fbpx

Modern Masters 2015 Sealed Practice for #GPVegas

Modern Masters Sealed has turned out to be incredibly complex and the variation in builds is very much tied to the synergy of the archetypes seeded into the format. Often the pools will be very divisive because there isn’t that much cross-synergy between the various archetypes. This results in pools that focus on synergy if enough cards are present like Jacob Wilson’s RB pool, or a more power-based build with mana fixing as we’ve seen with pools like Owen’s 5-color deck. Let’s dive in and see what we have with this pool!

Sealed Pool

White

Blue

Black

Red

Green

Multicolor

Artifact and Colorless

Lands

My Build

This pool doesn’t have a ton of power at rare, and also is somewhat low on fixing, so it simply isn’t set up for a 5-color ramp build. It does have a couple of interesting synergy builds it can move toward, including the artifact deck I built here which is supported by a plethora of artifacts and strong white enablers. At that point the question is whether to pair blue or red with the white. The blue looks quite a bit better at first, but once you start cutting the less powerful cards you’ll see that the deck only has a few slots for the best colored cards. At that point I think the red is a stronger splash. Guile is fine but hard to cast, and Qumulox would be quite strong but is simply worse than Hellkite Charger. I considered still running Tezzeret’s Gambit in RW but I think being as aggressive as possible is correct here especially given the lack of proliferate value.

I did include a few controversial cards in my final build that I’d like to discuss. First, Smash to Smithereens is in the main because I think most pools will have about 2-4 maindeck artifacts, and some will have many more. This deck wants to be attacking which also makes the 3 damage relevant, and I think most decks should be maindecking 1 Smash to Smithereens, Sundering Vitae, or Terashi’s Grasp. Sundering Vitae and Terashi’s Grasp also have the benefit of removing enchantments like Arrest and Narcolepsy, alongside some higher rarity cards like Necrogenesis and Inexorable Tide.

Second, Kitesail looks a bit weak but provides some reach in addition to being an artifact. It further buffs Sunspear Shikari and deserves respect in any deck trying to kill the opponent quickly. I wasn’t often considering it in my green Sealed decks, but will look at it with a much keener eye moving forward since it overperformed in practice games. Lastly, Skyhunter Skirmisher looks weak here with only a few ways to pump it, but the baseline creature is quite good in this format simply because the ground gets filled with a ton of blockers including Eldrazi Spawn, making flying even better than normal.

The other option with this pool is a UG proliferate deck, but once curved out you’ll see that it’s not nearly fast enough to keep up with the other decks. It does have a lot of late game power with 2 Cytoplast Root-Kin and a token swarm theme, but it can’t compete with a fast game plan. I do like this deck as an option to play post-board after the opponent boards in a bunch of artifact removal for the RW deck. At that point you’ll likely be blanking 1-3 spells, though to be effective you do have to cut good artifacts like Chimeric Mass and Precursor Golem from UG. Here’s the UG deck I’d consider playing post board:

(And choose two of 2 Sundering Vitae and 1 Plummet.)

[collapse]

See you in Vegas!

Scroll to Top