Reality Fracture Sealed Tips

I usually write quite a bit about Booster Draft when a new set comes out, and generally the Draft format is just a more curated experience of Limited than Sealed.

With the newer structure of Arena that's constantly putting out Arena Directs (seemingly every other week), Sealed is a much more useful skill than it used to be.

While the Hobbit Sealed format was not very popular, I actually found it a bit refreshing. There was only a handful of truly broken rares, and most of the sealed decks played Black cards of some variety because of how deep the color was.

Reality Fracture is almost the polar opposite of Hobbit. In Reality Fracture you're not ignoring any colors, and should be focusing a lot more on playing your bomb rares. Hopefully you have some, because despite what a lot of the Sealed truthers will have you believe, the rares are extremely important in a format this grindy.

Generally the first thing you should be looking at when opening a sealed pool is your rares, obviously, but after that you should look at your fixing and in Reality Fracture that includes land cyclers. A lot of formats you don't want to rely heavily on land cycling as part of your mana base, but in this format you absolutely can, and should.

While aggressive decks exist, most people build their deck with a bunch of colors, whether it's correct for their pool, or not.

When I think it's correct to build your deck a bunch of different colors, and in a way that wants to play long drawn out games, is when you have all the tools necessary, or at least a lot of them.

To play long games and win you need bombs, removal, and functional mana so you can actually get to the mid and end game.

Bombs is pluralized for a reason. Just because you have an Ajani Unrelenting doesn't give you inevitability. This format has crazy amounts of card advantage, and while Ajani can reset the board and win quickly if unchecked, this format is also quite good at dealing with planeswalkers. That means Ajani won't single-handedly carry an otherwise bad pool, you need to be able to keep up with the opponent's engines and play a normal game of Magic.

You want to avoid filler in this format because you're going to see a large percentage of your deck. This means you want to put cards in your deck that generate more than just a single card's worth of value if possible. This comes in so many forms in this set: Cards that create Heartwoods, have some other prepared value, draw raw cards, or at the very least remove problematic creatures.

Anything that empowers Jace is by default more than 1 card worth of value.

Aside from rares, there a few really key uncommons in the format from my experience. Number one is, of course, Kiora of Fire and Ashes. Kiora is one of the best cards in the format and a card you obviously want to priorize playing.

Craftwork Crusher is next on the list. Craftwork Crusher almost always dominates the battlefield, generates value, and removes problematic creatures.

I think both of the cards I listed are pretty obviously strong, and the one that I think gets a lot less attention is Way of the Mindsculptor. Way of the Mindsculptor with any additional Empower Jace support allows you to churn through your deck aggressively, and find threats or removal almost at will. Since the format is all about keeping your opponents best threats off the battlefield and deploying your own (as opposed to formats that favor tempo) Way of the Mindsculptor is a card I almost always squeeze into my deck, even as a splash, as long as I'm empowering Jace enough. Additionally, Way of the Mindsculptor almost always comes with Way of the Paradox, and the synergy between the two is absolutely incredible. It allows you to draw through your deck quickly and also make extra land drops so you can cast your extra cards even faster.

Example Sealed

As far as color balance, I think white is the weakest color, but not like some colors in Hobbit where it's unplayable. If anything, the issue is how strong blue is relative to other colors. At common we have Mindseeker Oculus which is just unbelievably strong for a common, and fuels Way of the Mindsculptor in addition to getting on board early and generating card advantage.

While I do think the best decks are just playing 3-5 colors with a lot of good rares, sometimes your pool is just not good enough to play long games. People have realized you can play slower decks but you can also take advantage of that and do something lower to the ground. Here's a 7-0 deck that's extremely unpowered, and attacking people trying to play a slower grindier game.

BW Aggro Sealed

This deck had a lot of hard hitting cheap creatures and removal, but basically no rares. While I did have Repurposed Enforcer and a Darklight Phoenix, these aren't exactly the highest impact rares, and Darklight Phoenix is just a Snare Thopter for the most part.

This deck could keep up against grindier ones because of all the Empower Jace attached to random three-power bodies, allowing me to rarely flood out and continue to draw gas. I had a small self-mill package with a few payoffs in the graveyard, but mostly it just turned the Metamages into fliers to close the games out. This is certainly one of the most underpowered decks I opened but I hit the right matchups and was able to close out some closer games with tight play and aggressive starts leaving my opponents on the back foot.

I do feel really burned out playing this format because the decks all feel extremely similar. While there's a lot of "pretend" archetypes, people are mostly just playing Empower Jace synergies and great rares, and you can almost be sure if someone has Mountain in their deck they're casting Kiora. We're mostly building our deck with removal and the few powerful threats at lower rarities.

Overall, I liked Hobbit Sealed more than this format because Hobbit Sealed felt like a much more level playing field where the play mattered quite a bit, and understanding how to sequence into Cruel Bent Blade paid off a lot. In Reality Fracture Sealed if you open a lower than average pool it feels really difficult to put together a winning deck.

With the Arena Champs qualifier next weekend I'll pivot most of my attention back to Booster Draft, and may even play in a paper Limited Champs Qualifier at the end of the month, schedule permitting.

It seems like the reception of this format is overall positive, which is great because it's the kind of format I generally enjoy, however this one just isn't quite hitting for me. I still like it, just not as much as formats that felt a lot more fleshed out like MOM and SOS.