Hey there! Last week, I dove in headfirst and tried to rate the top commons in Return to Ravnica without having played with them—and without having read other writers’ reviews for that matter. I realize that some of my rankings were way off, and I’m going to cover Return to Ravnica some more when I have actually had the chance to properly try out the different cards. So, you’ll have to wait for that for a little while longer. But don’t despair; I’ll be talking about Return to Ravnica Limited this week, too—just from a different perspective.

Even though I’ve been raving about how good Rochester Draft is in team play, I would like to point out that I am not a fan of normal Rochester Draft, as it is not particularly skill-intensive. Some people keep going on about how Rochester is very difficult, but in reality, it often comes down to people just going into some color early on and then drafting on autopilot, something that happens less in normal Booster Draft.

Let’s get back to the actual subject shall we. I’ll try to cover some basic strategies and ideas that I think are applicable for team play in general, and then I’ll end the article with some thoughts on Return to Ravnica Team Sealed along with an example pool. I hope many of you reading this will have a chance to go to Grand Prix: San Jose to try the format in action, as it is really fun. San Jose is not very near Helsinki, so you might think I’m not going. Luckily, as I am going to Pro Tour: Seattle, it provides the perfect excuse to extend the trip with a few days and make a stop in San Jose on the way to the Pro Tour. I will be playing with Level 5 Pro Markku Rikola and local Pro Tour Qualifier winner Jussi Tuurinkoski. Beware!

Dynamics

Team events in general require three people to be present. This means that even though you might be the best player in your area, you are not going to make it on your own. I feel that there are two ways to do things when choosing whom you are going to be playing with. The first way is to pull your two best Magic friends together, no matter if they are really good or terrible. The other way is to try to find the best players possible who are willing to play with you. In reality, choosing whom to play with is often a combination of these two ways.

The best possible situation is to find two great players with whom you get along well and who can handle the fact that everyone makes mistakes once in a while. I’m a firm believer in the idea that even the best players in the world make mistakes, as Magic is difficult on so many levels. You can, however, help each other minimize these mistakes in Team Limited by talking through different lines of play.

Communication is an important part of Team Limited even though you still have to play the games in the same way you would in a normal tournament. I saw a lot of teams using way too much time when communicating within the team at the World Magic Cup. Being allowed to coach each other is a luxury given to you in team play, but it does not mean you are allowed to disregard the use of time. We had the advantage of being able to communicate in a language that almost no one else understands, but if you speak English or another major language to each other, you might have to think about what you say so that your opponents don’t hear any extra info.

Team Themes

A theme can basically mean anything as long as your deck is dedicated to it. Your deck can be aggressive or controlling, and it can win by milling or having some weird combo—as long as everything you are doing is taking the game in a particular direction. In normal Limited, you don’t always have the luxury of things working out like this, and you might end up with an awkward deck that sometimes wins by beating down and sometimes by milling your opponent out. A good example of this would be from Scars of Mirrodin Limited, wherein you could end up with a deck that had an even distribution of infect creatures and normal creatures, which meant you were not good at any one game plan.

As mentioned, Team Sealed gives you a large pool of cards from which to construct your three decks. This means there will probably be cards to make three coherent decks, which in turn means that if you end up making decks that don’t stick to the theme, you will probably end up losing to opposing teams that are able to construct three solid decks.

Throwing Dice

This is not going to be very fun for the player piloting the bad deck, but this is a team thing after all, and most team sports require some sort of individual sacrifice. And you never know—maybe squeaking out those wins with that horrible deck is the most fun you’ll have while playing competitive Magic.

Teams in Ravnica

In some ways, Return to Ravnica actually helps you in the deck-construction process. As in usual Limited, you want to make sure you are playing all your bombs and removal. Multicolored sets usually mean that most of the really good cards are—surprise, surprise—multicolored. By first checking out which three guilds have the possibility to play the largest number of bombs, you get a good starting point from which to construct your first set of decks. Sometimes, the optimal builds might vary, and you might need to change things around a bit to find the best way to put things together. I hope the example pool will help clarify things.

Having so many cards to work with also means you will probably have a lot of mana fixers, allowing you to play one or more decks with three colors. This means you could have access to the best gold cards from each guild by going something like Golgari-splash-white, straight-up Rakdos, and Azorius-splash-red.

