Have you ever noticed the immense number of decisions that one has to make in order to win a game of Vs. System? It’s really an amazing thing. One of the aspects of this game that makes me love it over any other TCG I have ever played is that the decisions my opponent and I make affect the outcome of a game more than any other factor.
When constructing a Sealed Pack deck, do you think about how any little decision you make that morning could be the choice that wins you the next round or the oversight that costs you the victory? I’m the type of guy who tends to overanalyze things, but I think that’s a trait that has lent itself to my becoming a fairly strong Sealed Pack competitor.
I’m writing this article not long after playing in my local Infinite Crisis Sneak Preview event. It is my hope that you will be able to see Sealed Pack construction through my eyes. At most, you may go from knowing next to nothing about how to build a Sealed Pack deck to having a solid foundation. I’m hoping that you will at least pick up on a perspective or method with which to approach deck construction that you had not previously considered.
Rather than sorting the cards that I received alphabetically (as they were when I received my registered product), I will instead jump forward to the order in which I immediately sorted my card pool after verifying its contents. Here are the cards that I received. Please feel free to take a few minutes to see how you might build your deck, given these options. In just a moment, I will walk you through the steps that led me to register the thirty cards that I played with throughout the event.
Characters
Legacy Characters
1 The Penguin, Arms Merchant
1 Obsidian, Todd James Rice
1 Kilowog, Drill Sergeant
Secret Six
1 Parademon, Apokoliptian Ally
1 Ragdoll, Resilient Rogue
Shadowpact
1 Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee
1 Blue Devil, Dan Cassidy
1 Zatanna, Magical Manipulator
1 June Moon ◊ Enchantress, Good Witch
1 Dr. Occult, Richard Occult
1 Witchfire, Rebecca Carstairs
1 Ragman, Redeemer of Souls
1 Dr. Fate, Hector Hall
Checkmate
1 Surveillance Pawn, Army
1 Connie Webb, Knight
1 Retrieval Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army
1 Black Thorn, Elizabeth Thorne
1 Sasha Bordeaux, Knight
1 Arthur Kendrick, Knight
1 Harry Stein, King in Check
1 Elimination Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army
1 Amanda Waller, Queen
1 Huntress, Reluctant Queen
1 Graziella Reza, Knight
JSA
1 Atom Smasher, Al Rothstein
1 Kendra Saunders ◊ Hawkgirl, Eternal Heroine
2 Huntress, Earth 2
1 Katar Hol ◊ Hawkman, Eternal Hero
1 Richard Tyler ◊ Hourman, Man of the Hour
1 Wonder Woman, Earth 2
2 Power Girl, Earth 2
2 Black Adam, Ruthless Hero
1 Dr. Fate, Lord of Order
Villains United
2 Alexander Luthor, Duplicitous Doppelganger
1 Count Vertigo, Werner Vertigo
1 The Calculator, Noah Kuttler
1 Ishmael Gregor ◊ Sabbac, Malevolent Marvel
1 Zazzala ◊ Queen Bee, Mistress of the Hive
1 Sinestro, Villain Reborn
1 Bizarro, Me Am Bizarro #1
1 Hunter Zolomon ◊ Professor Zoom, Sinister Speedster
1 Alexander Luthor, Diabolical Double
Equipment
2 T-Spheres
Locations
1 Rann
1 Checkmate Safe House, Team-Up
1 The Rock of Eternity
1 The Oblivion Bar
1 Checkmate Armory
Plot Twists
1 Threat Neutralized
1 Double Play
1 Return Fire!
1 Baddest of the Bad
1 Systematic Torture
1 Grand Gesture
1 True Name, Magic
1 Magical Conduit, Magic
1 Abjuration, Magic
1 End of All That Is
2 Revitalize
2 Death from Above
1 Epic Battle
1 I Still Hate Magic!
1 Forbidden Loyalties, Team-Up
As I surveyed my options, I immediately tossed End of All That Is. No 9-cost plot twist should be considered for Sealed Pack play. With no other obvious drops, I began the detailed work.
I sorted my plot twists, locations, and equipment into these categories: generic, Team-Up, and team-stamped. The team-stamped blue, green, and gray cards were then sorted by team. I looked for anything that struck me as a “must play” card. Usually, generic combat pumps make my cut, but this initial search leaned more toward finding the best of my team-stamped cards. If my Team-Ups were team-stamped, or if any of my most powerful non-character cards were team-stamped, I would look to the characters of that team in my card pool, hoping to find depth at each drop.
I was happy to find two generic Team-Up cards and two copies of an equipment called T-Spheres, meaning that my Team-Ups would not dictate which teams I had to lean on. I hoped to find depth in my JSA characters in order to take full advantage of the bonuses that the T-Spheres would provide.
