[Music] this video is brought to you by Squarespace an all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website more about them at the end of the video many new Magic the Gathering players ask the question how do I build a sealed deck at my local pre-release event there are many different ways to play Magic the Gathering the sealed deck is a method of choice for pre-release events some competitive tournaments and a lot of casual play pre-release events are always a lot of fun and one
of the best environments for players new and old to play Magic the Gathering with their local community if you wish to participate in your local game stores pre-release event the format you will be playing is sealed so what is sealed sealed is a magic the Gathering format that falls under the large umbrella of limited which means a format where you are limited to the cards you open in sealed packs in sealed you open six packs of magic cards usually all from the same set the cards you open in these packs form the pool of cards
you'll have to work with from which you will construct a 40 card minimum deck because sealed is the format for pre-release and because it's a great way to play casual games of magic among your friends it's one of the best formats for a new player to learn learn gam playay and sealed is often more straightforward and focused on the fundamentals of magic such as attacking and blocking and everyone starts at a Level Playing Field since everyone is opening the same number and kind of packs all of these features make sealed the best most accessible format
for new players this video will tell you everything you need to know to play in your first sealed or pre-release event I will guide you through deck construction from opening and sorting your pool to choosing your colors and deciding which cards in those colors you should put in your [Music] deck if you are playing at a pre-release at your local game store then you will be building a deck using packs from the most recent set you also receive one randomized promotional card that will be part of your pool you are allowed to include that card
in your deck most competitive sealed tournaments also draw on the most recent set as well though the packs for these events do not provide you with an additional promo card for your your pool the first thing you'll want to do before arriving at your local pre-release is to spend a bit of time looking over the complete card list for the most recent set yes there are a lot of them usually around 250 to 300 cards in a set but don't worry you don't have to nor should you even try to memorize every individual card the
goal of looking over the set ahead of time is to be a little more familiar with the cards you open in your packs so as to make the experience of evaluating your card pool and building a deck much easier if you're reading every individual card as you open them you'll have less time to make decisions about which of them are worth putting in your deck the easiest way to look at all the cards in the new set is by pulling up the official card image gallery on the Wizards of the Coast website the complete set
list is sorted by color and you can also filter your search by color Rarity or card type for a more refined search I recommend you filter by Rarity when preparing for your pre-release as it will be easier to absorb the card images you're looking for when they're grouped with other similar cards think of this like a pneumonic device I recommend you start with the commons since those are the most numerous cards you'll encounter then filter for uncommons and then if you have time look at the rares and mythics Al together looking at the rares and
mythics for a new set is certainly exciting as they are often very cool and powerful cards but what if I told you these are actually the least important kinds of cards to familiarize yourself with ahead of your event it's true your sealed pool is actually going to have fewer rares and mythics than any other card Rarity and you're less likely to open any specific rare in your packs than you are a specific common or uncommon you'll have plenty of time to read and evaluate the rares that you open in your packs once you have them
in front of you but in preparing for your sealed event Focus your energy on uncommons and Commons get familiar with those first rules for deck building now that you have a sense of the cards in the set the next step will be to learn how they fit together to make a sealed deck a sealed deck consists of a minimum of 40 cards you can run more cards if you'd like to but I strongly suggest you keep your deck to know more than 40 cards so that you will have a better chance of drawing your best
cards this may mean you have to make some tough choices on the last few cuts for your deck but that's just part of the process your 40 card deck should consist of 17 lands and 23 non-land cards the deck will consist entirely of cards you opened in your sealed pool with one exception you may add as many basic lands As You Wish from the Basic Land station the staff running your local pre-release or sealed event will make it very clear where the Basic Land station is located but you can always ask them to point you
toward it any non-basic lands such as dual lands as well as all of your non-land cards will come only from your sealed pool step one opening and sorting it's time to start opening up your packs as you do so I also recommend you sort the cards you open in wooer order that is white blue black red and green you'll also need a pile for multicolor cards a pile for colorless cards such as artifacts and a pile for any non-basic lands form these piles of sorted cards as you go opening a pack and distributing the cards
in it into each color I also recommend keeping any rares you open separate from the color piles as these will have the greatest weight on your decision of which colors to run once you begin deck building be careful you don't fall into the Trap of getting ahead of yourself by starting to think about deck building while you're still opening your packs you might open a premium uncommon card in an early pack only to find that the later packs don't offer enough other playable cards in that premium uncommons color to build around that card it's just
best to put any thoughts of deck building out of your mind until you have your whole pool in front of you once you've opened and sorted your packs there's one more step I recommend taking before starting to build your deck sort your pool by Mana cost this will make planning out your Mana curve much easier more on this in a moment but first step two choosing your colors in most cases especially as a newer player you should try to build a two-color deck you will likely have one or two colors with more cards than the
other colors in your pool you don't need to build a deck in the color pair of your two most represented colors but you will probably choose a color pair that touches at least one of your most prevalent colors one of the biggest draws toward a particular color in your pool will be your bomb rares bombs are cards that either take over the game if left unanswered or provide you with such a significant Advantage the turn they are played that they are capable of swinging a losing game back in your favor bombs are often big creatures
that are hard to block such as those with flying and trample value engines such as those that repeatedly draw you cards or make Creature tokens or permanence with powerful effects when they enter play the best bombs do more than one of these things planes walkers have gotten weaker over the past few years of C design but a good planes Walker is still among some of the best cards you could open and sealed this is because they are hard for your opponent to easily remove and provide a significant repeatable advantage to the game every turn that
requires no additional input Beyond its casting cost a good planes Walker is one that does one or more of the following things generates card Advantage meaning it provides access to more cards than your opponent has access to such as by drawing extra cards impacts the board by either generating creature tokens removing Troublesome permanence or both has a high starting loyalty or has a low casting cost board wipes tend to be another exceptional kind of rare and limited as these generate virtual card Advantage by answering multiple cards of your opponents with a single card of your
