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Throne of Eldraine Sealed Guide

Core Set 2020 Sealed Event is a great way to build up your collection to the new expansion set. Our in-depth guide will equip you with all the information you need so you can get ahead of your opponents and win maximum rewards.

Throne of Eldraine Sealed Event is a great way to build up your collection to the new expansion set. Our in-depth guide will equip you with all the information you need so you can get ahead of your opponents and win maximum rewards.


MTG Arena will be the first Magic: The Gathering platform to get a chance to collect and play with Throne of Eldraine cards on September 26. The Throne of Eldraine Sealed Event will also be available to play at the same time, which is a great way to boost your collection. If you are familiar with paper Magic, this experience is similar to the prerelease events held in your local gaming stores – so if you plan on doing that as well, read on!

Important note: We have also prepared a Limited Overview guide and preliminary Tier List, which you should read before reading this guide, as much of the information here will refer and also pertain to it.

Event Information

  • Duration: September 26 2019 to October 21 2019
  • Format: Sealed Throne of Eldraine
  • Entry Fee: 2000 Gems
  • Ends After: 7 wins or 3 losses (whichever comes first)
  • Match Structure: Single matches (BO1)

Event Rewards

  • 0 Wins – 200 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 1 Win – 400 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 2 Wins – 600 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 3 Wins – 1200 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 4 Wins – 1400 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 5 Wins – 1600 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 6 Wins – 2000 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs
  • 7 Wins – 2200 Gems, 3 Throne of Eldraine Packs

The reward structure means that even if you do not win any games, you will still get the equivalent number of packs you would have got with 2000 gems, although you do not get any wildcard progression with Sealed packs.

What is Sealed?

Sealed is a type of Limited MTG format where you will receive 6 fifteen-card Core Set 2020 packs and using them plus (basic lands) to build a 40-card deck. Unlike Draft, you are limited by what cards you open and your job is to choose the best cards to make a deck.

In MTG Arena, you will then play best-of-1-matches with that deck, which means you cannot use the rest of your cards as sideboard. This is an unfortunate point, as much of the fun in sealed in swapping your cards in between games due to having access to a larger and broader sideboard. However, you can change your deck as often as you like in between matches.

Limited Archetypes

Firstly, it is important to take note of the archetypes the game developers intended for us to play. We can make use of any synergies and identify what is more viable. The theme of Throne of Eldraine is based on the five realms of the court – that is, the five colors of Magic. Each color has a strong theme and a related mechanic called Adamant to go along with it.

In sealed, it will most likely not be possible to go only a single color unless you get extremely lucky – so you will most likely want to stick to the two color combinations and their synergies. Here is a quick summary of each archetype, but for the detailed breakdown remember to check out the Limited Overview.

Even with this given information, sealed is highly variable format. The deck you will build will highly depend on the cards you open. Ideally, you want to build a sealed deck with as much synergies as possible while also including your good mythic rares and rares.

More often than not in sealed, you may be tempted to splash a third color to fit in the better cards or your “bomb” cards. In Throne of Eldraine, mana fixing will be hard to come by – unless you have access to green cards like Rosethorn Acolyte. There’s cards like Golden Egg, Signpost Scarecrow and Spinning Wheel, but those are cards we would rather not play (maybe except for the egg) if we can avoid it, as they don’t advance your game state.

Components of Your Sealed Deck

As we mentioned above, we also have our Throne of Eldraine Limited Tier List up, where we rank all the cards to help you make an informed decision on what cards to include and exclude from your sealed or draft deck. We will go through a few noteworthy cards, and show you what should comprise of your sealed deck.

Mythic Rares and Rares

The first thing you see when you open your sealed booster packs in MTG Arena are the Mythic Rares and Rares. These cards will hopefully be the backbone of your deck. There are cards like these where they will straight up win you the game:

And Rares like these that are powerful enough to steer you into those colors.

Here are a few other rares worthy of mention:

Except for a few unplayable rares (looking at you, Wishclaw Talisman), the rares seem to be well balanced in Throne of Eldraine where they are not too big of a bomb to make the game completely unfair. This may be slightly different to War of the Spark or Core Set 2020 where often rares would dominate the game and were completely unstoppable if you didn’t already have an answer in hand. In Throne of Eldraine, we have plenty of options to deal with these said rares, which are listed below.

The Removal

Removal spells are the second most important component of your sealed deck, and each color has a variety of ways to deal with your opponent’s creatures and especially their bomb rares. In an ideal world, you want to have 3 or 4 of these cards. Throne of Eldraine has some really good removal in black and red, as well as some conditional ones in other colors with Pacifism style enchantments in white and blue, and fighting and big pump spells at green.

