How to Build a Sealed Deck: The Sequel

I haven't written about Limited in a long time! Let's change that.

For those who don't know, 6-pack Sealed is my favorite 'flagship' limited format (team sealed is my true favorite), and a year and a half ago now, I wrote a piece called "How to Build a Sealed Deck", trying to generalize my theory about how to succeed in Sealed from an example OTJ pool.

Recently, I won a Sealed RC Super Qualifier on MTGO with one of my favorite sealed "builds" ever, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to update this piece! Folks who read the original should know some of the content here will be partially repeated, but I expect I have a lot of new readers -- the goal of retreading this ground is to have this piece stand on its own!

Why is Sealed So Great?

Sealed is the format where you get what you get, and you don't get upset.

This is the part people hate about it! All of the variance is upfront, and clearly visible. You don't get any control over the cards you have access to in sealed. You get what you get.

But Magic is a game about visible variance and invisible agency. Some draft seats are better than others, and some tournament runs in constructed have more forgiving draws than others, but the blatant injustice in this is much less visible than the fact that some sealed pools are better than others. From the very start, if you open a weak pool, you are at a disadvantage.

And yet, the best Sealed players in the world have winrates comparable to the best players in any other format. So clearly this delta between skill and variance is more of a question of visibility than presence.

Where does the skill come from?

I think Sealed is the purest test of deckbuilding there is in Magic - and, in some ways, the purest form of Magic there is.

Not to be this girl, but Magic "as Garfield intended" was meant to be players building decks from "cards I own" at kitchen tables. Sealed essentially gives everyone a "starter collection" to build their deck from.

It's easy to see how this could be more complex and skill-testing than draft or constructed if you imagine these starter collections being hundreds of cards big, and everyone having a different, unexpected (and unknown to others) set of cards to work from. The combinations of possible decks you could create from such a collection easily outnumbers the possible directions you can go down in a given draft.

But my argument for why Sealed is great is that Sealed is already far enough down this path to be skill-testing in meaningful ways beyond draft -- ways that people refuse to recognize because they see sealed pools as slightly-larger draft pools.

Don't get me wrong, some sealed pools (usually the weaker ones, but sometimes the very strong ones) aren't more than draft pools with a bunch of medium, never-able-to-be-used playables in other colors adding extra volume.

But I think lots of sealed pools are far deeper than most people give them credit for, and provide more meaningful and difficult decisions to be made in deckbuilding than are found in an average draft. This leads to sealed decks being more unique, more contextual, more "personalized" than draft decks -- you're not tuning a constructed deck, you're not drafting an archetype, you're building YOUR sealed deck.

In other words, Sealed is the most "Limited" of all the Limited formats:

The pool I want to discuss today is the epitome of this idea -- while I was crushing with my own build in the Super Qualifier, I sent it to lots of different people to see what they would build. Each person I sent it to, I got back a unique deck - not just the same core with a few different 20th-23rd card choices, but a truly different approach.

So let's get into it. What's this mythical pool like? What are we workin' with here?

The Pool

Here's the full pool. I encourage everyone who can to take some time on their own to sift through it and try to build the best deck they can!

For the folks who can't do this, here's a full image from sealeddeck.tech where I'm displaying the 17Lands Premier Draft "game in hand winrate"s on each card mostly just to make the top of each card's art box more visible for scanning, but might also give folks unfamiliar with the limited format a very (very) rough card quality scale:

So where do we start? How do we "build a sealed deck"?

Bombs

The first thing to do with any sealed pool is the obvious one - It's what everybody does... check your rares and see if you got any bombs!

I don't intend to sit here and tell you that Sealed isn't a rare-dominated format. In 90%+ of cases, your final deck should be one that allows you to play the strongest cards in your pool in some kind of consistent shell, most of which will be rares.

Still, there are a few nuances here. When I open a sealed pool, I'm looking for things I can call bombs, but those bombs don't have to be individual rare cards. I also consider powerful uncommons that I view as on the level of the good rares as bombs, and I also might consider a really powerful synergy package as on the level of a bomb when it comes to pulling me into a color.

Examples of this might be a Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper (59% GIHwr in draft), or 3x Fire Nation Cadets, multiple Firebending Lessons, and a variety of other lessons + ways to spend firebending mana (one notable property about Avatar Limited was that it lacks many compact, high-power-level common packages that could compete with uncommons and rares, which is why this example is a bit convoluted).

