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Today, I’m taking a break from constructed, and with the release of New Phyrexia on MTGO, I’m going to offer up some advice for the Sealed release events and a few general Draft tips. The first few weeks of a set being released on MTGO is always interesting, because it puts real-life impressions up against those who haven’t had the chance to draft the set yet and finally get in enough games to really form solid opinions about certain cards and strategies. Since I’m lucky enough to live in an area with a fairly high amount of Magic play by decent players most of the time, the early impressions I get aren’t too off from what comes up big on MTGO. Let’s start with the Sealed release format, since that’s the highest EV while the card prices are through the roof.
Sealed Tips for 3× Scars, 3× NPH
Phyrexian-mana cards are the most important cards to concern yourself with; however, you can’t go overboard unless you have an overwhelming lead due to the sheer number of them. Simply put, these will be the cause for most of your blowouts in Release Week Sealed or any triple NPH drafts you may play in online. Specifically, there are three cards that are brutal combat tricks and that you always have to be on the lookout for.
Mutagenic Growth, Apostle's Blessing, and Act of Aggression.
While the first two can be boiled down into one-for-one trades, the real issue is how much control your opponent has. The ability of your opponent to be completely tapped out and still possibly have a combat trick is nerve-wracking, and often your best play is simply to ignore the fact he may have it simply because the scenario is all-encompassing. Once you play around it for more than a turn or two, you are essentially conceding future turns to playing around this trick. In fact, overly aggressive players can bluff through a fair amount of damage with the threat of Mutagenic Growth and making what would normally be suboptimal or bluff attacks. If they do have the trick, they lose nothing in terms of mana or curving out when they “get you,” making it a win-win. If they’re bluffing and you don’t block, it’s just free damage for them, giving them more time to draw the trick.
Apostle's Blessing is much the same when considering attacks or blocks and the opponent has a mana open; it’s far more narrow in application, and you can play around it better if you have board advantage. However, the true power of the card is to give decks like B/x or G/x the ability to counter a removal spell at such low cost while retaining usefulness throughout the game. Just like Mutagenic Growth, once you show it to your opponent in Game 1 (or the opponent spots it in a replay), it can be an even better psychological trick, and one has to consider whether to spend removal or commit when the opponent is tapped out.
Act of Aggression is the final Phyrexian-mana card I want to highlight, simply for blowout potential; I’ve seen many games swung on the back of this card in the prerelease, far more than any other rare or mythic. Thanks to its being uncommon, it isn’t unreasonable to suspect the opponent has access to it, and as many people have never played against a Ray of Command effect, let alone one at 3 mana that can be played by any deck, it’s worth keeping an eye out for. Any time the opponent leaves out 
and the 4 life wouldn’t be a major detriment, you really have to consider whether you want to commit a large portion of your forces. 3 mana left open is significant in Sealed most of the time, and even against an empty board, Act can cause a lot of mayhem, at worst netting your second-best guy while preventing some damage or at best completely destroying your combat step. If you are Blue, you can feel safe that many of your creatures have higher toughness than power, minimizing the amount of damage Act can do to you.
While the other Phyrexian cards definitely have to be watched for, those are the three biggies that will be the bane of your existence in this format at the common/uncommon levels. The number of times I’d rather my opponent simply Dismember my creature over the annoying flexibility the other cards can bring to the table isn’t to be understated, and honestly, it’s easier to take advantage of Dismember than Act in terms of leveraging life totals. Obviously, the fact that Dismember can be played by any deck for 1 mana makes Dismember extremely useful; the number of times you’d be unhappy to see Dismember in a non-Black deck are minimal.
Phyrexian-mana creatures also fundamentally shift Sealed toward a more aggressive format, as cards like Vault Skirge, Porcelain Legionnaire, Slash Panther, and Thundering Tanadon tend to round out curves nicely, and all play better as attackers than blockers. The now-universal payment of life also makes an impact on how aggressive you wish to be in Sealed, as paying 4 to 8 life can make a huge impact on how you play out your hands. Cards that gain life, like Lifesmith, Venser's Journal, and Trigon of Mending, also gain a slight bit of value, as games often come down to straight life races due to the addition of burn spells and Phyrexian mana costs to the mix.
