What to Expect at Your Magic: The Gathering The Hobbit Prerelease

What Comes in the Box

Register at your local game store and you receive a Prerelease Pack containing six Play Boosters, one traditional foil promo card, a deck box, and a spindown die for tracking your life total.

Those six packs are your entire card pool, meaning every card you are allowed to build with. No trading up, no borrowing from a friend’s binder, no bringing cards from home.

Many stores also sell Prerelease Packs to take home during prerelease week if you cannot make an event, though you lose the part that makes the format fun, which is a room full of people discovering the set together.

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The 40-Card Math

From your six boosters you build a 40-card deck, adding as many basic lands as you need from the store’s supply.

Wizards recommends building your deck with 17 lands, which leaves 23 spells. The suggested curve:

• 1 mana: 1-2 cards
• 2 mana: 7-8 cards
• 3 mana: 5-6 cards
• 4 mana: 3-4 cards
• 5 mana: 2-3 cards
• 6 mana: 0-1 cards

Those 23 should be spread across a range of mana costs rather than clustered at one end.

That spread is what players call “your mana curve,” and the list is the shape to aim for. Read each line as the number of cards in your finished deck that cost that much to cast.

That heavy concentration at two and three mana is not a suggestion you can safely ignore. Sealed games are slower and grindier than Constructed, but the player who spends the most mana across the most turns is usually the player holding the win.

A deck full of six mana cards leaves you sitting on your hands for the first five turns.

Constructed limits you to four copies of any card. Sealed has no such limit. If you open three copies of a good common, play all three.

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Picking Your Two Colors

Your deck should be two colors, and The Hobbit gives you five signposted pairs, each themed around one of the armies from the climax of the book.

White/Blue Humans

Wants you to draw two cards in a turn. The set’s recruit ability handles that for you, letting you draw a card and discard one, then handing you a 1/1 Soldier token. Tokens are creatures the game creates for you on the spot rather than cards you drew. Bard the Bowman is the payoff.

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Black/Red Goblins

Leans on Amass. You build a steadily growing Army token, then either swing with it or sacrifice it for value with cards like Stir Up Trouble.

Black/Green Wolves

Cares about Ferocious, meaning you control a creature with power 4 or greater. Get something large down early and the payoffs follow.

Red/White Dwarves

Is the storied archetype, rewarding you for controlling three or more artifacts, legendaries, and/or Sagas. Thorin Oakenshield is the marquee payoff.

Green/Blue Elves

Runs landfall and plays the most controlling game of the five.

Sort your pool by color, find your two or three genuine bombs, then check which colors have removal to support them.

A splashy mythic with no way to protect your board is a trap. Open a great black/green threat but no green or black removal to go with it, and you should build something else.

What Sealed Does Differently

Removal is worth dramatically more here than in Constructed. In a 40-card format where most creatures are Commons and Uncommons, answering the one Rare your opponent built around often decides the game outright.

Creature quality also matters more than raw synergy. Constructed decks win with tight combos and consistent draws. Sealed decks win by having slightly better creatures than the other person and not stumbling on mana.

Board stalls are common, so evasion and fliers punch above their weight.

The other adjustment is mental. You are not building the best possible deck; you are building the best deck your pool allows.

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Counting Adventures on Your Curve

Adventure cards carry two mana costs, and deciding where they sit on your curve takes a moment of thought.

The general rule is to place them at the Adventure cost, since most Adventure spells cost less than the permanent attached to them.

Velvetwing Butterflies is a three-mana creature with a two-mana Adventure, Gaze in Wonder, so it fills a two-drop slot.

The exception comes when you actually want the permanent early. Most Decrepit Old Bird is a one-mana flier whose Adventure, Speak Secrets, costs two.

If your deck wants a cheap body to load up with Equipment, count it as a one drop. If you would rather cast the Adventure to fill your graveyard, count it as a two.

Bring sleeves and your entry fee and remember you can rebuild between rounds if something is not working.

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