Limited Tips

What is Limited?

Limited is a collective name for a few of the more unique ways to play magic. There are quite a few of these, but the two you’re likely to hear about are Sealed and Draft. Sealed is simple. Most "prerelease" events are sealed. Each player is provided (usually) 6 “booster packs” which are little packs of (usually) 14 random cards. Then, within an allotted timeframe, each player takes the cards from those packs, adds basic lands, and builds a 40 card deck. Once this is done, the players are paired up to play against each other with these impromptu decks! Draft is slightly more complicated. You still build 40 card decks out of a limited pool with added basic lands, but you don’t just get 6 packs and build from there. Instead, a “pod” of (usually) 6-8 players each get 3 booster packs. Once told to go, each player opens their first pack, and takes one card, and passes the rest to the next player in the pod. This process repeats until all of the cards are gone. Then, the whole thing happens again for the other two packs. Once this is wrapped up, each player will have a pool from which to build their deck.

Do Your Research.

The first step of preparing for a sealed or draft event is doing your research. First, know which set your packs are going to come from. Then, search up the “archetypes” of that set. Just about each and every set Wizards of the Coast releases has ready-made deck archetypes built in! This means that there is a type of deck waiting for you inside your packs, usually multiple! These archetypes are divided across the “color pie” (pictured to the right). It’s important to know which colors each archetype is in. If there is a zombies archetype in Blue and Black, but you try to play zombie cards in Green and Black, you’re going to start to feel a discrepancy.