·14 min read
Why Team Sealed is the best MTG Format
Howdy folks! Coming off of the Foundations prerelease where I was able to play Team Sealed with Mora and our friend Evan, I wanted to take some space to sing the praises of my favorite Magic format of all time. This will be less of a prerelease tournament report and more of a rant about how much (and why) I love team sealed so much, but there will definitely be some recapping of my first Foundations experience too.
Table of Contents
- Format Summary
- Ways to get ahead
- Teamwork makes the Dream Work!
- How to Build a Team Sealed Pool
- Wrap-up
Format Summary
Before we really dive into it, a quick summary of what Team Sealed actually is and how it typically works. The basic premise is simple: You open a sealed pool, but instead of doing this on your own, you do it with 3 people, and build 3 decks! Then you battle against other teams in best-of-3 matches, where each of the "3" is a normal Magic match (also best of 3).
Pools are typically 12 packs - they obviously have to be bigger than the typical 6-pack pool, but 18 packs turns out to be way too powerful for normal limited. 12 packs, believe me, is more than enough.
In a competitive tournament, you also need to split the cards in your pool into sideboards that each player can use.
The best part about team sealed is that during the matches, you get to help your teammates! Asking for outside assistance IS allowed in this one particular version of Magic, as long as that "outside" assistance is another player on your team, maybe one who has finished their match and can "copilot" yours!
This was a reasonably common Grand Prix format for a while, and before I broke onto the pro scene, these tournaments were my forte.
Limited Improvisation, Constructed Variance
Sealed is debatably the most high variance Magic format, and although I'm a notorious lover of it, I'm here to tell you that you don't need to have my particular taste for variance to love team sealed.
In fact, quite the opposite! Do you want a format where the best players almost always win? Then team sealed is for you.
Turns out that 12 packs actually makes for a lot less variance in overall pool quality, and combining this with matches being virtually best-of-9 instead of best-of-3 makes for an incredibly skill testing format where knowing what you're doing gets heavily rewarded.
Of course, the rares you open and whether you get there on that 2-lander in the win-and-in definitely will matter, it's still Magic. But the evidence shows that this is one of the most skill-testing formats in MTG.
If you don't believe me, take a look at MTGeloproject's spreadsheet that tracks team data (since ELO is very hard to do for team tournaments):
The best players have somewhere around a 70% winrate in team sealed across Grand Prixs and Pro Tours. This is a winrate that's only sustainable by the absolute best grinders (like, maybe literally only Eken, the best) on Arena Ladder. However, these stats are all from long swiss pairing tournaments where you're paired against someone at the same record every round, which naturally drags winrates down towards 50%. 70% is absurd - but you can see that many, many pros are somewhere above 65%.
Of course, I'm not above tooting my own horn here. I believe my own personal team sealed winrate is somewhere around 65% across 6ish Grand Prixs. It's hard to find old results, but I'm confident I've only missed day 2 at one team sealed Grand Prix - Providence in 2017, original Ixalan limited.
I'm very confident that in that tournament, our pool was in the bottom 1% of pools in the room. Not 5%, 1%. Out of the 12 rares we opened, we ended up playing just two of them - neither even being much better than a common! We were scrambling to figure out how to build three decks that could win games at all, but chose to lean into some higher-risk strategies that could steal games from better decks.
How'd we do? 5-4, one win away from making day 2.
My best finish at a team limited GP was Cleveland (Amonkhet Limited) in the same year, where we narrowly lost out on making top 4 playing against the eventual champions, Peach Garden Oath (Reid Duke, Huey Jensen, and Owen Turtenwald).
My match against Huey came down to this: On my turn 4, I played a discard spell to ensure that Huey couldn't untap and play his Liliana planeswalker on 5 (he was on the play). The board was stable, and I planned to untap and play my own Liliana, which would have easily controlled the board and led me to victory.
Huey proceeded to topdeck his Liliana and got to play it a turn before mine, winning an extremely long game where his board was juust ahead of mine at every stage. If I'd milled the right creature over those many turns to reanimate and start pressuring Huey's Liliana, I'd have probably won anyways, but it wasn't meant to be. We missed out on the opportunity to team draft! The better team won, obviously, but I'm going to remember how close we came to beating the best team in the tournament forever.
Besides Cleveland, I've also made top 6 of an SCG Grand Prix-like-tournament (Pittsburgh this time, New Capenna Limited), again coming up just one win short of being able to draft (at least we made our flight!).
I've played in 3-4 more big team sealed tournaments, and have made day 2 in all of them. None of the rest were particularly successful day 2s, but that's how it goes in a super skill-testing format when you start playing against the pro teams.
Obviously, I'd be remiss to put this all on myself - I've had some great teammates, Mora included, as well as our friends Griffin and Avi. Still, everyone in this circle knows that I'm the one obsessed with team sealed, and I tend to take the lead in deckbuilding at the very least, and gameplay assistance sometimes.
So, what does it take to win at this beautiful format? I'm glad you asked....
