So it’s better in Sealed when you aren’t running an infrastructure for decking your opponent because the games go on longer. Milling 24 cards from your opponent’s deck only kills them if you aren’t dead yet, and if it’s Turn 10 or later.
Rectum– Also, to those who mentioned a Blue-Black build with Army of the Damned– when would that have been better in the early matchups? I didn’t lose games because I didn’t have an 8-cast win-con. I lost games because my face got pounded in by werewolves (and because I milled myself with Mindcrusher). If you even try to build a UB list with this pool, you’ll notice that all the cards suck and that it’s stretching for playables. On the other hand, if you try to make a UB mill-oriented deck, the problem seems to be that you don’t have any consistent way to win other than Increasing Confusion. Yes, I had other Mill cards, but none of them deal the finishing blow to the opponent without Increasing Confusion, so my winning would seem dependent on drawing that card. Plus I wouldn’t have been able to live to the late game.
kaos– Elbrus sucks.
Tokamak– I have no middle mouse button.
Nonetheless, I find it thoroughly amusing that in client I had no way to see the power/toughness on the flip side of that card.
How would you guys build this turd?
Holding down both mouse buttons on a card does the same thing as middle mouse button.
You learn something new each day.
You had a bad pool. A couple of thoughts though.
Increasing confusion: 2 turn clock once you hit 7 mana against blue decks and some green decks. You don’t need any other cards to make this work. If your deck can afford to run a 7 drop, this is one of the better ones. Against non-blue decks you usually need to get to 8 mana to get the 2 turn clock. Still good though. I’d always run it in sealed because I think sealed is just slow enough to put a random 7 drop in your deck that wins the game by itself. In draft you can always first pick it and draft a control deck around it.
Elbrus: Once you hit 7 mana its still a 3 turn clock assuming you can get a guy to hit. If you can reliably get guys through at this point in the game you’re probably winning anyways. I don’t think I’d ever run this.
Pizza story is epic
I love your hatred of the card that everyone here is telling you is awesome. Don’t listen to them!!!
Viva la resistance!!!
ctrl+shift also makes cards bigger
Your pool wasn’t great, but I’ve seen worse – your build wasn’t awful and you were fairly rich in tempo and evasion (including that 7 mana equipment was a mistake). Your color greedy opponent’s deck really came together in R1 and you could never get ahead to use your tempo effectively. R2 should have been yours if not for play mistakes. R3 Your opponent’s deck was awful, but you still almost threw away G1 by not using sensory dep aggessively enough. R4 your opponents draws seemed mediocre and he made some play mistakes – not sure your deck was better as RW, but it won you 1 pack so… woot?
Lo, a 2-2 finish. Could have been a 3-1, but at least you learned something about the format.
As far as Increasing Confusion goes:
By no means is it fireball. It is a very different card. I don’t have a problem with it in this deck at all. Mainly because it gives you the old “orthogonal” victory condition at the very low cost of one card slot. Even if someone is milling *you* it gives you a chance to counter-mill them back, no matter how many horned turntles and rats they try and hide behind. Are their some matchups where it should come out? Of course. Are you sometimes going to kick yourself when you draw it? Yes. But it also has the ability to win otherwise unwinnable games.
While I echo the sentiment above that this is quite a weak pool overall, I believe U/W “All-in” mill has the best chance to get there.
White*6
1 Mausoleum Guard
1 Hollowhenge Spirit
1 Elgaud Inquisitor
1 Voiceless Spirit
1 Midnight Guard
1 Ghostly Possession
Blue *12
1 Increasing Confusion
1 Geralfs Mindcrusher
1 Skaab Goliath
1 Soul Seizer
1 Nephalia Seakite
1 Claustrophobia
1 Lantern Spirit
1 Divination
1 Chill of Foreboding
1 Chant of the Skifsang
1 Thought Scour
1 Sensory Deprivation
artifact*5
1 Ghoulcallers Bell
1 Blazing Torch
1 Butcher’s Cleaver
2 One-Eyed Scarecrow
The idea here is that you you combine mill with self mill (through bell and chill of foreboding and thought scour) that you can consistently find your increasing confusion if you dont draw it. You have reasonable ‘removal’ in a mill type deck with chant, sensory dep, torch, claustrophopia, and ghostly possession. Your one-eyed scarecrows would be helpful against your opponents nonexistant fliers, and perhaps more importantly random stuff like immerwolf. Overall you get reasonable blockers and tricks with your white 4 drops, and reasonable win cons if mill fails with cleaver and goliath. Thoughts?
Also: loved the ‘oops I forgot to play claustrophobia precombat just kidding play Ill blow you out with a combat trick play’. Was the most educational moment for me of the series.
Physics, I actually like your build quite a bit, but I might play an extra Plains and cut an Island. I especially like how it makes use of the Scarecrows and Ghostly Possession more effectively than my build did. I would like to test out Chill of Foreboding to see how effective it is. Five is not very good as far as milling goes, and the flashback is pretty expensive. It’s an interesting situational spell.
Glad you liked the pointless mindgame against that guy. I worked pretty hard on something that probably didn’t matter anyway because the opponent likely had his face caught in a bag of Doritos and couldn’t see the screen.
I totally agree, I played in a sealed, and my pool was terrible.
Yes, Elbrus is pretty weak, but he also can’t be blocked by a 1/1 flier as suggested early on. More likely to be Victim of Nighted or Smight the Monstroused after all the work setting him up.
It was a weakish pool, but not the worst. It did have good mill synergy. Looking at a Champion of the Parish and an Into the Maw that you can’t even play is why I don’t like Sealed. In my first sealed event for the new set I had to send a Huntmaster of the Fells straight to the unplayable pile. Lame.
I have no idea why so many people windmill-reject Intangible Virtue, even in decks where it’s good. I promise that there are cards in a typical sealed deck doing much worse than giving all of your spirit and zombie tokens +1/+1. Not saying it was great for your pool, but it’s always worth a look.
R1G3 : why not killblock the immerwolf with the 2/2 flasher, remove the 5/7 from combat (why on earth take the 4/4 there) and you can return the werewolves to wolves again next turn… think you might have missed a win there
Those pizza toppings sound like the ultimate recipe for bad breath.