Avatar is a very bomby format. The typical A level rare in a limited set has above a 63% winrate in draft, and Avatar has 11 non-bonus-sheet cards above this line (Legend of Yangchen, United Front, Legend of Kuruk, Wan Shi Tong, Rise of Sozin, Koh the Face Stealer, The Fire Nation Drill, Legend of Roku, The Earth King, Aang Swift Savior, Bumi Unleashed).

We don't have any of these "top tier bombs" in this pool, but we have a few cards just a tier below:

The only issue is that these cards are evenly split across... well, all 5 colors, almost comically so. That means that we probably won't be able to put all of them in the same deck.

So we don't have any of the (many) top tier bombs in the format, and we don't have enough color overlap to put our strongest cards all together in a consistent deck.

Time to pack it up, pool sucks!!

... calm down. There are more way than one for a pool to be good. We still have a few things to check.

The Mana

The second thing I always check in a sealed pool is my mana. In some formats this is pretty much a check for dual lands, but nowadays, most sets also have colorless fixing and often some amount of smoothing/fixing effects, usually in green, but sometimes in other colors (like Abandon Attachments, which does get partial credit as fixing!)

Checking your bombs is how you figure out what you want to play. Checking your mana is how you figure out what you actually can play.

Variance in mana optionality is a HUGELY important part of a sealed pool. If you've got a wide variety of fixing in colors that line up with your bombs, or even better, some strong universal fixers, the world is your oyster. So where are we with this pool?

Okay, now we're talking!

This is definitely a pool with above-average fixing tools. If we're in green, we'll get access to Great Divide Guide (one of the strongest cards in the pool already), Ostrich-Horse, Unlucky Cabbage Merchant, and Seismic Sense as fixing/smoothing tools that we are happy to put into any deck, and will have plenty of other fixing to put into any deck that desperately needs it (though, without access to premium bombs, it's going to be hard to justify playing Sparring Dummy or Cycle of Renewal because of how bad they are as standalone cards)

If we are also base-blue, we'll get an additional Hermitic Herbalist (an excellent-rate fixer almost on par with GDG), and a Waterbending lesson for our troubles.

We also have a few lands that help fix in roughly the blue-green space, potentially letting us splash black or red.

But I think the strongest aspect of this pool's fixing is actually how many tools we still have access to even in a nongreen deck -- namely, the 2x Barrels of Blasting Jelly and an Aang's Journey (which is essentially a slightly clunky 5-color land that counts towards your lesson payoffs).

Having ~3.5 of these colorless fixers (partial credit for Aang's Journey/Rumble Arena) means that we could potentially build a nongreen deck that is base-2-colors, but leans into a third color for a heavy splash. This is a very powerful option to have access to if we don't like the rest of the green cards in the pool!

While we probably can't just shove all the most powerful cards in the pool into a blue-green shell and call it a day, we are going to have a lot of options in deckbuilding for how we build a manabase that accommodates the most powerful combination of cards we can. This pool's mana is its' superpower.

Almost every pool has a superpower. Sometimes it's a couple powerful bombs, but players often misbuild and underestimate pools that have a different outlier strength. Usually the best build will try to leverage your pool's greatest strength.

The Colors

Now we're getting into the meat of things. Once we know the cards we want to fit in our deck, and the mana that allows (or doesn't) allow us to do so, we move on to the skeletons available to us.

The bombs and mana should inform what we're looking for here. If I have a powerful black bomb, but zero black fixing (or if the bomb is double-pipped), I'm desperately hoping black has a strong enough skeleton to be a base color or another color has enough to almost build a full deck from. Here, we're in a bit of a weird spot -- we have access to a single strong card in almost every color, but we don't have a particular draw -- so the strengths of the "filler" cards in each color are going to matter a lot. Let's compare:

White

White has arguably the best card in our pool in Appa, some nice spells like Airbending Lesson and Enter the Avatar State and some solid 2-drops, but is otherwise extremely shallow.

Blue

Blue is overall quite strong but still a bit shallow - it gives us a couple premium 2-drops (Fortune Teller and Quench), some replaceable 2s, a Katara, which I value much higher in sealed than draft because games get grindier and she becomes a must-kill threat quite easily, a strong card draw spell in Waterbending Lesson, and one of the best removal spells in the format, Lost Days. The Waterbending Scroll would only be playable if blue were much deeper.

