Today, I talk a bit about what Scars limited has to offer, both in terms of sealed and in terms of drafting, and featuring examples from this weekend's past PTQ in Detroit. With the limited PTQ season in full swing and two limited GPs coming up, this may be the most (or only) relevant article I ever write!
Let's start with how I approach a Scars sealed pool. Unlike in M11, it may not be obvious what color(s) I will be playing after I glance through the pool once, and out of the artifacts that I have, undoubtedly a good portion of them will be playable in some dimension. A good early step is to check whether you can be the infect deck. A general rule of thumb is that you need at least 10 infect creatures backed up by some assortment of removal and tricks (the deck will be black and then either blue or green, usually). If you can't really play the infect deck, then all of your infect creatures aside from Necropede can go away.
The tricky thing about the format is that so many of the cards have power levels that depend on what other cards you have. This is obvious with a mechanic like metalcraft, but more subtle with how to value the Trigon cycle (all 5 are playable in the right deck) or off-color Myrs, for example. Speaking of Myrs, their presence can often dictate how many colors and/or splashes your deck can contain. The issue with choosing colors is that a color does not need depth of playables to be considerable since you have plenty of playable artifacts; what you want is a color that gives you particularly strong creatures and/or removal. This is why so much white, red, and black is played in Scars sealed; those colors feature the removal and the bombs. While green and blue may be more deep in draft, depth isn't what we're looking for. Playing three black cards if they are Carnifex Demon, Grasp of Darnkess, and Skinrender is more than fine, to borrow an example from LSV's article.
After figuring out which color(s) are considerable, try to narrow down which artifacts you want to play. This is probably the hardest part of the sealed process in Scars, since usually at this point, even if you're down to 2 colors, you'll be at around 30 or so playables, and sometimes more than that. My advice here is to stay on track with the game plan of your deck- If you have proliferate effects, don't cut Tumble Magnet (and probably don't cut that card anyways since it's really strong). If you're beating down with 2/2 fliers, don't cut Barbed Battlegear or Trigon of Rage. If you have a lot of removal already, it's probably okay to cut a Trigon of Infestation, and if you're the aforementioned 2/2 fliers deck, the Trigon should have been cut long ago. If you have cards that need to metalcraft, don't go below 10 artifacts, and you should probably not go below 12. My other tip is to avoid loading up on cards that don't really do very much-playing a couple of mana Myrs and then a Perilous Myr and then a Darkslick Drake may seem like a sick curve, but you still haven't really done anything, and any deck with any bomb will be able to beat you.
I don't have my sealed pool from this past weekend put together, nor do I have my deck, but it was one of the easier builds I've had in this format. Red had double Galvanic Blast, an Arc Trail, and a Barrage Ogre while blue had two Volition Reins, some fliers, and a Grand Architect. My artifacts included two Chrome Steed, Trigons of Thought and Corruption, and three mana Myrs. I chose to run 16 lands and 3 Myrs; maybe I'm biased towards cheating on land count in this format, but I find people who are running 17 lands and 4 or 5 Myrs are just running too many mana sources in their deck. In addition, those mana heavy decks are the least likely to be running ways to upgrade their Myrs into relevant plays like Darksteel Axe or Trigon of Rage.
The games themselves were interesting and particularly rewarding for tight play. In one round, I failed to read that Nim Deathmantle gave intimidate, so I randomly died. In another round, I didn't make an attack with creatures my opponent expected me to attack with, so he put me on nothing and shattered my Chrome Steed EOT. I responded by Galvanic Blasting his Precursor Golem with exactly three artifacts in play. Playing for top 8, my opponent didn't destroy my mana Myr with Hoard-Smelter Dragon, instead killing my Rust Tick that wasn't doing much; on my turn, I had exactly six mana for my Volition Reins. Playing around cards in the format provides a much more real advantage in this format than in other recent formats; if you aren't well-acquainted with the set, before PTQing I'd definitely recommend reading through a visual spoiler to get a feel for what cards exist at the common/uncommon/rare levels to be playing around in certain situations (I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but it really helps; if I asked you what instant white removal was in the set and what its rarity level was if it exists, could you answer this question definitively? What tricks does our opponent represent if he leaves up a green and a red mana? I bet you didn't think of Tel-Jilad Defiance, did you...).
Draft is definitely more aggressive than sealed, and people's decks will feature more colored cards and fewer artifacts comparatively. The infect deck is again real (more on this later), metalcraft is a strategy that you need to draft around, and numerous strategies are, at least to some extent, viable. Again, my tip is to stick to the game plan; there's no real absolute "pick order" in a lot of situations because decks need to balance a certain ratio of threats to mana to removal, so the pick can vary depending on what deck you're in and how much of certain effects you have already. A very good example here is the card Tumble Magnet; while the card is playable in every draft deck, it is better enough in the aggressive decks (especially those that are trying to metalcraft) that control players probably will not pick the card high enough to get it. Mana Myrs are good, but it my view a little overrated, and it's usually not to hard to pick one or two up later on in the draft.
In the top 8 draft, my P1p1 was between Trigon of Thought and Blackcleave Goblin. While Goblin is by no means a bomb in the infect deck, it is a solid infect creature, which is all that the infect deck needs. Trigon of Thought is a fine card, and I'd even call it quite strong in sealed, but in draft your deck just doesn't have the density of removal spells and answers in general to justify picking it so high. The key to the infect deck is that all your guys seem shitty, but you just have to stick to the plan and the deck as a whole will come together okay. This is exactly what happened. I don't have my exact list, but I had around 13 infect creatures with double Untamed Might, a few removal spells, and some equipment. I lost in top 4 to a pretty ridiculous deck and a pretty loose keep (Vector Asp, Sylvok Lifestaff, Untamed Might, 4 lands game one on the draw), but that's just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.
To wrap things up, I'll present and explain my build of Rich's sealed pool, which was posted earlier this week on this site.
Black:
1 Painsmith
1 Skinrender
1 Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
Red:
1 Furnace Celebration
1 Hoard-Smelter Dragon
1 Shatter
1 Turn to Slag
Artifacts:
1 Chrome Steed
1 Clone Shell
1 Contagion Clasp
1 Copper Myr
1 Darksteel Axe
1 Darksteel Sentinel
1 Horizon Spellbomb
1 Iron Myr
1 Necropede
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Perilous Myr
2 Snapsail Glider
1 Strata Scythe
1 Sylvok Replica
1 Trigon of Corruption
1 Vulshok Replica
1 Forest
1 Blackcleave Cliffs
7 Mountain
7 Swamp
To me, the obvious colors are R/B, since they both have a kill spell or two and a bomb flier that can win the game on its own. Painsmith being a really strong card letting you trade up and Furnace Celebration being pure gas with at least three sac outlets means that those two get the nod, so the question becomes which artifacts to run. I have included those which I feel are strongest while leaving out some of the ones that I find more mediocre. Note that I have chosen not to play Venser, the Sojourner; while that card is undeniably strong, I don't think we actually want to play white, and adding two colors for a suspend three win the game just isn't quite good enough. This is especially true since we already have two bombs and our deck is very capable of winning regardless through beating down- If our current build was mediocre, we might have to try splashing the walker since it would be the only way we could win in later rounds, but I think that this build is perfectly capable of doing so on its own right.
I hope this helped you with the format a little bit, and hopefully we'll see some Trusty Machetes in the Top 8s of the PTQ in Chicago this weekend and at the GP in Toronto!
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