CML
Contributor
WHY DOES KHANS SEALED SUCK SO BAD?
an MTGarticle by: CML
—
This morning I skipped my uncle’s funeral for a more depressing experience — playing the Modo PTQ. I had promised myself I’d go back to sleep if my pool lacked stupid bombs, as we had discovered at the previous day’s paper PTQ that you could determine a deck’s top-eight potential within 30 seconds. But it was my misfortune that “sort by rarity” yielded a Flying Crane Technique, as well as a Ghostfire Blade and an Altar of the Brood.
The rest of the pool was as ramshackle as the ones Bob Moses built in Harlem, but at least I had a plan — I would have to curve out in every game, and then draw Flying Crane Technique. The backup plans involved mana screw
It is true that Sealed is always stupid and lame. It is also true that it is very skill-intensive, like Limited in general — if Modo ratings are any indication, it is possible to attain a bigger edge in Draft than in any Constructed format, over an appreciable sample size. Unfortunately, Sealed is not Draft; it is always worse, as you can see in the scientific and objective chart below:
Format Draft Sealed
RGD 11 10
ZZW 7 5
ROE 8 6
SOM 0-∞
ISD 7 6
AVR 3 -1
RTR 5 3
DGR 1 0
THS 5 4
JBT 6 5
M15 7 5
KKK 8 -∞!
If you use L’Hôpital’s rule you will see infinity factorial is infinitely more infinite than infinity, thus, Khans has the biggest quality discrepancy of any format I’ve played. Also profoundly, if you try to make the comparison geometric rather than arithmetic, DGR and SOM will force a divide by zero, which I imagine happens thousands of times daily on Modo.
But I digress. While playing the PTQQ two days ago Brendan and I were yapping about why Khans draft is super-sweet. I am less interested in ideas like mana-sinks, decisions at common, a flat power curve, etc. because though these virtues often evade retail Limited they are clichés to anyone on my Cube level, and they are not unique to Khans. Rather, Khans’s defining virtue has much to do with creature combat.
In previous NWO formats there have been many mechanics designed around slaying and battling. Some of them have been stupid because they always favor the aggressor (landfall, annihilator, heroic, maybe soulbond) and I look at these as primitive attempts to address the “avoiding board-stalls” fallacy. Otherwise-bad environments like RTR featured small triumphs like unleash, which was deceptively difficult in Constructed too. Yet no recent format has achieved the subtlety of Khans combat.
Morph and combat tricks and removal that functions like combat tricks have seen to that. Not only can you play around tricks, you can also represent them — and bad players will play around them! This level-two complexity is something you almost never see in MTG.
I am often clowned on for my love of chump-blocking. The Legacy grognards are particularly contemptuous because they remember (and pine for) a time where attacking wasn’t a viable strategy. But it has taken until Khans for blocking to be viable. The Draft format is largely about making good blocks, anticipating blocks so you don’t make bad attacks, and so on. With its depth of options at common and with regard to fixing, Khans draft is almost as good as my Cube.
Yet the Sealed format sucks. Why? Again, I am less interested in ideas like “bombs-removal-evasion-advantage-dudes,” “luck of the draw,” and other failures common to all Sealed formats — I want to discern what makes Khans Sealed an abortion as distinctively as the draft format is, um, not an abortion.
1. More bomb-based than the Intifadeh
No, not the Intifadeh, my bad Martyr deck that blocks a lot, and would be very well-positioned in this moronic Modern metagame — the Intifadeh, where the Palestinians lob explosives at Israelis. Anyone who has opened a Sealed pool starring Leonin Arbiter, Dissipation Field, and Inexorable Tide knows that every Sealed format is bomb-based, but in Khans it is particularly bad. It is less that there are a bunch of bombs and more that the existing bombs make it look like the people of Hiroshima had a chance:
Per <a href=“http://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/cards/draft/ktk_ktk_ktk”>MTG Goldfish’s useful rankings</a>, people who cast these cards win the game over 69 percent of the time. These percentages are not really different than the other formats for which we have data — being bomb-based is yet another way in which Modo Cube is indistinguishable from retail Limited.