Black

Black is deep in playables, but very clunky in its curve, and short in playables we uh... actually want to play. Sold Out is a solid removal spell, but not every deck wants 3 of them. Joo Dee is very strong in a synergistic draft deck and quite playable in every deck, but we don't seem to have the support to make it really shine. Swampsnare Trap is a solid removal spell we'll play most of the time. But the Wolfbats and the Azulas are a glut of the kind of "inefficient but grindy" card that you play if the rest of your deck supports them and you just need ways to pull ahead in a long game. It's not obvious that they're what we want here.

The 5-drops are both mediocre -- I'd only play Lo and Li if I were playing Azulas or particularly strong lessons, but we do have the Azulas, so I could see it. Merchants is just a very respectable threat, but nothing special for 5 mana.

Red

Red is the weakest color so far - the only cards we actively want to put in our deck are Fire Sages, Wartime Protestors, and an enabled Ran and Shaw, which can be extremely powerful but can also be hard to make work, especially when your only playable red lessons are two How to Start a Riot. The curve just isn't here to build a powerful aggro deck, and though red can play a more spells-based control role in this format, those tools certainly aren't here.

Green

The color we were excited about playing for its strong fixing, especially considering the wide color distribution of our strongest cards, unfortunately doesn't have much going for it beyond the fixing we already covered. Raucous Audience is a very strong common that is key to a lot of green decks, but the excitement ends there. Foggy-Swamp Vinebender and Saber-Tooth Moose-Lion are... fine. They're creatures with on-rate stats that you're allowed to put in your limited deck. Sometimes you need those! Green will be good as a main color in this pool if we can take advantage of the fixing tools it gives us, but it doesn't draw us in with much power of its own beyond Great Divide Guide, Raucous Audience, and Seismic Sense - setup tools to facilitate stronger cards, not cards that can win games on their own.

Colorless and Hybrid cards ("The Hole Fillers")

In this particular format, there are a large amount of common & uncommon hybrid cards that are supposed to help support mono-color archetypes in the draft environment. These cards are very important tools for sealed pools, because they represent pseudo-'colorless' cards that can fill out a deck's curve. I'm including Fire Nation Warship here because it fills the same role -- a solid, totally respectable 3-drop that goes in almost any deck!

Unfortunately, we don't have much filler for the most valuable place in our curve - the 2-drop slot. Pretending Poxbearers will go in most decks we build, as well as Fire Nation Warship, and Guru Pathik is a strong 4-drop in decks with a lot of lessons (6+), but the rest of these cards are not exciting to play, and most are 4-drops, an already quite contested spot on the curve if we're playing black.

Finding a First Draft

So where does this leave us? Unfortunately, all of our colors are quite shallow, and we don't have that many tools to fill out our curve with flexibly. Red is the weakest color and the easiest to discard, but it's reasonable to start with any combination of the other colors. White and blue probably have the strongest individual rate cards, green has enough fixing to build a true 3-color deck but little reason to justify its own cards being part of that deck, and black is the deepest color and has the removal, but lacks quality.

Let's see what each person I sent this pool to built as their first draft, to get a sense of the possiblity space before us.

I'm going to be evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each of these decks on their own -- I think a big part of being a good Sealed deckbuilder is understanding what a strong Limited deck looks like in the abstract, which I wrote about here!

Jason Ye built a Mardu shell, base-BW splashing red for Wartime Protestors, Fire Lord Zuko, and Sun Warriors. This is 27 cards, so there will need to be some cuts, but since it's just a first draft it's fine.

What are this deck's strengths?

Plenty of removal

Grindy engines like Toils of War, Azulas, Lo and Li, and the Appas

Enough 2-drops to get on board early

Solid mana

How about its weaknesses?

Many of the weaker cards don't stand up well on their own (Fire Lord Zuko, Appa 6, Corrupt Court Official without a lot of sacrifice synergy, Airbender's Reversal with a glut of removal, medium 2-drops without a true aggro curve to capitalize on them)

We have wayyy too many 4-drops, which will lead to a lot of clunky hands

Basically all of our removal is also quite clunky/mana-hungry, and so are our card advantage engines

This is a solid limited deck, but I'm quite skeptical it can beat decks that just get more out of each mana they spend, by having their high impact cards be cheaper and their card advantage come from synergies and efficient, powerful rares that affect the board at the same time as they pull you ahead on material.