Millions of ways to get ahead
Probably my favorite thing about team sealed is that you get to constantly be thinking. Done with building your decks? Time to start figuring out sideboard card distribution! Done with your match? go help your teammate! Waiting for your opponent to take an action? Scan quickly over to your teammate's game and try to be an extra layer to catch any mechanical mistakes they might easily make and head them off before they happen (*only do this with teammates who are okay with it!)
Part of why I think team sealed is such a skill testing format is that it rewards efficiently using your mental resources to focus on what matters even more than regular magic. There is just too much to think about in the time it takes to play a tournament! This will be a recurring theme in all the little ways I propose here to gain an advantage - many of them are about reducing cognitive load or focusing it in the right areas.
Teamwork makes the dream work!
By far the most important factor for making sure your team is efficient at solving problems is to make sure you have good communication and camaraderie!
This specifically means you should NOT just team up with the best player you can find. Friendship is genuinely Magic (win percentage) here!
At the same time, if you're actually trying to win, you do need to make sure that everyone playing respects each others' critical thinking skills and ability to evaluate Magic decisions, so there has to be some level of skill equity between all involved. This doesn't mean there can't be an acknowledgement of one or two players on the team being "better", but there's plenty of room for better players to be wrong sometimes, and if your "worse" players won't feel comfortable speaking up when they believe that to be the case, you're not going to catch those mistakes.
Time spent arguing is not time wasted, but it is valuable time, so you need to make sure arguments over card choices and game decisions resolve themselves quickly and confidently, even when there is ambiguity and nuance. This is a difficult problem, so you really want to team with people who you can communicate excellently with!
If you end up being on a team with people who you're less comfortable with, I'd encourage leaning more into individual decision-making and play. You'll lose some advantage that other teams are gaining through collaboration, but you'll also avoid the massive time sink of arguments that go nowhere and end up with people in a negative headspace or there being too many cooks.
As a small aside, never talk about your individual record in team sealed. Not only is it destructive to team dynamics (although if you're teaming with good friends, they likely won't care), but it's a completely meaningless stat. You should assign decks based on who will play each of them the best, and this is completely uncorrelated with deck strength. Similarly, you might be facing the best or worst opposing decks depending on your seat and luck. Every single person's record is the team's record -- nothing more, nothing less!
Preparation saves crucial time
This is true for all Magic tournaments, but it's especially true for team sealed. This is its own unique format, and preparing for it by playing normal sealed or draft is going to be insufficient if you want to win.
At the most basic level, this means you should open and build at least a few pools before a big team sealed tournament.
This will give you an idea of what to expect in the build stage, which is probably the most time-constrained stage of the tournament.
To give a sense of how hard team sealed pools are to build, some quick math. A normal sealed pool has 84 cards and requires you to pick 23:
A team sealed pool has 168 cards and requires you to choose 69 (nice) for 3 decks, ignoring for simplicity the need to separate between those decks or determine sideboards:
In other words, there are approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x more decisions to make in a team sealed pool. This is obviously kind of dumb math, but experientially it holds true. Building 3 decks out of 12 packs is just way, way harder than building 1 out of 6.
It's not just that you have more decisions to make, it's that team sealed decks look substantially different to normal limited decks. They are generally more streamlined and synergy-based than typical sealed decks, and have more rares than typical draft decks. Knowing how to quickly identify (and discard) these decks in a large pool is crucial, so that you don't spend time chasing false leads and identify the strongest things your pool can be doing right away.
If you can, you should even practice by battling your different builds against each other. Getting a sense for how streamlined the decks are and what packages and synergies thrive in these higher-powered games is incredibly useful. I used to do this by printing proxies before sets were even released and building 12-pack pools on Draftsim. This is high-effort, but I think it substantially helped me do well in events like Grand Prix Cleveland, where we finished one win away from the top 4 and a PT qualification!
How to Build a Team Sealed Pool
So I should probably talk about my process here. It's nothing special, but I think approaching this in a structured way is crucial.
Unlike a normal pool, you're going to use every color, so you have to figure out what each one wants to do. The first two questions I try and answer with every pool are:
- What is the strongest "package" in each color?
- Which cards do we need to figure out how to include in a deck almost no matter what? (normally these are bombs, especially multicolored ones, but sometimes they can be high payoff synergy pieces).
You'll often have a few good commons that show up in 3+ copies in your pool. Starting with these is a great way to see what small functional things you'll be able to do consistently in a color. Our prerelease pool had 3 copies of Stab and five copies of Helpful Hunter. This meant that our black deck was going to be good at killing cheap creatures, and our white deck was going to be good at producing small bodies at low cost.
Figuring out which of these "packages" synergize with the most powerful cards in your pool is crucial for getting indicators on which colors to pair together.
Our prerelease pool (which, it's important to note, was using 18 packs instead of 12), also had 2 copies of Kiora, the Rising Tide, and the first place we went with those was pairing them with the Stabs for some defensive speed and graveyard-filling.