(A brief word about using the MTGGoldfish numbers. The data is obviously skewed towards both win-more spells and expensive spells (Rites of Initiation and Boulderfall are premium commons!!!) It will also undervalue strong cards that are cheap (Debilitating Injury) and good on defense (Kill Shot). There is a vast array of variables beyond win percentage to be considered in evaluating cards, but are we not card-players? Do we not make these judgments all the time? Anyone who says MTGGoldfish is not enlightening is an idiot.)
2. No aggro
At any rate, the MTGGoldfish numbers are culled from Modo drafts, and Khans draft is the signature design triumph of New World Order. This is probably because many of the more expensive bombs just get stuck in hand. Against a fast Mardu deck Duneblast is often a 7-mana Wrath and Kheru Spellsnatcher is a Gray Ogre // Hill Giant split card. But in Sealed, nobody has a good Mardu deck. If they do, it is a statistical anomaly on the order of an angel appearing, the Rams winning in San Francisco, Frank Lepore t8’ing a Grand Prix.
On the whole, Sealed decks are less powerful than Draft decks. I think is a fundamental problem with Sealed — major sets are designed to be drafted; nobody prefers Sealed to Draft. In Sealed there will also be a much bigger difference between drawing the right half of your deck (Duneblast!) and the wrong half (Longshot Squad!)
That most of the commons in Khans are contextually good is great for Draft, but seems to be bad for Sealed. You seem to have a lot of decisions on which to include, but few of them matter. Playing a conventional Cube is much the same — which durdly four-drop do you want to include? It doesn’t matter, because if your deck doesn’t hiccup horribly, it will beat the guy with Elite Vanguard at the end of the table. And because Khans is very, very slow (Draft is 9.8 turns per MTGGoldfish, with Sealed even slower), your Elite Vanguards will all be outclassed, eventually, by the rares.
Practicioners of Standard a year ago know this is one of the dangers of a flat and low power curve. There were not many good cards and so you either played Gray Merchant of Asphodel and Master of Waves and hoped to draw them. Cards like Pack Rat and Sphinx’s Revelation fit similar roles and were similarly miserable.
3. Games decided by color- and land-screw
Another similarity between shitty Cubes, last year’s Standard, and Khans Sealed is that most of the games are not games. To put Khans Sealed in the context of retail Limited: this issue was at its very worst in DGR, where the ratio of real games to games decided by color- or land-screw was, uh, infinity to infinity factorial. To this day I have no idea how anyone could possibly have had a positive opinion of that format, and all the Magic writers who professed such an opinion can safely be ignored.
Now with respect to screw Khans is well-designed in a number of ways. Morph is a great way to mitigate not just screw, but flood. Putting the Refuges at common was a great idea (and works out to identical frequency of two-color fixing to the Guildgates in Dragon’s Maze). Cards like Summit Prowler and Arrow Storm are strong but have very real double-color costs. In draft, two-color decks are sometimes viable, even if Goldfish shows low win percentages and (more damningly) Frank Karsten thinks they’re good. Together these tweaks address the chief complaints about multicolored formats.
Yet there are failures too. The Banners fucking suck and Wizards must have known this and how to fix it and chosen not to. And the multicolor fixes again translate poorly from Draft into Sealed. You can’t register a two-color deck and hope to top-8 a PTQ; in fact, you can’t register a good eighty percent of decks and hope to top 8. Here’s what’s in the other twenty percent:
— 2-3 dumb bombs
— A bunch of White Outlast guys (Abzan Falconer, Abzan Battle Priest, Herald of Anafenza, Ainok Bond-Kin)
— Five-color fixing in tri-lands and Refuges
— A very strong three-color deck with good mana and the potential to curve out
If you have two of four of the above, congratulations! The odds will ever be in your favor.