My character cards are sorted in order of cost above, but for quick reference, my JSA character cards included one 1-drop, no 2-drops, three 3-drops, two 4-drops, one 5-drop, two 6-drops, two 7-drops, and one 8-drop, for a total of twelve JSA characters. The smooth distribution of JSA characters, along with the two equipment cards that I had quickly latched onto, easily had JSA locked in as one of my primary teams.
Noticing that I did not have any 2-cost characters in JSA, I sought to find the team that could best fill this gap. The Checkmate team offered three characters for that voided 2-drop slot, and they also lent a few other drops to flesh out my characters all the way up the curve, with one exception—between those two teams, I had only one character with a cost of 5.
It is usually at about this point in deckbuilding that I try to take a look at my card pool from a different angle. I set aside the notion that I was going to play JSA and Checkmate for a moment as I sorted all of my characters by cost. I still kept them grouped by team, but I laid all characters in stacks of 1-drops, 2-drops, and so forth, just to see what kind of depth I had at each slot overall. As it turned out, I had only two options at 5 and only five at 2.
While the decision to play Ragman, Redeemer of Souls and Wonder Woman, Earth 2 as my only 5-drops was already made for me, I still had to decide what to do about the 2-drop situation. I prefer that all of my low-cost characters share a team to facilitate mid-game team attacks if any of them are still lingering in play. Since three of my 2-drops were on the Checkmate team, I decided to start out with all three of them and Blue Devil, Dan Cassidy as my preliminary 2-drops. This decision meant that I would stick with my initial assessment and play primarily JSA and Checkmate characters. It looked like I would be splashing only two off-team characters out of necessity.
By the way, I gave a long second thought to playing Shadowpact instead of Checkmate as my second main team. Their team’s endurance loss/gain mechanic interested me, and I had a rare that somewhat resembled Terra, Tara Markov. My decision to stick with Checkmate was prompted mostly because of the curve-filling distribution they provided, but I was also a little timid to stray from the more familiar path of not causing myself excessive endurance loss.
The curve I laid out for starters included three 1-drops, four 2-drops, four 3-drops, four 4-drops, two 5-drops, three 6-drops, two 7-drops, and one 8-drop. That’s twenty-three characters in all. I prefer to play no more than twenty characters in Sealed Pack, so it looked like I would need to cut at least three. I was certain that I was going to play the two T-Spheres, which meant that I would have to choose between playing only eight cards that I could flip from my resource row or playing even fewer than twenty characters.
Putting non-reservist characters into my resource row always makes me a little ill, so I decided to compromise my character count a little bit. I found a total of ten locations and plot twists that I really wanted in my deck to go along with my two equipment cards, meaning that I was now looking to play only eighteen characters.
Those ten plot twists and locations were:
2 Revitalize
1 Threat Neutralized
2 Death from Above
1 Epic Battle
1 I Still Hate Magic!
1 Forbidden Loyalties, Team-Up
1 Rann
1 Checkmate Safe House, Team-Up
Playing these cards would satisfy my preference of playing two Team-Ups. With the exception of the two T-Spheres; Threat Neutralized; and to some extent, my Checkmate Safe House, Team-Up, my non-character cards were all generics.
So now, I needed to trim out the excess from my characters. I cut my 8-drop next, thinking that few to no games would go that long. After that, the next most logical place to find characters to cut was on the other end of the curve. I’m a huge fan of playing multiple 1-drops in my Sealed deck, but given the restriction of playing only eighteen characters, I was going to have consistency issues if I tried to cheat fate by scooping out mid-cost characters.
As I whittled my 1-drops down, I also took another look at my 2-drops. I really wasn’t a fan of Retrieval Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, so I decided to give it the boot. I know this slightly contradicts what I said previously about wanting all of my low-cost characters to share a team, but I felt that the Blue Devil would serve me better with its 4 ATK / 2 DEF than the Retrieval Protocol with its 2 ATK / 2 DEF.
I have always found it nice to have a 1-drop that comes close to being on par with most 2-drops. That way, if I draw both my 1- and 2-drops, I will begin with an optimal curve, but if I whiff on turn 1, finding my 1-drop on the next turn instead of a 2-drop, I will not be at a major disadvantage. A wonderful example of a 1-drop who doubles as an excellent 2-drop would be Copperhead, Slithering Assassin. I chose to play Surveillance Pawn, Army as my only character with a cost of 1. In hindsight, Atom Smasher, Al Rothstein would have been an excellent inclusion, either in addition to or instead of the Surveillance Pawn.
