How to Build a Sealed Deck

It's time to talk about my favorite limited format.

That's right! I'm a Sealed Enjoyer. Unsurprising given my love for limited, but most limited players prefer draft. It takes a true sicko to love the format where you get what you get and you don't get upset!

"Sealed is the lottery"

"Once I see my rares I know if I have a chance"

"I lost to double Bonny Pall, nothing I could do. What a dumb format"

"My pool is unplayable, I should probably just drop"

"Why do they even have Sealed tournaments, all it tests is your pack opening skill"

You get it. You've heard it. You've experienced it. I certainly have. Sealed is the Magic format where the injustice, the inequality, the pure LUCK of it all is front and center. Some people are just going to have better decks than you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

And yet...

Have you ever checked the "traditional sealed" leaderboards on 17Lands? The players there have higher winrates than the bo3 drafters. Huh.

Have you ever noticed how you see pros at the top tables of sealed tournaments time and time again? How Martin Juza and Shuhei Nakamura dominated Sealed Grand Prixs with ease?

The evidence is hard to argue with if you really pay attention to it. Sealed is just as skill testing as draft. Why?

Combinatorics

The answer is that large numbers scale much faster than small numbers when it comes to the ways in which they combine.

In a draft, you're going to end up with 42 cards in your pool, each selected from a pack of 14 or less. That's a lot of decisions! It might seem like there are far more decisions in draft than in sealed. After all, you literally see more cards!

Choosing 23 cards out of a static 84 might seem easy in comparison. What's the math on that, anyway?

Oh. uhhh..... that's... that's not a small number. Google's calculator needs to display it to me in scientific notation.

Just for comparison, what would a rough way to estimate the number of decisions in draft look like?

Look, that's a lot of decisions. But it's no Sealed.

Testing Skill

Obviously, this is not a perfect way to evaluate which format is more difficult or more rewarding of skill. But hopefully it's a nudge for our intuitions away from the idea that draft is more decision-intense by nature. If the math checks out, and top players consistently win at sealed at similar or even greater rates to draft, something must be going on here.

What skills does Sealed test?

I think Sealed is the purest test of deckbuilding there is in Magic. Rather than knowing the top decks in advance and being able to test against them like in constructed, and instead of having your decisions presented to you one card at a time like in draft, Sealed is all about building the best possible machine with what you've already got.

In lots of ways, it's Magic as Garfield intended -- players are essentially opening "starter packs", mini collections from which they will build their one "Magic deck".

Sealed requires innovation and improvisation, as well as adaptability to any situation. This goes beyond the deckbuilding portion -- Sealed is the only format in Magic where you have a large enough sideboard to completely remake your deck in between games.

I won't be focusing too much on sideboarding in this guide -- This is mainly intended to be a guide to building a pool "blind" at the start of a tournament. But many of the skills are transferable - If you understand what makes a deck strong against "the field", you should understand how to adjust it to a particular matchup (or in rare cases, pivot entirely).

Getting started

It would be difficult to go through all the stages of building a sealed pool in the abstract without having a specific example to work from, so we're going to be following along with a recent example I selected because it happened to be a particularly interesting build. Here it is! You can take a few minutes to try and build it yourself, then compare what your process looked like to mine, or follow along step-by-step as we go -- it's up to you! I think either method will work well. All I'll ask is for you to seriously engage with how you'd be thinking through this pool, and comparing your views to mine. I think this is a pool with a lot of nuance, and I don't think there's a clear right answer here, so it's less about the answers and more about the thought processes.

https://sealeddeck.tech/22cEndg8Ui

Let's get into it!

Bombs

The first thing to do with any sealed pool is the obvious one - It's what everybody does... check your rares and see if you got any bombs!

I don't intend to sit here and tell you that Sealed isn't a rare-dominated format. In 90%+ of cases, your final deck should be one that allows you to play the strongest cards in your pool, most of which will be rares.

Still, there are a few nuances here. When I open a sealed pool, I'm looking for bombs, but those bombs don't have to be individual rare cards. I also consider powerful uncommons that I view as on the level of rares (think cards on the level of Hollow Marauder, which has a case for being better than powerful mythic Hostile Investigator in the right context).