Formats that offer broader options in (regular) Draft sometimes suffer in Sealed because of it. Anyone who has tried to Winston draft a Cube knows this. The decks are boring and lame. They all do the same thing. They’re all mid-rangey piles. They all want Mulldrifter and never want Goblin Guide, so the drafting decisions are boring too. They have terrible mana.
So do most of the bomb-based decks in Khans sealed, and, as in bad Cube, there are precious few aggro decks to punish them. Most of the time, you simply have to play five colors (there’s little opportunity cost — you’re never “wasting a pick” on a land over a spell) and hope to get there twice per match. In Draft, this is an ambitious and amusing strategy to try and pull off and if you do you deserve it. In Sealed, it is a tedious necessity. The extra variance this introduces, alongside all the aforementioned issues, greatly outweighs the flattening effect of morph. It also lays to rest the “five-color good-stuff” fallacy, popular among the MTGS mongoloids, that holds “too much fixing makes all decks the same.” No — Khans Draft has a bunch of different decks; Khans Sealed does not; Khans has the same amount of fixing — it is Sealed that sucks; it is bombs that suck; the five-color fallacy is a paperboard-thin way people have of hiding their own atrocious design from themselves. That I am right about this is small consolation when I’m trying to get a Wizards employee to pay attention to this, playing Sealed with a two-colored pile, or fighting other impossible battles better left unfought.
A few more brief comparisons. Mana was about as bad in original-Ravnica Sealed and the games went about as long. But, because the bombs were fewer and further between, and the removal was a fuckload better, meaningful decisions often abounded until the very end. In Khans Sealed the games end like World War II — bomb; mass death; surrender. This is a fine paradigm for EDH players and other children but for a competitive format it is distressing. Just as often the games will peter out or turn into topdeck wars, which leaves the same salty residue as a game lost to missing your fifth color on turn ten, or missing your third land-drop, but wastes more time. When you play in a Sealed PTQ you will play enough of these games that the games where everything is very incremental and grindy will be irrelevant.
4. Linear mechanics even worse
A more general complaint in the vein of “no aggro” I touched upon above is that you can’t really choose to build a deck with a “plan.” The concept of “synergy” is always attenuated and often bastardized in Sealed — I imagine opening a bunch of Kithkin in Lorwyn was good? — and in Khans it falls into one of two categories:
— Luck-based: see the example of the “Outlast squad” above. In Draft you will rarely get more than a handful of these. In Sealed, you might open a bunch!
— Just bad: aggro decks will be rare and underpowered and at the mercy of hitting not just the right number of lands but the right colors of them and in the right order. Delve sucks even more.
You might be able to string together enough aggro starts to win a match or a Sealed daily or a PTQQ, but you will never top-8 a PTQ.
5. Josh Ravitz won a PTQ
While pointlessly slogging through the dead rounds last Saturday we noted Josh Ravitz, fresh off a devastating defeat at the Magic 2015 prerelease, was being nice to us. Why? Had he acquired a sense of humor? Would he soon be presentable in public outside a cruelly-lit convention center? No, of course not — he was just cutting through the Swiss, with god knows what, and then winning the entire tournament. We should have known; he is, after all, once again getting fatter.
What I’m getting at is this. We all really enjoyed Khans Draft way more than we’d enjoyed retail Limited in years. We wanted to be excited for PTQ season. But we shouldn’t’ve been; we should have known from the moment we saw Frank Lepore atop the GP Orlando standings that Khans Sealed was bogus and lame. It was the expectation Khans Sealed would be good that has been the biggest bummer about it — an expectation that I’ve never had about any other Sealed format, and one that was unrealistic.
Seriously: Sealed still sucks. Maybe someday it will go the way of four-block Extended, Block Constructed, and Zac Hill’s commentary, and die out because nobody likes it. But in Magic that process takes years.
Khans Draft is like playing a good Cube — one with sweet synergies, a flat power-curve, strong fixing, meaningful decisions during the Draft and the games. Khans Sealed is like playing a Cube from Usman or Prosak or MTGS — good enough to be the best-selling set of all time, I guess, but not good enough for me.
