October 27, 2020
set – verb : be restored to its normal condition by knitting together again after being broken
Every time a new Standard set is released my son and I play some sealed deck with packs from draft booster boxes I buy. Sometimes it’s weeks after the box has arrived, but eventually the kid is interested enough, or bored enough, to want to open packs and even play some (2-3) games. That’s about all I can get out of him per set, but it’s not nothing.
For Zendikar Rising, however, I didn’t buy a draft booster box. Why would I, in a world with set boosters?
To play sealed deck is why. Duh. To think I have to tell myself these things.
So…no draft booster box this time. Except – hey! – I preordered a ZNR bundle with my set booster box, and that contains 10 of the 12 draft boosters the kid and I would need to play sealed.
Full and fair disclosure: it never actually occurred to me that buying a set booster box would foul up this particular ritual of ours.
Due to Wizards’ production delays thanks for COVID, ZNR bundles were delayed and mine hadn’t arrived with the set booster box, so I figured the kid and I would try sealed with set boosters. Except set boosters have only 11 playable Magic cards in them, vs. 14 in a draft booster. That’s 18 fewer playables in a 6-pack sealed pool. Which is a LOT.
Various solutions presented themselves: open 7 set boosters each; stick to 6 and make do with a much smaller cardpool; wait until the bundle arrived. I chose…none of those. Instead I bought 4 draft boosters and we did a weird hybrid sealed pool: 2 draft boosters and 4 set boosters each.
Woof.
Look, I’m not going to disparage set boosters. I think they’re awesome, and even after opening just a few, I think they’re a much, much, MUCH more interesting experience than opening a draft booster. But…
The section for “connected” commons and uncommons, while a theoretically interesting idea, is not working in practice. None of my 4 set boosters had a discernible theme throughout all 6 cards, and though I didn’t see my son’s packs, he didn’t see any patterns either. Oh, I opened, for example, a pack with 4 blue commons all related to kicker. But the 2 uncommons that followed had absolutely nothing to do with kicker.
End result: weirdly chaotic cardpools. I ended up with 8 white cards. My son had 5. Five white cards from 6 packs! But I had 24 green cards. Unless I wanted my deck to be rubbish, green HAD to be one of my colors, just by virtue of needing enough playables in a color. And whether due to rotten luck or just the vagaries of the “connected” cards in set boosters, my entire cardpool had only a couple removal spells. My final deck, a green/black concoction that appeared to have some kicker and party synergies but played out as though it had neither, used all of the removal available in those two colors: 1 card – Hagra Mauling.
A rare no less! That was the only removal card I opened across 2 colors in 6 packs. Beyond that, I opened a Kabira Takedown in white and a Synchronized Spellcraft in red, and…that’s it. Out of 72 cards, 3 were removal (one of which is highly conditional.)
Yeah. Woof.
I understand this is how sealed goes sometimes, and that’s a reason a decent number of players will only play limited if it’s draft. But the kid and I make do with that we have.
For Kaldheim, though…we won’t do this again. Building a deck with what you’re given is a fun challenge, but the peculiarities of sealed deck are greatly amplified when using set boosters. They aren’t MADE for limited play, of course, so using them for that purpose was undoubtedly a specious decision. But I still didn’t anticipate just how wonky our cardpools could end up.
For what it’s worth (squat, I suppose) the games were still fun. The kid beat me 2 of 3 games, with Nighthawk Scavanger being instrumental to both his wins. Turns out that if you can’t remove a flying, lifelinking threat that grows larger as the turns progress and your efforts to deal with it fail, you lose.
And in an update to my quest to shed my “king of bobo rares” crown, we have the expedition box topper from the set booster box:
How you might feel about this card will likely depend on whether you play Commander (I currently don’t but hope to some day), enjoy the Azorius color combination (I mostly despise it in constructed play), and whether you want your boxtoppers to come out of the wrapper in mint condition – mine had a slight crimp along the top edge. I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to report this admittedly rather minor flaw to Wizards, and I’m mostly sure it’s not worth the effort to ship the thing to Seattle to get a replacement (assuming that’s even possible.)
Sea of Clouds isn’t a bobo, of course. A mint copy sells for $11-12. But it’s still among the lower tier of Zendikar Rising expeditions, I can’t currently use the thing in any meaningful way, and getting a less-than-mint copy straight out of the package was hugely disappointing.
I hate to pile onto the avalanche of “2020 Sucks” negativity, but…well…
Boo.
To counterbalance that, however, I will tease that my next post will be a more positive one. It’s…
The Return of Mardoom!
Casual Magicking 