Aside from being one of the first major tournaments in the New York area for quite a while, today is also the first major event featuring Heralds of Galactus. This $10K serves as a Sneak Preview for many players who haven’t seen the set before—myself included.

There’s been a lot of feedback about the new set, most of it positive. For Sealed Pack, Inhumans seems to be the most solid team, with a broad array of excellent characters and tricks. Heralds of Galactus is right behind, followed by Doom. The Kree team and its press mechanic aren’t quite as good in Sealed as they are in Draft, but that’s balanced out by the Skrulls—additional power from teaming-up has Sealed written all over it. I’ve seen decks here today designed to win anywhere between turn 5 (the lucky few with good Kree builds) and turn 8 (full-blown Heralds stall). Each archetype has its strengths and weaknesses, and a player will most likely have to be familiar with all of them to truly master this format.

Of course, as I said, this is the very first Heralds tournament for many players. As you might expect, there have been a fair number of humorous mistakes made due to unfamiliarity with the cards. In his feature match, Milton Figueroa equipped Power Gem to Clumsy Foulup. Whoops. In another game, Gerard Fabiano flipped and KO’d a Warskrull in his resource row to get Act of Defiance . . . He failed to find one, because he had already drawn his only copy and hadn’t noticed. Down a resource, he still won the game.

Not everyone is behind the curve, though. Doug Tice, who along with the rest of TDC has already done a number of drafts, wanted the world to know that it took him four minutes to build and register his second deck. I expect that we’ll see either a comfortable Day 2 finish or a game loss for mis-registration for Doug. In general, though, he’s the exception to the rule. Players here are delving into the format with care, trying to figure out what set of cards will let them come out on top. Mercifully, perhaps, Sealed Pack limits a player’s options—there’s only so much you can screw up. Tomorrow, that won’t be the case. I hear that Heralds is even better in Draft than in Sealed! Considering the overwhelmingly positive response that this Sealed Pack format is receiving, though, it’s going to have to be seen to be believed.