CML
an MTGarticle by: CML
—
This morning I skipped my uncle’s funeral for a more depressing experience — playing the Modo PTQ. I had promised myself I’d go back to sleep if my pool lacked stupid bombs, as we had discovered at the previous day’s paper PTQ that you could determine a deck’s top-eight potential within 30 seconds. But it was my misfortune that “sort by rarity” yielded a Flying Crane Technique, as well as a Ghostfire Blade and an Altar of the Brood.
The rest of the pool was as ramshackle as the ones Bob Moses built in Harlem, but at least I had a plan — I would have to curve out in every game, and then draw Flying Crane Technique. The backup plans involved mana screw
It is true that Sealed is always stupid and lame. It is also true that it is very skill-intensive, like Limited in general — if Modo ratings are any indication, it is possible to attain a bigger edge in Draft than in any Constructed format, over an appreciable sample size. Unfortunately, Sealed is not Draft; it is always worse, as you can see in the scientific and objective chart below:
Format Draft Sealed
RGD 11 10
ZZW 7 5
ROE 8 6
SOM 0-∞
ISD 7 6
AVR 3 -1
RTR 5 3
DGR 1 0
THS 5 4
JBT 6 5
M15 7 5
KKK 8 -∞!
If you use L’Hôpital’s rule you will see infinity factorial is infinitely more infinite than infinity, thus, Khans has the biggest quality discrepancy of any format I’ve played. Also profoundly, if you try to make the comparison geometric rather than arithmetic, DGR and SOM will force a divide by zero, which I imagine happens thousands of times daily on Modo.
But I digress. While playing the PTQQ two days ago Brendan and I were yapping about why Khans draft is super-sweet. I am less interested in ideas like mana-sinks, decisions at common, a flat power curve, etc. because though these virtues often evade retail Limited they are clichés to anyone on my Cube level, and they are not unique to Khans. Rather, Khans’s defining virtue has much to do with creature combat.
In previous NWO formats there have been many mechanics designed around slaying and battling. Some of them have been stupid because they always favor the aggressor (landfall, annihilator, heroic, maybe soulbond) and I look at these as primitive attempts to address the “avoiding board-stalls” fallacy. Otherwise-bad environments like RTR featured small triumphs like unleash, which was deceptively difficult in Constructed too. Yet no recent format has achieved the subtlety of Khans combat.
Morph and combat tricks and removal that functions like combat tricks have seen to that. Not only can you play around tricks, you can also represent them — and bad players will play around them! This level-two complexity is something you almost never see in MTG.
I am often clowned on for my love of chump-blocking. The Legacy grognards are particularly contemptuous because they remember (and pine for) a time where attacking wasn’t a viable strategy. But it has taken until Khans for blocking to be viable. The Draft format is largely about making good blocks, anticipating blocks so you don’t make bad attacks, and so on. With its depth of options at common and with regard to fixing, Khans draft is almost as good as my Cube.
Yet the Sealed format sucks. Why? Again, I am less interested in ideas like “bombs-removal-evasion-advantage-dudes,” “luck of the draw,” and other failures common to all Sealed formats — I want to discern what makes Khans Sealed an abortion as distinctively as the draft format is, um, not an abortion.
1. More bomb-based than the Intifadeh
No, not the Intifadeh, my bad Martyr deck that blocks a lot, and would be very well-positioned in this moronic Modern metagame — the Intifadeh, where the Palestinians lob explosives at Israelis. Anyone who has opened a Sealed pool starring Leonin Arbiter, Dissipation Field, and Inexorable Tide knows that every Sealed format is bomb-based, but in Khans it is particularly bad. It is less that there are a bunch of bombs and more that the existing bombs make it look like the people of Hiroshima had a chance:
Per <a href=“http://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/cards/draft/ktk_ktk_ktk”>MTG Goldfish’s useful rankings</a>, people who cast these cards win the game over 69 percent of the time. These percentages are not really different than the other formats for which we have data — being bomb-based is yet another way in which Modo Cube is indistinguishable from retail Limited.