I also might consider a really powerful synergy package as on the level of a bomb when it comes to pulling me into a color. Think about something like 2X Omenport vigilante, 2X Thunder Lasso. Each of these cards is pretty underwhelming on its own, but having this package in a deck allows me to be attacking with a 3/3 double strike that gets blockers out of the way on turn 3 of a good 20% of games. That's an interaction that demands removal. Another example might be a package of 2X Mourner's Surprise, 1X Honest Rutstein, 1X Spinewoods Armadillo. While these are individually strong cards, I don't think any of them are bombs... but the package, when considered as a whole, adds a dramatic amount of both consistency and redundancy to a deck, concepts that we'll cover later.

So what do our "bombs" look like in this pool?

Pretty much nonexistent. Some of these are very high quality cards, but none of them rise to the level of bombs, in my opinion. Stoic Sphinx is the strongest, along with Freestrider Lookout, but none of these cards will take over a game in most situations where they go uncontested. A quick scan of the rest of the pool doesn't turn up any game-warping synergy packages or bomb-level uncommons, so we're looking at a mostly bomb-less pool.

GIVE UP!!! PACK IT IN!!!! POOL SUCKS!!!!!

... calm down. There are more way than one for a pool to be good. We still have a few things to check.

The Mana

The second thing I always check in a sealed pool is my mana. In some formats this is pretty much a check for dual lands, but nowadays, most sets also have colorless fixing and often some amount of smoothing/fixing effects, usually in green, but sometimes in other colors also (think Treasure Dredger).

Checking your bombs is how you figure out what you want to play. Checking your mana is how you figure out what you actually can play.

Variance in mana optionality is a HUGELY important part of a sealed pool. If you've got a wide variety of fixing in colors that line up with your bombs, or even better, some strong universal fixers, the world is your oyster. So where are we with this pool?

NOW we're talkin!!!!!!!

This pool is a significant outlier when it comes to the mana. Not only do we have four universal land fixers in the Mirage Mesas, we've also got plenty of dual lands across a wide range of colors, three patient naturalists in green, and some additional playable fixing in a Hardbristle Bandit and our FreeStrider Lookout.

I've pulled in a few other cards that count as pseudo-fixing, although they're not going to be relevant for this pool. Card selection and treasure makers definitely count as fixing in certain contexts - Card draw adds consistency to greedier decks and decks that are splashing late-game cards, and treasure makers add sources for single-card, high-impact splashes.

The main thing I'm thinking at this stage is that this pool is lacking in overall power, but is pretty much unlimited in the ways it can fit the power it does have into the deck - as long as it's base-green. Even a nongreen deck would still have significantly more fixing ability than an average pool, but a green deck in this pool can be a true 5-color pile. So we're basically left with the task of putting together the most powerful 23 cards possible.

Now, "making the mana work" will still factor into our decision making in this pool for sure - but it will be a question of consistency and speed rather than "splashability". It's not about which cards we "can" play, it's about which cards go together most smoothly.

This pool's mana is its' superpower.

Almost every pool has a superpower. Sometimes it's a couple powerful bombs, but players often misbuild and underestimate pools that have a different outlier strength. Usually the best build will try to leverage your pool's greatest strength.

The Colors

Now we're getting into the meat of things. Once we know the cards we want to fit in our deck, and the mana that allows (or doesn't) allow us to do so, we move on to the skeletons available to us.

The bombs and mana should inform what we're looking for here. If I have a powerful black bomb, but zero black fixing (or if the bomb is double-pipped), I'm desperately hoping black has a strong enough skeleton to be a base color or another color has enough to almost build a full deck from.

With this pool, I'm hoping we get to be base-green so that I can truly lean into the pool's mana superpower. Luckily, our green is quite solid, if ultimately only medium-powered:

I think it's very important to start to consider your curve when looking at color skeletons. Now we're getting into what will be the "meat and potatoes" of your deck, and it's really important that you cover your bases. In most formats, this will mean that at least one color will need to contribute multiple 1-2 drop that can affect the board early, so if the color that has your bombs or your best cards doesn't have a good curve, you're going to need to figure out how to support that. It's also almost equally important to avoid clashes at 3, 4, and 5 mana -- A deck with 8-10 3-drops can only be so powerful, because it becomes nearly impossible to double-spell during the development stage of the game.

In this case, we're stocked up on 3s and 4s, and light on 2s, so we need to be careful of any color that is also 3-and-4-heavy.

We're also in somewhat of a special case, given that our mana is SO good in this pool. Instead of picking a second base color, we do have the option to "pick and choose" between the "best of the rest", and simply be a base-green 5-color soup deck. However, if there is a second color that is a strong complement to our curve here (something with 3+ quality 2-drops), we should consider being a traditional base-2-color build with as many free splashes as our hearts desire.

