Sealed: My Current 4 Booster Sealed Experiment

Yesterday was a relatively minor day for me. Wrestlemania 31 is upon us and as a huge wrestling fan, I’m excited to see Brock Lesnar run train on Roman Reigns. As such, I spent the day listening to wrestling podcasts and Bryan Alvarez over on Wrestling Observer.

Between law school, working out, home responsibilities and sleep (or lack thereof) I haven’t had time at all to stream, let alone take out 3 hours of my evening to play some sealed or Swiss draft. I’ve even been looking into Commander decks in order to play more casually and have seriously considered selling off my $500 worth of standard cards online.

In paper magic, I still have half a box of KTK and FRF to open and my 540 cube is basically balanced although it hasn’t been updated for DTK and I have a few other minor alters I want to make but don’t know what to cut for (Is Pack Rat too oppressive?).

However, with this weekend coming upon us and 8 KTK packs in my inventory (Which of course, aren’t worth shit), I’m at the crossroads where I’m deciding if I should do a sealed daily, 3 drafts or 2 4 booster sealeds.

It’s all about Estimated Value in this case and knowing yourself as a player. I know that I tend to get frustrated with a bad pool or bad game and while I don’t get salty enough to rage quit, I’ll usually end up punting more easily because I’m tilted. Unfortunately, MagicEV hasn’t been updated since the winter,but we can still glean some information from there. First of all, at a 50% win rate, phantom sealed costs about 2 dollars an event. This is perfect for my plan to practice for GP Montreal, and save my real money for the Sealed Dailies and PPTQs when I get good, which usually take about 8-10 events for me to get a handle on a set.

Meanwhile, what do we do about these 8 pack of khans? They are sitting at a sell price of around 1.8, and I’d rather play with them than sell them (I have this strange idea that I’m going to be able to collect a full redeemable set) so the real question becomes, “which of the limited events do I do?”

As of right now I’m leaning towards 4 booster sealed. Not only do I get to open 4 packs a game, 2 wins garners 1 KTK pack and 2 FRF packs. This means that 2 wins basically helps us split even. I know what you’re thinking, “but Colt, 2 wins in KTK swiss drafts also pay out the product needed minus 1 KTK pack.” You are correct, so that means they both have around the same EV for a higher than 50% win rate, but the 4 booster sealed let’s you crack an extra pack AND if you 3-0 you win 6 packs as opposed to in swiss draft where you’ll only win 3 (aka your product back).

I’m writing this very “stream of conscious” and to be honest, I haven’t completely done the math, but as of now, I’ll be using my extra packs to fund 4 booster sealed events. I’ll give a full report whether or not this was worth it. If anything, it’ll be an interesting experiment.

Draft: Was I The Only One Who Liked M15 Draft?

Was I the only one that actually liked M15 as a draft format? I keep hearing about how “uninspired” and “bland” it was, but to me, it was the perfect draft set. 

The set was almost perfectly balanced. Every two color combo seemed to have a clear strategy associated with it. The artifact subtheme made artifacts cool and relevant. The rares had a good number of junk and a good number of bombs, but even all the rares had answers so matches never turned into a “bomb-off”. I particularly liked that there were “build around me” uncommons (Ajani’s Pridemate and Ensoul Artifactspring to mind) that rewarded forward planning in the draft portion and had proper support cards. 

Yes, triplicate spirits was a ridiculously powerful card and may have been better suited as an uncommon, but even that wasn’t game breaking since there were enough stronger fliers and reach creatures to deal with them (although Triplicate Spirits + Sanctified Charge may not have been as well thought out as it should have been) and it wasn’t really dangerous unless they somehow had 2 or 3 of them in their deck and you were playing green/blue without Netcaster Spider or bouncers. 

Sealed wasn’t as good as most games turned into “who opened the most Lightning Strikes or Ulcerates”. In Sealed’s case, the fact that there were 6 packs from the same set opened, worked against it as it was very difficult to make a 3 color deck, although that didn’t stop RGB decks from trying. 

All in all, M15 drafting was really cool. You never felt like you had a particularly bad deck and it was really easy to shift colors during the draft if it was obvious people were fighting over one (usually white, leaving blue wide open).  The set itself didn’t sell well meaning that a lot of the rares have retained value, leading to better value in pack opening. Lastly, the set is just fun. There’s a certain charm to it’s simplicity and there are still a multitude of fun decks to draft and play as if you’re willing to go off the beaten path. You haven’t lived until you played a Generator Servant into a haste given Stormtide Leviathan.