They Never Play Around the Second Harsh Rule (31-9, sealed, #11)

Welp, this deck didn't feel fair. Harsh Rule is a very difficult card to play around in Sealed, and no one is going to play around the second one. Having two copies of it also meant I had the consistency necessary to build my entire deck around it - pretty much every game consisted of me playing some units to block with, stalling the game a bit until my opponent ran out of cards in hand, then cleaning things up with a Harsh Rule before playing out even more gas.

Of course, things were helped along by some very solid other rares - I'll call out Waxing Moon as pulling the most weight by giving me inevitability in most matchups due to the extra card advantage, while also clogging up the board by giving deadly half the time. D'Angolo Houndmaster, Rolant's Honor Guard and Sanity Scorcher are also all very strong units and capable of providing a ton of pressure. Winchest Merchant was just okay due to me not having a bunch of great options for my market, but it was never bad either.

Went 2-2 in the first week - I opened some strong bombs (including one of the Harsh Rules), but the only other removal I had in my pool was a single Topple, which meant I couldn't really function as the control deck my pool clearly wanted to be. Week 2, I opened the second Harsh Rule and a few more removal spells (including a second Topple and Send a Message), at which point I was off to the races with a 13-3 record. Went 7-3 week 3 with only minor changes (cutting a few fire cards for smoother influence), and closed things out week 4 with 9-1 record despite no deck changes from the previous week. Final record was 31-9, juuuust outside top 10.