"Our choices in life are made according to our sense of our own worth" - Kaylan Pickford

This past week I made a choice that hit my Magic life pretty hard. My local Youth League, where my daughter plays basketball, needed a coach. I volunteered and I am totally excited at it. Unfortunately, that hinders my Magic playing on the PTQ level. I live in a region that is rather lacking in PTQ's anyway so I only get two or three in a season that I would consider at a drivable distance. Chart in my usually hectic weekend schedule and I am lucky to attend one a season. I had it all planned out, I circled the date, I even had it cleared by my wife's work schedule. We get our basketball schedule and BLAM there is a game right on the only Saturday that I had a chance to get to a PTQ. So San Diego will have to go to someone else. Cursed fate.

The double bummer is that Sealed is one of my favorite PTQ formats. While many people claim that it's no fun because it is to luck based and there is no predictable metagame. I find those facets exhilarating. The luck factor is doubled since you have to deal with your assigned card pool along with the randomness of shuffling that is inherent in the game, I find the challenge of building from scratch much more fun than facing a bunch of netdecks all day long.

Sealed also has a special place in my heart for PTQ's. When I just started playing I heard about a big tournament that was going to be held in my In-laws home town. We happened to be planning a visit anyway so I looked into it. At that time I was playing with another teacher's extra cards and didn’t even know about Standard or Extended or any format for that matter. I barely knew that the gold symbol meant rare. Anyway I was very excited when I found out that I didn’t need any cards to play in this tournament. In fact when I got my allotment of cards at the tournament it doubled my collection at the time.

During the day I was able to go undefeated with one intentional draw in the last round. I actually had to be explained how drawing would work and I did it even though it didn’t help me. It did help a guy that was nice to me during building so he could slip into the top 8 so I felt good about it. Then I sat down to my first ever draft. That’s right, never even heard of Draft before that day. The Judge had to explain all of the rules to me. I didn’t mess any thing up so I was happy. I did lose in the first round in close games. So if you’re new to the PTQ thing this season is the one I would recommend.

When you build your deck in Sealed deck you’ll be making many choices yourself. How you make those choices will greatly influence your results. What I would like to do today is talk about the value of those choices.

First thing that we need to get out of the way is that rarity is of no consequence. The rarity of cards affects draft since we need to realize the probability of seeing a card we may want for our deck 'theme' but in Sealed the cards you get are what you get. The fact that a card has a gold or black symbol only matters as we try to anticipate our opponents moves during a game. It does not affect our building decisions though.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve seen a person play a rare just because it’s a rare. "I was going to run Green/Red but all my non-Green rares were in White so I went Green/White instead" was actually said at my local store. After playing, he shared his card list with me. The white pool of cards where just bad with the majority of his available removal being in Red. At least he was right on the fact that his Green was good. I was happy to take the easy win.

At that PTQ I was reminiscing about earlier, my final deck contained no rares. That’s right. NONE. After I was out and I was salivating over the massive amount of product I received for my 5th -8th place finish a local player with pro points asked to see the deck I had built. I had already sorted it back to colors but I let him see what I had. Based on my rares he thought I had gone with two completely different colors and was amazed when I told him what I really played.

When you build a Sealed deck you have to make many of your choices on Card Values. This does not mean the cash worth of the cards but instead their impact on the game versus there cost to ourselves. Sure you might crack open a foil Misty Rainforest that will easily pay your entry fee but if you not in Green or Blue and you have minimal Landfallers it isn’t worth playing in your deck.

Before we get to deep into Card Value we need to understand that not all cards are created equal. Mananation's own Vampire Nighthawk is far superior to Kabira Evangel. While both have the same mana requirements, power and toughness Nighthawk far outshines the Evangel in Limited play. This makes the Nighthawk’s CV (card value) higher than white Ally. Notice the rarity of these two cards. If you went by just the color of the expansion symbol the Kabira would win.

For today's lesson I want to look at the first phase of Card Evaluation. In future lessons I will discuss how to compare the benefits of the cards. The final Card Value is weighed by comparing our costs to the expected benefit.

There are three basic types of cost inherent in Magic. Mana, Cards, and Life. Mana of course is the most prevalent resource with a minority of cards costing ourselves life or extra cards to play.

Mana requirements are actually very interesting. In fact I have heard of people applying Economic structures to the use/supply of Lands during a single game. The scarcity of land in the opening turns and our need to cast greater value spells in the early when compared to our desire to NOT draw a land in the late game because we would rather have spells that could effect the game. So land cards go from the most needed cards in our opening hand to being all but worthless in late game makes for quite an interesting Supply/Demand curve. Finding the optimal number of lands so that we have enough to consistently play our cards while not having so many that it hinders our game development is probably the hardest thing to do in any Format. And this speaks to the value of fetch lands as they allow you to thin the deck by removing two land cards from the library.

Here is the point when it comes to mana. Counting the total converted mana cost (CMC) is not good enough. We really need to look at it terms of Expected Turn of Play (ETP). In a mono colored deck the CMC is equal to the ETP for less expensive cards. But cards with higher cost the CMC and ETP begin to vary with the ETP falling behind. Iona, Shield of Emeria for example would not be expected to hit the table on turn 8 very often even though her CMC is 8. In fact for our deck to hit all 8 land drops for the first 8 turns we would need to nearly half our deck to be land. While Blood Seeker in a mono black deck will be able to hit the table on turn two as long as it’s in your hand so its CMC is equal to its ETP.

In Sealed however mono colored decks almost never happen. The majority of decks are two colored or two with a third splash. For right now let’s think in terms of a two colored deck with a perfect mana split so each land is exactly half of our deck. Now an interesting thing happens. A simple one drop like Hedron Crab actually has a slightly higher ETP than CMC because it’s possible that we may not hit a blue source in our hand but the other cards make it viable enough we won’t mulligan. But as early turns progress our chances of having a blue source for a card like Gomazoa increases so the ETP for Gomez is nearly the same as its CMC. The late game 7 CMC still applies but the different colors of the deck become less relevant.

Beware of the hidden cost of double colored spells. Let’s say I built a Black/White deck that had both Vampire Nighthawk and Kabira Evangel in it with equal number of Swamps and Plains (8 of each). While both have a CMC of 3 the Nighthawk has a higher ETP because of the double black in its cost. In most games with 16 lands out of a 40 card deck you can expect to see 4 lands by turn 3 so we’ll have enough mana. The odds of having 2 Swamps in those lands is less than having one of those lands being a Plains.

Basically, the larger the ratio of colored to non colored mana requirements the more the ETP is affected. Elemental Appeal is an extreme example of this. 100% of Elemental Appeal’s mana cost is colored so while his CMC is 4 I would play him at an ETP of 7. Therefore a commitment to putting the card in my deck is the same as playing an Enormous Baloth or a Platinum Angel. Both are easily more valuable.

If you begin to think about ETP you can hopefully choose better cards that will have a more relevant impact on the game. I can already tell you that this will be a multiple class lesson as I have only begun to talk about the things that I wrote in my notes before starting. Hope you tune in for more.

I see that class time is almost over. Remember to drop any comments you like. I really appreciate ALL feedback from the readers.

See you next week. Don’t be tardy or I have to turn you into the principal!

There's the bell.