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Limited Resources: Return to Ravnica Sealed DE
Posted on November 23, 2012 by Limited Resources
Limited Resources Limited Resources podcast co-host Marshall Sutcliffe provides coverage on North American Magic events and writes for DailyMTG. He educates listeners about limited and heads the highest-prizing clan on MTGO.
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Good morning Marshall.
Thank you very much for another draft
Ooops it´s a sealed this time
Stopped watching after match one game one.
Just kidding, that hand was the stone cold nuts vs his draw!
Congratulations on piloting a sub-par (through no fault of your own) deck so well through those tricky matches, sir.
Very very nice Match 1.
Turn 2 Pack Rat … hahahaha
Win against 2 turn 2 Pack Rats… I never would have expected that fro m your deck. I must say excellently pilotted. Although I do have a question.
In Round 4, game 1, you could have double blocked with Eyes in the Skies the turn before you would have lost to the coinflip. That way it would have triggered the roll to kill the Rig twice and maybe have wiped the board. Did you see that play? Because you didn’t comment on it, but made some comment on it a turn earlier.
Anyway, love the vids, whether they are sealed or draft. Keep up the good work!
Stopped watching when you said it was Marshall Sutcliffe.
I havent played a lot of RTR limited, but why is it better to main a dispel than a cancel? I mean, is there many instants you really wanna counter anyway? charms? rootborn defenses?
@Godot lololol, always good to hear from ya.
@Marsh “No math alpha attack here; Got to love it.” lololol
Love the drafts/sealeds but I really despise the video player, or not so much the player as the popup windows. Can’t even count the number of times I’ve clicked outside it and it closes the video
Would it be possible to change it to only close the player if you click the X?
Anonymous– I’m not sure, but I’ll look into it. You always have the option of clicking on the video title within the lightbox and watching on our Youtube page, just FYI.
@aristi2, Dispel is only 1 mana, so it’s much easier to keep up while casting other stuff. And there are a lot of expensive instants that are good to counter: Trostani’s Judgement, Explosive Impact, Launch Party. Countering the cheaper instants can also be good if they planned around them (like pump spells or rootborn defenses).
Round 3 Game 1: when you draw your second frostburn weird you can double block his dead reveler when he attacks with it. you wait for him to order blockers and then whichever he orders secondly, you pump it to a 3/2 and you kill his dead reveler without openning yourself up to a lot. also you could play your knightly valor on your frostburn weird and have a 3/6 that can become an 8/1 or just get through his 5 power of blockers and pick off his guys. also the vigilance is extremely relevant when hes attacking with a 3/4 into your 3/6 that turns into a 4/5 very easily.
Round 4 Game 1: I think this would be a good one if you wanted to go back and look at the game again to see if you could have played better/played with the rig better. I personally didn’t see anything that you could’ve done better but maybe with our powers combined! we could find something. The game was very close and could have some potential for learning for all parties involved. Coin flips are coin flips though :/
Also I always really love you mulligan decisions but the ones in the last rounds were a little weird, but I’m also always trying to hold onto my seven as much as possible. Could go either way I think.
M4G1′ I’m pretty sure that passing with 7 untapped mana was a bad thing. The entire time you had been talking about racing the rig, and you *were* winning that race. You could have dropped griffin that turn to block the Voidwielder, leaving Eyes in the Sky up for the end of his turn. At that point, you would have lethal on board (minus the one block he would have with his roc) and would be at 8. Next turn, you swing with everything and leave him at either 2 or 3 (depending on his blocks). After that, you would drop the Weird for one turn of clumping and he’d be forced to swing with everything. You see what he does and block with your Weird. You take 4 on his attack, loose a bird to the bounce (if he didn’t trade the roc), and possibly draw. Next turn you have three attackers in the air for lethal. If he has eyes at that point, then you are in trouble, but that seems like a very specific sequence of plays by him. I think you should have been trying to race him. I also think that he had to bounce his Roc because he knew you were going to beat him in the air. You had 4 power of fliers in your hand (and the mana to cast them), and that was going to beat him.
I feel like you may have an inherent bias towards U/W. White was pretty good, but blue seemed really average overall. Unlike with the other colors, especially black, where you picked out only 1 card you “really cared about” you seemed to think most of the blue was sweet. The only exciting blue cards were:
Voidwielder
Faerie Imposter
Stealer of Secrets? (I suppose you can steal games in sealed w/him if you have ways to get him through)
All the other stuff was pretty meh, runewings are a very average card. Inspiration, cancel, hover barrier: all very marginal. Now lets compare to black’s exciting cards:
Desecration Demon
Stab Wound
Thrill Kill Assassin
Dead Reveler
Ogre Jailbreaker
Launch Party (its value goes way up in sealed IMO)
Then in the marginal category we have roustabout, perilous shadow, mind rot (don’t know why you classified this as unplayable), and deviant glee. To me, I don’t see black as being particularly worse than blue: in fact I think it’s significantly better. What happened, I think, was you saw that pile of sweet white cards and knew you wanted to be azorious (an archetype you seem to favor). Particularly, that martial law may have skewed your decision-making, it’s a flashy card that can make an archetype seem more desirable than it should be.