With this in mind, I'm going to be pulling together only the strongest parts of the other colors, knowing that we won't need to fill out playables in a secondary color, and can instead use the "pick and choose" method:

Red is... underwhelming to say the least. Scalestorm Summoner might be really strong with our Beavers, but Prickly pair is merely a playable common, and a 3 at that, which we already have plenty of. Deadeye Duelist is also a mediocre common, but a strong enabler for crime payoffs if we have them,

Black is a little stronger, but still pretty disappointing. The 2X Desert's Due are nice and definitely count as 2-drops, and Rictus Robber can be quite strong in the right context, but is overall just medium.

I'm also including the Corrupted Convictions here, despite them being pretty weak cards. The reason for this is that I'm hunting for upside. Given that we're lacking high-end individually powerful cards, but have enough fixing to play almost anything available to us, I'm on the lookout for synergy packages that can give us a power boost. Conviction can be quite strong with things like Take For a Ride or Nezumi Linkbreaker, or as a sideboard card against removal-heavy decks. We'd probably need to be base-black to play it, but it's worth being aware of as a high-upside tool that our Black has access to.

Blue is also pretty shallow, though it does contain our most powerful card, the Sphinx. Blue excels at card advantage, that's its' mini-superpower. 2X Loan Shark and 2X Seize The Secrets mean that we'll rarely run out of cards if we include them in a deck. Essence Capture is a high-upside way to deal with opposing bombs, but tough to run unless we're base-blue.

White has some solid playable creatures (not pictured), but is shallow on cards that provide a unique effect. The highlights are the two near-unconditional removal spells in Journey to Nowhere and Buried in the Garden (which I'm counting as a white card since we're so likely to be base-green). Outlaw Medic is in here because it's a 2-drop, but there are not many reasons to be base-white besides playable count, something we're not very worried about because of our abundant fixing.

Finally, probably the most important "color" in this pool is gold! Unfortunately, not many of these cards are green, but they are all at least decently powerful. Reckless Lawbringer is maybe the best card of the bunch, but without any recursion or cheap creatures to sacrifice, it's underwhelming here. Malcolm and Tai Wakeen are both quality card, but mainly are strong when cast on curve, and both are red, a color we don't expect to be playing many sources of.

I did save the best for last, though. Rakdos Joins Up and Back for More are undoubtedly the most promising cards in this scan. Not only are they pretty splashable (being single-pipped cards that are best when cast lategame), they also have some convenient synergies with our Patient Naturalists! Back for More requires some beef, and we've got that covered with our Beavers + Cactarantula (and maybe the loan sharks?).

Finding a First Draft

So we've finally found the beginnings of a deck "shell". No color seems stronger than our green (3X Beaver, 1X Throw From the Saddle, 1X Freestrider Lookout and 1X Cactarantula), and green is already what lets us maximize our mana with the Naturalists and Bandit.

Meanwhile, Black seems like the strongest "pairing" candidate with the green, for two main reasons: The Desert's Dues and the reanimation spells.

At this point, we want to see what this all looks like as a deck. Then we can start to figure out what that deck's missing/what it wants and how to fill those holes.

At this point, I think it's well worth laying out your pool while separating into cards that can be cast "on curve" and cards that will likely be cast "off curve". Mostly this looks like creatures vs. noncreatures, but precisely what we're looking for is how strong your deck will be at winning, or at least tying, the development stage of the game. This is why I have Desert's Dues counted in the 2-drop "creature" slot - they are a totally viable tool to use to avoid falling behind.

I've also split the Rictus Robbers between the 3-and-4 drop slots to reflect their flexibility, and am assuming Rakdos Joins Up is basically a black card that we will naturally have a few "incidental" red sources for because of our abundance of fixing.

What is this deck missing? Here's a short list:

Early pressure

We can maybe stay alive early, but we're not going to be "winning" the development stage most of the time. This means our pool will need to be able to win a grindy game.

Card advantage

We have a lot of chunky creatures and ways to recur them, which does help play a grindy game, but this deck is missing ways to go up on cards or filter away lands it draws.

Unconditional Removal

Especially in this format, you must be able to answer opposing bombs if you want to win a grindy game. Now, our Desert's Dues pull some more weight here than normal - We're going to be playing a lot of deserts, so they're much closer to Doom Blades than expensive Disfigures.

