The year was 2022, and Brother’s War had just come out. It was an important plot point in both lore and gameplay. It seemed like new archetypes were spawned or supported, with cards like Portal to Phyrexia (Artifact Reanimation) and Brotherhood’s End (support for sideboards against Affinity and aggro decks).
The return of Unearth posed interesting deckbuilding decisions, especially with new additions like Cityscape Leveler. The pseudo-Mystical Archive cards (the Retro Artifacts) were a large selling point in Limited and beyond. Cards like Liquimetal Coating, Semblance Anvil, and WURMCOIL ENGINE(!) began to see play in Arena where it was once never thought possible.
Mishra’s Bauble in Historic became one of the fastest bans in the West, only losing out to the ban of Lutri, the Spellchaser in Commander. Yet, nothing could stop these artifacts from being played in Limited formats, including the one I’m going to educate y’all on today: Sealed.
Sealed is a format where you’re given six 15-card booster packs, an unlimited number of basic lands, and sometimes unplayable bulk rares. However, there are those times where you just open bomb after bomb, and that is how I won the Brothers’ War Sealed League on UOL. Today, I’m going to take you through my thought process once I first got my pile, and how I ended up building my deck based on the cards I was given.
Let’s take a look at my pool.
You can see that there are some clear-cut ways to go here; let’s check our rares and see our options.
NOTE: Sometimes building around your rares is not the best way to go. If you have multiple copies of a busted uncommon like Third Path Iconoclast or Yotian Tactician, those can enhance your game plan significantly.
Deckbuilding
Looking just at these rares alone, I can see that an artifact build is clearly the way to go. These have been sorted by Draftsim rating. Wurmcoil Engine, Siege Veteran, and Myrel, Shield of Argive are some of the best, if not the best, cards in this format. They should be an auto-include in any Sealed deck. Each one presents a new constraint on the opponent, whether it’s Wurmcoil’s death trigger or Myrel’s passive ability.
Those cards narrow our options a little bit. We know we want to go Wx, but the X variable still remains up for grabs. Gixian Puppeteer is a very nice rare also, acting as a mini-Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. The Mightstone and Weakstone may help cast Wurmcoil as well as late game card advantage and removal, so that goes in. In a 2-color deck, Chromatic Lantern is a very nice fixing piece. Stuck on 1 color but have Lantern? No problem.
Key to the City can also just win games late, burying your opponent in card advantage as well as rapidly snowballing damage each turn. Journeyer’s Kite is a possibility, but it seems a bit too slow if we want to follow our aggro plan. Adaptive Automaton seems nice for a Soldier-heavy deck, which seems very likely given that Myrel and Veteran both pseudo-rely on that specific tribe.
However, Over the Top and Fateful Handoff are just not built for this format at all. You can’t give an opponent an artifact that could be pivotal, and given how many we have, Fateful Handoff is worthless. Over the Top is a fun build-around, but it’s not good for this circumstance.
So, based on the things I just mentioned, Wx Soldiers seems like a solid plan. In a scenario like this, you will want to look for cards that can synergize with literally any of your cards. Keep Puppeteer in your back pocket just in case you want to pivot to black in games 2 and 3.
TIP: Sometimes, even if you do have a large amount of playable rares, they might not end up making the cut in your final deck, and this serves as a good example. They will often lead you to pivot your game plan, as Puppeteer demonstrates. Depending on what cards your opponents present, your secondary cards in your sideboard can help swing games in your favor.
Soldiers
1 Adaptive Automaton
1 Aeronaut Cavalry
1 Ambush Paratrooper
1 Myrel, Shield of Argive
1 Siege Veteran
2 Warlord’s Elite
1 Wing Commando
1 Yotian Medic
1 Yotian Tactician
Let’s break our pool down even further and take a look at our Soldiers. Since they synergize well with Siege Veteran and Myrel, Shield of Argive, they should be one of our first priorities while deckbuilding.
TIP: If your rares rely on a specific tribe or mechanic, be sure to look for cards that fit that criteria first. If you have enough of a specific tribe or mechanic, you may be able to create a deck revolving around just those cards!
There aren’t too many here, a scant 10 in the UW colors that we are looking for. Siege Veteran and Myrel, Shield of Argive are the bombs we mentioned earlier. Yotian Tactician being a lord is a huge boost, as we need to be able to swing in the late game. Wing Commando‘s decent, but we’re not yet sure how many noncreature spells we should run. Warlord’s Elite is fantastic in a deck like this, as it can tap Key to the City for free card advantage on the next turn.