Example Pool

"Example Pool"

• Creatures (82)
• 1 Ash Zealot
• 1 Axebane Stag
• 1 Batterhorn
• 1 Blistercoil Weird
• 1 Bloodfray Giant
• 1 Centaur Healer
• 1 Concordia Pegasus
• 1 Corpsejack Menace
• 1 Crosstown Courier
• 1 Deadbridge Goliath
• 1 Deathrite Shaman
• 1 Doorkeeper
• 1 Faerie Impostor
• 1 Gobbling Ooze
• 1 Goblin Electromancer
• 1 Grim Roustabout
• 1 Hellhole Flailer
• 1 Isperia's Skywatch
• 1 Keening Apparition
• 1 New Prahv Guildmage
• 1 Nivix Guildmage
• 1 Rakdos Ringleader
• 1 Sewer Shambler
• 1 Spawn of Rix Maadi
• 1 Splatter Thug
• 1 Stealer of Secrets
• 1 Tenement Crasher
• 1 Terrus Wurm
• 1 Trained Caracal
• 1 Viashino Racketeer
• 2 Axebane Guardian
• 2 Azorius Arrester
• 2 Catacomb Slug
• 2 Dead Reveler
• 2 Drudge Beetle
• 2 Fencing Ace
• 2 Gore-House Chainwalker
• 2 Hussar Patrol
• 2 Korozda Guildmage
• 2 Korozda Monitor
• 2 Rakdos Shred-Freak
• 2 Sunspire Griffin
• 2 Towering Indrik
• 3 Cobblebrute
• 3 Golgari Longlegs
• 3 Lobber Crew
• 3 Oak Street Innkeeper
• 3 Runewing
• 3 Stonefare Crocodile
• 3 Vassal Soul
• 4 Selesnya Sentry
• 1 Rakdos, Lord of Riots

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Jace, Architect of Thought

• Spells (75)
• 1 Aerial Predation
• 1 Annihilating Fire
• 1 Auger Spree
• 1 Avenging Arrow
• 1 Cancel
• 1 Chemister's Trick
• 1 Chorus of Might
• 1 Common Bond
• 1 Dynacharge
• 1 Electrickery
• 1 Fall of the Gavel
• 1 Golgari Charm
• 1 Launch Party
• 1 Thoughtflare
• 1 Trostani's Judgment
• 1 Ultimate Price
• 2 Azorius Charm
• 2 Druid's Deliverance
• 2 Explosive Impact
• 2 Eyes in the Skies
• 2 Heroes' Reunion
• 3 Giant Growth
• 4 Essence Backlash
• 5 Rootborn Defenses
• 1 Assassin's Strike
• 1 Destroy the Evidence
• 1 Search Warrant
• 1 Seek the Horizon
• 1 Slime Molding
• 1 Supreme Verdict
• 1 Survey the Wreckage
• 1 Teleportal
• 1 Treasured Find
• 1 Vandalblast
• 2 Horncaller's Chant
• 2 Mind Rot
• 3 Traitorous Instinct
• 1 Conjured Currency
• 1 Cyclonic Rift
• 1 Deviant Glee
• 1 Ethereal Armor
• 1 Grave Betrayal
• 1 Havoc Festival
• 1 Knightly Valor
• 1 Pyroconvergence
• 1 Shrieking Affliction
• 1 Soul Tithe
• 1 Sphere of Safety
• 2 Stab Wound
• 3 Paralyzing Grasp
• 1 Codex Shredder
• 1 Izzet Keyrune
• 1 Pithing Needle
• 1 Rakdos Keyrune

• Lands (22)
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Plains
• 3 Forest
• 3 Island
• 4 Mountain
• 1 Golgari Guildgate
• 1 Izzet Guildgate
• 1 Rakdos Guildgate
• 2 Azorius Guildgate
• 2 Selesnya Guildgate
• 2 Transguild Promenade

Buy This Deck

As mentioned earlier, I like to first look at the mythics (I’ll just call these rares for clarity’s sake) and rares and see which bombs we have to work with. We see that Azorius gives us access to three rares, Golgari three, and Rakdos two, with one rare going into either Rakdos or Golgari. Now, some of these rares are merely solid and not amazing, such as Ash Zealot and Deathrite Shaman.

The following thing I would like to look at is the mana fixers we have available, as that gives us a better idea of which different color combinations we can make work. As we can see, we have two universal fixers along with two fixers per color except for Golgari, which only has one. To make up for it, green supplies us with two Axebane Guardians along with Seek the Horizon if we are going real deep. From this brief overview, my first instinct would be to go Golgari, Rakdos, and Azorius splashing red.

