Sealed Experiment Selesnya Deck Build in ISD+RTR Standard

Now that I have shown the cards from the intro pack and the five additional booster packs, it is time to build a Standard Constructed deck. Every card has to come from this selection. I will make the exercise further constrained by not using the one uncommon and hand full of commons from M13 that come with the intro pack. All other cards are fair game.

Here are links to the posts for....

The cards in the intro pack.

The additional cards from the booster packs.

First, let's do a creature count:

Ideally I would like to have three to four one-drops, all I have is two, and they require additional mana. I will take them.

There's also one Trained Caracal.

Now let's do the two-drops: just one, and that means we have a bit of a mana curve hole in this selection. That's the bad news.

The good news is that we have six useful three-drops. These cards will play to the defensive early game: Seller of Songbirds has 2 toughness, and Centaur Healer increases life.

We are now at 10 creatures. We have 10 more.... and that means 20 creatures and all to keep. The ones not listed below have Scavenge, a Golgari ability, or are defensive and with heavy CMC (converted mana cost).

The creature mana curve is not that great: too few 2-drops, no 5-drops, no 6-drops, and then three 7-drop bombs, and we need them all to have 20 creatures.

Let's see if we have better luck with the Sorceries: the three Call of the Conclave will help us fill our 2-drop hole. Chorus of Might may find some use too. We are up to 25 cards.

OK....better luck with the instants? This deck build is already looking like a mono Blue deck: low on creatures and sorceries. Let's look at the instants...well, let's add the two nice enchantments from the packs to get to 27 cards, and that leaves us with a very large number of possible enchantment: 51 minus 27 is 24!!!. Yes, 15 of these can go in the sideboard, but still, that's a large number.

Here are the enchantments.

And given these limited numbers, let's fish out the two Selesnya Keyrunes that came with the Intro Pack.

22 Instants? Really? There's 14 good ones in this selection.

What to do to fill 8 slots? With these...

Here is the final mana table.....I squeezed every card I could and still could not come up with the full count of 51 cards. (Add 24 and you have a 60 card deck and a 15 card sideboard).

Conclusion: a Standard Constructed deck is either weak when it comes out of an intro pack-and it is supposed to because the intro pack is designed to introduce the game to new players; or incomplete when you add three packs on top of the two that come with the intro pack. A better sealed experiment for Standard Constructed could be from two intro packs and five additional boosters: two 60 card decks and 9 booster backs. Of course, no sane Local Game Store (LGS) would ever run such a format because the cards alone would cost $26 for the two intro packs and $20 for the additional booster packs: that's close to $50!