TIP: When checking through your Sealed pool, be sure to look for funky interactions like Key to the City and Warlord’s Elite. It turns out that the smaller synergies can go a long way!
Aeronaut Cavalry as a big flying beatstick and a booster to any of your other Soldiers is a nice point to help swing games in your favor. Adaptive Automaton, as I mentioned earlier, is a great additional lord effect. Yotian Medic is a nice filler card, and can provide you with some nice ground cushion blocking and some incidental lifegain. Ambush Paratrooper isn’t exactly what we’re looking for here, as we want to spend our later turns casting our large artifacts like Wurmcoil Engine and The Mightstone and Weakstone for 5+ mana.
Artificers
Another thing I look at in this pool is the number of Artificers. Even though there’s only 5 of them, they could play a critical role in casting some of our artifacts and paying for Scatter Ray costs. Sadly, we don’t have that much support for Thopter Mechanic in an aggro deck.
If we are to stick to the aggro plan, then we want as little noncreature spells as possible. The only real enabler for it is Key to the City as a repeatable effect, but both it and Thopter Mechanic are 1-ofs, so consistency would be a problem.
Powerstone Engineer, however, is a huge boost to our aggro plan, as it can help cast our chunky artifacts in the late game and force trades from the opponent. Lastly, Great Desert Prospector can create an ABSURD amount of Powerstones in this deck. Especially with a large amount of tokens and creatures on the battlefield, I averaged about 3-7 Powerstones per ETB. Powerstones are great because they can help pay for Key costs as well as Equip costs with our Sigil of Valors.
Noncreature Spells
1 Desynchronize
2 Flow of Knowledge
1 Lay Down Arms
1 Loran’s Escape
1 Prison Sentence
3 Recommission
1 Scatter Ray
2 Sigil of Valor
1 Stern Lesson
2 Urza’s Rebuff
The last part of our plan will be the noncreature spells. Even though we want as few as possible, there are some that are necessities. Lay Down Arms in a Wu deck will be very nice, as you can cast it reliably for x=3 or 4.
Loran’s Escape is more of a tech card against removal that you can expect in games 2 or 3. Recommission is a huge boost, as it can buy back Siege Veteran or any of our other priceless 2 and 3 drops. It works especially well with Warlord’s Elite, as a 2-mana 5/5 is certainly well above rate.
Prison Sentence is an auto-include in any white deck, as it shuts down an opposing creature and can help you scry into your larger threats. Scatter Ray and Urza’s Rebuff are nice sideboard cards to help prevent board wipes and other removal, but for game 1 we’d want to stick to our aggressive plan. Stern Lesson could be cool, but since this is an aggro deck, you’d rather play a creature on turn 3.
Flow of Knowledge isn’t really worth it here, with not enough Islands to make it really meaningful in the game. Even though Desynchronize needs only 1 Island to be cast, it still isn’t worth casting on turn 5 when you are an aggro deck.
Sigil of Valor is our real noncreature spell payoff here. Being able to get tapped by Elite and also providing a huge creature that our opponent has to block against is a game-changer in any circumstance. Especially with Key to the City, you can have a huge unblockable token or other creature, often setting a 2 turn clock.
Another thing to note is that I did not include Hulking Metamorph. This is because in the early games, I felt like I wouldn’t have enough blue lands to reliably cast it.
So, with this in mind, here is the final deck list I settled with. The sideboard includes 15x of each type of basic land, in case I wanted to pivot colors.
Overall, as the title states, this deck went 6-1 in overall play, ending up as the number 1 seed after the “regular season.” Overall, the deck played as a very aggressive beatdown pile. Having my early threats go unanswered in the long run, like my Powerstone Engineers and other low-curve Soldiers hit for early chunks of damage proved pivotal. I was able to outrace other aggro piles, and outgrind Third Path Savant spam and board stalls late.
Also, just getting to resolve my larger bombs proved pivotal in preventing my opponent from winning the game. Even if they got answered, there were still many other creatures and collateral damage they had to deal with. The only loss came in Round 4, against a deck I would eventually beat.
That deck contained 2x Overwhelming Remorse, the best removal spell in the BRO format, as well as Myrel, Shield of Argive. Thanks to good draws and Siege Veteran carrying the day, I ended up winning in the finals against that same deck and pilot, 3-2. If you end up playing similar piles at your prerelease (or even the same player twice) it is very helpful to reflect on what went wrong in your earlier matchup and side in cards that you may not have thought about siding in before.
