Table of Contents
Hey everyone! I know you’re all wondering why I’m doing this Sealed article when I normally pawn that assignment off on one of our other wonderful writers. Let’s just say that plan took a last-minute detour leaving me to handle this. If you have ever doubted how much I love my readers, I am literally writing this while sitting in a hospital with my wife having heart surgery. Now that’s true dedication to content creation.
When looking at Phyrexia: All Will Be One Sealed, there are clearly going to be many major differences from draft. I’m going to be focusing on those differences since you can check out my archetypes and mechanics article below for a ton of the other information.
Building Your Sealed
We’ll start out with building your sealed before we get into more of the generalized ideas you’re going to need to know.
Step 1: Sort out all of your power cards so that you know which cards you want to try to build your deck around. These are your main draws into a color, but not necessarily going to force you to play them. Include mythic uncommons in these piles as they can often add more power than some of your rares.
Step 2: Break down all the cards in each color into ones that you actively want to play, ones you are willing to play, and the true stinkers. This will prevent you from thinking you have a deep color when you really have two good cards and a bunch of janky filler. You can usually eliminate one or two colors here. Keep in mind the splashable cards from those colors if they are good enough.
Step 3: Look at what synergy your playable cards have with each other. A game plan based around toxic is going to be really difficult to pull off if you don’t have a critical mass of toxic creatures. You don’t want to be playing understatted cards when you won’t feasibly finish a game with them. While corrupted requires much less of a commitment, you also want to discount those cards if you don’t have enough early enablers for them.
Step 4: Build multiple different color combinations to see how those shells look when they are laid out in front of you. It’s also a good idea to remember these options as a possible transformational side board.
Step 5: Once you have a one or two combinations you would be happy with, try to identify any holes you have in them. This could be anything from lack of removal to inability to finish a game. See if you can fix those problems through splashing. Consider whether you need to add a card like Prophetic Prism to help enable that splash. While that’s not something you want to be doing in ONE draft, it might be a necessity in sealed.
Step 6: Build a mana base. The sphere lands might seem like automatic inclusions, but not being able to curve out is actually a significant drawback. You can probably get away with it more in sealed than you can in draft, but there’s still a limit especially considering that they don’t fix your mana. Don’t forget that lands from Terramorphic Expansealso come into play tapped and I would play those over the sphere lands in any deck with two or more colors.
Tips and Tricks
Tempo is still very important, but not the same all encompassing menace that is looming above ONE draft. That actually gives you time to reequip some of that equipment that got left behind by your For Mirrodin! Creatures. Considering that some of them are fine on tempo anyway, they are even better here.
Even though I just said that tempo isn’t the only thing that matters in ONE sealed, make sure you still have plenty of ways to interact in the early game. You can and will get snowballed if you take the first few turns off.
Since you are far less likely to run into a totally streamlined deck in sealed (it still happens, sometimes you take an L) you have a little more time to do things. That means a card like Cruel Grimnarch becomes a fine card that can trade with almost anything on the board or even possibly grab their expensive bomb with the Ravenous Rats effect.
I know I brought this up during deck building, but it’s a very important point. Killing through the toxic mechanic requires a dedication that is far less likely to manifest itself in a sealed pool. This can lead towards playing slightly below rate creatures without the advantage of the alternate poison clock being relevant. I’ve already had multiple games where I won at nine poison and a low life total because opponents played an unoptimized deck.
When it comes to oil cards, some of the cards require zero synergy to still be really good. Furnace Strider and Evolving Adaptive are prime examples of giant beatings that don’t ask anything else of you to do their thing. Urabrask's Anointer is on the opposite end of the spectrum where you really don’t want to be playing it if you don’t have at least five other oil cards.
You don’t want to play too many cards that go in different macroarchetypes that rely on synergy. Red and green are going to have a lot of the generically good cards which is a huge pull into those colors for me.
Being good at combat math is one of the highest boosts to EV that you can have in this format. There are plenty of times you can pull out games because you figured out when to prevent corrupted or saved a couple of damage.
Combat tricks are cheap, plentiful, and most importantly good. This means you need to know all of them ahead of time so you are prepared to play around them. Hexgold Slash and Anoint with Affliction are both obviously great, but they do an amazing job of blowing out all those tricks on the cheap.
Don’t underestimate all the little things that Free from Flesh can add to a deck. Outside of being a one mana trick, adding three permanent counters on to Trawler Drake or Evolving Adaptive for only one mana is pretty big game.
Another sealed trick is that counterspells tend to be significantly better. They might have The Eternal Wandereror White Sun's Twilight, but you can still cleanly answer them on the cheap.
Every set I get asked about whether or not you should be packing artifact or enchantment removal in the main. In this case it really depends what the cost is to your deck. In general, it’s not a great exchange for having a possibly dead card in your deck since they already got a creature off of their equipment. If you have a Cankerbloom or Shrapnel Slinger, then it’s a minimal investment in case you need to blow up an Urabrask's Forge. If flyers are a big problem for your deck and you are removal light, then Carnivorous Canopy has just enough potential utility to consider.
Don’t let losing to a bomb get to you. There are a lot of them, it’s going to happen. Luckily many of them are answerable. Focus more on if you could have played differently to beat it so that next time you can.
Per usual, it doesn’t hurt to be really lucky. Opening a busted pool and winning some die rolls will go a long way. (At least I’m honest and upfront with you on this)
Wrap Up
Thanks for coming with me on this little journey into the depths of Phyrexian sealed. Good news, I was just told my wife is in a recovery room so I’m going to go spend some time with her and get this posted when I’m home tomorrow. Check back in a few days when I’ll be dropping the Phyrexia: All Will Be One Draft Guide. Until then, stay classy people!
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
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