Running a sealed event for beginners [Sealed]

Over the holidays, I ran a private sealed event with five other players, each of whom had somewhere between zero and five prior games of Altered under their belt. All of them have experience with light/medium eurogames, but Altered is their first trading card game.

As refreshingly simple as Altered’s core mechanics are, I knew deckbuilding would be a step up in complexity, so I did my best to prepare so that the event would run as smoothly as possible.

What worked well

• Creating a printout with a deckbuilding cheat sheet on the front and in-game reminders on the back
  • The back included the game’s symbols, keywords, and phases of the day.
• Sorting heroes in a grid with power level on one axis and complexity on the other
  • Less experienced players could stick to starter deck heroes while those who chose more complex heroes knew what they were getting into.
  • Players with weaker heroes didn’t feel bad about losing to stronger heroes.
• Keeping my “Deckbuilding 101” guide short and sweet:
  • Choose a strong hero
  • Prioritize characters over spells and permanents
  • Cheap cards (1-3 mana) are valuable
  • Include some removal spells
• Giving a sentence-long summary of each of the factions
  • This gave players who were more interested in the game’s lore a good starting point for deckbuilding.
• Not encouraging players to focus on rarity when deckbuilding
  • There are enough weak out-of-faction rares that choosing a faction based on quantity of rares is often misleading.
• Handicapping myself by not letting myself use the heroes I judged the strongest
  • Excluding Sigismar & Wingspan, Teija & Nauraa, Kojo & Booda, and Fen & Crowbar from my pool kept things fair and gave me an interesting challenge.
• Having two of my previous sealed decks at the ready for players to use in case the deckbuilding process seemed overwhelming to anyone.
  • Everyone was excited to build their own decks, but I was glad I had backups just in case.
• Building my deck beforehand so that I could walk around to provide deckbuilding advice

Things I would do next time

• Budget for more time
  • Deckbuilding took 45-60 minutes.
  • Rounds took longer since I occasionally had to get up to answer a question.
• Emphasize early on that you could do just fine by throwing together 29 cards at random from 3 factions
  • Parsing 84 unfamiliar cards was overwhelming enough that I had to remind one or two players not to get lost in the weeds.
  • Altered’s draw/mana system is forgiving of deckbuilding errors.
• Provide a short list of cards that might pull you into a faction
  • There are several cards that are non-obviously strong in a way that goes against some of my deckbuilding advice, e.g. Hydracaena, The Monolith, A Cappella Training, and Haven.

The decks

Highlights

I was thrilled that everyone had a good time and seemed to enjoy the game. Here are a few of the cool plays that got people excited:

• Rin using a cost-reduction support ability to play Issitoq (F) on D3, blanking Kojo’s Booda and first character
• Kojo using Helping Hand (C) to remove fleeting from their Bravos Tracer (R)
• Sigismar anchoring a Haven Warrior (C) for two consecutive turns with Muna Caregiver support abilities
• Kojo using Martengale (C) to play Hydracaena (C) a turn early and snowball to victory.
• After losing to the above player, Rin ramping with Mighty Jinn to a Hydracaena (C) of their own to win their second game
• Fen realizing she could use Flamel (C) and Studious Disciple (C)’s support abilities to cast both sides of an A Cappella Training (C) despite having no mana
• Kojo being one Kodama (R) / The Sandman top-deck away from winning with Lyra Festival (C)

Uniques

All five of the uniques that were opened are cards I’d consider for constructed, which is pretty lucky. I’ll give my first impressions of them below.

My rating system

Kakoba, Legion Commander: 5/7

With its double-sleep from hand, this is an excellent finisher for a deck running Bountiful Meadow. In a Lyra Festival (F) deck, ways to sleep characters are at a premium, and the conditions on the abilities are trivially fulfilled.

Yzmir Stargazer: 4/7

Afanas loves uniques that return cards from reserve to hand. This one is cheap, reasonably statted, and returns any card, not just a spell.

Its main downside is that requiring two boosts means this has to be played with two spells or specifically Helping Hand (F). If you put a boost on this and it gets removed, you’re losing your investment of a spell and not getting a card in return.

Athena: 5/7

4 mana is on the expensive side for a Sandman-like unique that can’t even boost your own character. This Athena mostly makes up for it, however, with its great stats and the fact that it triggers from reserve as well. If you play this in a deck that will reliably have a landmark out, it can opportunistically sleep a character each turn until your opponent is able to discard or sabotage this.

Ozma: 5/7

For Sigismar & Wingspan, this Charge! (C) unique is a 3-mana 2/3/3 that draws a card as a baseline. Each additional character you generate before playing this increases the total stat output by 1/1/1.

The fact that this draws a card makes up for the fact that you’ll almost never want to play this from reserve. The “eight or more mana orbs” condition on the card draw will usually be irrelevant, since by that point, you’re hoping this will win you the game.

This unique’s main downside is that playing it forces you to include one fewer copy of Ozma (C), one of Sigismar’s best commons.

Atlas: 3/7

The statline bump already makes this a slight improvement over the common. It scores extra points as a finisher due to the fact that the from-reserve ability is able to boost itself for 10/12/10 in stats across both expeditions.