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Divinity, Vampiric General

Iron Man, Illuminati

Technarx, Cyborg General

Titania, Temper Tantrum

Doom-Bot ◊ Dr. Doom, Cosmic Thief

Molecule Man, Owen Reece

Doom Needs Only Doom

2 For the Glory of Doom

Mask of Doom

Arsenal of Doom

Inhumans

Alpha Primitives, Army

Invisible Woman, Flame On!

Dinu, Face of Terror

Gorgon, Thundering Hooves

Heralds of Galactus

The Punishers, Army

2 Human Torch, The Invisible Man

Morg, Harbinger of Extinction

Cosmic Necessity

Titannus, Alien Conqueror

Skrull

Adam Warlock, Protector of the Soul Gem

Infinity Watch

Other

Negative Zone, Shadow Dimension

Recently I wrote an article for StarCityVs.com where I talked about a different way of approaching Sealed Pack. Essentially, I said that the conservative model of establishing a consistent build simply isn’t enough to give you the best chance of winning an event anymore. The sophistication of Vs. sets—as well as the general rise in skill and acumen of the player base—means that you need to push the envelope a little bit more if you want to succeed at Sealed Pack. Simply maxing out on a 0-4-4-4-3-2-2 curve (turns 0-7) is not enough anymore. You have to play to your strengths.

What I am advocating is that you play a very basic, skeletal curve, designed only to ensure that you are not blown out in games. This curve focuses on freeing up space in your deck for more cards that complicate the game state, which allows you to create more advantage for yourself by putting your opponent in unfamiliar territory. The curve I tentatively proposed was three 2-drops, four 3-drops, three 4-drops, two 5-drops, and two 6-drops. This might seem a bit strange, as it only suggests fourteen compulsory characters. However, this is something that I think does a lot to free up creativity and increase the status of the game as a contest. The argument says that there is nothing you can do to avoid missing your curve—no matter how hard you try—so instead you should concentrate on making the most of not hitting your curve (rather than building a deck that must hit its curve or fall apart).

Looking over Rob’s list, I felt that this was a perfect opportunity to put my new theory to the test. Quite simply, Rob’s pool is what fashionable gamers call “awkward.” There aren’t really any highlights at all. Overall, Vs. sets don’t have many dead cards, but Rob has managed to open a distribution that offers neither a clear-cut path nor any real bomb card to hang his hat on. Some players might see this as horrifying, but with my new and rejuvenated approach to Sealed Pack, I saw it as a boon.

Looking over the four major teams, there are no two-team combinations that offer us our desired skeleton curve. The combination of Inhumans and Heralds comes closest, but we should look at the plot twists before we make any final judgments. Infamous Seven and Penal Colony are excellent Kree cards, but the Kree faction tends to be dominated by cards that depend on a bevy of press characters to even be relevant. I find that for Kree to be accessible in Sealed, you need two press 2-drops and at least one press 3-drop, 4-drop, and even 5-drop to really take advantage of a lot of the affiliation’s cards.

A lot of people like Arsenal of Doom, but it just doesn’t do enough for me. I think you want more from your cards in Sealed. Two Doom-based Team-Ups are okay, but they can go in any deck. Mask of Doom is a little narrow for me, although Doom Needs Only Doom can be extremely good. Overall there isn’t really anything that great to recommend a big push with Doom. Even if we move on from Doom, only The Royal Guard is there to push us into Inhumans. It’s a great plot twist, but not much by itself. Extended Family is the generic plot twist with the most incentive, but even then we need more evidence to push for Inumans.

Heralds probably has the most promising non-character cards. Not only do they have their own team-friendly Team-Up, but Relentless Onslaught; The Power Cosmic Unleashed; and Elemental Converters are all excellent Sealed Pack cards. The case isn’t cut and dried, but Heralds is a likely candidate for inclusion in the deck at this stage. Considering that we have the closest skeletal build possible in Inhumans/Heralds, there is some decent synergy between the teams; Extended Family and The Power Cosmic Unleashed offer some redundancy in the cosmic department. Given that The Uni-Power; Mind Gem; and Interstellar Offensive are the best generic cards we have available, this synergy might be the best thing we have going right now.

So, aiming for just the basic curve, we arrive at something like this:

Human Torch, The Invisible Man

I cut Dinu to ensure we had enough Heralds characters in the basic framework, though he could easily come back at a later stage. I also cut the fourth Human Torch from the 4-drops, as having back-to-back drops with same name could obviously be a major issue if we go overboard. Even three could be too many. Still, as a start, we do have a decent character base that is really only missing an extra 3-drop. The characters we do have play well with our cosmic enhancement cards, though by no means is the above list of characters anything greater than an average Sealed pool would provide. From here we could easily add the obvious non-character support:

The Uni-Power

Mind Gem

The non-character cards Rob had available to him were excellent. Not only does he have an abundance of attack pumps, but he also has quality card-drawing facilities in Elemental Converters and Mind Gem. Furthermore, access to cosmic counter enablers allows him to take advantage of the quality and abundance of the cosmic and cosmic—surge characters in his pool. Two in-team Team-Ups also seems incredibly fortunate, as you really want to be playing a couple of Team-Ups in Sealed Pack. Overall, the non-character card selection for this deck seemed very easy.

With such great non-character cards, we really want to make the most of our character base to take advantage. Happy enough with the basic framework above, we should look at how our deck is likely to operate so that we can add characters that will accentuate our deck. Instead of looking for characters that dominate the curve, we want to find characters that will gel with the other cards of our deck. From the outset, it seems that our deck could be quite hard to stun. We have two 4 DEF 2-drops, with Thing, Rockhead on turn 4 and Destroyer, Harbinger of Destruction on turn 6. An abundance of power-ups, as well as generally stall-friendly cards like Nahrees, the 4-drop Human Torch, and Terrax all suggest that we might have a deck that expects turn 7 every game.