Moving on!

wund3rboi from the Limited Level-Ups discord built this straightforward BW deck:

The thesis of this deck is that the red splash, which has us playing 2X Barrels, a Rumble Arena, and an Aang's journey to fit in Fire Lord Zuko, Wartime Protestors, and Sun Warriors, is diluting an otherwise fair deck with inefficient cards for only a small amount of upside.

This deck argues that Wolfbats and a Tundra Tank filling out our curve between 2 and 4 leaves us with a solid limited curve that gets on board and still has plenty of interaction to answer bombs, and ways to go up on cards so that we don't run out of things to do.

I like this deck a good amount! I think it's probably better than the Mardu deck, which has some nice strengths but more devastating flaws.

I wouldn't be unhappy to submit this deck, but I wouldn't be happy either -- it's pretty underpowered for such a bomby format, and we'd mostly be relying on having draws that line up slightly better than our opponents.

My roommate Mora built a UB based deck with a very light white splash for Tolls of War:

This deck is also pretty solid, and some of the blue cards are very appealing -- Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper is just a bomb-level card in this deck, Forecasting Fortune Teller fits perfectly, It'll Quench Ya provides some much-needed cheap interaction, Katara is going to have lots of fodder to waterbend with, and Lost Days instantly becomes our best removal spell. Moreover, the extra clues that the blue cards produce make Tolls of War that much stronger, which makes it a very worthwhile splash!

However, because of blue's shallowness, this deck has to play some pretty stinky 3-drops in the Earth Village Ruffians, and it still has the glut of 4-drops and the same problem where it's gaining card advantage through cracking clues, but also needs to tie up a lot of its lategame mana in casting expensive removal spells. The First-Time Flyer is also probably on the edge of playable with only 3 lessons.

ADoodWithaGood from the Limited Level-Ups discord took a similar approach to Mora from the other direction - he built BWu, splashing the strongest blue cards instead of the strongest white cards. This approach makes a lot of sense, because our best blue cards are single-pipped while Appa is double-pipped:

The black decks we keep building seem to consistently be running into the "lots of 4-drops and clunky removal" problem, and ADWAG tries to fix this problem by cutting an Azula, a change I approve of.

I think this is my favorite deck so far. It's consistent, reasonably synergistic, has enough early board presence, has enough removal to deal with bombs and enough card advantage to not run out of gas. I'd be pretty happy to submit a deck like this.

But fundamentally this deck still misses out on playing a lot of the power in the pool, and in general is a bit underpowered for a sealed deck in a large tournament that will inevitably have to compete with some outlier pools.

Solving the Soup Puzzle

Great Divide Guide and Wartime Protestors are very strong cards, and if we could find a way to fit them into a multicolor "soup" shell that still plays a lot of these powerful esper cards, maybe that would be better! It could be an imposible dream, but it's worth making an attempt (or 5).

It's important to notice in the esper deck above that the only black cards we're actually happy to be playing here are the Sold Outs, the Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper, and the Tolls of War. The other black cards are very filler (people might be surprised I'm saying this about Azula, but she's a clunky 4-drop that doesn't perform well in the format generally). While blue and white aren't nearly deep enough to make a base-2-color deck together, maybe green is the "glue" color we need to fill things out. Its abundant fixing might let us splash around for the power we want while lowering our curve at the same time.

My PT teammate Jennifer Wang and her partner Luke tried to build multicolor decks with this philosophy. Here's Luke's:

Here's where we're going to get into the nitty gritty details of limited manabases. I think being able to build manabases at an elite level can often be the difference-maker in Sealed, and in limited in general, so while this might be boring for some people, you should know that these details really do matter - in fact, they are often the big difference maker.

This is a base-UG deck that is trying to splash white for Airbender's Reversal, Airbending Lesson, White Lotus Reinforcements, Fire Lord Zuko, Sun Warriors, and Appa, splashing red for Zuko, Protestors and Sun Warriors, and splashing black for Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper and triple Sold Out.

The source counts (including Barrels, but only including Great Divide Guide and Hermitic Herbalist for the non-green and blue colors):

10 Green

9 Blue

6 White

7 Red

7 Black

The first issue here is that 6 sources is not enough to play Appa, a double-pipped card, nor enough to play a total of 6 white cards.

