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Editor: Anthony Macali. Saturday 2nd April 2005

Feature Article

Whats the Deal with Sealed by Enchante Chang

Whats the Deal with Sealed

Hey Guys and Gals. Today I am going to talk to you about Sealed Tournaments. The things I will over are what you should do when you get your boosters, how to avoid deck registration sheets getting filled in wrong, basics in building a sealed deck and basic game play.

Now before you think this is an article just for beginners, ask yourself this, have you ever filled in a registration sheet wrongly and been punished for it? Do you always need a pen? Do you always need a piece of paper to write your life total on? Can I borrow your dice?

What to bring?

1. Bring stuff. At every sanctioned sealed tournament the Tournament organizer is going to ask you to register cards, this means you need a pen.

2. Your going to play games right? You need to track you and your opponent’s life totals. A small notepad is great for this because you can go back a few weeks later look at your pad. Wow, I won so many games that day or I played against this person….ahh memories.

3. Counters/Dice. Counters are good these days. Characters have cosmic, characters have +1/+1 counters. Much better than ripping up a piece of paper, plus they won’t blow away when some walks by.

4. A deck box of some sort, it is always good to keep your deck in a secure place, you don’t want to lose cards because those relate to a game loss

What to do once you have your boosters?

1. Doesn’t matter if you are doing a deck swap or keeping for yourself, first of all, sort your cards! The best way is to sort them into team affiliation, location, plot twists and equipment. Then sort them into alphabetical order. Now this may seem to take a long time, but it actually doesn’t and you register your cards very rapidly once they are sorted, this also helps to prevent incorrect listings of cards. If you have gone pass the letter C and come to a card called Alpha Centurion, then you know something went wrong and can go back and check.

2. Register the cards you have in the TOTAL column and NOT the PLAYED column.

3. Write your NAME, UDE NUMBER. If you don’t, it causes lots of problems for the judges working at that tournament. At bigger events it can lead to game loses. Now we don’t want that do we?

4. Double Check. 1 in 5 tournaments when you do this, you most likely will spot some sort of mistake. However, if you followed instruction 1 then most likely you’ll be good.

I’ve Registered my cards now what?

1. You can start building now, it is best to try and stick to 2 team affiliations as they are easier to reinforce, team attack and a team up can team them both up. If you have to, splash a couple of cards from a 3rd team but make sure they don’t have loyalty. But stay away from the 3rd team if you can.

2. You need to build a minimum 30 card deck, now you can build a deck bigger than this but it is best to keep it at 30 cards. Why? Would you like to draw your 30th best card or your 31st best card? What about 35th best? I think you get my point

3. Make sure you have enough guys in your deck. What’s the point of having all those plot twists and equipment if you have no guys to play them on? You want at least 17 guys in your deck (presuming your deck is 30 cards), any lower would most likely cause you trouble. 21 would be the maximum I would want, as plot twists are also needed. But if your characters are really that good, by all means have more guys.

4. Now you have chosen the 30 cards to play in your deck, alphabetize them again and register them in the PLAYED column. Is your name on the registration sheet?

Game play

1. Shuffling. Make sure you shuffle well because at the end of each game your characters are in one pile and your plot twists are in one pile. If you don’t shuffle well the next game you might draw all characters or all plot twists and that is no fun.

2. Make sure your shuffle your opponent’s deck before the start of a match; you never know what kind of sleight of hand your opponents can pull. Better safe than sorry here.

3. Make sure you know what your opponent has just played. It's difficult at sneak preview tournaments as no one knows the cards, so if you are not sure of what things do, read them. If you are about to attack, read your opponents cards first to check if they have any funky abilities you need to know.

4. Combat is the most important part of this game so you should know what you are doing:
a) Declare your attacker and their defender
b) Exhaust your character, you now have initiative, so if you wanted to play effects you need to do them now, as if you pass initiative and they do too, it's too late to play stuff!
c) Once both players have passed initiative consecutively then that attack concludes.

Final Points

Remember even though you are a playing a tournament, you’re here to have fun, so make sure you do Play fair, and enjoy your VS.

Until next time folks, Same VS time, Same VS channel.

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