The first ever online sealed deck tournament is just over a week away (with an amazing number of entries already) from kicking off and the crew here at Artificery wanted to put out a few more details and reveal the oft-inquired contents of the “Deck Essentials” that will be included with each sealed pool, as well as provide a sample pool for everyone to tool around with a bit. This should give everyone plenty of time to theory-craft before the event, and we hope to see you all there!

Clarity and Balance

First up, we have a significant rules change. Needing to choose between building a deck around Grand Inquisitor’s Lightsaber with not much to support it or playing a lower-power but more consistent Hero deck is an interesting, skill-intensive, and fun choice, but not being able to have a chance of winning if you chose to play with certain legendary cards felt terrible. At their current point costs, K2SO, Mace Windu, and Sabine Wren were completely unplayable outside of extraordinarily lucky pools where you would either open two of the same character, or open Ezra/Rookie Pilot alongside them. Opening up just one of them meant your lucky legendary pull was actually a wasted card.

With that in mind: The NON-ELITE point costs of K2SO, Mace Windu, and Sabine Wren are adjusted to 14 to allow three-die decks with decent health pools to be played with them. Their elite point costs remain as printed. There was an internal discussion about wether or not the change would push the envelope too far, but we found that the overall quality and economy of the Villain cards were comparable, and pools which would be able to abuse the Hero’s respective abilities at a lower non-elite cost were few and far between. Basically, the average pool and “deck essentials” pack doesn’t make any one of them the automatic best choice for deck construction in a vacuum.

As a point of clarity because it wasn’t sufficiently explained before, you may play any number of cards in your deck that you have available to you, so long as their inclusion would not break any other rules. IE: Four Electrostaffs can be played, but you cannot use three copies of Thrawn to make him Uber-Elite.

To see the full rules and general information, check out our information page.

Deck Essentials

Destiny is a hard game to make work in a limited format. A small amount of cards-per-pack and a sneakily restrictive deck-building ruleset combine to make development of a solid format very difficult. IRL sealed events usually used one of two methods to make things work: Opening extraordinarily high numbers of packs at great expense and time (usually a box per player), or by abolishing the Faction and/or Color restrictions on building decks (meaning you just threw all the dice you opened into a deck and hoped for the best).

Our solution in the digital space was to white-list a subset of cards that could be played with either faction, guarantee at least a modicum of decent support for each color, and provide every deck with a bare minimum of removal and mitigation options flavorfully tailored to each color without obsoleting the cards you can open from the sealed pool. We aren’t arrogant enough to think that we nailed the balance perfectly (looking at you DH-17) and there are definitely some “must-include” cards in the pool for any deck (hi Flank!), but our internal playtesting combined with the feedback from our trusted friends who helped test give us enough confidence to move forward with publication. Each sealed pool file will come pre-loaded with two copies of each of these cards ready to go.

Without further ado here are your deck essentials, and you can download a sample pool here (right-click and “save as”). To use, just put it where your deck files are located, and spawn it within the Destiny mod.