For those unfamiliar with how to think about source counts in limited, here's a helpful guide:

1 source - This is an opportunistic dip into a modal card that I'm happy to never cast for its other color. Almost always accomplished via a card that can produce one of my main colors as well (dual land or 5C fixer)

2 sources- Still an opportunistic dip, or maybe a risky splash of a REALLY powerful card that I'm happy to be casting no matter how late the game goes. Potentially an acceptable way to splash a bomb in a deck with lots of card selection, but I'd still like 3 sources ideally

3 sources- A risky, but acceptable splash for an A/A- level card (maybe 2) that I'm okay casting reasonably late.

4 sources- A very comfortable splash for a single card, a reasonably comfortable splash for 2

5 sources- Now we're starting to get into 3,4,5-card "splashes" that are really more like a pseudo-main-color. If I'm going to be pretty uncomfortable not having access to this color in a normal game, I need 5 sources. This is the "awkward middle", and ideally you don't want to be here. Often 5 sources will be a splash where I just happen to have a bunch of free sources (or sources that are taxed in other ways).

6 sources- Still somewhat in the awkward middle, but now starting to get more comfortable with powerful early-game cards that are still relevant later on. I'd play up to 5 B level cards if I could easily fit in 6 sources without hurting the rest of my mana too much.

7 sources- Officially in main color territory, but we want to be careful not to lean on this color too heavily. For supporting colors that aren't necessary to see in opening hands. Tough to support double-pipped cards

8 sources- Solid main color, but hopefully not a heavy one. The minimum number of sources for a color you must have access to on turn 2. Can support double-pipped cards, but not freely

9 sources- Comfortable main color. Reliably cast your 2-drops, reliably have access to double pips.

10 sources- This is a color you're leaning heavily on (think green in a 5C green deck). If I told you you don't have this color until turn 4, you'd immediately conclude you lost the game.

This deck is playing around in the "awkward middle" with its white counts -- 6 sources, some of them removable, for 6 cards, one of which is double-pipped. That's not a splash, that's a support color, and we don't have enough sources for it. We could adjust the mana by cutting a forest for a plains, but that still leaves us with just 7 sources, and I'd need 8 as an absolute minimum to be comfortable supporting this white (8 "can support double-pipped cards, but not freely"). 6 is unacceptably low.

There's also one more problem with the mana, which is that even though the source counts for the rest of the colors are technically fine, it's pretty hard to curve into the cards we want to cast on curve effectively. It's not really feasible to curve Raucous Audience, unlucky Cabbage Merchant, or Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper into Fire Lord Zuko or Sun Warriors, which means we're losing out on a lot of the power of the more heavily splashed cards, which will sometimes only come online after we've spent some time setting up our mana. For cards that aren't always powerful at any stage of the game, this is a real downside to our manabase that should be acknowledged.

This deck does succeed at lowering its curve though, and playing all of the pool's most powerful cards! So the fact that there's only one big mana issue means if we keep working on it, there might be a manabase solution here.

Let's look at another attempt at multicolor. Here's Jennifer's build:

This is a base-bant deck splashing black for Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper and Fire Lord Zuko, and splashing red for Wartime Protestors and Zuko. That's in some senses more ambitious and in some senses more conservative than Luke's build. The rough source counts are:

8 green

9 blue

9 white

8 black

8 red

This works a bit better, although because I'm counting Great Divide Guide and Herbalist as sources of the colors they aren't, we'd really want one if not two more green sources, so I might end up cutting an island and a plains for two more forests. The issue with that is that we barely have any green cards!! This is the danger with trying to splash your fixing.

I like that Jennifer's playing Aang's Journey here over the 17th land, because getting selection on the final basic you draw for the cost of 2 mana I think is better than playing an arbitrary additional basic -- the mana's just that important to get right. Plus we have a First-Time Flyer!

The problems with this deck are that we're still splashing Zuko for the synergy with Appa despite him being quite hard to cast on curve, and we've cut some of our unconditional removal in the Sold Outs, which makes it harder to be a deck trying to compete in the long game against bombs. On that point, we have to be a deck trying to go long, because a base of 2-drops that's evenly split between 3 colors can't expect to always have access to the board-affecting plays of its choice. But along with our desire to go long, I'm less confident in our ability to play into the lategame with a lot of low-impact 2s.

Quick pause.

It might sound like I'm just being relentlessly critical of everyone else's decks, and being too focused on all the problems to accept that we just have a solid but slightly underpowered pool, pick a good-but-not-great build, and submit it.

But that's precisely my point!!!!