There are also cards like So Tiny and Kenrith's Transformation that don’t remove creatures but negates the creature’s powers on the battlefield. True Love's Kiss is also another decent card especially in sealed – as we can see here, there are plenty of enchantments and artifacts it can destroy, while also netting you an extra card.

In this set, we are most impressed with black’s removal suite. Bake into a Pieis the best removal in the set at common rarity and gets our vote for the strongest color in the set. Black even has more impressive removal in the form of Bog Naughty if you’re going Food, Festive Funeral and Drown in the Loch if you’re going for the blue/black graveyard archetype.

Adventure Cards

In Throne of Eldraine sealed, we have a new mechanic called Adventure. These cards deserve a special mention as they can serve both as a spell and a creature. You may not be lucky enough to pull a Realm-Cloaked Giant or a Murderous Rider, but even simple Adventure cards like above are very useful as they can smooth out the deck’s mana curve and allowing the deck to fit in more creatures.

The Creatures

You want to have between 13-16 creatures in your deck, and will be the backbone of your sealed deck. Adventure creatures and bombs aside, most of them will be your filler commons – and most importantly, it will have at least one of the sign post uncommon of your archetype:

And then these are the better of the common creatures as an example:

Others

Other than the bombs, creatures and the removal spells you will also have other cards to augment your deck. Here are some that we think will be good inclusions:

  • True Love's Kiss: This would usually make an excellent sideboard card, but alas MTG Arena sealed is best-of-one. There are a decent number of playable artifacts and enchantments in the set (Trapped in the Tower, Frogify, and other equipments) and this could be worth maindecking. What pushes this over the line is the fact that it can draw a card as well.
  • Witching Well: Just an all-round good card to smooth out your draws.
  • Foreboding Fruit: Draw spells are always good, and if your opponent is low on life, you can even target them with it!
  • Covetous Urge: This is a really strong spell if it can hit a decent card.
  • Golden Egg: Remember, this also counts as a Food and can be used as such.

Building your Sealed Deck

Generally, your deck will look like this:

  • Two colors
  • 17 lands
  • 14-16 creatures
  • 7-9 other spells
How your sealed deck might look like.
Throne of Eldraine Prerelease Primer

There are situations where playing your third color is better if you are low on playable cards, or want to splash for a bomb rare, as mentioned above. You generally don’t want to deviate from 17 lands. You could play 16 lands if your deck is more aggro, and has a lower mana curve whereas 18 lands is also possible if your deck is more controlling and can make up for excessive lands with card draw.

Strategy, Tips and Tricks

  • In Sealed, keep in mind decks are generally more slow (compared to draft) as players do not really have a choice in picking their cards, and have to play more expensive spells to make their decks more formidable.
  • On top of the above, Throne of Eldraine looks to be a slower and grindier format. A lot of the creatures are defensive in nature, and aggro decks will have a hard time getting through all the 1/3 (Curious Pair, Locthwain Gargoyle, etc) creatures. Food Tokens also do not help this cause. Prepare for longer games!
  • Creatures with evasion are at a premium in this set; there are not that many flying creatures and there are some creatures with menace.
  • The Adamant creatures will be interesting as you won’t be able to cast them on turn 3 most of the time in a two color deck. Consider them to be more late game plays, more like a six mana slot.
  • Always be prepared and play around your opponent’s open mana. Click here to see all the cards in Throne of Eldaine that are Instants, have Flash, and other combat tricks that can be used against you.
  • Weapon Rack + Animating Faerie: A cool interaction that allows you to distribute even more +1/+1 counters to all your creatures!
  • Fling is a great card to have one of in your deck – it is a great combat trick, it can finish off your opponents out of nowhere.
  • Run Away Together: This card is more useful than it looks – there are a few enchantments you can get rid of from your creatures like Trapped in the Tower and Charmed Sleep. It also works well with Adventure cards if you want to reuse the spell portion of it, as well as other enter the battlefield effects.

Sample Decks

Here are some decks from the Early Access Streamer Event, from Magic Pro League player Michael Sigrist.

Practicing

It is never a bad idea to do some deck building practice before heading in first into these events. Draftsim has a sealed simulator for Throne of Eldraine available, which you should try at least once to get a general feel.

Wrapping Up

Throne of Eldraine Sealed is a fun way to introduce yourself to the new cards, and even if you do not win a lot, you can consider your 2000 gems to be spent on 6 packs in the store. We hope you find this guide useful for your upcoming prerelease event also.

If you have any thoughts, tips, card interactions, need help building your sealed deck, or even any feedback on this guide or tier list, please come over to our Discord channel and discuss the new set with us!

Throne of Eldraine Limited Guides

Changelog

  • September 27: Guide updated with a few more details.
  • September 26: Guide added.

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