However, we'd really like at least 1-2 more universal answers. Having 4+ removal spells that can deal with a bomb ensures that we'll always draw at least 1, and usually 2 for some insurance.

Luckily, our blue and white are pretty good at solving two of these problems! Blue gives us cards and white gives us robust removal.

This is the most expansive we'll get in terms of a maindeck "shell". What I'm doing here is:

1.) Adding in the blue card advantage pieces (Loan sharks, Seize the secrets, and Siphon insight)

2.) Adding in the white unconditional removal (Buried, Journey)

3.) Creating a "sideboard" of cards that would be viable includes in our final deck, either because of raw power or potential hole-filling, but aren't necessary as part of our core

4.) Laying out our fixing, just to make sure we can still make all of this work.

That's a lot. I've basically jumped from our core GB shell that's missing a few pieces to a more expansive "mini-pool" that we're going to have to whittle down. The right deck is somewhere in between these two states. To find it, we're going to be alternating between closer and closer versions of the two until we find something cohesive and strong.

So let's take one step back towards the "smaller" version of the deck. How many cards do we have in our "skeleton" right now?

This is 25, which is already too large, so let's make it smaller. (This is a common occurence with mana-flexible pools). What don't we need here? What is redundant?

What jumps out immediately is that there are just too many 4s. The Beavers are the strongest among them and in our base color green, so we're not cutting them. The Loan Sharks are filling a card advantage hole, so we'd like to keep them ideally. The Rictus Robbers and the Rooftop Assassin are pretty redundant, so we can cut those for now (and add them back in later if appropriate!). I'm also going to cut the Rattleback Apothecary, because we have plenty of 3s, the other ones are necessary, and it's not a spectacular card.

Now we have this:

This looks a bit more balanced in terms of curve, but there are a couple things to notice.

First, we've accidentally opened up a new hole - this deck only has 11 creatures! This might not be a problem since A) The creatures we do have are beefy enough (Beavers, Sharks, Cactarantula), but we also are relying on a Throw From the Saddle and two reanimation spells, so 11 is tough to justify. I'd like at least 13.

Secondly, how many black cards are left again? 5. How many blue cards? 5. Are we sure we're base-black?

Well if the way to answer the creature count problem is adding back in the creatures we just cut, maybe we're still base-black. Or, we could instead lean heavier into the blue and play our Stoic Sphinx, the best card in the pool. This, though, makes our Desert's Dues a bit worse, and remember, they are covering our early defense, so this would come at a significant cost. It would also be another 4, which we don't really need.

The safest route seems to be thinking of this as a straight-up 3-color deck, based in green, playing equal amounts of black and blue, and opportunistically splashing some red and white. That's still quite a lot of mana requirements, so it's time to really get into the weeds of our manabase and make sure we can support it.

The Mana

If there is one thing I think players could work on to improve their sealed results, it would be to build their manabases more slowly and carefully. This is the unsexy part of limited deckbuilding, but it's also quite literally THE most important thing to learn. I massively leveled up in sealed when I started explicitly counting out sources and thinking about the nuances of different numbers, instead of just trying to get as close as I could to 8 for base colors and 3 for splashes, and calling it a day.

In fact, off the top of my head, I can give a detailed breakdown of what any particular source count for a color precisely means in limited:

1 source - This is an opportunistic dip into a modal card that I'm happy to never cast for its other color. Almost always accomplished via a card that can produce one of my main colors as well (dual land or 5C fixer)

2 sources- Still an opportunistic dip, or maybe a risky splash of a REALLY powerful card that I'm happy to be casting no matter how late the game goes. Potentially an acceptable way to splash a bomb in a deck with lots of card selection, but I'd still like 3 sources ideally

3 sources- A risky, but acceptable splash for an A/A- level card (maybe 2) that I'm okay casting reasonably late.

4 sources- A very comfortable splash for a single card, a reasonably comfortable splash for 2

5 sources- Now we're starting to get into 3,4,5-card "splashes" that are really more like a pseudo-main-color. If I'm going to be pretty uncomfortable not having access to this color in a normal game, I need 5 sources. This is the "awkward middle", and ideally you don't want to be here. Often 5 sources will be a splash where I just happen to have a bunch of free sources (or sources that are taxed in other ways).

6 sources- Still somewhat in the awkward middle, but now starting to get more comfortable with powerful early-game cards that are still relevant later on. I'd play up to 5 B level cards if I could easily fit in 6 sources without hurting the rest of my mana too much.

