Team Sealed is one of my favorite Competitive Formats. There is nothing like showing up to an event with a pair of friends and working together against a huge field of other teams.
The format is also extremely challenging. Specifically, it is quite a task to build three great Limited decks out of 12 packs of cards!
I’ve been practicing, building, and playing Team Sealed decks all week in preparation for Grand Prix Columbus and today I’d like to share some of the important lessons I’ve learned from playing the format.
What Does the Dominaria Team Sealed Format Look Like?
Unlike Ixalan Limited, which was extremely fast and centered around aggressive decks, Dominaria is the opposite. The strongest Dominaria Limited decks I have built have been controlling.
Ixalan was notable for having a lot of powerful tribal beatdown decks and was sparse on efficient removal. Rivals of Ixalan clearly slowed things down somewhat by cutting down the number of Pirate’s Cutlass and powerful he-haw Auras, and adding some decent removal into the mix. RIX Sealed was certainly a slow format, although I felt like the Team Sealed decks for that format still tended to be centered around tribal beatdown synergies.
On Dominaria, there are simply better ways to drag out a game and more individually powerful threats that help players stabilize and turn the corner. I would cite good cheap removal and lots of solid token generators as a reason why.
League of “Legends”
Another reason I believe the format favors decks that go bigger is that legendary creatures are an important theme in the set. While there are a handful of 2- and 3-drop legendary creatures, the vast majority fall into the CMC 4+ range. It is also worth noting that there are a ton of legendary uncommon creatures that are pound-for-pound better than a lot of the rares. Not only are these creatures just good, but they are also the synergy hubs that most of the format runs through.
The fingerprints of legendary creatures are all over the set. On keywords like historic and legendary sorcery, and many spells or creatures are better when combined with legendary creatures.
From my experience, it is maximizing the potential for legendary and historic interactions that results in the best Team Sealed builds.
How to Get Started Building Decks?
The actual build is the most important part of any Sealed tournament. Mistakes made during the build will linger all day since you and your teammates are locked into playing whatever you’ve registered.
For past Team Sealed events, I developed a strategy for mapping out decks that held up all the way until Dominaria. Basically, we’d lay out all of our creatures arranged by color and curve, and look to pair up colors in such a way as to maximize curve efficiency. In a format that rewards speed over other options, it makes a lot of sense to make sure those crucial 1- and 2-drop creatures are spread around properly.
In a slower format, where there are many good ways to stabilize, turn the corner, and go over the top. I’m much less worried about forcing a low curve as I am building decks for overall power.
I’m not saying to cut all the 2-drops for 6-drops. Not having a 2-drop on the draw is still an efficient way to lose a game on the spot. Build responsibly. The key is that Dominaria Limited decks are better at catching up than Ixalan decks.
With all of that being said, my team and I have started approaching our build by looking at the gold and historic cards and pulling out all of the historic or legendaries-matter cards that we’d like to play. By doing this we are able to see which colors have our strongest legendary and historic interactions.
In Sealed, players want to play multicolored cards whenever possible, but the fact that the multicolored legends are the key cogs for a lot of decks raises the incentive to work them in.
Jeskai Team Sealed Control
Brian DeMars
The way this pool broke, it was pretty clear that we wanted a G/B deck. Green was deep with lots of good threats and black was shallow but had a nice cache of good removal spells. In addition to a good G/B Rock deck, we had a mono-white aggro deck highlighted by four copies of D’Avenant Trapper.
I suggested that we should just build a legendary control deck around recurring Urza’s Ruinous Blast with the multicolor legends in play. We were all skeptical about whether or not the deck was even playable, and it easily rolled through the gauntlet.
A deck like this changes how I think about the format. First of all, this Jeskai control has a handful of nice build-around effects, but outside of 5-6 powerful ones, it is primarily a bunch of cards I wouldn’t describe as particularly great.
Another key to this deck was:
Can I get a witness?
Ghitu Chronicler was the linchpin of the deck and I built the deck around this modest common (since I had four). The ability to recur Urza’s Ruinous Blast, Board the Weatherlight (to find Urza’s Ruinious Blast), or Blessed Light is what gave the deck inevitability against most strategies.
All of the 2-drop kicker creatures are great in a slower, go-big format since they are passable as blockers early but also have a big impact when the game inevitably goes late.
I think a deck like this is a good illustration of just how fundamentally good legendary synergies are in this format.
Other Observations
When I pool all of my experience playing Dominaria Limited together I can make a few generalizations.
It’s hard for me to say what I think the strongest color is, but I’ve been much more strongly drawn to green, white, and black than red and blue. Based on what I’ve played so far, there appears to be a considerable divide between the depth and power of the best three colors as opposed to the weakest two.
Red gets burned (pun intended) by the fact that the format is slower and rewards turning the corner. Red is weak on flyers and has a difficult time pounding through high-toughness creatures and tokens on blocks.
Green and white both have a lot of impressive board presence creatures. Either creatures that produce tokens or simply big bodies and high impact abilities on the battlefield. Blue feels lacking when it comes to cards that get onto the battlefield and matter. Blue has some good evasive critters, but pound-for-pound they don’t match up well in combat.
I much prefer blue as a support color for a deck that might have some problems breaking up a ground stall.
Most of the Sealed pools I’ve built have included a G/B deck and I believe most teams will build one. Green is one of the strongest colors but lacks removal, and black has a ton of removal. It just makes sense.
I find this happens a lot:
Deck #1: G/B Deck
Deck #2: W (with either red or blue)
Deck #3: (Split either G, B, or W) and pair with (whichever color isn’t in deck 2)
Much of how these colors are paired will depend on our historic synergy or how our multicolor cards fall.
Speaking of historic, there are also some neat artifact synergies you can build around:
With two marquee commons caring about historic spells I’ve found that a lot of my white aggro decks have a heavy artifact theme. It is nice that the historic aggro decks don’t specifically pull from the pool of actual legendary creatures.
I’ve also found the equipment to overperform in these decks. They count as historic for generating triggered abilities, but they give the aggressive decks some late-game options and grind. I actually don’t mind playing 3-4 Equipment in the right deck, especially if that deck has a lot of token generation.
Last but not least, while 1/1 tokens are a great way to buy time and block, that they are very poorly positioned on offense. There are a lot of cheap, high-toughness creatures that simply brick wall them. It’s also annoying that they can’t attack through even a Skittering Surveyor! A few good Equipment is a great way to really get value out of tokens that otherwise don’t do much other than chump block.
I’m really looking forward to Grand Prix Columbus this weekend. As I said before, Team Sealed is one of the best Magic tournament experiences ever and I’m stoked to be slinging cards alongside a couple of buddies.