(A brief word about using the MTGGoldfish numbers. The data is obviously skewed towards both win-more spells and expensive spells (Rites of Initiation and Boulderfall are premium commons!!!) It will also undervalue strong cards that are cheap (Debilitating Injury) and good on defense (Kill Shot). There is a vast array of variables beyond win percentage to be considered in evaluating cards, but are we not card-players? Do we not make these judgments all the time? Anyone who says MTGGoldfish is not enlightening is an idiot.)
2. No aggro
At any rate, the MTGGoldfish numbers are culled from Modo drafts, and Khans draft is the signature design triumph of New World Order. This is probably because many of the more expensive bombs just get stuck in hand. Against a fast Mardu deck Duneblast is often a 7-mana Wrath and Kheru Spellsnatcher is a Gray Ogre // Hill Giant split card. But in Sealed, nobody has a good Mardu deck. If they do, it is a statistical anomaly on the order of an angel appearing, the Rams winning in San Francisco, Frank Lepore t8’ing a Grand Prix.
On the whole, Sealed decks are less powerful than Draft decks. I think is a fundamental problem with Sealed — major sets are designed to be drafted; nobody prefers Sealed to Draft. In Sealed there will also be a much bigger difference between drawing the right half of your deck (Duneblast!) and the wrong half (Longshot Squad!)
That most of the commons in Khans are contextually good is great for Draft, but seems to be bad for Sealed. You seem to have a lot of decisions on which to include, but few of them matter. Playing a conventional Cube is much the same — which durdly four-drop do you want to include? It doesn’t matter, because if your deck doesn’t hiccup horribly, it will beat the guy with Elite Vanguard at the end of the table. And because Khans is very, very slow (Draft is 9.8 turns per MTGGoldfish, with Sealed even slower), your Elite Vanguards will all be outclassed, eventually, by the rares.
Practicioners of Standard a year ago know this is one of the dangers of a flat and low power curve. There were not many good cards and so you either played Gray Merchant of Asphodel and Master of Waves and hoped to draw them. Cards like Pack Rat and Sphinx’s Revelation fit similar roles and were similarly miserable.
3. Games decided by color- and land-screw
Another similarity between shitty Cubes, last year’s Standard, and Khans Sealed is that most of the games are not games. To put Khans Sealed in the context of retail Limited: this issue was at its very worst in DGR, where the ratio of real games to games decided by color- or land-screw was, uh, infinity to infinity factorial. To this day I have no idea how anyone could possibly have had a positive opinion of that format, and all the Magic writers who professed such an opinion can safely be ignored.
Now with respect to screw Khans is well-designed in a number of ways. Morph is a great way to mitigate not just screw, but flood. Putting the Refuges at common was a great idea (and works out to identical frequency of two-color fixing to the Guildgates in Dragon’s Maze). Cards like Summit Prowler and Arrow Storm are strong but have very real double-color costs. In draft, two-color decks are sometimes viable, even if Goldfish shows low win percentages and (more damningly) Frank Karsten thinks they’re good. Together these tweaks address the chief complaints about multicolored formats.
Yet there are failures too. The Banners fucking suck and Wizards must have known this and how to fix it and chosen not to. And the multicolor fixes again translate poorly from Draft into Sealed. You can’t register a two-color deck and hope to top-8 a PTQ; in fact, you can’t register a good eighty percent of decks and hope to top 8. Here’s what’s in the other twenty percent:
— 2-3 dumb bombs
— A bunch of White Outlast guys (Abzan Falconer, Abzan Battle Priest, Herald of Anafenza, Ainok Bond-Kin)
— Five-color fixing in tri-lands and Refuges
— A very strong three-color deck with good mana and the potential to curve out
If you have two of four of the above, congratulations! The odds will ever be in your favor.
