I decided to provide all of you with an in-depth explanation of the fine format called Sealed. To do so I will write multiple articles, each featuring a different aspect of the game; like rules of the format, deckbuilding, resource distribution, deck and player styles,etc. I will start with the basic rules and reasons to playsealed, so if you have been playing The Spoils™ since Open Beta or are a TCG veteran you will probably know most of that already.

To make the article worthwhile for those veterans I have already included an example sealed pool at the end of this very first article of the upcoming series. It is a random sealed pool, created from real first edition The Spoils™ product. The pool is meant as a way to practice building a sealed deck. That way the more experienced readers also get some use out of this article, while the less experienced The Spoils™ fans get to know about the rules before they try to build the pool. I will continue adding a pool to each article, giving my own build and reasoning behind it in the respective next article. So you could just wait and see how the theories of the last article are put into practice, but I would suggest you also indulge in deck building yourself. As an additional interactive feature, I will open a thread in the deck building section of the forum when this article goes online, where you can compare and discuss your builds with other players. There are also a bunch of useful links at the end of the article granting you access to some nice tools the awesome Spoils fan base has already programmed for your pleasure.

Ok, let’s see what has happened so far: You heard rumours about a new game being released. People were calling it a good game. A really good game. A great game. The best tournament card game ever! You did not really believe the hype, but at least you took the time to check it out. You sat down at a white demo table with a long-haired freak, a cute spoiler girl, or one of your friends and learned how to play The Spoils™. You received a Spoils Tournament Experience™ number and got to keep your trade deck. You realized that all those people were right, so you bought some of the other trade decks to teach your friends at home how to play this fantastic game. And that is what you have been doing ever since then (apart from sleeping and eating occasionally).

Playing with the trade decks provided endless hours of fun for you and your friends, so why should you care about playing sealed deck?

There are lots of reasons to do so, but I am just going to give you the most important ones: By now you have “only” enjoyed the game play of The Spoils, but you know there is more out there. There are probably cards and themes in the Trade Decks you like better than others; therefore you decided to get some more cards to change the contents of the decks. That process is commonly referred to as deck building. Deck building works like body building: It will increase strength and appearance of your decks, and people will adore you for that, and therefore try to marry you, have sex with you, and so on. As a minor side effect you will alsowin more games with a well-build deck. So even though ripping open lots of booster boxes and looking at all the cards you haven’t seen before, enjoying their flavor and thinking of their potential applications surely is fun, you could also use your newly obtained cards already in the opening process to play a game of sealed deck.

If you do so, you also get a good feeling for the power level of the cards you have never played with before, something that is hard to get by only looking at the cards and thinking about their potential. In addition to that cards will come up in combinations you have never seen before, which will result in funny and challenging game situations, and sometimes you will even discover new combinations to build a new constructed deck around.

You might also have heard about Tenacious Games´ incredible Tournament Series calledInvitational Qualifiers (IQ), which comes to your local retail store. Some of those tournaments will be featuring the sealed deck format, so it is probably a good idea to prepare for that. The IQs already have a great prize support and the Invitationals will be even better . Make sure you check it out at:
http://www.thespoils.com/spoils/view.php?pg=article_retailer_iq

Even if you are not winning the first tournaments you go to, you will meet new players, who share your appreciation for The Spoils™, make new friends, and have a lot of fun with them.

What are the rules for sealed deck construction?

Playing in a sealed tournament you will get a Competition Pack, consisting of 69 (you have to love those naughty boys and girls at TG for that!) cards, including 30 resources and one faction card. In addition to that you receive 2 Booster Packs, containing 13 cards each. That leaves you with 64 random non-staple cards. With those cards and any number of resource cards (you can use more than those included in the competition pack) you must build a deck consisting of at least 45 cards. You are allowed to play more cards, but you should not do so because it will weaken your deck. A limited amount of time will be given to all the players to build and register their decks.

During that period you not only need to choose the cards to play but also need to figure out how many resources of each kind you want to run in your deck. That can be pretty complicated at times and will be addressed in an upcoming article. I stated you could also use the product you bought to enlarge your collection to play a game of Sealed with a friend, but you happen to only have Booster Packs and no Competition Packs. No problem at all! The content of the Competition Pack nearly equals that of three Booster Packs. Just take five boosters to create a sealed pool. You will end up with one more common card, but you can easily remove one of the commons at random from the pool, or just build decks from those 65 cards. You will also need to add resources from your collection in that case.

So by now you already know all the rules you need to know. Before I give you further strategical advice in the next article, you can try to build one deck on your own just following the rules above.

Here is a picture and the list of our first sealed pool:

Characters

Non-character cards

If you want to look up some of those cards for any reason you can use the new and great online database named “Athena” created by two of the forum members here : http://www.metatime.net/athena/

You can also download the list as an .mwDeck file for Magic Workstation here.

MWS is a program built to enable online deck building and play for TCGs. At http://thespoilschest.googlepages.com/ you can find all the links and files to download MWS, patch and reconfigure it, to make it a nice tool for The Spoils™. That way you can look at the pictures of the cards while trying to build the sealed pool, but try not to get too distracted by “Entrancing Harlot” and “Erotic Assassin”.

If you already have a lot of cards the best option would definitely be to really put the sealed pool together as a physical pile of cards. This feels a lot more natural and has some advantages: First of all you can move around your cards freely, sorting by trades, costs or whatever seems appropriate to you. Additionally you do not forget about any cards in the pool and you can actually play some games with the deck you built, testing its performance. And after all that is the best way of simulating a real sealed tournament.

In the next article I will use the above sealed pool as an example to provide you with methods to find out which trades are the best in a given pool, and how to derive the most efficient deck from those trades, mainly focussing on card quality and interactions, still leaving resource issues aside.

I hope you liked my article and my interactive approach to it.

Have fun with The Spoils!