Building Decks with a Shadowmoor Card Pool

Sealed Deck gets a lot of flack for obvious reasons. It's prone to be a reflection of your card pool more than your play skill and that is a source of frustration for a lot of people. However, in Sealed more than Draft, it's all about how you build your deck.

The difficulty with a set that has so much flexibility is that of organization. You need to easily lay out all your cards to survey just what you have, where the connections and power lies. Herein lies the problem as your layout needs to be organized. In a normal sealed deck you'll receive 45 cards in the tournament pack and 30 from the boosters, so organizing 75 cards can present some issues.

The way I do it is I lay out the five base colors such that they have their allied colors on either side, for me I go Black -> Blue -> White -> Green -> Red, the right of red mentally connecting to the Black on the left. Then with Shadowmoor I begin separating the hybrids by creating a second row of columns above the base, offset so that it falls into the spaces between as follows:

I split Artifacts and lands off to the side and now I can easily segment my card pool based on the color strengths. The first time I do this I do it with all cards to survey the landscape and see how the numbers stack up. I can see where I'm light and where I'm heavy. I don't really do anything at this point other than observe, read the cards and begin considering my options. Then I pile the cards again, riffle once or twice and then I repeat the process, except this time I separate out the cards into playable, maybe and unplayable.

My system was to repeat the color piles with only the playable cards, then create two more piles for the maybes and the not playables. It was then I began looking for my deck amongst the card pool. Even though I had a Mirrorweave in my pool, I didn't have the white or blue to support the spell and so I had to set it aside. However I did notice that I had the majority of my strength in Black and Red, this meant that I could cut out all Blue, Blue/White, White, White/Green, and Green cards. I would be building by picking from Green/Red, Red, Red/Black, Black, Black/Blue. This left me with a little over half my card pool and began simplifying my choices.

"Choice" is what deck building comes down to. Shadowmoor can be almost overwhelming because it is so flexible and the most important part is determining how to make the cut.

Just like in draft you need to look for creatures who offer utility without costing too much. The magic number is three in my mind, any creature that costs more than three is suspect. I'm not saying that a four casting cost creature is necessarily bad, but I'll play a 3 casting cost 1/1 as long as it has some utility, but a 4 cc needs to be a 2/2 with utility. I can't give hard rules, these are things you learn with experience. Not things that are learned just with time, you have to be playing to see creatures, you have to be building decks to learn which creatures are good.

So with the deck you're building, you're looking at two colors, maybe three, then the hybrid cards which are connected to those colors. The color flexibility is there to run three colors but I tend to be more choosy when it comes to the colors I'll run, I try very hard to slim down to two colors even if I sacrifice some power for consistency. Lee though tends to play for the power and run more colors, in draft he runs the five color decks and makes them work! I can't do it, so I pick the safer path.

Now moving past the colors and what I have out there, the main thing in this format are creatures, so I split the cards into two piles Creatures and Spells. Unlike Lorwyn where Creature types are the main attribute to build on, with colors I've already got my colors and I've got my playables set out, so what I'm looking at is in theory all good enough to go in my deck. So I lay out the creatures by casting cost, seeing how they curve. Ideally you want a hump in the 3 cc range. And as a general rule, 7 cc is too expensive for just about any creature short of a game winner bomb, or as they are generally referred to as "Dragons."

I usually aim for a 3:1 ratio of creatures to spells. It's a common downfall where you don't put enough bodies into the deck and so yes, you've got a hand of utility spells, but no creatures on the ground to actually damage your opponent.

After the creatures, I survey the spells and generally just look for removal first, then damage spells, then combat tricks and finally anything else. There isn't any formal system for this for me other than culling the bad spells.

From here it becomes a numbers game. We've got X slots to fill, and Y cards. Y needs to equal X. This is again something you just learn with experience, you can see the pieces and the ones which are good one-ofs but they don't necessarily fit in with the whole plan.

The next step for me is to split the chosen cards into casting cost piles. This is where Shadowmoor can get hairy and the easiest way for me, playing two colors was to sort into three piles. I put all Red and Green/Red into a pile, all red/black into a pile, and all black, black/blue into a third pile. This is how I judge mana needs. The red/black are not counted and I count the mana symbols in the other piles. So I may have 18 black and 14 red needs. I then used that to generate a ratio with the remaining land slots to determine how many lands of each type I need. You can do the same process with a three color deck, but instead of simply discounting the hybrids between colors, you add their totals to both piles. This means the color in the middle with have the majority of your mana as it affects the most spells, in theory.

And there you have a fully functioning deck!

Do a few shuffles and pile shuffle to count your cards and be sure that you do indeed have your 40 cards. Otherwise you could miscount and register only 39, causing issues for the rounds to come.

--Trick