Sealed deck practice on 128 real MTG sets

Practice · sealed · real sets

Build the best deck you can out of the pool. Your opponent opened the same one, so everything that separates the two decks is what each of you does with it. Hover any name to see the card. Choose the set you want to practise in the picker above; change the set and a fresh pool is dealt from it.

How a sealed pool is built into a deck

Quality decides, not a plan. The smaller the pool, the weaker the synergy you can build and the more the absolute quality of the cards matters. In sealed the scales are tilted all the way over.
The score is the first cut. Two for an A and one for a B separates the pairs that are not close, which is most of them. When two pairs finish within a point or two the score has said all it can, and what separates them is the curve: of two pairs that score alike, the one that can cast something on turns two and three is the better deck.
The four grades. A is the top quarter of its colour, ranked by cost against benefit, and the bombs that win a game on their own sit at the top of it. B is a solid playable, C is filler you would rather not run, and D is a card that does not belong in the deck at all, not even as filler: too dear to cast in a limited game, or waiting on conditions that rarely come, or needing a combination you cannot build in forty cards. A nonbasic land carries a letter too, by the same test — what it costs you is a card slot, and a coloured source when it makes no colour you need; a basic land is not graded at all. A card is playable when it is an A or a B, and the page keeps its own grading to itself until the build is over. Every grade is given against the card’s own set, not against the whole history of the game: a B in a set of 1998 is a B among the cards of 1998.
What the deck would be. The score chooses the colours; it does not promise they add up to anything. The reveal answers both questions — how much quality each pair carries, and whether those playables gather into one of the five strategic ideas, which wants about five cards of each of its two components. When they do not, the deck is still the right one; you simply know what it will not be.
Three measures of a deck. The reveal judges every pair of colours three ways: quality, the points; strategy, whether its playables gather into one of the five strategic ideas; and mechanical synergy, whether its cards feed one another the way the synergy chapters describe. Quality decides in sealed; the other two say what the deck will be.
Two colours, chosen by quality. Score every card: two points for an A, one for a B, nothing for a C. Take the pair of colours with the highest score — the same weights the draft chapters use. There is no reading of the table here and no plan you brought with you; the pool has already decided.
Then the gap. Two colours plus the colourless cards will usually leave you a few short of twenty-three. Fill it with filler, or splash a third colour for two to four quality cards. When the count is short, the splash should be considered very seriously: the gap in quality between what you add and what you drop is much wider here than in draft.
Splash what you can cast. The splash colour is the one whose castable cards score highest, on the same two-and-one scale; a card with two coloured symbols in its cost is not splashable, however good it is.
Expensive cards are judged on quality. Sealed is slower than draft and rarely assembles the critical mass a fast deck needs, so a big card usually gets cast. Include the good ones — but few of them.
Leave the set mechanic alone unless the pool obviously hands it to you. Mechanical synergy is demanding, and a sealed pool rarely has enough of it to be worth the cards it costs.