Andy Van Zandt, another up-and-coming player in the professional community has joined our staff.  You can e-mail him at truekid@pojo.com

As 'implied' by the title, for this article I'm going to talk about team sealed. Not at length, by any means, for I am far from an expert on it myself; but I would like to throw a few interesting points out there for general perusal.

First off, make sure you have every confidence in your teammates, or at least as much confidence in them as you have in yourself. It can be frustrating to watch them make a game losing mistake that costs your team the match. It can be even more frustrating to watch them make several mistakes. Support your teammates though, learn from their mistakes and make sure they learn from them too, especially if it is a card specific mistake that they might make later on in the tourney…

Second off, it's all fine and well to go into the tourney with preconceived deck ideas, but make sure you pay attention to whether or not they actually work. That way at the next tourney you aren't just building the same loser deck again. To delve further into preconceived ideas, here are a few that I noticed were in practice by the occasional team here-and-about: Deck strength levels; having a weak deck, a medium deck, and a strong deck, Or having 2 decent decks and a garbage one, or trying to build 3 relatively equal decks. Deck color schemes; having red-green-something, a white-blue-splash black, and a red- Black-splash blue decks, as preset colors, or any other color set up based on what You expect to get in your starter. This is very popular in some areas to the point That certain deck set-ups are considered as givens. Player Seating; since the 'team captain' is player A, quite a few teams have their 'strongest' player in that slot. Other teams seat based on what color deck they want to play and which slot they want that deck to be played in. there are any number of other reasons why people choose the seating arrangement for their teams, and I am unsure what the most popular is.

Thirdly, if you happen to make top eight, and are put in the oh-so-fun Rochester draft, keep in mind that… um… you're going to feel like you are in a boxing match, or some equivalent. Since the choices affect each team as a whole, there are only 2 real sides, and while your opponents are picking it will feel like they are pummeling you, and when your team is picking it feels like you got your second wind and are ready for anything they'll throw at you. Back and forth. No real advice for this, I could only give generic drafting tips which even then would be skewed by the format, so just the warning about the overall tone of the 'confrontation' , as it were, and keep your goals in mind.

And finally, good luck and have fun; team sealed lends itself well to both. J