The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth Prerelease and Sealed Guide

Hey everyone! I’m extremely excited that the Lord of the Rings has finally arrived in the world of Magic: The Gathering. Prereleases are starting tomorrow (or maybe even today depending on when this gets posted) and it’s launching on Arena on Tuesday. I’m here to help you go through the process of building your sealed deck along with some tips and tricks to help you scoop up some of those sweet prizes.

The Lord of the Rings (LTR) Limited Guides

• Tier List - Updated!
• Draft Guide - New!
• Jump Into Middle-earth - New!
• Removal Guide
• Archetypes Guide and Example Decks
• Underperformers and Overperformers
• Combos and Synergies
• Mechanics Guide
• Prerelease and Sealed Guide
• White Review
• Blue Review
• Black Review
• Red Review
• Green Review
• Artifacts, Lands, and Multicolor (Part 1)
• Artifacts, Lands, and Multicolor (Part 2)

Building Your Sealed

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As you may have suspected, the first step is to pull out your key cards. This includes your bombs, such as Anduril, Flame of the West or Spiteful Banditry. It also includes mythic uncommons and quality removal. These will be the cards that draw you into certain color combinations.

Next you want to sort through your cards to separate each color into cards you actively want to play, cards that you’d play with the right synergy pieces, and cards that you hope don’t make the cut. This way you’ll know what colors are actually deep, which ones are situationally good, and which you can rule out besides a splash.

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The next step is looking at your mana fixing. There is a lot of it running around, but with the values all over the place depending on your other cards. This will give you an idea of what you can get away with doing during your builds.

There is a lot of green fixing that you can have as the base of your deck while playing all the single pip good cards, but you don’t necessarily want to use that as a default because your deck will probably be all over the place. If you open that pool, by all means go for it. You’ll usually be better off going a focused two colors with a light splash.

You can usually rule out at least one or two colors by now. Build a few different versions to see how they look and compare their strengths and weaknesses. This format appears very high on synergy so try to make sure that your deck has a plan. Check to see if you can afford to splash something that helps shore up some of those weaknesses.

Once you get to this point, you should be able to choose the most consistently powerful deck that will carry you to victory. Just figure out your mana base and you’re good to go.

Tips and Tricks

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Sealed is typically slower than draft so you can get away with more late game cards, but also need ways to deal with them. You’re far more likely to get to the point where a card like Fall of Cair Andros takes over the game in sealed.

Counterspells tend to play better in sealed than they do in draft and most of the ones here are pretty good to begin with. There is actually an Izzet all spells deck floating around that can nullify two of the counters, but it’s extremely unlikely for a fully creatureless deck to pop up in sealed.

Another thing that goes up in value is card draw since you have time to play the spells afterwards.

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One of the biggest increases in EV you can do is to understand what the ring temptations do. I’ve seen lots of punts already from people misunderstanding what can and cannot block.

Because of how the ring works, 1/3 is a much better stat line than it typically is. That also means that 2/1s are worse than normal.

Make sure you have some form of early defense; the overall set is weaker than normal so an unblockable ring bearer can snowball games quickly.

While there are plenty of ways to splash some of the crazy multicolor cards, a lot of them are focused on a particular archetype. That means they probably shouldn’t make the cut unless they synergize with your deck.

Another important point about splashing is that you need to consider at what point of the game you would be playing that card because you don’t want to splash something that is only good early. If you’re splashing removal, that is good during most points of the game. If you’re splashing a late game card, then its likely that you’ll have the mana by the time you would play it.

Try to avoid playing cards that don’t function with the other cards in your deck. A good example is Aragorn, Company Leader which needs temptation cards to be worth it. If you have none, then it’s just a hard to play Centaur Courser. Another great example is Horn of Gondor which is a bomb with a bunch of humans and pretty terrible if you don’t have any of them.

While all of the big butts can lead to board stalls, the ring bearer helps to break those up once the ring gets powered up.

There is also the possibility of games going to decking because of too much food production on both sides of the field. It’s important to realize this before your opponent does to make sure you play accordingly.

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You can cut a non-green land for Many Partings since it is basically another land.

Lembas can be sneaky good because it helps synergize with so many different game plans. It should probably be in more sealed decks than you would think.

Especially in the scry deck, there can be a ton of missed triggers if you’re playing IRL. Take your time and make sure you hit them all. Even on Arena, try to plan out what you can do before you do it.

The land cyclers are actually great enablers for splashing because they only cost one of their color to cast except for Lorien Revealed.

Wrap Up

Thanks for reading! I hope these strategies help you crush your prerelease or what ever sealed events you will be doing. I’ll be back tomorrow to finish up my set review with the second part of multicolor. Until then, stay classy people!

Fine…I guess I will add that I’ll see you LTR! I’m pretty ashamed of that one, but I have a brand to uphold here.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.

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