There are a lot of different theories on how many 7-drops you should run in your typical Sealed deck, with one or two being popular choices. Still, it is not unheard of for a player to go to extremes and run no 7-drops at all or three 7-drops (though three 7-drops usually means they have some extra utility beyond being recruited on turn 7). Most Sealed games will end on turn 6 or turn 7, with the player who has the initiative getting the W. What this means is that a lot of the time, 7-drops aren’t even relevant; if the game doesn’t get to turn 7, they aren’t seeing play. More importantly, a 6-drop with a pump is often enough to break down opposing defenses on turn 7 when you have the initiative, reducing the role of 7-drops even further. In formats where the game was likely to end before turn 7, such as Infinite Crisis Sealed, I tended to run three unique 6-drops and no 7-drops. I found this gave me the most flexibility while retaining winning chances.

Every deck is different, however, and the reasons for not running 7-drops can easily be overturned when the conditions change. In this case, I think that has happened; not only do we have a deck that could play a slow game, but this format can also definitely be slow itself. Furthermore, Sealed Pack is a lot more about shunting and grinding out games than the smooth archetypal fluency of Booster Draft. I think this deck is going to get to turn 7 nearly every game and is even more likely to go to turn 8 than finish the game on turn 6. For this reason, I would play two 7-drops for some options, and I would definitely make Galactus one of those 7-drops.

The choice of the second 7-drop is a little trickier. I am not a fan of Morg at all, especially when there are so many good options. Gorgon could be okay, providing some large DEF for our opponent to balk at. Invisible Woman can be very powerful but doesn’t really play to our theme of high DEF, meaning that all the work we did in drawing out our opponent’s pumps earlier on would go to waste. Molecule Man is okay, but I don’t think he is so ridiculous that he is an auto-inclusion. Titannus could be good if we wanted to play more Team-Ups, but then we would probably want to play several more off-team characters. At this stage of deck construction, I feel that we should go with Adam Warlock; there are several annoying smaller characters in this set, and we have none of them. The biggest barrier to playing Adam is his cosmic loyalty, which shouldn’t be a problem in our deck since both our 6-drops at this stage have cosmic.

This gives us sixteen characters, so before we go anywhere else we should probably get our fourth 3-drop. The 3-drop is probably the most important drop to fill out in Sealed, as an unchecked 3-drop can really be effective in the late game, and often a 3-drop plus another drop is the minimum that can help you out if you miss your curve. There are only three other 3-drops to consider in our pool: Dr. Doom, Richards’s Rival; Technarx; and Iron Man, Illuminati. Iron Man is clearly inferior to the others, so we can forget him. However, we have to decide whether we want to run just one of the other 3-drops, or run both of them and cut a 3-drop we already have in the deck. If we did want to play both extra 3-drops, we would likely need to play an extra Team-Up to keep everyone in line. I don’t necessarily think this is a good idea, especially since we have several Nasty Surprise-type effects that are pressing for service. Really, then, the deciding factor is whether we think Technarx is better than Dr. Doom. If we could team-up the Doom team with our other affiliations, maybe he could be, but this has already been shown to be a troubling suggestion. Thus, we are probably better off just going with Dr. Doom, who allows us to find key cards like Extended Family and The Uni-Power.

Given that we only have three 2-drops, we should probably be looking to shore up our early game next. There aren’t really any relevant 2-drops left in the pool, but that isn’t much of a worry since we weren’t expecting much from our 2-drops. This deck is much more about the mid and late games than the early game. For that reason, Lockjaw seems like the best choice for a slot. Although we don’t have an Inhumans 7-drop, we have plenty of time to draw into the 7-drops we do have. We have all other bases covered.

At this stage the deck looks like this:

Characters

Human Torch, The Invisible Man

Adam Warlock, Protector of the Soul Gem

Plot Twists

The Uni-Power

Location

Equipment

Mind Gem

At this stage there are a few issues to consider. Terrax seems a bit of an odd choice, but I find too many people consider him merely on his typically random ability—his 13 DEF, flight, range, cosmic, and Heralds affiliation are all big plusses in this deck. Really, the character’s only weakness is that he has a mere 11 ATK. This weakness is common to several characters in the deck, with Thing, San (who we are likely to play visible to draw out the game), Firelord, and even our 5-drops having average or below average ATK values. On attack we seem to have enough pumps to compensate, but while defending we need to compensate too. Again, Rob’s amazing non-character selection comes to the party, with not one, or two, but three mini-Nasties. This might seem a bit radical, but I think we should play them all.

This would leave us with only eighteen characters, but there just doesn’t seem to be anyone else worth including anyway. We can’t really play the fourth Human Torch, and it would be even worse to play Titania or something just to plug a hole. Maybe before I changed my approach to Sealed I would have done something like that, but it is obvious that we need the “+2 ATK while defending” cards quite a lot, and three 4-drops is far from terrible. With Lockjaw and some card drawing in the mix, we aren’t stretching ourselves too thin. This leaves the final decklist at:

Characters

Human Torch, The Invisible Man

Adam Warlock, Protector of the Soul Gem

Plot Twists

Locations

Equipment

Overall I would be happy with playing this deck. While some of the characters are a little weak (Mr. Fantastic can be mediocre), the options this deck has when attacking and defending are incredible. Throw in the cosmic enablers, and the game becomes very hard very quickly for your opponent. There are enough search cards and card drawing to make your game consistent without sacrificing the power of the characters to do so.

As a footnote, this is the deck Rob built:

Characters

2 Human Torch, The Invisible Man

Dinu, Face of Terror

Morg, Harbinger of Extinction

Plot Twists

The Herald Ordeal

Cosmic Necessity

Location