Now overall, I don’t think Azorious was necessarily a bad choice. I just think that since this video is for learning purposes, you should have given black more credit than you did. You could have made a very solid junk deck out of your pool, utilizing both the G/W and the G/B guildmages, the other solid gold cards in those colors, the best of your white/black and have axebane guardian, vine, lantern, and a guildgate for fixing. I don’t think there’s any question it would have been a much more powerful deck, I think the only argument for Azorious over it are curve considerations and mana issues.
Also disappointed about the missed oportunity to finally play a deck without white or blue, you always take at least one of those colors even if they are very mediocre.
A blackwhite splash red deck would have been so much more fun here…
I think this Jund list makes up for in power and kick-assness what it lacks in consistency. It has reasonable fixing/ramp, decent removal, Viashino Racketeer for some filtering, and a great way to get your monsters into play with the otherwise awful Guild Feud. You could get tempo’d out, but hey you can always get tempo’d out. Play bombs imo.
Desecration Demon
Ogre Jailbreaker
Launch Party
Stab Wound
Dead Reveler
Thrill-Kill Assassin
Guild Feud
Explosive Impact
Utvara Hellkite
Viashino Racketeer x2
Gatecreeper Vine
Aerial Predation
Axebane Guardian
Towering Indrik
Rakdos Shred-Freak
Rakdos, Lord of Riots
Auger Spree
Korozda Guildmage
Grisly Salvage
Rakdos Keyrune
Chromatic Lantern
Golgari Guildgate
5 Mountain
6 Forest
6 Swamp
jup, not right colors for sure.
Next time, if someone plays Assassin’s Strike on your Frostburn Weird while you have a card in hand and tons of mana open, you might want to consider pumping the Weird 4 times in response to make the spell fizzle and keep the card in your hand.
Not convinced about playing WUg – power level of the deck is very low. Not sure why you didnt explore rakdos/x – all your bombs are there, and you got plenty of quality removal – sure, concessions have to be made, but even if you play few sub-par cards overall power level of the deck will be higher. For example RBw:
Meat:
1x Rakdos Shred-freak
2x Frostburn Weird
1x Grim Roustabout
1x Thrill-kill Assassin
1x Dread Reveler
2x Viashino Racketeer
1x Ogre Jailbreaker (couldnt find one more playable sadly)
1x Rakdos
1x Desecration Demon
1x Goblin Rally
1x Batterhorn
1x Utvara Hellkite
Stabby-stabby:
1x Augur Spree
2x Arrest
1x Stab Wound
1x Launch Party
1x Explosive Impact
1x Annihilating Fire
Other:
1x Mind Rot
1x Chromatic Lantern
1x Rakdos Keyrune
2 Plains
6-7 Swamps
7-8 Mountain
Hey
M1G2 you main phase tristoni;s judgment on the spirit. Why not just attack if he blocks you regen and its the same as casting the spell? And then if not you have judgment up in case he has any shenanigans. Just curious about that line and if I am missing anything.
Thanks for the videos Marshall
I agree with others about playing black. When you open Desecration Demon and Rakdos, Lord of Riots you’ve got to have some pretty big reasons not to be playing black and some amount of red.
Also, in M4, G2 just after the 22 minute mark you opted to keep the Sunspire Griffin in hand and activated the Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage instead. You made a comment that, “I’m taking 2 in the air no matter what anyway.” I couldn’t figure out why that is. If you play out the Sunspire Griffin it blanks the Vassal Soul. Did I miss something?
I learn a lot when I watch you play which is why I push through , but please stop eating when you record, you clearing your throat and hard swallowing is very hard to listen to.
Also I love how people nitpick the choice of U/W when you went 3 and 1 and the last game was more not drawing what you needed as opposed to not having answers.
Yes you had very good options in other colors but I think your strategy of “I dont want to be drawing dead” was better. Rakdos is amazing, sometimes, but you would have been hard pressed to be on double red when you could get damage through if you were in B r and a third.
Also I am glad you didnt play the desecration demon I hate that card on Modo, turn 5 no, no no no yes no no no no no no, turn 6 yes no no no no no no no…
I always find playing the clock game a bit shady. There is some truth in the argument that it’s the opponent’s own fault if he doesn’t see that it’d be better for him to concede the game to save the match. But I could bring that same argument if someone accuses me of stalling in a paper tournament while I’m set to win at 0-0. And while I’m not saying it’s as bad as stalling, it certainly reeks a bit of it.
Besides, your opponent might have legitimate outs in his deck, like Mizzium Mortars, an Island for the Cyclonic Rift he’s holding or two lands for Street Spasm, all of which give him the immediate win. So he might not even be at fault for continuing to play, making the whole thing just come down to luck.