Ixalan Sealed League: Week 1

Welcome to week one everybody. After going 3-1 at the opening tournament, I was feeling pretty good about my deck overall, but there were definitely some holes that needed filling. If you need a refresher, here's the deck I ran originally.

Wanting double red by turn three for a burn spell would be a lot easier if all of my two drops weren't green. Along the same lines, even though Ixalli's Diviners did good work for me, I really wanted to be able to get ahead and stay ahead. I needed red two drops! Let's see what the weekly pack held for me.

Darn. Deeproot Warrior is a good two drop, and I could replace one of the Diviners with it, but I still had the same problem with mana consistency. It's a good thing I knew where I wanted my trade points to go, so I could find someone with good red that they couldn't use. This trimester, that person happened to be Tams.

After trading pools for a perusal, we managed to find the following four point trade. Now, I'm not good at getting my trades in, usually because I'm cautious about closing doors early on, and then I usually don't find trades that I really want later, but in this case, I knew exactly what I wanted, and so did she. Here's the deck I ran this week.

So how did it go? It went... Fine. I could feel that my deck was running more smoothly than it had during the opening tournament. Lannery made a huge difference to my mana, just through making treasure, and people didn't seem to want to block her and let her trade up. Of course, I didn't always draw her, so I did have a frustrating first round where I had three forests and one mountain. Between that and a mul to five, I had a frustrating first round. In round two I came up against a three colour Dino deck with one or two too few actual Dinos. If the pilot find them, I think it could be quite strong. He has all the payoffs, but I managed to keep killing his dinosaurs, which made his humans easy to run over.

In round three, I had a rematch with a new player whom I'd played against in the opening tournament. We were neck and neck for two good games, but in the end, even with my removing all his early creatures, and even with Captivating Crew stealing his Deathless Ancient, he managed the damage to do me in. In round four, I got to play against the literal mirror match, right down to the Snapping Sailback at instant speed to give a Thrash of Raptors Trample. They were three good games, and I managed to pull out a win mostly due to having multiple burn spells just when I needed them. 2-2 may be a worse record than my 3-1 from the opener, but the deck felt good, and with one more pack, I'm excited to see what next week brings. Join me next Tuesday to find out! Thanks for reading, -Step.