Draft & Limited
A sealed deck is a 40-card deck built from six booster packs you open yourself, with 17 lands and as many free basics as you want. Nothing is passed and nobody picks: your pool is whatever those six packs gave you, and the whole format is deciding which 23 of those cards make the deck. It is what every prerelease runs.
A sealed deck is what you build at a sealed event: six booster packs, opened by you, turned into a deck of at least 40 cards. That is the entire premise. You do not bring a collection, you do not pass anything to anybody, and you cannot choose which cards you get. A pool of roughly 84 cards arrives, and the format is the hour you spend deciding which two colors and which 23 spells come out of it.
That makes sealed deck the most purely deckbuilding format in Magic. Every player in the room faces the same problem you do, with a pool just as awkward, so the person who assembles the most coherent 40 wins more than the person who opened the best rare. It is also the format with the lowest barrier to entry: prereleases are sealed, and a prerelease is where most players play their first competitive game.
Sealed deck is the simplest ruleset in Magic. Open six packs. Build a deck of at least 40 cards from what is in them, adding as many basic lands as you want from the store's supply. Play. Everything you opened and did not play is your sideboard, and you can swap freely between games.
Six booster packs, which in current sets are Play Boosters of 14 cards each.
A pool of roughly 84 cards, so twice the size of a draft pool.
Minimum 40-card deck, and you should play exactly 40.
17 lands, free and unlimited, never drafted or bought.
Your sideboard is everything else you opened, and it is much deeper than a draft sideboard.
A bigger pool means a better deck, so sealed decks are stronger than draft decks.
More powerful, and worse. A sealed pool has more bombs in it, because six packs contain six rares, but nobody was able to steer their pool toward a plan. Sealed decks are consistently clunkier and slower than draft decks, which is why sealed games go long and the deck with the better late game usually wins.
Sealed is a deckbuilding format wearing a card game's clothes. You did not choose any of your cards, so the entire contest is who assembles the best 40 out of a pile they did not pick. Six steps, in this order, and the order matters.
Sort the whole pool by color, with gold and colorless cards in their own piles. You cannot see a deck in an unsorted heap of 84 cards, and this takes two minutes.
Pull out every removal spell and every bomb, regardless of color. That is the B and the R of BREAD, and both matter more in sealed than in draft, because the games run long enough that every bomb gets cast. Build around whichever colors hold most of them.
Count the playables in each color. A color needs roughly 15 to 16 playables to carry half a deck. A color with six good cards and nothing else is a splash, not a main color.
Pick the two colors with the best combination of bombs, removal and depth, not the two with the most cards. Depth without a way to win is how a sealed deck goes 1-3.
Lay the deck out by mana cost before you sleeve it. Five to seven two-drops, a real middle, and no more than three or four cards above five mana.
Count to exactly 23 spells and 17 lands. If you are at 24 spells, the worst one comes out rather than a land.
The rule of thumb that saves most sealed decks: build the deck that is still doing something on turn eight. Draft rewards curve and pressure, sealed rewards having the biggest thing left on the table when both players have run out of gas, because both decks will run out of gas.
Sealed mistakes are all the same mistake with different faces: valuing the cards you opened over the deck you could build.
Playing three colors because the rares are spread across them. A rare you cannot cast until turn seven has lost you more games than it wins.
Building the fast aggressive deck. Sealed pools are deeper and clunkier than draft pools on both sides of the table, so games go long and the deck with the bigger late game usually wins.
Cutting a solid two-drop for a splashy six-drop. Sealed decks tend to be top-heavy already, and the curve is the first thing to break.
Leaving removal in the sideboard because it is off-color by one pip. Check whether the splash is castable before you dismiss it; a single dual land plus a mana creature sometimes is enough.
Ignoring the sideboard between games. Every card in your pool is legal to swap in, and a sealed pool has answers in it that were not worth a maindeck slot.
Sealed and draft are the two Limited formats, and they differ in one place: where the pool comes from. In sealed you open six packs and that is what you have. In draft you open three, pass them around eight players and pick one card at a time, so every card in your pool is a decision you made.
A lot of people search for "sealed draft" as though it were one format. It is not, and there is nothing by that name, but the instinct behind it is reasonable enough: both are Limited, both end in a 40-card deck with 17 lands, and stores run them on the same nights. If somebody invited you to a "sealed draft", ask which one they meant. A prerelease is sealed; a Friday night event is more often draft.
A prerelease is a sealed tournament held the weekend before a set goes on sale, and it is the format's natural home. Everybody in the room is seeing the cards for the first time, which removes the one thing that usually makes a competitive event intimidating: nobody has an information advantage.
You get a prerelease pack: six Play Boosters, a foil promo rare or mythic, and a spindown die. The promo is yours and is legal to play in the event.
Build a 40-card deck from those six packs, same as any sealed event. Basic lands are provided by the store.
It is the friendliest event on the Magic calendar. Prereleases are where a large share of players play their first competitive game, and everybody at the table is seeing the set for the first time too.
Rounds are usually casual and often untimed in spirit. Ask questions, ask about new mechanics, and expect the person opposite you to be reading their own cards carefully.
You keep everything you open, so the entry price is largely the price of six packs.
If somebody has asked you to try a store event and you are not sure where to start, this is the answer. It is sealed, so there is no pick order to learn, and the pace is set by a room of people reading their own cards.
A sealed deck is a deck of at least 40 cards built from six booster packs you open yourself, plus as many free basic lands as you need. Nothing is passed and nobody picks: the roughly 84 cards in those six packs are your entire pool, and the format is choosing which two colors and which 23 spells make the deck. Everything you open and do not play is your sideboard.
A minimum of 40, and you should play exactly 40. Your pool is six packs, about 84 cards, so you are playing roughly a quarter of what you opened. The rest is your sideboard and is legal to swap in between games.
17, the same as draft. Sealed decks are usually a little more expensive than draft decks, so 18 is more defensible here than it is in draft, and 16 is rarely right. Basic lands are free and supplied by the event, so they never come out of your pool.
Six. That is the standard for both regular sealed events and prereleases, and a prerelease pack additionally contains a foil promo rare or mythic and a spindown life counter.
Two by default, and three more often than in draft. A sealed pool has more cards but fewer of them are good, so the pull toward a third color is real. It is only worth it when the third color is one or two genuinely game-winning cards and you have fixing to cast them, not when it is four mediocre cards you would rather not cut.
No. They are the two Limited formats and the difference is where the pool comes from. In sealed you open six packs and build from only your own cards, with no picking and no passing. In draft you open three packs and pass them around eight players, taking one card at a time. There is no format called sealed draft, though the phrase gets searched often because both are Limited, both end in a 40-card deck with 17 lands, and stores run them on the same nights.
A sealed event held the weekend before a set goes on general sale, where everybody plays with cards nobody has seen before. You get six packs, a foil promo and a spindown die, build a 40-card deck and play a few rounds. It is the single most beginner-friendly event most stores run, because the entire room is learning the set at the same time.
Track Limited nights alongside your Commander and Standard games.
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