Good draws and massive bombs aren’t the only ways to win your Sealed games; tight play also goes a long way. Sometimes you just need to stick in it for the long run, waiting to slam those bombs until you know the coast is clear. Bluffing was a major part of how I won. On a later turn, if I had something like Myrel, Shield of Argive and another cheap creature like Warlord’s Elite in my hand with enough mana to cast it, I would wait until the opponent had cast their counter or piece of removal before casting Myrel.
As far as deckbuilding goes, I personally recommend doing basically what I did just then. When you first open your packs, lay out your cards in a pile by color, and in those piles, by mana value. If you are missing a specific mana value for a color, you can easily check and slot in the appropriate cards. Figure out what your rares are and their level of playability.
Look at your signpost uncommons, if you have any. Look at your card quality. Look for small synergies between cards, like Warlord’s Elite and Key to the City. Even if you don’t open a ton of bombs (or none at all), a cohesive and focused base of commons and uncommons can be enough to carry the day. Treat your uncommons as your rares and build your deck that way.
That’s that for Brother’s War, but what about All Will Be One?
Phyrexia: All Will Be One seems to have a much more diverse Limited format than Brothers’War. There seem to be many different paths to take, with Toxic, Oil, For Mirrodin!, and 10 planeswalkers to potentially open. Our ONE Sealed League has just started, so I will also take you through my thought process of how to build your ONE prerelease deck.
DISCLAIMER: Prior to this article, I had never personally played the ONE draft format. Some of my thoughts are based on ratings from Draftsim, Luis Scott-Vargas/Reid Duke, and Jim Davis. I have also watched other streamers do Early Access drafts and Sealeds, prior to the release of the set on Arena.
Here is the pool I was given.
WIth our abundance of green cards, it seems glaringly obvious that it should be one of our colors. However, Voidwing Hybrid is very appetizing when it comes to other color pairs.
Let’s take a look at our rares and see what they have to offer.
Rares
Immediately out of the gate, Nissa, Ascended Animist and Thrun, Breaker of Silence are our major “bomb” rares. These cards generate so much value early and late, and can also set an inevitable clock that your opponent has to answer ASAP. Even though Nissa technically has 4 green pips, it can still be cast reliably for 5 mana in a 2 color deck. The fact that she generates an incrementally large token that can protect her on its own, Disenchant for only 1 loyalty, and give you a Overrun-esque ult effect is certainly a way to end a game quickly.
Thrun, Breaker of Silence’s “hexproof from non-green” makes it very hard to answer and deal with, especially since black is a primary removal color. The “indestructible on your turn” effect makes it able to swing for large chunks of damage without you breaking a sweat.
Two copies of Mercurial Spelldancer is very interesting. As an unblockable creature, it can play a major role if we choose to go aggressive; although there aren’t many noncreature spells in the pool, we could still load it up with Equipment and combat tricks.
Unctus, Grand Metatect can also win games on its own, thanks to its low mana cost and high value both early and late. Slobad, Iron Goblin and Blackcleave Cliffs are fringe playable in this pool, as we don’t have too much artifact support and our black/red card quality isn’t that good. With this in mind, it’s fairly safe to go UG on just our rares alone, with some type of artifact + aggro synergy that would serve us best.
Artifacts
1 Dune Mover
1 Malcator’s Watcher
1 Myr Convert
1 Myr Custodian
2 Eye of Malcator
1 Maze Skullbomb
2 Meldweb Strider
1 Surgical Skullbomb
1 Sylvok Battle-Chair
Delving even further into our pool, we have the artifacts. Surgical Skullbomb is a utility piece for our game plan. The flexibility of cantripping in the early game and bouncing a critical creature in the late game (while still drawing a card) is extremely powerful in a Sealed format.
Sylvok Battle-Chair is Colossal Dreadmaw on a stick, and is a nice pairing with Mercurial Spelldancer, given that you can have the Phyrexian Rogue send in 6 unblockable damage a turn. The big chair can also give you an extra blocker in the late game, if need be.
Malcator’s Watcher is a good aggro card that can chump block and help get you up in cards. Myr Convert, despite the 2 life, can help power out an early Nissa or Thrun.
Maze Skullbomb is similar to Surgical Skullbomb in the cantripping ability, but can also pose a lethal threat in the late game.
Myr Custodian isn’t worth that much, as a 2/3 for 3 is bad on rate. Meldweb Strider seems not that good for a 5 drop in this format, even though it can essentially crew itself for a turn. Lastly, Eye of Malcator is not worth playing at all since we have so few artifacts that matter. A lot of these cards will most likely play out as they look in paper, but sometimes first impressions are both helpful and hurtful.
