Successful Edge of Eternities Sealed

Last weekend, we had the privilege of playing Sealed for steaks, I mean, stakes. Edge of Eternities Sealed is a lot different in a best-of-one setting than I expected, at least, what I thought might be successful.

My record in the Arena Direct was a 71% win percentage, converting three of the 11 attempts I made into boxes. Relative to others, it was a successful campaign.

With a couple of more opportunities to play Sealed with the Arena Open this weekend and the Arena Champs Qualifier the following weekend, I thought it might be a good idea to go over what I found to be GTO (Game Theory Optimal).

I went into my first couple of Sealed events thinking landers would make for some nice splashing opportunities, and everyone would have a bunch of multicolor soup decks.

In reality, Sealed was a lot different. In fact, I found the exact opposite to be true. While the format has a lot of powerful cards, almost none of the cards carry games on their own outside of some of the mythic rares like Ouroboroid and Quantum Riddler.

Normally in Sealed, you're looking to play your best rares and build your deck in a reasonable way so that you can play all of them, including splashing them. This would make sense with landers, however, as I said, I found that you want the most consistent deck from top to bottom.

I found the decks easy to build once I understood the baseline power level of potential opponents' decks. It wasn't just all bombs all the time. While there are a lot of sweepers in the format to be careful of, I didn't find them that difficult to finagle around. It takes a delicate balance of figuring out when you can beat a sweeper and when you have to unload your hand. Generally, it was obvious when the opponent had them, and you could easily not overcommit on the board.

The way I found to optimally build my decks was to focus on my best two colors and try to build a strictly two-color deck. Many of my pools would have zero or one total land, and it wasn't enough for splashing a third color. Green decks were more flexible, and while green was still the best color in Sealed, it wasn't for that reason. I'd occasionally splash a removal spell or two in my green decks, but I wasn't going too deep on splashes because the early mana was too crucial to board development.

Green overperformed for me for one simple reason: the green creatures are extremely large, hit very hard, and there's redundancy of them at common. Between Icecave Crasher, Fungal Colossus, Germinating Wurm, and Drix Fatemaker, your four- and five-drops pack a huge punch, and any hiccup from the opponent would leave them buried.

One thing I found is that my typical Sealed deck had less removal than my average draft deck. This meant that unchecked large creatures were a nice strategy. This is exactly what green was capable of.

Take, for example, this deck:

My mana was concerning with so many double-pipped creatures, but I had a good curve, some removal, and combat tricks. No overly broken rares. No sweepers. Just curving out and attacking. When my opponents stumbled on mana, I was able to bury them in combat.

This deck went 7-1 for a box, and my only loss was to an easily top 1% pool with eight rares, six or seven of which were blue. Not really a strike against the deck. It's worth noting that Timeline Culler was absolutely fantastic in this deck and made my deck more resilient to sweepers.

Here's another trophy deck. Again, black, green, and a nice curve of creatures. I'd be lying if I said my Elegy Acolyte didn't win me a game or two, but the deck won plenty of games without it as well. I curved out with creatures, used my mana efficiently, and made sure I was always winning on the board without overdeveloping into sweepers. I really liked Wurmwall Sweeper in all of these decks because one issue with this format is that the lack of dual lands doesn't only punish splashing bombs, it punishes two-color mana bases. Many more games than usual come down to players having smooth mana, so a cheap colorless surveil card that turns into an evasive threat on turn three or four is perfect for this kind of strategy.

Typically in Sealed Deck, I hate combat tricks, but in this format, I usually want at least one, if not two. As you can see, I played Dark Endurance for the first time, and it was excellent. While Biosynthic Burst would have been better, I was able to protect creatures, win combat, and develop my board into potential sweepers because I had a flexible card. Since you're often left with less removal than you'd like, combat tricks in this style of deck felt more potent than usual.

I disliked expensive cards. Cards like Mouth of the Storm and Pinnacle Kill-Ship felt underwhelming. Games weren't dragging on like they did in draft. A lack of interaction led to more curving out and "sweeper checking" the opponent. While you can certainly play these cards, understand that without interaction to bridge you to them, the game may not last long enough for them to have an impact.

To start the format, I was all about playing my counterspells, even Temporal Intervention. By the end of the format, I was only playing these things when I ran out of cards I deemed playable.

Fundamentally, all the rules of Sealed Deck, where you build your deck to go slower, try to out-bomb your opponent, and interact with their bombs, got thrown out the window. Both because there are few truly broken rares and the best-of-one hand smoother. I expect to have to adapt to best-of-three some, but regardless, I will likely build my decks in a similar fashion.

I'm excited to try playing more competitive Limited in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, some of these tips will help you out as well.