Even though this particular pool is a pretty big outlier on this axis and has upwards of 10, heck, maybe 20 deeply flawed decks of comparable quality, most sealed pools will still have a variety of possible directions to build in, and your job is to ruthlessly criticize them and try to patch their holes until you find one you're satisfied with, or run out of time.

When I was building this pool, I didn't see most of these builds, because I value cards slightly differently from each person I sent the pool to. But even though I was building different decks I thought looked fine, there was something tugging at the back of my mind saying this isn't the best you can do.

I think listening to that voice is really important in sealed if only to make you keep trying to find different angles, even if you end up concluding that none of them ended up in better builds than your first draft.

So let's keep listening to the inner critic.

My friend Teddy (tedfro from the LLU discord) tried to build a GW-based multicolor deck:

This deck cleverly tries to maximize the power of Ran and Shaw by splashing the powerful blue lessons and playing Guru Pathik. A pretty different direction for the multicolor space, and an exciting one in my opinion!

Our source counts are:

10 green

9 white

8 blue

8 red

Even though splashing Ran and Shaw, a double-pipped card, is daunting, I think this deck succeeds at it by including 8 red sources (mountain, airship engine room, barrelsx2, aang's journey, great divide guide, cycle of renewal, and cabbage merchant/rumble arena getting partial credit). It also enables making the second dragon just well enough, playing 7 lessons with Guru Pathik/Sparring Dummy/Ostrich Horse teaming up to count as our "8th".

The mana in this deck works, the curve is low, we have actually been able to engineer our way into a "true bomb", we're able to consistently cast our cards on curve, and the source counts are functional.

Wonderful! Submit! I'm so proud we found this deck.

.... except hold on a second, we should really scan for any other potential flaws.

I'm pretty concerned about this deck's ability to continue to spend mana as the game goes on. Sparring Dummy, Cycle of Renewal, and Aang's Journey give us a virtual 19 lands, and only a few of our cards go up on material in a meaningful way (Waterbending Lesson, Lost Days, Appa, Guru Pathik, and Ran and Shaw when it's turned on).

I'm also concerned that we've dipped too low on good removal -- we have only 4 removal spells in 2x Barrels, Airbender's Reversal, and Lost Days -- plus, our Barrels are unnaturally pressured to stay on the battlefield un-cracked because they're sources for a double-pipped card that we are splashing that also has a condition we really want to meet before casting it.

I think I'd submit ADoodWithaGood's esper deck over this deck -- they have very different strengths and weaknesses, but I think the esper deck is just more solid in terms of removal, board presence and mana sinks, and has a similar overall power level, and I'd bet on a deck with the "meh, it's not that good" problem over a deck with the "does this deck just run out of impactful things to do too quickly, and can it actually beat bombs?" problems.

Okay, I promise this next build is the last deck "draft" we're going to look at. Zev Goldhaber-Gordon, a friend & PT player, tried to build a Ran and Shaw soup deck that solves some of the problems I had with Teddy's deck:

By basing ourselves in blue instead of white, we can play Katara and Forecasting Fortune Teller, giving us two more ways to go up on cards. Zev is also playing the Tolls of War for more ways to grind, and splashing two Sold Outs and a Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper for good measure!

This is an ambitious manabase though -- does it hold up?

9 green sources

10 blue sources

7.5 white sources

8 red sources

8 black sources

This is... workable. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty damn impressive way to cram so much power into a deck while staying defensible with the source counts. We're leaning on blue and green exclusively for our 2-drops, and have 10 and 9 sources respectively for each. The blue and green base unlocks enough fixing for us to accommodate whichever other 1-2 sources we need in the early-mid game, and then eventually we should be able to find the 5th color, or the second red source for our lategame "true bomb" Ran and Shaw (which will be enabled in long games due to our 9ish lessons, same as the count from Teddy's deck, plus It'll Quench Ya!).

Moreover, we still have a low curve, have a few more ways to go up on cards now, and have 3 additional strong removal spells. This is an extremely solid limited deck with very few holes beyond needing to worry about finding its mana in time throughout the game!

Now, don't get me wrong -- that last point, "needing to worry about finding its mana in time", is real. There will be some games you lose with this deck because you fixed for white and black early, and drew Ran and Shaw with only one red source in a long game. The Tolls of War, for example, is quite hard to cast early. There will be games where you can't cast your Airbending Lesson on time, instead needing to cast a do-nothing 3-drop Cycle of Renewal just to set up your "tempo" card, and fall behind to a deck that's just playing the creatures it got in its deepest colors on curve.

