Brewing and dueling are the core experience in magic, sometimes you're not in the mood to herd seven drafters and devote a whole evening to cubing. Sealed is the closest limited format to constructed, but the variance makes it a sucky experience. You're struggling for a functioning forty, while your opponent's opened obnoxious bombs. The variance issue can be fixed with predetermined, duplicated pools each player, aka Duplicate Sealed.
The aim is to curate a pile of cards that are fun to brew even if you've seen the pool before, and produce games with minimum feel bad moments and non-games. The more playable decks that can be built from the pile the better, and the more alternate builds of each deck the better. There should not be a dominant strategy when building, ideally if the pool was given to eight experienced players who were playing to win, they would each produce a different deck.
The format was often used at Invitationals with a pool of around 100 cards excluding lands. In this build, each player will brew from a pool of a 200 cards including lands. The lands will be included partly for ease of brewing, to allow different sleeving of each pool to keep each pool separate, and to enable the use of utility lands in the pool. The pool size is 200 cards, slightly larger than the invitational pools assuming 85 lands (17*5), in part to allow greater brew potential associated with a larger pool and in part to allow easy storage in commander focused boxes.
Although a full vintage power level pool would be great fun, proxying is effort, cheaper is better and power-maxing reduces candidate inclusions to the 1% of magic cards. That means low-ish power level.
I'll be building the pool in this thread, card by card. If anyone has suggestions for cuts and includes I'd love to hear!
First in, not a card I'm married to, but it's a 1-card archetype and offers the option to skip deck building and provides a second pseudo-format with all the extra rules text on a single card. The only cost to the pool is requiring a sensible ratio of lands:spells. This might get cut if more brew-value could be gained by condensing the lands section (by including more multi-deck lands) allowing more spells and more possible decks.
Initial land base is a full cycle of the bouncelands, a full cycle of scry lands, 4x Ash Barrens, and 11 of each basic. These should help minimise negative variance, and bouncelands interact nicely with the other choices. The land base is an obvious candidate for optimisation once the pool has been playtested, by both tweaking the amounts of each land and by inclusion of utility lands.
Tomorrow I'll be looking at build-arounds and utility artifacts.
I think Worldknit is a bad idea, but only because a 200 card deck is huge, which makes it tricky to shuffle. If you're looking for a Conspiracy that creates a one-card alternate format, may I suggest Sovereign's Realm?
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The mana base feels a bit awkward, but that's mostly because it's 79 cards and my brain desperately wants that to be 80. (I know that Worldknit is the 80th land, but still).
I think Worldknit is a bad idea, but only because a 200 card deck is huge, which makes it tricky to shuffle. If you're looking for a Conspiracy that creates a one-card alternate format, may I suggest Sovereign's Realm?
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The mana base feels a bit awkward, but that's mostly because it's 79 cards and my brain desperately wants that to be 80. (I know that Worldknit is the 80th land, but still).
Worldknit is definitely questionable, I'm on the fence about the deck size issue but that might be because I always wanted to play Battle of Wits in modern. I don't think it's auto-cut because the 200 card deck is an opt-in experience, and we can make gameplay smoother by limiting shuffle effects. My issue with Sovereign's Realm is there's not enough downside so it might be heading towards a dominant strategy, whereas the Worldknit deck might be a fun outing for some players but has enough downside it's unlikely to be dominant.
All that said, it might be better to cut Worldknit, swap the fixing for a fetch+shock manabase and a few 5 colour utilities and reduce the overall land count to ~50 and add 30 extra spells.
I've done peasant(ish) duplicate sealed a few times, with a different pool every time. One time the only multicoloured cards were hybrid, which was honestly my favourite - it meant breaking peasant, but they just fit into so many decks/colour combos, and there were some surprise inclusions (Giant Solifuge did good work in a U/G tempo deck)
Definitely recommend having some theme/s that rock up in all five colours like graveyard matters/flashback/unearth or something, opens things up a -lot- and makes it way less predictable.
I also use a voucher system for fixing to discourage 5c control or goodstuff - you don't get -all- the nonbasics in your pool, you get a set number of vouchers (Usually 5) that you can trade in for mana rocks, fixing lands and utility lands. It's seemed unnecessary when the gap between the strongest and weakest cards is narrow, or when there are really strong lanes or archetypes to follow (Which TBH is pretty boring as the cube builder - the harder you push specific colour pairs into specific archetypes the more predictable everyone's decks get), but I've gotten it wrong often enough that I keep the vouchers as a safety valve. Don't think that would work if you're set on Sovereign's Realm though.
Oh hell yeah if I can get away with it it's all I play in limited (that and tempo decks). Deny people their manabases, play all the value, feels so good.
It's just kinda lame if it's the -best- thing you can do, or is too easy - and if you aren't fighting other players at the table for fixing and the best cards there's got to be another reason to not do it.
Heavy colour pips is another good way - no one's casting Cryptic Command and Cloudthresher in the same deck after all...
*studiously ignores 2009 standard*
I've done peasant(ish) duplicate sealed a few times, with a different pool every time. One time the only multicoloured cards were hybrid, which was honestly my favourite - it meant breaking peasant, but they just fit into so many decks/colour combos, and there were some surprise inclusions (Giant Solifuge did good work in a U/G tempo deck)
Definitely recommend having some theme/s that rock up in all five colours like graveyard matters/flashback/unearth or something, opens things up a -lot- and makes it way less predictable.
I also use a voucher system for fixing to discourage 5c control or goodstuff - you don't get -all- the nonbasics in your pool, you get a set number of vouchers (Usually 5) that you can trade in for mana rocks, fixing lands and utility lands. It's seemed unnecessary when the gap between the strongest and weakest cards is narrow, or when there are really strong lanes or archetypes to follow (Which TBH is pretty boring as the cube builder - the harder you push specific colour pairs into specific archetypes the more predictable everyone's decks get), but I've gotten it wrong often enough that I keep the vouchers as a safety valve. Don't think that would work if you're set on Sovereign's Realm though.