7 sources- Officially in main color territory, but we want to be careful not to lean on this color too heavily. For supporting colors that aren't necessary to see in opening hands. Tough to support double-pipped cards

8 sources- Solid main color, but hopefully not a heavy one. The minimum number of sources for a color you must have access to on turn 2. Can support double-pipped cards, but not freely

9 sources- Comfortable main color. Reliably cast your 2-drops, reliably have access to double pips.

10 sources- This is a color you're leaning heavily on (think green in a 5C green deck). If I told you you don't have this color until turn 4, you'd immediately conclude you lost the game.

Okay, so under this framework, we'll be wanting at least:

9 green sources

6 Black sources

6 Blue sources

4 White sources

3 Red sources

With just our nonbasic lands, we have:

(The mirage mesas are not true 5-color fixers, so while I'm counting them that way, it's probably more accurate to shave these all by about half a source).

Very clearly, we won't need to add any plains or mountains, and can focus on shoring up our sultai sources. This is 9 nonbasics, so we have 8 adds. 5 forests, 2 swamps and 1 island gets us to:

11 G

I'm not in love with the blue and black counts, but I also haven't been counting the Patient Naturalists or the Hardbristle Bandit - I'm intent on getting to at least 10 green sources so that these can do the job of unlocking my secondary colors.

Where are we again?

Polishing it up

This is still an incomplete deck, but it's getting much closer to a final build. We've got 2 slots left to fill, so let's take a look at our "sideboard". In fact, since we're only at 11 creatures and want to get to 13, let's narrow it down even further and look at only our creature options:

The first card in is obviously Lazav. This is a creature we didn't consider when dipping into blue because it's not strictly a card advantage engine, but now that we know we're base-sultai and need creatures, it's a no-brainer, especially with our crime-lands.

The last slot is much trickier.

First, we need to talk about Stoic Sphinx.

This is the most powerful card in our pool, yet it's a card I'm only considering as a marginal include. Why?

The primary answer is that I take mana very seriously. Remember when I said on 7 sources it's "hard to support double-pipped cards"? I meant it. Sphinx is a card that's best cast on curve os it can put opponents under pressure, and only 7 sources means we won't always get to do that.

Now, it might be easy to make the argument that the 3X naturalists and 1X hardbristle bandit actually count as some number of additional sources, so it's fine! But that's a motivated justification. You could equally easily say that the fact that we're leaning so hard on our mirage mesas means we're actually operating at far less than 7 sources. In short, I think 7 is roughly the accurate number (these things aren't always exact). That makes Sphinx justifiable, but not a no-brainer.

Then there's the additional consideration that we're already quite 4-drop-heavy, and don't have much else in the flash deparment. Back for More and Desert's Due are it, and neither are conveniently on-curve in a way that interacts favorable with Sphinx. Sphinx is also not great with Back for More, only having 3 toughness.

I don't think it's wrong to play Sphinx, but I decided to go with a medium playable that I thought fit the deck better in Bounding Felidar. Since we happen to have 7 white sources more or less for free, and this is a single-pipped white card, it will almost always be castable on curve. Our deck generates board stalls with its naturalists and beavers, and Felidar is a solid way to break out of a board stall that we're missing (so is Sphinx, to be fair, if the air is clear). We're also always happy to mill it to a naturalist and reanimate it.

So this is the "final deck":

Sanity Checks

So we're at a final draft. But this isn't the final step. Assuming there's still time left, I always want to spend the rest of it poking and prodding at my decisions and seeing if there are any tweaks (or audibles) left. In a paper tournament this is slightly different because you might need to think about registering your deck and grabbing food, but online at least, you should be using every minute of that clock!

So what do we do first?

Usually, there are at least a few build "directions" I didn't get to try, and I will attempt to skeleton these quickly in case something radically powerful shows up that I had simply missed. For this pool, I immediately went to the green, but we could have tried to build a nongreen deck that uses all the nonbasics as fixing. It's okay for this to be quick and messy - we're just making sure we didn't miss anything major. What might that look like?

Mardu looks like the best shell for this, and there is a deck here, but it's unimpressive. Tai Wakeen is interesting since we have a lot of crimelands, but unfortunately only one of them is in Mardu. It was worth seeing if we could make the Vial Smashers + Tai Wakeen work, but this deck is just not consistent enough nor aggressive enough to reliably punish opponents who stumble, and it's not better at winning long games than our current build.