The two most overplayed Phyrexian trick cards by a fair margin have been Marrow Shards and Gut Shot, both of which typically play out as bad two-for-ones or at best straight one-for-one removal against bad cards. Unless you’re taking down a Spikeshot Elder or other imposing x/1, the amount of value Gut Shot has is minimal at best and should usually be left on the sidelines. Marrow Shards is even worse, and often I’m left in shock when people play it to finish off a creature in combat, wondering if they couldn’t have just played another creature or subpar combat trick in its place. Often, Soul Parry or Seize the Initiative would be far stronger than Marrow Shards, and yet those almost always get left on the bench instead.
Moving onto normal cards that tend to be underplayed in their respective colors:
Green:
Red:
White:
Blue:
First, I’m always disappointed when people underrate cards that can just cycle away in the worst-case scenario, especially at perfectly reasonable costs such as 0. In all seriousness, I have no idea why anyone ever leaves Gitaxian Probe (when it’s on-color) in the board, since the odds that you don’t want to replace your fortieth card with it are so low. It doesn’t even need the Peek portion and it would be playable; with it, you’re just giving up free value whenever you don’t play it. Due Respect is the same way in terms of what it can do for you when used correctly. Anytime you miss on your curve, you can hold open mana and cast this card to potentially screw your opponent while cantripping. If you need your opponent unable to play blockers for a turn after you’ve just attacked him and killed most of his board, Due Respect provides what you need. The rest of the time, you know what else you get to do with it? Cycle it away for something better.
With cards like Numbing Dose, Brutalizer Exarch, and Victorious Destruction, I’m firmly in the camp that people just don’t actually read the spell all the way through. Exarch sticks out the most, as a Hill Giant at 6 understandably leaves a lot to be desired, but often the worst-case scenario is you play a 6-mana Scrapmelter. Best case, you fetch up your Myr Battlesphere or whatever absurd bomb creature you have in your pool, and life is good for you! Probably sounds obvious to some of you, but the number of players with high limited ratings ranking this as a bit of a throw-in card for Green was surprising. Both Victorious Destruction and Numbing Dose are more expensive cards than I’d normally be comfortable playing, but in nearly all the Sealed pools I’ve seen, it’s very easy to run out of playables.
The color combos B/R, G/U, and W/U all tend to gain more from having 3× NPH than in normal Sealed. The new B/R decks in particular gain a large chunk of removal and better aggressive creatures, such as Mortis Dogs, to assist their normally subpar aggro plans. They can take advantage of Phyrexian mana better than almost any other deck due to the early pressure they can apply, and leverage their life payments a lot better than other decks typically can.
Decks such as W/U become a lot more impressive, since Tezzeret's Gambit and Mindculling both already give the deck a lot more depth than it had previously. They also gained some really good flyers at the 5 slot, which can significantly alter how the game plays out—Shattered Angel coming to mind as the main offender. In a format where you often have to race other decks unless you have a very good deck or multiple walls in play, gaining life while having a 3/3 flyer beating down is an impressive hurdle for the opponent.
Finally, I’d like to talk about play versus draw in Sealed with the format as it stands. I’ve talked a lot about how aggressive the format has become and how curving out with relevant spells is a far more likely occurrence thanks to Phyrexian-mana creatures padding out colors that often don’t have amazing 2- or 3-drops. You’ll see more people choosing to play these to maximize these draws and take advantage of the awkward hands you sometimes see in Sealed. I still believe that the extra card gained is worth more than the advantage of being on the play, but I think this decision has become more dependent on your deck, whereas before I’d draw with 95% of my decks in Sealed.
My general rule is that if I have an aggressive curve and more than three to four Phyrexian-mana cards, unless I have very good life gain, I’m probably going to play. This isn’t so much because I feel that the difference between playing a Porcelain Legionnaire on the play or draw is huge, but because anything that gives me more time to use my life total to the fullest is important. One of the worst feelings in this format is drawing or holding onto a pay-life trick and then being too low to actually use it without risking death. Believe me when I say this is not an uncommon scenario, and at 5 life or less, you are very much in the danger zone of dying to burn spells from a Red or Black deck in this format.
Next up is Draft, though this will be more of an overview of the strategies I’ve had success with rather than an entire Draft format overview. Frankly, I haven’t played enough drafts for that to be accurate, nor against good enough competition to help those of you who play in higher-end draft environments. For me, the most interesting aspect of PBS draft is how the theme deck of Infect plays out with the reverse-order aspect stepping center stage. Because people don’t necessarily have a great grasp of the new cards, it becomes it becomes difficult to judge when to go in on Infect, and this can severely distort the draft—much like when Mirrodin Besieged was added, and you tended to have fewer Infect drafters for the first month or so.
