This past weekend there was a high stakes Limited tournament in my hometown: the SCGCON Pittsburgh Team Sealed 20K Main Event. I was very excited when this was announced a few months ago and am thrilled to be bringing you a full Day 1 tournament report today. Let’s get started!

The first thing to do when preparing for a Team Sealed event is to assemble your teammates. Ben Werne and Alex Nikolic, my usual suspects, were unfortunately unavailable for the weekend, but I managed to snag two fantastic folks in their stead. First up is Matt Bedsole aka StunlockFTW, sometime streamer, moderator to the stars and (jokingly) my personal content manager. I met Matt via Twitch a few years ago while he was still living in Pittsburgh and count him as one of my very dear friends. Our third came in the form of MTGO sealed grinder Charlie Schaefer aka StryxFamiliar. I likewise met Charlie through Twitch, have roomed with him at multiple GPs before and was thrilled when he messaged me to say he was interested in coming to Pittsburgh for this event. I certainly wanted to work with two people I trust and respect as Magic players but equally important to me was sitting next to two people I was going to have fun with. Matt and Charlie checked both of those boxes big time.

As far as our preparation, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Since this event coincided with release weekend, we weren’t going to have much time to play with the cards. Leading up to the weekend, we each took the time to do an entire set review and grade each card so we could see where we were lined up and where we differed. We each attended at least one sealed prerelease (and in Charlie’s case, a total of five!). I then had the opportunity to play in the streamer early access event on Tuesday, and we all did as many drafts as we could on Thursday. We even practiced with a couple Team Sealed pools online to get a sense of the likely archetypes we might want to build.

A bit about Team Sealed for folks who have never played before: you are given 12 booster packs and must make three different 40-card decks from among them. You not only distribute cards for main decks to each person but sideboard cards as well. Each player is assigned to be the “A, B or C” seat and plays a best-of-three match against the corresponding seat on the opposing team. Whichever team wins two out of their three matches wins the round.