Ready to put your deck-building skills to the test? This week’s Midweek Magic has players cracking packs and assembling a 40-card deck from six packs of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. Though you won’t keep the cards you open when the event ends, you can still walk away with some cool rewards.
Your sealed deck and Magic: The Gathering skills can help you pick up a number of rewards worthy of your adventures in Middle-earth. Getting three wins in this event will earn you two Rare Individual Cards and one Mystery Cosmetic pack. The Rare Individual Cards can be any rare or mythic rare card from those available on Arena, while the Mystery Cosmetic pack can include anything from new avatars to pets. You’re more likely to pull a new card style, as that’s the most common drop, but you never know what you’re going to open!
The Tales of Middle-earth Phantom Sealed event is free to join, both from the Magic: The Gathering Arena app or game client. To make sure you have plenty of time to build your deck and get your games in, make sure to jump in starting on Tuesday at 2 p.m., giving you two days to wrap up your matches, ending on Thursday at 2 p.m.
Phantom Sealed Rules
The most important thing to keep in mind with this event is that your cards are temporary, and once the event is over, you don’t get to add those cards to your collection. It is unfortunate but since it’s a free event, it’s not a terrible trade-off.
The event follows traditional Sealed event rules, you need a 40-card minimum deck, built from six 15-card packs, and any leftover cards you have are automatically added to your sideboard. You can change your deck as often as you like between the best-of-one games, swapping out a card or two or even your entire deck if it’s not performing as well as you’d like.
The biggest thing to keep in mind while evaluating your cards is the color synergies. There are 10 color combinations that have mechanics and themes that help make a more solid deck.
- White-Blue: Go wide and “draw a second card” theme.
- Blue-Black: Amass control and mill.
- Black-Red: Amass aggro and Orcs.
- Red-Green: Beefy creatures and counters.
- Green-White: Food tokens and +1/+1 counters.
- White-Black: Token midrange and removal.
- Black-Green: Sacrifice midrange and Food tokens.
- Green-Blue: Scry midrange and Elf typal.
- Blue-Red: Spellslinger control and flyers.
- Red-White: Human aggro and plenty of tokens.
When building your Tales of Middle-earth Sealed deck you’ll likely find yourself splashing a third color to help flesh out your deck. A token-heavy Green-White deck can get a lot of extra mileage from splashing a few black cards in there to give your tokens extra abilities from cards like Gothmog, Morgul Lieutenant.
Another powerful color combination, and quite possibly one of the strongest in the set, is Black-Red. With plenty of removal, burn, tokens, and synergies with Orcs, Goblins, and amass cards, there’s plenty of great cards to keep the pressure on your opponent.