Table of Contents
Hey everyone! With prerelease starting tomorrow (or today depending on where you live) I figured I should drop a sealed guide to help you prepare to win a pile of packs. I was jamming early access with my Draft Lab buddies so I have a bunch of thoughts to share with you about the experience. I’ll be discussing how to go about building your sealed deck as well as a bunch of tips and tricks to help you get across that finish line.
March of the Machine (MOM) Limited Guides
- Five-Color Archetype Guide - New!
- Tier List
- Archetypes Guide and Example Decks
- Battles Guide
- March of the Machine: The Aftermath Guide and Review
- Arena Open
- Draft Guide
- Combos and Synergies
- Underperformers and Overperformers
- Mechanics Guide
- Removal Guide: Unconditional Removal
- Removal Guide: Conditional Removal, Tempo and Sweepers
- Sealed and Prerelease Guide
- Multiverse Legends
- White Review
- Blue Review
- Black Review
- Red Review
- Green Review
- Artifacts, Lands, and Multicolor
Building Your Sealed
We’ll start out with building your sealed before we get into more of the generalized ideas you’re going to need to know.
The first step is to sort out your bombs and power cards. That means rares, multiverse legends, and mythic uncommons. There are a lot of ridiculous rares in this set and the Multiverse Legends bonus sheet has some real bangers as well. The power level in the set is really high and you don’t want to be found lacking. That means that you will probably go out of your way to ensure that you are playing as many of them as your mana reasonably allows.
The second step is to go through the rest of your cards to separate the cards into ones that you actively want to play, the ones that you conditionally want to play (think build arounds or synergy cards), and cards that you hope to God don’t make the cut. Once you have those sorted by color, you can see which colors are deep, which cards synergize with your power cards, and which colors are actually shallow.
The third step is to sort out all of your mana fixing. This includes the dual lands, Skittering Surveyor, Flywheel Racer, Blighted Burgeoning and their ilk. It’s mostly where you find out how feasible splashing is, but go ahead and follow your dreams if you can somehow get there on some crazy Invasion of Alara shenanigans.
By now you should have a good idea of what is actually feasible with the pool you have. Start building the combinations to get a good look at the curves or what the weaknesses of each build are.
Try to go with the most consistently powerful one, but, if possible, also have a low to the ground side deck ready to switch into in case your main deck matches up poorly. Write down those changes somewhere so you have easy access to them.
Now just figure out your mana base and enjoy collecting your victories. There aren’t any Terramorphic Expansetype cards in the set so you’re at the mercy of the dual land gods helping you out here.
Tips and Tricks
The battle mechanic leads towards games snowballing in one player’s favor. They do require future planning and figuring out whether you should actually just be swinging at the face. During early access I saw a lot of people just jam battle after battle without an actual plan to flip them.
Battles also heavily complicate combat math. It adds a whole new level of complexity so take your time to figure out the different permutations.
So far, all of these decisions have made the format very skill rewarding.
There haven’t been any archetypes that have felt underpowered yet, but it is still very early.
In draft you can actually make decks that almost entirely avoid battles to focus on pure aggression, but in sealed you’re much less likely to have a deck like that. Equipment can still play a large role though.
When a battle is flipped, it isn’t like a transform, the back has to be cast. That means you can counter it if you need to. It’s not optimal, but sometimes it’s better than the alternative.
The land cyclers are basically auto includes in sealed if they are in your color. Don’t them let them being big, goofy looking cards scare you off.
Since sealed is slower certain cards such as Invasion of Eldraine improve because it is more likely to actually hit two cards.
Counterspells also tend to perform better in sealed. I would happily run a Negate in any blue deck.
While it has fallen from its lofty status in draft, you should still be playing Skittering Surveyor in sealed.
The cheap combat tricks have also been helping to keep the aggro decks in check. Ephara's Dispersal has been especially brutal against them.
Speaking of combat tricks be very careful about walking into Angelic Intervention and Bladed Battle-Fan Right now, they have that early in the set bonus of people forgetting they exist.
The dual lands are not in common slots, they are in the land slot in half of the packs. That makes them much harder to get than a set like DMU where they were flowing.
Not to sound like a broken record here, but the best thing you can do is be lucky on your opens. A few bombs in the same colors along with some good interaction will go a long way.
Wrap Up
Thanks for reading! Hopefully this helps you excel in your prereleases or prepare for them coming to Arena next Tuesday. I’ll be back tomorrow with the last part of my review of the Multiverse Legends. Until then, stay classy people!
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.
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