These artifacts that I mentioned above are the ones that we are most likely to include in our deck. Unctus will serve its purpose very well, just like in Phyrexia.
Surprisingly, Ruthless Predation is the only real instant or sorcery spell that we want to play. Despite basically being a carbon copy of Epic Confrontation from BRO, this fight spell literally packs a punch. Ruthless Predation can create scenarios where suddenly you are essentially winning the ground game.
The +1/+2 stat boost can sometimes surprise a lot of people, as if you target just a 1/1 like Malcator’s Watcher you can start to take out much larger threats. However, Ruthless Predation is also one of the very few ways in the set that your opponent can kill Thrun, so be very careful of that interaction. Given that the majority of our rares are creatures, and that they mostly support an aggro artifact plan, this card effectively acts as a pseudo-Murder with a bunch of creatures on your side of the battlefield.
A lot of the other noncreature spells we have in the pool aren’t worth spending a turn on or passing a turn on when we could be sending in large chunks of damage with smaller blockers on the field.
In the event of a pseudo-reprint, lessons from your previous Sealed experiences can come in handy. If you used something like this card in a past deck that did pretty well, and you think that you can craft a similar shell to that deck, it seems like a decent choice. Even if you haven’t seen a similar card in a previous Sealed pool, it is still beneficial to reflect on if you used this card in other formats, and what kinds of shells it went into.
Creatures
1 Branchblight Stalker
1 Contagious Vorrac
1 Evolving Adaptive
1 Ichorspit Basilisk
1 Lattice-Blade Mantis
1 Oil-Gorger Troll
2 Plague Nurse
1 Predation Steward
1 Rustvine Cultivator
1 Tyrranax Atrocity
1 Unctus’s Retrofitter
These are the rest of the creatures we’d like to play. Contagious Vorrac is a nice inclusion, thanks to its flexibility. Being able to both get a land or add another poison counter to your opponent is beneficial in all phases of the game.
Unctus’s Retrofitter is cool since it can turn your Skullbombs or other artifact creatures into a 4/4, and the Toxic 1 is a small but beneficial stat boost.
Evolving Adaptive as a turn 1 play can snowball quickly, especially with the variance of creature powers we have here. It is also a nice combo with Nissa, Ascended Animist’s uptick ability, since the creature she generates grows exponentially and so does Adaptive.
Oil-Gorger Troll is a bit of a sleeper, especially with the amount of Oil in green. Being able to get some life cushion and draw a card attached to a 3/4 is surprisingly effective.
Lattice-Blade Mantis is another Oil enabler that can swing for large chunks of damage both early and late, and can also block thanks to the “untap” clause attached to the +1/+1 ability.
Branchblight Stalker and Ichorspot Basilisk are filler toxic cards, as they can provide some good blocking as well as apply pressure early.
Tyrranax Atrocity can apply some pressure late, and slamming it on an empty board will feel good for you and not your opponent.
Plague Nurse is interesting as a Toxic 2-er as well as a decently sized blocker. We shouldn’t expect to have to use its ability, but it could come in handy in the late game.
Rustvine Cultivator is an OK ramp card, but something like Myr Convert is much better. Since it does take 2 turns to get running, it is certainly slower than we’d like to see.
Predation Steward is a pretty good Bear, and a solid filler 2-drop.
These will serve as our creature aggro base. It should be able to apply pressure both early and late, and address our general game plan nicely. This large plethora of variance can help us either stabilize, apply pressure, stall for time, or generate value.
Lastly, there are some utility lands to include in this build. 2 copies of The Hunter Maze can help us hit our land drops early, although the “enters tapped” is a bit of a drawback. The ability to sac it to draw a card, similar to the SNC common lands cycle (Tramway Station, for example), will be potent in the late game if we get flooded or stuck. If we draw into something good, then we are well set up for the next turn. These effectively replace 2 Forests in deckbuilding.
One other thing to note is that I didn’t include Voidwing Hybrid. With the general lack of Proliferate cards in the pool, and the assumption that we want to play Nissa and Thrun, 3 colors isn’t exactly the best shell for this deck. The black cards could be good in the other games, but probably not for Game 1. An example of a shell for Hybrid could be a UB Toxic build with some proliferate support, like Experimental Augury or Drown in Ichor and creatures like Blightbelly Rat or Gulping Scraptrap (cards not in this pool).
