Hey everyone! It’s been a long strange trip back through time and space to return to the land of Khans of Tarkir. We’ve arrived at the Arena Open portion of the format so I’m here to help you prepare to take all that money from WotC. Today we’ll be going over the process of building a KTK sealed deck as well as some tips and tricks for day one.
Building Your Sealed
The first step to building your sealed is to sort out your power cards. This includes your bombs, mythic uncommons, and solid removal (there isn’t much in this set). This set is very bomb heavy with almost one third of the rares being first pickable so you should hopefully have some great choices here. Normally I would say that these are your draws into these colors, but in KTK it is more a guide for how you are going to twist your mana to accommodate them.
The next step is to check out your mana fixing. This includes the gainlands, the trilands, fetch lands, and even Embodiment of Spring if your colors allow it. This does not include the banners. This is really going to determine whether you have a consistent deck or if you will be praying to the mana gods every game. This really isn’t a format where you can just ignore some of the powerful cards in your sealed so you really have to hope it lines up correctly.
The next step is to go through each color to separate them into cards you actively want to play, ones that you’re willing to play based off of other cards in your deck, and ones that you do not want to be playing no matter what. This is back when there were plenty of bad limited cards still being printed so you’ll actually have some in that last pile. This step helps you determine which colors are actually deep and which ones are better off left to a splash or ignored all together.
Now you want to start building different versions of your deck to see how they look. This lets you evaluate for any curve concerns or weaknesses. It’s going to be very difficult to end up in a two-color deck in this format. You typically want to focus on two colors while splashing around a bit. I don’t mind splashing all the way up to five colors as long as the cards are worth it. If you’re determining whether to have a higher power level or more consistency, I would lean towards more power in this sealed format.
If you can’t get to a competitive point power wise, try to build a low to the ground aggressive deck to hopefully go under someone playing too many tap lands. You kind of have to get lucky to open a good version of that, but if you do it is possible that you just want to be playing that anyway.
Once you have it down to your final choice, you just have to figure out your mana base and you’re good to go.
Tips and Tricks
You are bound to run into some pretty powerful cards in this sealed format. That makes counterspells better than normal especially something like Disdainful Stroke which is much easier to slide into your mana base.
This is an eighteen-land format. It is extremely mana intensive because of needing to hit your land drops for morph on turn three and unmorphing on turn five or six.
While obviously not preferable, sometimes you have to play an off-color morph to hit playables. It is still better than a normal Gray Ogre because it is colorless and threatens to be much more. You usually want to play your blank as your second morph because everyone believes that’s when you play your best one. Winning the mind games can win you the actual game.
It’s important to remember that unless they have five mana up, morphs can only trade or bounce off of each other. You can’t just get blown out on a block until five mana. It is vital to note that this doesn’t hold true if you block a morph with a 2/1 as there are some that can flip to live while killing yours.
Since sealed tends to be a little slower, you can usually get away with playing some cards that you might not get away with in draft.
On the note of it being slower, Outlast tends to be better because you have more time. That makes all of the “Each creature you control with a +1+1 counter has” creatures better as well.
Treasure Cruise is a perfectly fine splash card. Having a random draw three for a blue mana late in the game is pretty nuts.
Speaking of delve cards, you’re fine playing a couple of them even without any self-mill because you’ll just naturally get some cards in the yard through normal play. Once you hit four in your deck, you really need to consider if they are really worth it without some way to feed them.
You’re much less likely to open all the cards you would want for a build around card. Sorry Goblinslide people, it’s probably not going to work out for you here.
Quality removal is severely lacking in this set so I would almost always try to splash a Murderous Cut or Arc Lightning.
If it feels like your deck can’t quite get across the finish line, consider a card like Barrage of Boulders as a way to crack open a board stall.
You still don’t want to be playing the banners unless your fixing is really bad and you have some really expensive stuff to be playing.
I am only saying this because I saw this question in chat earlier. Never play Lens of Clarity. It doesn’t give you anywhere near enough information to be worth a card.
This is another one that I am only addressing due to previous questions. If you open a triland, but it only fixes for two of your colors, you should still play it.
Once again, I must remind you that the best thing you can do in sealed is to be extremely lucky during the pack opening phase. Open the nuts (Seeing double Wingmate Roc is a good time to start your victory lap) and have some fun!
Wrap Up
Thanks for reading! Good luck in the Arena Open this weekend. I’ll be back in a few days with another MWM article. Until then, stay classy people!
I’m always open to feedback, let me know what you loved, what you hated, or just send dog pics. You can contact me at:
Premium >
Enjoy our content? Wish to support our work? Join our Premium community, get access to exclusive content, remove all advertisements, and more!
- No ads: Browse the entire website ad-free, both display and video.
- Exclusive Content: Instant access to all exclusive articles only for Premium members, at your fingertips.
- Support: All your contributions get directly reinvested into the website to increase your viewing experience!
- Discord: Join our Discord server, claim your Premium role and gain access to exclusive channels where you can learn in real time!
- Special offer: For a limited time, use coupon code L95WR9JOWV to get 50% off the Annual plan!
