My partner and I wanted to play the recent Fallout expansion for Magic: The Gathering, but it was prohibitively expensive to try to buy boosters for it. (I’m not sure if they only did Collector Boosters, or if the local store was just sold out of Draft/Play boosters.) Additionally, the Commander decks were pretty expensive; I wanted this game to be my treat, but I didn’t want to shell out for two of them.
As a result, I did some thinking, and decided that for me, Maximizing Fun would involve buying a Commander deck and then somehow generating a Sealed-like experience out of it.
I asked my partner what his favorite colors to play were: Black and Red. Since my favorites in Limited tend to be red and white or red and green, this was a pretty good start! I picked the Caesar deck as soon as I saw it (I’m a sucker for Roman theming, although I don’t remember this specific guy from watching other people play the game), because at heart I’m really just Boros.
We first pulled out all the lands from the deck and set them aside (even the non-basics). We each got an Evolving Wilds//Terramorphic Expanse, because those are truly identical. I took the lands that had non-mana, non-scry abilities, and put them in their own pile To Be Distributed.
The deck came with two Commanders, so that came next: even though we’re not going to be playing a Commander format, they’re still powerful creatures! I randomized them, and my partner picked Mr House, leaving me with Caesar. That tracks. 😁
We then divided the deck into colors (and Guilds, and I guess…shards? I can never remember the Khans of Tarkir narrow-shard names). For each color, we shuffled all the cards of that color and dealt them randomly into two piles, from which each of us would build our deck.
For mine, I found myself mostly picking white cards, with a few black; almost no red except in the gold cards. I’m not sure what colors he’s going with; I started writing this post while waiting for him to build.
After we finished, I laid out the remaining dual+ lands we had set aside, and we took turns picking cards from that set.
In our first game, I got pretty solidly rolled by his Menace thugs (Tunnel Snake, Thrill-Kill Disciple, and Overseer of Vault 76). I was able to get out a few Soldier tokens, and my Bastion of Remembrance kept me alive a turn or two longer than I might otherwise have survived; but it wasn’t enough. My only consolation was having Voter’s Dilemma take out his Tunnel Snake.
We’re about to start our second game. I’m looking forward to it!
Overall, I think this is a viable format. Normally I would not play 3 colors in limited/sealed unless it was a set explicitly designed for that/with lots of hybrid mana, but because this is built from the bones of a Commander deck, all the duals and mana fixing make it very easy to splash a third color (in my case, red). My mana cost count was something like 21 white, 12 black, and 6 red; in a normal draft that would be, out of 17 lands, probably 9 Plains, 5 Swamps, and 3 Mountains, and honestly that’s just not enough mountains. I just would not play this deck without better mana fixing. Fortunately, again: we have that!
Emilybook 