own bomb cards have always been a significant feature in sealed since you have a pretty good shot at opening at least one great rare in your six packs but the bomb Centric nature of sealed has gotten even more pronounced with the switch to play boosters in 2024 between the wild card slot in a play booster pack the foil slot and the booster fun slot all in addition to the ordinary rare slot it's possible for a single play booster pack to contain as many as four rares because you're much more more likely to open a good
rare that means your opponents are also much more likely to open a good rare when building your sealed deck I would try very hard to build a deck that contains as many of your best rares as you can so that you can keep up with the raw power level of the other players you'll encounter A good rule of thumb for choosing your two colors is this choose whichever color contains the greatest quantity of bomb rares and the color that's the most represented the heavily represented color will provide you with a depth of playable cards while
the color with your bomb rares will provide you with raw power if your color with the most bombs does not provide you with enough playable low Rarity cards to reach 23 non- lands you might be better off picking a deeper color for your second color and simply splashing a third color for the bombs in your shallower color if your deepest color is also the color with the most bombs then congratulations you've opened an excellent pool for your sealed event so what's next step three building your deck aside from bombs the best sealed decks have plenty
of removal card advantage and Mana fixing as well as a nice Mana curve and enough creatures with which to reliably win the game a good sealed deck might be lacking in one or two of these categories but you can often compensate for that by putting a greater emphasis in the other categories keep in mind that your opponents will have bombs of their own and you'll need answers for them you'll also need removal in the early game to not die to your opponent's more aggressive starts spot removal is therefore a premium category of card to include
in your deck the best removal spells are those that are flexible and efficient meaning they can Target a wide range of cards and don't cost very much Mana that said you will have to work with what you have access to running removal spells that are narrower or overcosted is almost always better than not running any removal at all removal that comes attached to a creature or that draws you a card is especially powerful I talked about card advantage in the context of boms but there are other forms of card Advantage as well even spells that
just draw extra cards and do nothing else are often good cards to include in your Deck card Advantage can also take the form of recursion which means bringing cards you've already used back to your hand or into play recursive effects get better the more powerful the cards you recur are though you should plan to build a deck consisting of two colors it is possible to Splash a third color if you open enough color fixing cards like dual lands Mana rocks and land tutors that allow you to easily gain access to your third color without having
to add a bunch of basic lands of that color to your Mana base if you can achieve upwards of four or five sources of your splashed color while only running one or two basics in that color then you should feel free to play a few powerful cards in that third color some limited environments are easier to Splash additional colors in than others but the basic principle of splashing colors always applies regardless of the format you need color fixing if you want to play more than two colors keep in mind that that some color fixing is
still valuable in two color decks such as dual lands and your color pair but fixing is mandatory if your goal is to play three or more colors your Mana curve is the distribution of cards especially creatures in your deck at each Mana value you want to have more cheap cards than you have expensive cards and ideally you should have more two and three Mana cards than you do cards of any other Mana cost the reason for this is because you want to use all your mana and cast a relevant card every turn of the game
if possible start no later than turn two if you do not cast a spell before turn four your chances of winning the game are close to nil lastly and most importantly you should build a deck that has plenty of creatures creatures are the most important card type in sealed as the vast majority of sealed games are won through creature combat if you run out of threats to cast in your game your opponent will effectively win by default the minimum number of creatures you should run in your deck is 13 but definitely your deck will have
between 16 and 18 creatures that fall all along your Mana curve two drop creatures are especially valuable for building your board early in the game cards that generate creature tokens contribute to your creature count if you have a spell for instance that makes two one one creatures then that spell is just as much of a creature as a card that actually has a creature type similarly lands and other non-creature permanence that can be animated into creatures using an ability also count as creatures these days creatures tend to be much more powerful than they were a
decade ago even at low Rarities it's therefore important to have creatures in your deck that do more than put a body into play creatures that accumulate card Advantage interact with your opponents or make your other cards more powerful tend to be excellent creatures and limited remember that while it's great to be blessed with a sealed pool with plenty of good cards to choose from you'll still want to make sure you run no more than 40 cards in your deck meaning no more than 23 non-land cards in your deck when deciding between two different cards a
good tiebreaker is to favor the lower Mana cost card and there you have it you've learned learned everything you need to know to begin playing in a sealed or pre-release event remember that with each new set we release a limited guide to offer intermediate strategy to help you crush your next pre-release or sealed event so keep your eyes open for those videos or know that if you are playing in a flashback sealed event that we have quite the library of them or just watch our own sealed pre-release gameplay such as our triumphant return to lwi
pre-release with spice eight rack Aaron Hansen and Spencer critton that gameplay video is linked in this video's description or you can just click hereabouts it's it's like an eye click the eye yeah I really need a website already to show off all of my episodes of Shuffle up and play but I don't know how to make a website lucky for me Squarespace is the best way to make a brand new professionall looking totally customizable website all without needing to know anything about how websites actually work it's perfect for me the professor and it's the sponsor
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when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com tarian Community College to save 10% off of your first purchase of a website or domain thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this video [Music] next time on shuffle up and play what's up it's Shuffle up and play with Decks that toer has built for us toer built the entire pod for how much money toer $25 each so total $100 do you notice how he built the decks for all of us and he's the did I did notice that it looks kind of over this isn't Petty Prof anymore it's
proper play Prof all the P so much PP so much PP he's showing weakness get him you've played your last shambling gas cuz it's Commander yes correct that's am I going to win next turn type face oh God no you didn't build it that good he just called you a Zoomer you going to take that uh you know because of that I'm going to swing it Prof [Laughter]
