After looking through the spoilers and checking the available removal creature stats, abilities etc. I came to the following conclusions.

Khans sealed will be slow, even by sealed standard.

Evaluating it based on creature stats is difficult, because outlast messes up the math. Players won't have a static board position relative to combat, even when they're topdecking. But let's look at what they do as a whole.

1.-Blue does not have a common flying creature costing less than 3. WIthout being an alarm signal, that's a clue right there.
2.-Blue only has two common flying creatures (without defender). Yes two. I counted them. I actually thought I had missed one.One costs three for a 2/1 but does have prowess. The other is a 2/2 for four. You won't be flying to victory with that.
Then you also have two uncommon flying creatures. A four mana 3/1 and a six mana kung-fu 4/5. So you can expect things to clog up a bit on the ground. So if you have removal, and you see something that flies? Take it down.

Blue does have a common unblockable 3/2. But it costs 5. And even if you morph it, you'll be skiping your 4 drop, or you didn't have one and you're not exactly going to the tempo bank.

(Quick aside, a rule was broken in this set. White has more flying creatures than blue, so I guess it's officially the color of flying now)

3. Mana acceleration? Yeah, no.This environment is starving on that side too. The only thing you get are the banners at 3 mana. Don't bother asking green for it. The few green cards that search for land (I count two, magic number here) put them in your hand. Yes, there's rattleclaw mystic, but he's rare. So don't count on it. So you won't be popping up mid to large size creatures earlier than development wanted you to.

4. Next, the other thing that tells you how fast a format is. Removal.

Black? Well, you have five removal spells there. Which normally isn't so bad. One is a 2 mana enchantment that gives a creature -2/-2. We can work with that. But it's an enchanment so you rarely will get any CA out of this. You have to do it up front and legit, after that, everything cossts 5 mana or more. Two at five mana, one at six mana, and one at ten mana. One of the five mana ones has delve, but I wouldn't count on getting a discount before turn 4 IF you're lucky. The other is a -4/-4 so killing big things is not going to be easy. And killing small things will be based on the luck of how many debilitating injury you open. So far, things are still slow.

5.Burn

Removing small creatures is usually red's job. But we still fall a little bit short. There is nothing under 3 mana. One burn is at three mana, one at four and two at five. The three mana one is arc lightning though. So you can get card advantage out of it. But you might want to save it for a 3/3. Arc is not common though. So you can expect to pay 4 and 5 mana for your burn.

So playing small creatures and pushing them through early with removal spells is not something you can hope for. The cards available simply won't let you. And removal will be too valuable for you to throw it at a 2/1.

However, you should understand that this wasn't done simply to slow down the format (though that played a large part.)

There are two other reasons.

1. The mardu clan has access to white black and red. That's basically where ALL the removal is. So if they had made Khan's removal on par with most sets. There would be little reason to go with any other clan than mardu. It would have access to all the removal in the set. And even if other options would be underdrafted, your mardu opponents would still have the means to deal with every threat you had. Also, Raid would not really have a condition because you'd be blowing up blockers left and right

2. There is morph. If you put a lot of good cheap removal. Then players won't want to play with morph creatures. No one wants to put a bunch of grey ogres in their decks that will constantly be killed early before they can do anything. Morph hugs a lot of space in limited design, just like pairing did in avacyn's restored (that in my opinion was a badly designed mechanic)

6. White doesn't have much common fliers either

The cheapest white flying creature costs 3, and it's an uncommon. The only other good common fliyer is a four mana 2/3(Does have vigilance though)

7.There is only ONE multicolor common with flying. And it costs 6 mana for a 3/4. The best you can do is hope to pull the uncommon icefeather aven. a two mana 2/2 fliyer.

8. Morph. I don't think I need to explain that one. Morph was not designed to be fast.

So yeah. You may enjoy this, but it won't be over quickly.

Don't take this as meaning that Abzan will have an advantage though. You need to pull down your pants to use outlast. If you try to use it early, you may actually give a short game to your opponent. At turn five removal will start flying, and your tempo along with it. You'll have less threats in play if you activated outlast a lot, so you may not be able to recover from losing two creatures on turns 5 and 6. Or 6 and 7.

I am on my phone so I can't post all my points but this is very different than my take. I will post a reply tonight or tomorrow.

Turns out that all of this is wrong.

This is actually right in my experience.

More games required!

You are both wrong. Agreeing with each other doesn't change it.

I found the T3 banner to be perfectly adequate acceleration to launch a deck into dropping 5-drops on T4. But maybe that's because my deck was running two Ivorytusk Fortress and two Krumar Bond-Kin (and two Throttle) - getting to that 5-mana hump was big, and getting there with the T4 land drop was huge.

I'll agree that things were not quick, though. Twice my match went to fulltime and I swung for the win during the 'five more turns', and I know many others in the room did the same - seemingly a lot more than the usual for limited.

You go to time because your deck is bad and you're not significantly better than your opponent.

I never went to time but my matches were still really long in turns. I just played fast.

Insightful; I'll be sure to apply this wisdom tomorrow when I play my prerelease. Thanks!

I'm just here to help.