The Helpful Strays were more tricky. We weren't sure what the best way to take advantage of 5 of them was. The good news was that our white package was almost strong enough on its own, but it didn't have enough go-wide payoff, so we'd need to supplement with a secondary color. Should it be red for double Goblin Surprise? Green for Overrun and Preposterous Proportions? Black for triple Eaten Alive?
These are the crucial decisions in a team sealed pool, and there's no way to prescribe how you should make them. In the end, it comes down to trying different configurations and maximizing the overall strength of 3 limited decks (a thing I've written about evaluating here).
An important note: You are trying to maximize total average power, and should not consider "balance" as a factor. It's better to have a 10/10 and two 5/10s than three 6/10s. The basic reasoning for this is that any deck can win or lose games of magic, it's all about win %, and the best way to do this is to build the strongest set of three decks you can, regardless of how it ends up looking in terms of power distribution!
Once you've settled on (or at least preliminarily decided to explore) a set of color combinations, it's time to get into the nitty gritty of deckbuilding. Usually you'll have many options for how to build any set of 2 colors, so it's time for me to give the most important piece of advice I'll give for team sealed:
You need to be absolutely ruthless in evaluating card strength in team sealed. Start every deck with a core of cards you absolutely must play, rather than dumping every "playable" card in a color together and trying to make cuts.
Across the three decks we built on Sunday, we played a total of 4 nonrares that cost 5+ mana. That's barely more than 1 per deck.
When I'm creating deck skeletons, I'm starting off on the assumption that every non-removal common that costs 4+ mana is not a core card. Anything that's less than a B- or a part of a key synergy package is suspect. Kill your darlings, because you can always bring them back!
(This applies to the identification portion of build too. You should be ignoring cards that are merely playable until you get to the final portions of deckbuilding - unless they are packages of multiple commons that are key for structural synergies).
After you've got cores in place, you want to build based on what decks need, not what you think the best cards are. Hopefully you've already included all or most of the strongest cards/packages in the pool, so the rest of your builds should be supporting the core thing the deck is doing. Does it need removal for big creatures? Defensive speed? Ways to break through board stalls? You should have enough options available to fill these gaps.
Finally, before finalizing maindecks, you should check to see if there are any cards that could easily be swapped between decks and be playing a more important role in their new deck. I'll mention an example of this soon.
Sideboards are largely not very important, but it's largely an extension of "filling roles". Make sure every deck has the ability to fill holes or accentuate certain things it does poorly. Be willing to split up multiple copies of cards that are marginally playable, since it'll be rare that a deck wants to board in more than one.
Here are the decks we ended up building from our 18-pack pool on Sunday:
https://sealeddeck.tech/sets/fdn/e5tdxca7hm
This is how we decided to flesh out our white core. Green gives us Unicorns, which should accumulate a lot of power and toughness throughout a game with all the bodies this deck has (though ended up being quite underwhelming and may have been a mistake to run), and it gives us two ways to break through board stalls and capitalize on going wide.
The snarespinners were a last-minute swap from the RG deck we also built - We noticed that that deck had more 4-drops than it wanted to play, and some anti-synergy with the cards that cared about power 4 or greater. It turns out the GW deck wanted cards that could stabilize the board in the air and then win in a long game, so it was a perfect fit!
https://sealeddeck.tech/sets/fdn/z5WuidoUzs
This was the home for our red cards, which was the weakest color in the pool, but had some good rares. Triple burst lightning gave the deck enough defensive speed, and flamewake phoenixes obviously work with 4+ power creatures, but they're also good at breaking board stalls. Bushwhacks were nice here as fixing, fight spells, and allowing us to play 16 lands with double Ruby. Ghalta was promising in this deck, but ultimately ended up stuck in Mora's hand a lot, and we concluded the card is probably not good enough.
https://sealeddeck.tech/sets/fdn/6Eztb7m6ZR
This was probably our strongest deck, because it didn't overlap in colors and blue had some of the best bombs in the pool. What better to pair them with than black removal and value creatures! I didn't see this one in action much because Evan was piloting it in seat C (I was seat A, on the other end of the table), but it seemed very fun and strong.
At the end of the day, I think there were probably some big mistakes we made in build. The GR deck lacked some consistency because it was trying to do a little bit too much, the green payoffs in the white deck were hard to really capitalize on, and the black deck needed some more card advantage (we had a Phyrexian Arena that we didn't play because I was worried it was too slow, but a deck with that much defensive speed wants it pretty assuredly).
We ended up going 2-2, losing some close matches to some other really good players. But the experience was a total blast!
Wrapping Up
I hope this piece will at least convince some of you to try out team sealed when you next get the chance. It's worth the effort, and I wish Wizards supported it more as a format! I'm praying that at least one Spotlight Series next year is team limited, that would be incredibly rad and I'd instantly sign up.
Feel free to share your own team sealed experiences! If anyone has a story of playing fewer rares than we did in our Ixalan pool (2/12), I'd be fascinated to hear about it & how you did.
Originally published on Patreon.