by Mike Rosenberg

How many teams did you expect to play in the Crown of the Heavens Team Sealed Sneak Preview tournament today? 20? Nope. 30? Guess again. 40? Keep going. 50? Not quite there yet.

60? There you go.

60 teams, that's 180 players. It was an unexpected turnout, which went beyond anyone's expectations here today. Thanks so much to those who could make it out to play!

Despite the unexpectedly large number of people playing, the tournament remains at the same number of rounds. Players will be opening twelve packs of Crown of the Heavens and building decks for three players out of their massive card pools. What kind of awesome decks will be possible with twelve packs to work with? That's tough to say, but Team Sealed has proven in the past that a larger card pool results in much more powerful sealed decks.

This could lead to some interesting decks once the deck building phase finishes. More cards means more Monsters, which can lead to some absurd Monster decks for one of the players to pilot for their team. Need more big Monsters to flip your Warlord Grok'thol? No problem. Twelve packs gives you more giants to play around with. What about Demons? If you're going to play with Tyrus Blackhorn as your hero, then you're going to need a lot of Demons to strip your opponent’s hand once you get them up to 15 damage. Oh, wait, twelve packs!

Bigger sealed pools also benefit the Alliance and Horde decks, as players have more faction-based allies to choose from to build their decks. The general strategy that some of the players are following is to build one deck from each faction so that each player has an Alliance, Horde, or Monster deck. The result is the best of the best from their sealed pools for each faction. Going around the room, I've seen a team or two siding with Tyrus, the Demon Warlock hero, thanks to the aid of multiple Jadefire Scouts and Jadefire Satyrs in their pool. Talk about aggression! Other decks instead seek to Harmonize their way into some gigantic allies.

One thing I want to emphasize, looking around, is how deep some of the Alliance pools appear to be. There are a wide variety of allies in this set with strong keywords on them, as Harmonize appears alongside other helpful abilities like Stealth, Elusive, and Protector on many allies. Of course, the Horde has not been left out in the dust either. There are a few allies in the common and uncommon slot for the red team which help generate tokens, or cannot be targeted by opponents.

As people are cracking their packs, one thing is certain. This set's going to be mixing things up in both Constructed and Limited!