We've got Lazav, Stoic Sphinx, and Siphon insight, plus some blue and black playables. Have we tried UB?

This is definitely something, but it doesn't have many upsides above the current build The main ones are an ability to play Sphinx, Malcolm and Essence Capture, but we lose out on Cactarantula, have to downgrade our beavers into Rooftop Assasin and Rictus Robbers, we lose out on the white removal, and we're still short on playables. Unimpressive, moving on.

Those are the only non-green paths I could see us going down, and I'm pretty comfortable that we tried to maximize the green space.

Are we done yet?

Not quite. Still more we can use the time for!

Building Intimacy

Let's return to our deck. Once we're pretty confident we've got the right overarching build, it's time to get to know it more deeply. Sometimes this process turns up a couple swaps we want to make, and sometimes it just helps to get familiar with the deck's strengths and weaknesses to prepare for gameplay and sideboarding.

What are our deck's strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths:

Well-balanced

Consistent mana

Enough removal to cover most bases

Large bodies

Ways to gain card advantage

Ways to recur threats

Weaknesses:

Lack of top-end power

Lots of taplands

Not a ton of ways to get on the board early

Not great at interacting in the air

Only 13 creatures with 2 reanimation spells

Every sealed deck is going to have strengths and weaknesses. The most important part of sealed is understanding and accomodating for these. Your deck should be able to leverage the things it does well as consistently as possible, and have ways to mitigate the things it does poorly. I think this build does a pretty good job at all of that, but there are advantages to being aware of it anyways.

Here are some examples of things I might do in gameplay to mitigate my deck's weaknesses:

Use a Desert's Due on a medium 2-drop that normally wouldn't warrant removal if I don't have one of my patient naturalists or if the 2-drop is good at attacking past them

Bluff attack more aggressively with my naturalists if I'm playing against a deck with a lot of fliers and know I'll need to race

Save my hard removal against decks that look like they're playing weaker cards in order to fit in bombs (think UG bad cards that almost assuredly has a Bonny Pall -- I'm not using my buried in the garden on their beaver just so I can attack with my own!)

It's also important to be on the lookout for potential mistakes in build that could come up in "feel" once you start your matches. If I'm starting to always hope I draw just one more creature, I might bring in the Rictus Robbers. If I'm constantly losing because I need to use my removal on threats and then getting wrecked by a bomb, I might bring in the Ruthless Lawbringer. If I'm struggling to break board stalls, get in here best card in my pool!

Conclusions

Overall though, I'm pretty happy with this deck. This is better than a pool with Bonny Pall, zero fixing, and a bunch of filler UG that doesn't make a cohesive deck. This is, in fact, a pretty robust and well-rounded sealed pool.

For full transparency, this isn't actually the deck I built with this pool. It's the deck I wish I built! But this article took many hours to write, and I had 20 minutes to build. I also consulted with some friends who are experts at sealed (my roommate Mora, who I talk about on here constantly, and Noor Singh, the lead of team Sanctum of All who recently qualified for the Arena Championships via this sealed format!)

Here's the deck I submitted & played in the MTGO prelim:

https://sealeddeck.tech/5xo9rFRfHU

The mistakes I'm making here are, I think, not realizing the blue could be a secondary color instead of just a splash, underestimating my need for card advantage, and playing Ruthless Lawbringer just because it's a card I really like in the format without much consideration for whether it's actually good here.

Here's Mora's build (noting that they had significantly less time than me):

https://sealeddeck.tech/8twFN1tjyw

Here I think they're overestimating Malcolm, and the ability to splash Stoic Sphinx.

Here's what Noor put together on a first look:

https://sealeddeck.tech/YqM9H41lvR

This is only 3 cards off from our final deck! (Noor is really good at sealed). She recognized the value of playing the blue, and while I don't love humiliate or rattleback apothecary here and think divinations would be better, they're defensible choices.

Still, 3 cards is definitely enough to make a substantial difference in how a deck plays. When combined with the fact that 3 expert players will almost always come to slightly different conclusions about a pool, we're starting to see how much skill can be leveraged.

I ended up going 3-1 with my build, but I think Noor's is better and the one we arrived at here is even better than that. Over a long tournament like a Grand Prix or online PTQ, these margins would matter. Sideboarding would matter. Gameplay would matter, and would test your familiarity with your deck's strengths and weaknesses.

And yeah, you'd run into bombs. You'd probably lose to some of them.

But God, do I love Sealed anyways.