I'd love to hear any other tips or thoughts you've got on Duplicate Sealed, I'm struggling! I started aimlessly populating with cards I liked at about the right power level, didn't realise how quickly I'd run out of space to make everything work the way I usually would with a 360+ cube. I don't think a "bottom up" design is possible because space is so tight, gonna start again from zero, starting with proactive and reactive gameplan for each colour. Making sure the proactive reactive gameplans combine well across each colour pair, then look at "glue" cards that work in both the fast and slow decks, and cards that support multiple colours gameplans.
Was planning to go without gold cards, just because they hit too few decks, and devote more space to colourless.
I think dropping Worldknit is the way, and try and squeeze the lands down to 50-65 with more multi-role lands either fetches+shocks+evolving wilds, or thriving lands.
I don't know if the lessons I've learned are the most helpful - I've sort of had this "welp, fishing the baby out of this bathwater sounds like work, out the window it goes" approach to the pool. My biggest issue has been in working out how to deal with 5c - A long long time ago a few friends and I did this with the massive piles of draft chaff we'd accumulated from Innistrad through to Dragons of Tarkir, no real effort in balancing the pool beyond everyone getting the same stuff, and the 5c goodstuff pile I piloted dominated thanks to the abundance of fixing - I think I had like 2 basics? I only mention this because it's the reason I'm so stingy with fixing now - my friends do not like my tendency to draft/build 5 colour value city decks that beat up on linear aggro decks, and don't like to acknowledge the significant gap in limited experience as a factor.
My honest recommendation (even though I tend to ignore it myself) is to go with simpler cards, and avoid single cards that are way better than the average card of their colour - if there are isolated spots of guaranteed card advantage that also affect board state, its worth jumping through hoops to hit them all and slower multicolour decks get rewarded - stuff like Artful Takedown and Hypothesizzle did this in GRN.
Same is true if most of your creatures are about as exciting as a Air Elemental, but you include Baneslayer - now that UB control deck may as well splash for a finisher, since the competition in its own colour is crap, and if its skewing its manabase to hit by turn 5 it might as well include some of that single-pipped white removal too, and now oops you've got an Esper deck. Its even worse in formats with an abundance of land tutors - even if they put it in your hand, it'll get you your colours off splashing a single basic and now 4c and 5c decks are totally possible.
OTOH, if tempo or CA require cards being played together to get full effect, you're rewarded for consistently playing -something-, so you need more reliable mana, so fewer colours. Same is true once you start hitting three coloured pips on a card - that basically locks you out of playing other colours unless you're willing to lose to your own mana base.
Another lesson I've learned: Turns out gold cards are sexy and people want to run them. If you include them they will get played. Anecdotally, the worst pool I put together really suffered from the 5 enemy cards I included. All 6 decks that got built included one and exactly one gold card and the cards from that colour that synergised with it, three nonbasics of that pair, and no splashing. The allied colour synergies were totally ignored, even though they had twice as many signpost cards. Their signposts were single colour, invisible in the middle of the sorted pool, and went either unused or underutilized ('Eh it has flying I guess' is the dumbest reason to include a Pteremander in a deck that can't grow it). I wonder if this can be 'fixed' by using alternate frame treatments for signpost cards, and I intend to find out in upcoming attempts.
Finally, know your players. In the most recent attempt I was playing with a different group, much higher magic literacy and more comfortable with spike-y play. So, maximum complexity time.
I broke Peasant but kept it low power, ran 20 hybrid cards that were picked for being generically "on brand" for their colour pair, still 5 artifacts but this time they were much stronger, and I tried to have the archetype signpost cards be monocolour rather than in the hybrid sections. Then every signpost card had things that went with it in every other colour - Abiding Grace could loop Spore Frog or Sidisi's Faithful or Martyr of Ashes among many others, for example. Went up to seven vouchers for fixing, changed the lands to just fetches and the snow duals, and added the borderposts to the talismans and signets (Including custom borderposts for the enemy colours) - so five pieces of fixing per guild. Artifact synergies in every colour, Infect for shits and giggles, threw in some domain/sunburst stuff too. Gave up on trying to have a decent curve, aggro was just bad despite the inclusion of Icehide Golem and snow basics for everyone, and every card had like 5+ lines of text. Consistency was terrible because no one archetype had more than like, 4 dedicated cards. Glorious 3c piles abounded, greed everywhere, complex board states and silly gameplans the order of the day. A Jund deck using Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith to make rocks for Flensermite to throw at things as both a stalling tactic and scary clock was probably my favourite. This was the version where Giant Solifuge (And Noggle Hedge-mage iirc) put in -work- in a U/G tempo deck that ended up coming second. It was a mess.
There were two kinds of emotional response: "This is hilarious what the fuck" and "Fuck this BS". Turns out that there are multiple kinds of competitive, magic literate players: The ones that are all for wacky janky interactions and puzzle-like deckbuilding and board states, and the ones that view their investment into specific formats or types of magic as a due they've paid and who hate having that experience invalidated by wacky jank. Based on my single data point, the former are judges or former Rules Advisors, and the latter are eternal players. I wouldn't put a sealed pool like this in front of the latter group, they'll never let you make a limited environment for them ever again. I also deliberately avoided putting this anywhere -near- my friends who play magic casually and for whom EDH is a scary competitive format.
regarding not being able to fit all your archetypes into the space: you basically have two choices, either accept that they’ll all be under supported, or kill off archetypes until you have enough room to properly support the survivors. and bear in mind that players WILL come up with decks you did not have on your archetype list