While there are a couple of standout Infect cards, such as Fallen Ferromancer and Viral Drake, these are often off colors for Infect decks and throw people off. What would normally be slam-dunk first picks are now passed around (well, not Ferromancer so much, since it’s still a pinger, but I’m trying to make a point) and throw people off. Similarly, other Infect cards such as Reaper of Sheoldred and Whispering Specter, which are on-color, are underrated by a good number of players who need a really good reason to jump into Infect. These creatures are perfectly playable and serve specific purposes in the Infect deck, but because they don’t have the raw power of a Viridian Corrupter, they often get written off. This is especially true of Chained Throatseeker, which is effectively a reverse Phyrexian Juggernaut at common! Even if you fall off the Infect boat, it’s still a very good blocker, and often you could snag a few cards that poison the opponent and get him online as a major threat.
Hint to drafters: While base Green will still be the case for many Infect strategies due to the goodies in both Scars and Besieged as well as mana-fixing, you can have off-color poison decks and succeed. White in particular gets the shaft since it only has a total of four Infect cards, and they’re split two/two between NPH and Besieged. However, Shriek Raptor and Priests of Norn are both very useful in any poison deck that isn’t all-out aggro, and float around relatively late as a result. Tine Shrike and Lost Leonin are no slouches either, filling out spots on the poison curve nicely, and are cards many Infect drafters won’t take early. Blue is in the same niche, but it’s easier to notice since all of these cards are in NPH (outside of Corrupted Conscience, which is first-pickable regardless of archetype), so if they start showing up late, you know nobody wants to be off-color poison.
If you want to get really indie on it, go ahead and run the Red poison creatures, though there are so few that I have a hard time going out of my way to include them. Again, though, if you get them late, just snatch them up and perhaps you can throw together a brew with them. Even in decks that aren’t primarily Infect, they make decent enough blockers, and Ogre Menial can become a legitimate threat with the assistance of an evasion poison-giver (such as the criminally underrated Blighted Agent) or Contagion Clasp.
My point is that while you’ll still more than likely be base Green or Black for your poisoning needs, since they have thirteen and fifteen creatures, respectively, you can still get solid secondary-color Infect guys at a cheap price. Besides, the reduced number of obvious Infect anchors means that fewer people will be willing to commit to Infect at all in the second or third pack, giving you a better shot of seeing uncommon or rare critters—although you still won’t see Blightwidow all that often, unfortunately.
As a result of this, and Dinosaurs gaining more than they lost with the addition of NPH, my favorite color combos are G/B and G/U Dino/Infect decks.
My favorite part about Infect creatures going later is that I can transition into a solid core of them as defenders or secondary win conditions if necessary. I don’t need to be a primary Infect deck anymore; I can simply be dinosaurs and supplement my late-game Fangren Marauders, Hexplate Golems, and Maul Splicers with early Cystbearers and Rot Wolf. The same goes for pumping up my Spire Monitor with various Green pump and using Untamed Might as Fireball when cast on Blighted Agent. Black with Green typically becomes a midrange Junk deck that plays the early Infect game when I curve out properly. When I don’t, I have some defenders that trade off well while keeping my Black removal around to kill anything that can stop my 6-drops.
The worst archetypes I’ve seen so far in Draft have largely been the “average” B/R or W/x deck. Either the strategy has too many holes to work, as in the case of B/R Aggro, where you need a ton of cheap removal and early drops to have a shot. Burly defensive creatures are just far too common nowadays, and it’s become even more difficult just to get in there and bash with random 2/1 creatures. Worse still, they don’t even trade well until you get into Mortis Dogs territory, where the creatures actually have useful abilities stapled on. Same goes for White—as anything other than a supplementary color, it just doesn’t seem to have any real focus or goal in mind. Nearly every non-W/U flyers deck I’ve seen has had White as a mish-mash of “good cards,” situational removal, and late-pick Metalcraft cards that almost never function in patched mode.
Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. It was nice to do something different for a change, and I look forward to seeing what Grand Prix: Singapore brings to Standard.
Josh Silvestri
