For the first Sealed Pack of the weekend, I sat with Adam Horvath as he built his deck. Adam didn’t do so well—he only managed to muster a record of 3-2 in the first five rounds. I thought it only appropriate that for the next round of deck construction, I cover his semi–arch-nemesis, fellow PC champion David Leader. He’s currently undefeated and hopeful that he will be able to come back tomorrow to draft.

David opened a card pool with a lot of Team-Ups, a few impressive plot twists, and a big pile of characters. He immediately began sorting his characters into playable and unplayable piles. Unaffiliated characters and characters from legacy affiliations were quickly relegated to the unplayable pile, along with a few characters from the main affiliations with less than impressive stats. After shuffling through his cards again, David made an early decision about his deck, and all of the Injustice Gang and some Secret Society characters were designated as unplayable.

It looked like David was following the popular plan of JLx. Those two teams didn’t afford him such an excellent curve, though, so he started to add in Secret Society. He was still hurting on 5-drops, so Scarecrow, Psycho Psychologist was added to his playables. “I’m going for a JLA-JLI-Secret Society strategy,” he said. “It’s how I build most of my Sealed decks. Teaming up is very easy—I have three Team-Ups here, and they’re all good ones—so I want to play the best characters and use my cards to team them up.” Indeed, David had UN Building, World’s Greatest Heroes, and two copies of Funky’s Big Rat Code.

After establishing a tentative character base, David went back to his locations and plot twists. “I probably don’t have enough leader characters to justify playing two of these,” he said, cutting a copy of Sinister Citadel for another Team-Up. He checked his characters one more time and was done, lightning fast—his entire deck was constructed in less then ten minutes. I asked David what he thought his chances were with this deck. “Well, the person who registered this wrote “tough luck” on the package, but I actually think my chances are quite good. With my tiebreakers, I only need to go 1-3 to make Day 2. Tiebreakers follow you into the next day, though, so I would certainly like to do better than that today.”