It's impossible to build a deck with no problems -- I am also pretty disappointed with the lower end of this deck's power level, Sparring Dummy and Cycle of Renewal are very stinky cards in my opinion. But 2-color limited decks also often play bad cards, and also fail to cast their cards on time sometimes. In terms of casting its 2-drops on turn 2, this deck has 8 green sources and 8 blue sources, with some more fixing up to 10+ sources each for double spelling on future turns. That's very nearly as good as any 2-color deck is going to achieve.

In the realm of functional and consistent magic decks with some flaws, this deck can compete in the early game with the streamlined 2-color decks, and it can compete in the lategame with the bomby piles. It's an extremely well-rounded limited deck with responsible source counts. It's really hard to find out of this pool, but I believe someone who submitted this build would have a pretty similar winrate, if not somewhat better, to the solid esper deck we liked out of the earlier builds.

For side-by-side comparison:

I think a lot of people would scan these two decks side by side and conclude that the esper deck is more consistent and overall better, and the soupy deck must be too greedy. But if you pay careful attention to the source counts and the timing of when you want to cast your spells, I contend that things are a lot closer than they appear, and the soup deck gains a lot of robustness from the ability to pick and choose the cards it wants to play while enabling a powerful bomb.

Achieving Perfection

You guys didn't think I was gonna let you believe that Zev built the best deck, right?

All of the decks above are good, but in my opinion, meaningfully not the best deck you can build with this pool. They are all important stepping stones to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the pool, and the possible structures available to us -- but I believe we can achieve even greater structural synthesis.

Behold, the perfect sealed deck:

I'm obviously being a little tongue-in-cheek here. This deck's not perfect, and it's very hard to say whether it's in some objective sense the "best" deck that can be built from this pool. But I do think this deck represents a very tangible maximization of this pool's strengths (good mana, a lot of powerful cards) and minimization of its weaknesses (shallow colors, clunky removal, hard to fit all the power together in a way that makes sense). It very well may be the best sealed deck I've personally ever built, in terms of the difficulty of finding it and the deep lack of holes/weaknesses.

Let's start with the mana. I view this as a base-bant deck, splashing black for 4 cards and red for 1 card. The rough source counts are:

9 Green (6 cards)

10 Blue (7 cards)

8 white (5 cards, one double-pipped)

7 black (4 cards)

5 red (1 card)

(Compare to Zev's deck: 9/10/7.5/8/8 for 8/6/3/4/2, one double pipped)

The comparison is difficult here, but I'd say our decks are roughly equally consistent at finding all our sources in the long run. The difference is that Zev's deck gets to enable Ran and Shaw, whereas mine gets to play more white cards on-curve and play Appa as its rare instead.

I'm consolidating white to a full support color and demoting red/black down to splashes. I believe this focus on 3 "main" colors gives this deck an easier time in gameplay figuring out which sources it needs to establish early, and which can wait till later. In the early game, you can find a white source to cast your Glider Kids, a green source to play Great Divide Guide and unlock all your mana forever, or a blue source to hold up It'll Quench Ya, while knowing that you're very likely to draw a universal fixer for that Sold Out in your hand by the time it matters. In Zev's deck, finding that first red source to set up your Ran and Shaw down the line (one of only two red cards in your deck) sets you back much further on casting your Airbender's Reversal or Airbending Lesson.

I also get to cut the bad cards Cycle of Renewal and Sparring Dummy, which are there to support Ran and Shaw and squeeze more sources into the deck, but don't hold up on their own and can cost you games with their stinkiness. Instead, I get to play cards like Glider Kids, an on-rate body that helps smooth our draws, and White Lotus Reinforcements, a pseudo-bomb in a deck with 13 allies!

If we assume that all the spells are castable, this is a deck with about:

13 creatures with on-rate bodies

6 removal spells that can deal with a bomb

7 ways to go up on cards

7 "premium uncommon" or higher level cards

6 2-drops that count towards defensive speed

Compared to Zev's 9/6/6/6/6, and the esper deck's 9/7/6/4/4.

This deck is just the most powerful deck that we've seen so far. It will do more things and bigger, faster things over the course of a limited game where both decks see a large portion of their library than any of the other decks.

Consistency: Practice Before Theory

I also contend that this deck is genuinely quite consistent at doing these powerful things.

I know that people won't necessarily believe me when I say this, so I want to talk about why this deck actually works -- but before telling you, let me show you.