The problem with everybody's opinion on the format is that they all picked a different clan for the prerelease and each clan is supposed to play differently. Some are slow and grindy, other are more midrange, and others are aggressive. You can build a deck that is extremely slow or you can build something that is low to the ground with all of the pikers that are available. You can actually get decent mana with the common and uncommon fixing so playing an aggressive deck is possible. But, there are a good amount of cards that can blow the aggressive decks out and make them basically unable to operate. The gb infest comes to mind.

There were a gajillion draws at our pre-release. Also my deck was bad and I was not significantly better than my opponents. There is TONS of removal in this set. I was running 4 colors ("notwhite") and had 3 I had to cut.

It's almost like all the decks in a limited format are bad, and yet they need to slam into one another to determine which one is not-significantly-better than the other.

No, wait, that IS limited, and especially sealed. Bad deck slugfest.

I went 5-1 in a Swiss draw - if all the decks in the 4+ win tables were not significantly worse than my bad deck, and they got to those tables because they were in turn not significantly better than the decks they faced, then doesn't it stand to reason the whole field was bad decks, and thus my deck was, relatively-to-field-speaking, not all that bad? Where were the 'good' decks?

Abzan is, by design, about endurance (says right there on the box, "BATTLE WITH ENDURANCE"), so it's playing exactly into design that I play high toughness creatures that eventually stops the bleeding from aggro, and I use removal to take out evasion, and eventually establish enough of a board to start counterpunching while maintaining enough of a defense to keep myself alive.

Prerelease analysis is pretty skewed. I mean, I was beating someone down as they flooded their board with tokens, and then with the +2/+1 warrior-based trumpet blast they got in a 36 point life-swing and won. There were several games I just simply lost because players played insane bombs, and yes, the removal is much more abundant here.

I went 2-2 across both events. My match losses all came about from mana issues and keeping questionable hands. In the first event it was more bad luck... I averaged 9 lands per 13 draws on my match losses with 18 lands in my deck. I then used that "information" to justify keeping 2-landers in the second event, which was terrible because I was perpetually late to getting to 5 mana.

I went Temur in the morning and Sultai in the afternoon. Temur really needs to curve out, and their bounce spells are very powerful. The 2-mana tap enchantment is alright, but it also allows your opponent to untap his creatures at instant-speed in the late game, which feels awful. I think the key to Temur is the 1-drop fetches and the 3-drop 0/5 looters. A Temur deck with perfect mana and smoothed-out draws seems impossible to beat.

I went Sultai in the afternoon. Weak lower end of the curve but I had a ton of morph. When I could get to 5 I could just blow everything up with my 3 throttles and other removal, but most games I spent on 4 mana hiding behind my apes.

I love those apes btw. They stop almost everything, and getting some +1/+1 counters onto them is g/g.

I agree about the bounce spells in general were very good against me dropping 6 drops or "8" 3/5 drop morphs.
I had almost no mana issues running 8/7/7/4 in a 4 color deck. I think there was one case where I was short red and one where I was short black.

Come to think of it, I almost never missed a land drop - in 16 games. And my curve went to 7. That seems really lucky.

It really hurt when my Necropolis Fiend got bounced and I no longer had the delve fuel to cast it again.

I played some 6-land hands when the hand covered all three colors - and never lost doing that. Getting to 5 mana was so critical in my deck it was worth the risk relative to mulliganning to 6 and maybe getting a more 'normal' 2 or 3 land, but risking not getting a 5 drop down by T5.


The only match I lost was to a deck with several Act of Treasons ... games where I 'stabilized' against the aggro with some giant creatures, only to have one spell both give him one extra huge attacker AND take away one of my blockers. That hurt... dying to my own Fiend or Fortress. One time he even took my Chief of the Edge and attacked, and then we noted how many of his other attacking creatures were Warriors in his deck that had no intentional Warrior-tribal tricks.

I would rate the clans from most aggressive to least aggressive
Jeskai
Mardu
Temur
Abzan
Sultai
As usual in Magic, you can beat a deck that is slightly more aggressive than you, but not a deck that is much more aggressive than you.

Mardu is by far the most aggro. I know this, because I absoloutely stomped Jeskai players with Mardu. I also did the same after picking Abzhan (surprise, I went Mardu instead, but I felt like implying I was primarily WBG and aggro, even though with the right pool you easily can)

Also, the only people I saw going to time were the people I know are terrible players who take forever. My matches rarely took more than 20-30 minutes.

Format isn't super slow like you guys are implying. I think the problem is that inexperienced players don't know how to attack with morphs. Knowing how to use morphs is probably the biggest skill testing factor of the format. I was beating with all sorta morphs as my opponents simply let them through, then never swung back unless they could unmorph, which was an obvious tell as to what morphs they had.

Sorry to say, but your analysis is wrong.

I'm neither a terrible player nor inexperienced. I finished 4th of 44 (my third straight top-4 finish in limited play). A lot of the other Abzan players in the top brackets were also neither terrible nor inexperienced, and many of them also had to grind their way through the end of the alotted time to come away with their wins and draws to get there. The Abzan cardpool is designed to grind the creature combat to a halt and then eventually turn the tide. It's not a quick win unless your opponent fails to execute entirely.


Appreciate the broad brush though. "I won fast, so everyone who won slow must suck!"