The Final List
With these considerations in mind, here is the final decklist I settled with (for now). In our Sealed league and during your prerelease, do NOT forget that you can change your deck in between matches. If you realize that the blue or green isn’t playing the way you expected, you can pivot into any of the other colors.
UB would be my 2nd main choice for deck colors, following UG, mainly because we have some removal cards like Annihilating Glare and three copies of Vraska’s Fall. Also, Voidwing Hybrid as a signpost uncommon for that color is also beneficial. Black also lets us use the power of Mercurial Spelldancer a little bit more, since there are a couple more instant/sorcery spells in black than blue in our pool.
Just like the BRO pile, I included 16-17 copies of each basic land type in the sideboard, for the pivoting reasons mentioned above.
That’s deckbuilding, but how do you actually win games?
Sure, deckbuilding is half of the Sealed process, but the whole title of this article is “How to Win at Your Sealed Prerelease.” So, how does play factor into your general experience? Obviously, if you know your opponent’s pool, that will help a lot when making decisions and knowing what to play around. However, most of the time, you don’t.
The easiest, most effective way to win your Sealed games is simply by thinking. You won’t know what to play around (eventually you will), but if you know any amount of cards in the set and a vague idea of what they do, then you can speculate what your opponent has in hand based on how much mana they leave open or what types of mana are open.
TIP: Take a look at the WotC Card Image Gallery before you go to your prerelease. It can help you gauge what cards may be bigger threats than others, and what cards you are most likely to see in a player’s decks. Here is the link: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-image-gallery/phyrexia-all-will-be-one
If you can gain intel on the set’s big problem cards, then you can anticipate when to use things like instant-speed removal (Sheoldred’s Edict, Volt Charge, to name a couple) on problematic cards like any of the Dominus cards.
Instant-speed cards can also help you force your opponent to make plays to save their biggest bombs, like spending any amount of a mana/life combination to make their Dominus indestructible. Making your opponent spend their combat tricks (Tyvar’s Stand, Blazing Crescendo, to name a couple) to try to gain an edge in the game can help your plan also, as you know they blew a card they could have used later to send in more critical damage.
Also, tricking your opponent into playing counterspells or removal is another way to gain an edge, similar to the combat trick process. Play smaller “bait” cards, like casting Hexgold Slash on their only flying blocker, which baits out the counterspell. Then, play a simply better card, like a large flier or just a bomb rare and swing in damage, forcing them to block with their flier to not take lethal damage.
This was just an example, but similar scenarios could play out in your games. Simply saying the 4 words “On your end step” and casting a spell can throw your opponent into a panic and force them to spend their available mana to take the 1-for-1 in cards. The next turn, you get to untap, and play a much better card without it being countered.
If you brick and keep drawing lands (which is also completely possible), and your opponent has just played a bomb, you may still be able to attack past it and win the game. If opponent’s at a lower life total, and they just played like a Ovika, Enigma Goliath while tapping out, and you have enough creatures to just attack past it for lethal, that’s still winning the game. If they play a bomb while they know they have lost, that can also gain you valuable intel into the later games. Since you now know now to play around it, you can side in appropriate cards to help mitigate the damage or deal with it early in the game.
Conclusion
The Phyrexians have taken over both our prereleases and our deckbuilding. At your prerelease, it seems like Toxic will be the mechanic to beat. Proliferate could – like Contagious Vorrac[c] – could be prominent in your deckbuilding, mostly because of the Oil and Toxic subthemes. Even if you have no cards that rely on proliferate, some of them like [c]Drown in Ichor are very good just by themselves. 10 is much less and much easier to reach than 20, although you can maybe hit both at the same time.
Of course, the piles could be vastly different than what I have shown you here in this article. You could pull some even larger bombs than Nissa or Thrun, like The Eternal Wanderer, the Dominus cycle, and even the big baddy herself: Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines.
To win at your prerelease, you will need to have backup plans for all kinds of scenarios, and leverage every rarity of cards to your advantage. Take a deeper look at some of the subthemes of your pool, like Soldiers in BRO and Oil in ONE.
Sometimes even the worst cards or the most bulk rares can get you good wins. Even if you lose all your games, you still gained the vital Sealed experience necessary for your Store Championships or RCQs. There’s nothing better than gaining valuable practice, and experiencing the fun of going to your first (or any numbered) prerelease.
Every new set comes with its joy of playing Limited for the first time. I hope you experienced the Thrill of Possibility that this article has to offer to your Prerelease experience, and I do hope that you can take home some valuable promo cards from your LGS.