Here are some truly random opening hands from this deck (I am actually pasting every hand I simulate on the first time I'm trying this without any editing tricks, I promise -- do it yourself if you don't believe me!):

Keep

Keep

Keep

Keep

Mull (1.5-lander)

Snap keep

Keep

Close, maybe mull?

Keep

Snap keep

Mull

Keep

Keep

Keep

Mull

That's 11/15 hands we'd keep, and most of them look quite strong, even if they end up needing to wait a little bit to access one of their cards.

Okay, now here are some hands from the "consistent, responsible" esper deck (10/10/5 sources):

Keep, but slightly worrying if we need to use our Barrels before casting Appa

Keep, but not amazing

Uh..... I think we have to mull this, not 100% sure though, it's high upside

Mull

Keep

Mull

Snap keep

Keep

Keep

Keep

Mull

Keep, but not guaranteed we get to use this Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper this game

Keep

Keep

Mull

That's 10/15 keeps, not a lot worse, but definitely not clearly better by any measure. The difference between total keeps/mulls is probably just minor variance but I hope I've convinced you that the soup deck is at least quite close to the consistency of the esper deck, if not actively more consistent (and I think it probably actually is).

How excited are we by the hands we kept in the esper deck? Lots of them don't do anything particularly powerful, whereas almost every keepable hand in the soup deck had a lot going for it.

Why did I bother showing you this deck's consistency instead of explaining it to you? Because I genuinely think that practice is a lot more important than theory when talking about limited decks and making them function smoothly. There's a lot of tricky-to-see nuance that goes into this, some of which I've already covered, but the most important thing is that if it works, it works, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If you're trying a deck that has completely acceptable source counts but keep finding yourself in situations where you don't have access to the right colors when you need them, you're probably missing something important. If you think a deck simply must be less consistent than a normal limited deck, but you keep drawing opening hands with it and most of them are bangers, you're probably missing something.

Here's my best attempt at explaining what folks often miss about soupy decks like this, both in the sense of building them poorly and not being brave enough to build them at all:

(I then followed up to Andrew with this longer-form thought experiment):

For the record, adding in swamp would turn Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper, Tolls of War, and both Sold Outs into live draws, making for only 9 bad first draws in the entire deck.

This is just a highly consistent soup deck that gets better the more cards it sees, and also has the potential for lots of fast, explosive starts -- curving on-rate allies into payoffs, or quickly ramping into cards like Katara and Waterbending Lesson to run away with the game. It can race, it can grind, it can answer bombs. It's the total package. And it took us 9 rebuilds, but we got there.

This deck, which I submitted after cutting a basic mountain for an extra island with 9 seconds left on the build clock, cut through 9 rounds of the toughest MTGO limited players you can find like butter. I lost once to a UW deck that curved strong common creatures into multiple bombs, and most other matches didn't feel close (besides round 1, another UW curveout bombs deck that I beat. These tournaments are so brutal, it was still a close call in a way!)

I love this pool, I love this deck, and I freaking love Sealed!!!!!

Wrapping Up

I wouldn't have been able to build this pool in only 20 minutes if I'd been the same sealed player I was a year ago, maybe not even a few months ago. I want to give particular shoutouts to Noor Singh, cftsoc, and Daniel Goetschel as players who I've learned a lot from observing over the past year.

Folks can certainly disagree about some of the card evaluations I made in this piece, and I'm sure many strong sealed players would build my final deck slightly differently based on their own perceived best cards and strategies.

But I think somewhere between 90-99% of players who opened this pool would have concluded that they had opened a average-to-slightly-below-average pool, and built a "responsible" 2-color deck with a splash.

This kind of discipline is quite often the correct way to build a pool! I think the esper deck would have been better than most of the other multicolor decks we looked at today. Sealed is extremely hard

Even between the same general builds, small card choices can matter a lot. I think the step between Zev's deck and mine, only a matter of 5ish spells and a couple land swaps, is a pretty large one. Similar differences between more normal 2-color decks can also make or break a pool.

If you take away anything from this piece, it's to always be asking yourself "Am I really building the best possible deck with the cards available to me? Are there any holes I can patch up, any consistency improvements I can make, any power boosts worth fighting for?"

If you always ask whether you can do better, sometimes you'll find that the answer is a surprising yes.

So go out there and play some Magic as Garfield intended. Go build a sealed deck.