At this point, my curve was one 1-drop, three 2-drops, four 3-drops, four 4-drops, two 5-drops, three 6-drops, and two 7-drops, for a total of nineteen characters. As I tried to cut my final character, I kept going back to Harry Stein, King in Check. I liked his high ATK and DEF but felt that playing him would pose too much of a risk of losing a game that I should not lose. I decided that he wasn’t worth it, and I was down to eighteen characters. But could I really afford to play only three characters at the 4-cost slot when I was already so thin at the 5-cost slot as well? If I was going to have to under-drop on turn 5, I certainly did not want to have to play anything less than a 4-drop. I did not return Harry Stein to my pile, though. Instead, I chose Obsidian, Todd James Rice over June Moon ◊ Enchantress, Good Witch. Yes, I should have chosen June Moon ◊ Enchantress instead. I don’t know what I was thinking. Her potential to turn a bad situation around is too good to pass over, even if you are not focusing on the endurance-manipulating theme of the Shadowpact team. Obsidian seems fine too, in hindsight, but he doesn’t strike me as being as game-swinging as Enchantress can be.
I did not want to skimp any more of my characters, although it was tempting not to play any 1-drops. I chose to bring my character count back up to nineteen because I was already counting the Surveillance Pawn as an emergency 2-drop and because one of my 4-drops would likely play the role of an emergency 5-drop on more than one occasion.
So, I made a quick decision to cut one of my two Revitalizes or Death From Aboves. If I had spent a little more time thinking about this, I may have arrived at the correct decision, which I now see. Since I fully expected to have 1 extra resource point available on turn 5 in a few of my rounds throughout the day, I should have played both copies of Death from Above. My final cut of the morning was to play only one. I should not have made this last exclusion. Instead, I should have removed my Threat Neutralized. I liked that the +1 ATK / +1 DEF could modify a character who was attacking or defending, but part of the reason that I chose to include Threat Neutralized in the first place was to provide a little insurance for Harry Stein, King in Check. Also, fewer of my characters were printed with the Checkmate team affiliation, so if drawn before I could team-up my characters, Threat Neutralized would be limited in its usability.
Mistakes included, here is the deck I played at my Infinite Crisis Sneak Preview event.
Characters
Shadowpact
1 Blue Devil, Dan Cassidy
1 Ragman, Redeemer of Souls
Emerald Enemies
1 Obsidian, Todd James Rice
Checkmate
1 Surveillance Pawn, Army
1 Black Thorn, Elizabeth Thorne
1 Sasha Bordeaux, Knight
1 Graziella Reza, Knight
1 Huntress, Reluctant Queen
JSA
2 Power Girl, Earth 2
1 Kendra Saunders ◊ Hawkgirl, Eternal Heroine
2 Huntress, Earth 2
1 Katar Hol ◊ Hawkman, Eternal Hero
1 Richard Tyler ◊ Hourman, Man of the Hour
1 Wonder Woman, Earth 2
2 Black Adam, Ruthless Hero
Equipment
2 T-Spheres
Locations
1 Rann
1 Checkmate Safe House, Team-Up
Plot Twists
2 Revitalize
1 Threat Neutralized
1 Death From Above
1 Epic Battle
1 I Still Hate Magic!
1 Forbidden Loyalties, Team-Up
I was pleased with my list and felt that I should be able to sweep the event if I didn’t falter too much on the fifth turn of each game. Although few of my games were easy, I managed to win every round before losing in the finals to Tillman Bragg.
The point of this article was not to give a full recap of my tournament experience, but rather to try to take you through every thought that goes into Sealed Pack deck construction. I would like to think that you shared some skepticism about some of my decisions, such as when I chose to exclude June Moon ◊ Enchantress and Atom Smasher, and that you were pleased to see that after the event, I also thought those decisions to be unwise. Before I sign off, I would like to touch on Katar Hol ◊ Hawkman, Eternal Hero, since I predicted that he would be a key player in my deck in my Infinite Crisis card preview article.
I have to say that I did not get the chance to make use of Katar Hol’s power, given the options that my Sealed Pack card pool provided me. I kept my eyes open for cards in other players’ decks that would aid in maximizing his power and saw a few throughout the day. I noticed a few plot twists that referenced a character’s identity, and at least two other characters who shared the Hawkman identity but not the same character name. I’m inclined to think that opportunities to abuse Katar Hol’s power in Sealed Pack will be few and far between, but to me, it looks like you could really run away with a draft if you move into the identity strategy quickly.
Next week, I will begin my analysis of the Infinite Crisis set for Draft and Sealed Pack play. Your local Pro Circuit Qualifiers should already be using Infinite Crisis product, so I hope that this article and those to come will lend you the helping hand you might need to get over that hurdle and join me on the Pro Circuit!