The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Prerelease

Tonight it is the first of our Lost Caverns of Ixalan Prerelease Events.

Starting at 7pm, players will get the first chance to play with the new MTG set, which is released next weekend.

How exactly does this work out? Let me walk you through it.

When you sit down on Prerelease day, you're going to get handed a Prerelease Pack for The Lost Caverns of Ixalan.

While there are many things in here, like a spindown life counter for tracking your life total and a fun little insert with some information and tips, the most important are these six Draft Boosters:

Open them all and check out your new stack of cards. There will also be a foil-stamped rare or mythic rare card inside that you can play—make sure to pull that one out.

Okay, boosters open? Well, you're ready to build a deck!

But where do you even start?

Well, first thing's first, you should know what you're trying to do. In Sealed Deck, you only need 40 cards, not 60 or 100. You can get as many additional basic lands as you want from the store.

A good rule of thumb is to play 17 lands. So, all things said and done, you're only looking to play about 23 nonland cards from the cards you open. That's your goal: identify the 23 cards to play.

Okay, sounds a bit easier. How do you go about picking those cards?

Try sorting your cards by color first. Make eight piles: one for each color, one for any multicolor cards, one for colorless cards, and one for lands. As you're going through, you'll have a chance to read the cards and see what interests you.

You'll want to whittle your choices down to two colors. You can sometimes "splash" a third, playing two colors as your base and a couple powerful cards or additional costs of another color, but I'd really focus on the two colors you want here. You can select them in any ways you want—maybe you just like those colors—but three things to keep an eye out for are:Any strong rares in those colors that you're excited to play
A lot of removal cards (Cards which destroy or otherwise deal with your opponent's creatures.)
Evasion (A lot of Sealed Deck games are won with flying creatures or hard-to-block cards.)

Additionally, another huge element to look out for are good synergies and multicolor cards. Every two-color pairing in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan has a theme, and knowing what those are can clue you in to which colors to play. These are detailed in an insert on the top of every Draft Booster display box, but here it is for easy reference as well:

Once you've chosen your colors, it's important to think about your mana curve. This helps to ensure that you have creatures at every turn of the game to cast. If everything costs six mana, you're going to be way behind on playing creatures, and if everything costs two mana, you're going to get outclassed in the late game.

Here's how to check your mana curve. First, lay your creatures out in mana-value order from left to right. So, all creatures that cost one mana, then all creatures that cost two, and so on. Only lay out noncreatures here if they're cards you are planning to play as soon as you have that much mana—for example, you might play an Equipment on turn two, so that counts as a two-drop, but you're probably not playing a removal spell on turn two.

For Limited in general—and this is just a guideline—I'd look to play something like this:1 mana: 0–2

• 2 mana: 4–6
• 3 mana: 3–5
• 4 mana: 2–4
• 5 mana 1–3
• 6+ mana: 0–2

Once you have those figured out, go ahead and add in your noncreature spells. You will probably want to play all your removal spells to deal with your opponents' creatures. Beyond that, it's nice to have ways to pump up your creatures at instant speed and ways to draw cards. But you can season to taste depending on what you think might work well in your deck.

And there you have it! When you're finished, you should have a 40-card deck. You can play more than 40 cards, but I would strongly advise against it: every card you play beyond 40 just worsens the odds of drawing your best cards.

So, that's how you build a sealed deck. 

On Saturday every player that attends our event will get an additional promo card at the end of the event along with the two set booster prize packs which is ...