I hope my opponents get crappy heroes.

it would be interesting if they ended up doing an 'auction' format like they do at the magic invitaionals, where you would bid a negative number, which you would decrease your heros starting health by.

Just an FYI for those of you who do not know, but the events I've played in that are limited will pool heroes for public use. In sealed they are collected at the beginning and draft at the end, but they are just sorted in stacks on the table and you take the one or two you need on that rare occasion. Of course, you don't get the other 3 or 5 heroes you would have gotten if you just opened the packs, but that's the way it goes. :D

I don't think there's any denying that this game is probably the worst CCG for sealed deck ever (and I've played some pretty bad ones... L5R anyone?). At least they did a good job of making it fun for draft; but I don't see sealed events as being terribly popular.

It may be too early to tell also. I'm not sure how extensive the methods and procedures for events are right now, but I'm sure it was pretty well thought out before they started printing. Disclaimer: I'm about to relate to MTG. It's like faulting 8th edition drafts for having only one land per pack and not being able to cast spells for that reason... Those drafts were very fun and it didn't make limited any worse. I think the same holds true here even though it's sealed. It's an easy fix: everyone gets 6 heroes and only needs one to play. I’m not sure the exact number but statistically you have to have very few players for a hero swap not to work out fine. Just my thoughts.

Well, most people don't actually make you play the heroes you bust. That's not the issue.

The issue is that the sealed decks tend to build themselves. You pick a faction based on character count often, and rarely are able to cut any allies. You throw in what quests you have (if you were lucky to get the 8 - 10 you want), and pick the "deepest" class. This usually leaves you room to make about 5 or 6 cuts, give or take. Not exactly a healthy sealed deck building experience.

It gets considerably worse when you get stuck with heroes. I had to play a hero I had 2 abilities for because the alliance character (I only had 1) was necessary to support my good character base. My hoarde allies were utter garbage. It just wasn't fun.

Sealed deck in general seems too slow, with everyone playing whatever they have to in order to make a legal deck. Though I've never been decked, every game I've come VERY close, and the decks just play clunky (often both players play off the top).

Have people had other sealed experiences that may be better than the two I've done?

The only one I've done so far wasn't too bad... I got some decent pulls as far as horde and shaman support so I went with a Grennan Stormspeaker deck in that tournament. I made a few errors in deckbuilding though (mainly I built the deck too fast and didn't read all of the cards before I slapped them into the deck). If you're interested in the cardpool and to see what I did with the deck then you can check the last Palmer's Corner article in the Original Content area here.

Money right now has stopped me from buying up more packs so I haven't gotten around to mimicking the sealed pack pool for future articles, hopefully that'll change sometime later this week though. Of course that was why I was hoping folks would actually submit card pools of their own for a breakdown/deckbuild article every week but that didn't seem to happen so I'm back to square one.

You could always make it a weekly activity or something, bust out lists of 6 boosters and challenge people to make a deck out of it to play each other with.

Hardly the worst. If you say you've drafted L5R, then you know it can't be. L5R is impossible to draft. There is nothing worse than impossible.

No, I've sealed decked L5R. You basically get a random stronghold, and it comes with at least a portion of the cards you need to make your deck's theme. Then you have a couple packs to work with, and you put together a deck.

90% of the time you play everything possible from your stronghold, and still have to play 2 cards that are completly useless for no better reason than "They have high focus values". It was lame, and I guess technically was worse than this format.

Still, this game doesn't lend itself well to sealed deck, for no better reason than I don't think there's much skill. Your card pool more-or-less builds itself; a glance at any 6 packs will make it obvious you're going to always find hoarde or alliance stronger very quickly, and you're going to play a hero who gives you 3 or 4 playable abilities. You'll possibly be forced to play every quest you opened, though I have seen people be able to cut as many as 3 here (others are luckier at opening quests than I am... I've done two sealed decks, had 8 one and 9 the other).

Compare it with "good" sealed deck games like Magic and VS, where it seems like you have endless options for tweaking and building decks, and where strategy articles on doing such are interesting and controversial. Someone posted a sealed deck, another person replied... that person was right. The card pool said to build Warlock and Hoarde, no question... and there were only a couple choices on what allies to eliminate.

I do like the limited for this game, but only have hopes for it in draft. I don't see Sealed being an interesting strategy in this game for the long-term... if decks build themselves, everything really does come down to "luck of the draw".

You hit it dead on. It may be that I just enjoy the game too much right now, but you are exactly right about what you said. Pretty much you have to open your packs, determine Alliance/Horde and see if the 3 spells from a class merit play in your deck. I have never cut an ally in sealed, ever. You also have the fact that sealed is for the most part pretty easy to handle whereas in MTG or other games with better sealed formats it is incredibly easy to build a deck wrong. I know that is a benefit to good players, but with a new TCG maybe they wanted it this way. Unfortunately, it would be hard to change and fix that issue down the road, but we can just wait and see.

I have played Draft with the WoW CCG/TCG, but I have not been able to do a Sealed Event yet, so I am personally wanting to, but I am not sure if the decks seem to build themselves, but I still think it does take some talent to build the decks and play them properly.

curious ... are you able to hate-draft ?

No you don't only choose one of the six you pulled. At GenCon everybody put their heroes in a pile and you would get to choose your hero.

It would depend... If you open a Chain Lighning and aren't Shaman then I would either change to Shaman immediatly or take the CL and cut someone... If you are heavily in to Warlock and open a CL and a Shadow Bolt it would be different.