The good thing about the rares is that they all fit relatively well into the same kind of decks. The Azorius deck wants to be quite controlling, so Supreme Verdict is perfect. The Rakdos deck wants to be aggressive, so Ash Zealot and Rakdos, Lord of Riots fit really well into that strategy. The Golgari deck is sort of midrange, with the Axebane Guardians helping you to cast the expensive cards such as Grave Betrayal and to activate scavenge cards.

Here are the lists I came up with; feel free to chime in if you have other opinions regarding the pool.

"Azorius Sealed"

• Creatures (15)
• 1 Doorkeeper
• 1 Keening Apparition
• 1 New Prahv Guildmage
• 2 Azorius Arrester
• 2 Hussar Patrol
• 2 Sunspire Griffin
• 3 Runewing
• 3 Vassal Soul

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Jace, Architect of Thought

• Spells (7)
• 1 Avenging Arrow
• 1 Cancel
• 1 Trostani's Judgment
• 2 Azorius Charm
• 1 Supreme Verdict
• 1 Cyclonic Rift

• Lands (17)
• 7 Island
• 8 Plains
• 2 Azorius Guildgate

Buy This Deck

When I ended up putting the deck together, I found that splashing for red was not really necessary. Nivix Guildmage and Thoughtflare are nice, and you could maybe remove the two Azorius Arresters to go for an even more controlling build. Even though I mentioned the importance of having one unified theme, this deck has two routes two victory. One is to just overwhelm your opponent with flyers, while the other is to grind opponents out with the control cards. Decks are usually well-equipped to deal with the common flyers, so I feel that most of the time, you will win by using the control cards to your advantage with a game plan that resembles that of an aggro control deck. So, I’m not particularly worried about the theme being diffused.

"Rakdos Sealed"

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Ash Zealot
• 1 Bloodfray Giant
• 1 Deathrite Shaman
• 1 Grim Roustabout
• 1 Hellhole Flailer
• 1 Sewer Shambler
• 1 Spawn of Rix Maadi
• 1 Splatter Thug
• 1 Viashino Racketeer
• 2 Dead Reveler
• 2 Gore-House Chainwalker
• 2 Rakdos Shred-Freak
• 1 Rakdos, Lord of Riots

• Spells (7)
• 1 Annihilating Fire
• 1 Auger Spree
• 2 Explosive Impact
• 2 Stab Wound
• 1 Rakdos Keyrune

• Lands (17)
• 7 Swamp
• 9 Mountain
• 1 Rakdos Guildgate

Buy This Deck

I tried separating the black removal between the two decks as best I could, and I figured the Stab Wound would be much better in the more aggressive deck, as you can often just burn your opponent out with them. I ended up putting the Deathrite Shaman in the Rakdos deck, as I needed more playables, and the black activation is really the best of the three. Even though a 1-mana 1/2 might not seem like the best, it really puts the hurt on in the mid- to late-game, allowing you to burn your opponent out if the board becomes stalled.

"Golgari Sealed"

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Corpsejack Menace
• 1 Deadbridge Goliath
• 1 Gobbling Ooze
• 2 Axebane Guardian
• 2 Drudge Beetle
• 2 Korozda Guildmage
• 2 Korozda Monitor
• 2 Towering Indrik
• 3 Stonefare Crocodile

• Spells (7)
• 1 Giant Growth
• 1 Golgari Charm
• 1 Launch Party
• 1 Ultimate Price
• 1 Assassin's Strike
• 1 Treasured Find
• 1 Grave Betrayal

• Lands (17)
• 10 Forest
• 6 Swamp
• 1 Golgari Guildgate

Buy This Deck

It’s a shame that there weren’t better cards to splash, as the Golgari base would have easily accommodated a splash or two. I’m not the biggest fan of Gobbling Ooze, but it works so well with the Korozda Guildmages and Corpsejack Menace that I thought I might as well include it. The deck is a fairly straightforward midrange deck that becomes really good in the late game thanks to all the scavenge creatures. Stonefare Crocodile also becomes a whole lot better when you start dumping +1/+1 counters on it and gaining a bunch of life.

Summing It Up

As usual, if you have any questions or comments regarding this article, other aspects of team play, or anything else, be sure to hit me up on Twitter or in the comments section.

Thanks for reading,

Max

@thebloom_ on Twitter

Maxx on Magic Online

You can find my music on: http://soundcloud.com/bloomlive