Design Team Article - "Building A Sealed Deck"

What is the Sealed Deck Format?

Sealed Deck is a “Limited” format, meaning that unlike Constructed formats where you “construct” your decks with your own cards, you’re “limited” to building with the cards provided to you at the tournament. For Sealed Deck events you receive 6 booster packs and assemble a deck with the cards they contain (bonus: you get to keep the packs!). New in Undaunted Raid are boosters with 11 cards instead of 10, each with a guaranteed Character card. In total you’ll have 66 cards including six Character cards. The minimum deck size is 40 cards excluding your character, however it is not uncommon to see players breach the minimum to include more options in their deck.

What Makes Sealed Deck Fun?

Two features make Sealed Deck unique in UniVersus formats, giving it a twist that makes it a blast to play.

The experience is different every time. Undaunted Raid has a total of 17 different playable characters found inside the booster packs. The character roster is very wide, encouraging you to play different characters in each Sealed event. The majority of cards you pull from your packs will also influence what character you choose to play as. Your Rares, Ultra Rares, and even XR cards will change every time as well, giving you different ways to approach deckbuilding every time you play Sealed!

There are no deckbuilding symbol restrictions for Sealed Play. In Constructed deckbuilding you select 1 of the 3 resource symbols on your desired character, then build your deck with cards that share that chosen symbol. That rule doesn’t apply for Sealed! Instead you can play any card you pull from your six packs without having to worry about resource symbols. This means that there are some cool combos that you can perform in Sealed Play which you cannot do in Constructed!

Building Your Sealed Deck

The average constructed deck in UniVersus usually has a ratio of around 30-35% attacks. For example, a deck of 60 cards would commonly play around 20+ attacks. When building a 40 card deck, try to aim for 14-15 attacks and adjust from there. Your foundations might synergize with a handful of your attacks, or encourage you to increase the total amount of attacks you want to play. Remember that you do not have to play the minimum of 40 cards, but you must play at least that many (not counting your Character).

A common way to approach sealed deckbuilding is to start with your total cards, then trim cards down until you get to 40+. Raw numbers are quite important in Limited play, so you might consider trimming cards with narrow combos and synergies in favor of cards that generally have good stats.

Any cards you choose not to include in your maindeck will end up forming your “sideboard” to be consulted with in between matches (not individual games). You might notice a few things after playing your initial games with your Sealed deck, as there may be interactions you overlooked or that did not perform as expected, or you may want to add or remove cards to adjust your ratios. 

Another small thing to take into consideration is that you can actually play Character cards in your Sealed deck if you wish. Although you cannot build them as resources like Foundations or Assets, they serve as a +0 Mid block and also have a 6 check. If you ever find them stuck in your hand, you can always discard them for your Review Step! 

Sealed Interactions in Undaunted Raid

Izuku Midoriya has an ability that allows him to discard 1 card to give his Fury or Punch attack +4 damage. His own support has cards that synergize with this ability, but since we have the freedom to use any cards we want in Sealed, we can look for a Kendo Rappa foundation, Lust For Battle. You can discard this card via Midoriya’s ability, then activate the response, removing it from the game and giving your rival’s check to block -1, making it more difficult for them to block the attack you just put +4 damage on!

Learning to Harden and Nejire-Chan Of The Big 3 are both common cards you may find among your 66 total cards. Learning to Harden has a symbol specific ability that you can only activate if your character has the Death symbol. Since Sealed Play has no resource symbol restriction, you can use Nejire-Chan to proc Learning to Harden and draw 1 card! This combo becomes more powerful when you’re attacking with Foresight Fusillade, another common card in the set.

In Summary

Undaunted Raid is in stores now! Sealed Deck is the perfect format to show off the new cards, walk away with packs no matter how well you do, and experience all the powerful new tools being added to UniVersus. You can use our Store and Event Locator here to find an event near you!