Formats that offer broader options in (regular) Draft sometimes suffer in Sealed because of it. Anyone who has tried to Winston draft a Cube knows this. The decks are boring and lame. They all do the same thing. They’re all mid-rangey piles. They all want Mulldrifter and never want Goblin Guide, so the drafting decisions are boring too. They have terrible mana.
So do most of the bomb-based decks in Khans sealed, and, as in bad Cube, there are precious few aggro decks to punish them. Most of the time, you simply have to play five colors (there’s little opportunity cost — you’re never “wasting a pick” on a land over a spell) and hope to get there twice per match. In Draft, this is an ambitious and amusing strategy to try and pull off and if you do you deserve it. In Sealed, it is a tedious necessity. The extra variance this introduces, alongside all the aforementioned issues, greatly outweighs the flattening effect of morph. It also lays to rest the “five-color good-stuff” fallacy, popular among the MTGS mongoloids, that holds “too much fixing makes all decks the same.” No — Khans Draft has a bunch of different decks; Khans Sealed does not; Khans has the same amount of fixing — it is Sealed that sucks; it is bombs that suck; the five-color fallacy is a paperboard-thin way people have of hiding their own atrocious design from themselves. That I am right about this is small consolation when I’m trying to get a Wizards employee to pay attention to this, playing Sealed with a two-colored pile, or fighting other impossible battles better left unfought.
A few more brief comparisons. Mana was about as bad in original-Ravnica Sealed and the games went about as long. But, because the bombs were fewer and further between, and the removal was a fuckload better, meaningful decisions often abounded until the very end. In Khans Sealed the games end like World War II — bomb; mass death; surrender. This is a fine paradigm for EDH players and other children but for a competitive format it is distressing. Just as often the games will peter out or turn into topdeck wars, which leaves the same salty residue as a game lost to missing your fifth color on turn ten, or missing your third land-drop, but wastes more time. When you play in a Sealed PTQ you will play enough of these games that the games where everything is very incremental and grindy will be irrelevant.
4. Linear mechanics even worse
A more general complaint in the vein of “no aggro” I touched upon above is that you can’t really choose to build a deck with a “plan.” The concept of “synergy” is always attenuated and often bastardized in Sealed — I imagine opening a bunch of Kithkin in Lorwyn was good? — and in Khans it falls into one of two categories:
— Luck-based: see the example of the “Outlast squad” above. In Draft you will rarely get more than a handful of these. In Sealed, you might open a bunch!
— Just bad: aggro decks will be rare and underpowered and at the mercy of hitting not just the right number of lands but the right colors of them and in the right order. Delve sucks even more.
You might be able to string together enough aggro starts to win a match or a Sealed daily or a PTQQ, but you will never top-8 a PTQ.
5. Josh Ravitz won a PTQ
While pointlessly slogging through the dead rounds last Saturday we noted Josh Ravitz, fresh off a devastating defeat at the Magic 2015 prerelease, was being nice to us. Why? Had he acquired a sense of humor? Would he soon be presentable in public outside a cruelly-lit convention center? No, of course not — he was just cutting through the Swiss, with god knows what, and then winning the entire tournament. We should have known; he is, after all, once again getting fatter.
What I’m getting at is this. We all really enjoyed Khans Draft way more than we’d enjoyed retail Limited in years. We wanted to be excited for PTQ season. But we shouldn’t’ve been; we should have known from the moment we saw Frank Lepore atop the GP Orlando standings that Khans Sealed was bogus and lame. It was the expectation Khans Sealed would be good that has been the biggest bummer about it — an expectation that I’ve never had about any other Sealed format, and one that was unrealistic.
Seriously: Sealed still sucks. Maybe someday it will go the way of four-block Extended, Block Constructed, and Zac Hill’s commentary, and die out because nobody likes it. But in Magic that process takes years.
Khans Draft is like playing a good Cube — one with sweet synergies, a flat power-curve, strong fixing, meaningful decisions during the Draft and the games. Khans Sealed is like playing a Cube from Usman or Prosak or MTGS — good enough to be the best-selling set of all time, I guess, but not good enough for me.
CML
