As a player in a Sealed YCS, your job is very simple. Show up, get your cards, and play! But have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes? The answer is: quite a lot! Here’s an inside look at what we did to prepare for the very first Sealed YCS in North America.

1. Make the Deck boxes.

Each Duelist entering today not only gets the cards from their packs, but also a special Deck box featuring one of Battle Pack: Epic Dawn’s coolest monsters: Jinzo!

These Deck boxes don’t come preassembled, though. We put together one Deck box for each and every Duelist in playing in the main event.

1. Open up the packs.

For normal Sealed tournaments, players receive ten packs of Battle Pack: Epic Dawn to open and build their Decks. For YCS San Diego, players are still receiving ten packs worth of cards, but this time, we’ve already opened them up and put the cards into a Deck box. By opening them ahead of time, we’re able to prepare each player’s Deck list in advance. It also helps to avoid the Truckroid filled with empty booster pack wrappers!

1. Sort the packs.

For Sealed Deck lists, your Starfoil cards are entered first, then your regular Rares. We went through each Deck and moved the Starfoils and Rares to the front of the Deck. That made it easier to type up Deck lists and ensured everyone’s packs did indeed have the correct number of each type of card. After sorting, each Deck is put into a Jinzo Deck box and is numbered.

1. Type the Deck lists.

Finally, we typed up every single card pool as a Deck list. This saves trouble for everyone: Players don’t have to worry about writing out a Deck list on the spot, possibly with errors; and we don’t have to sort through each list in the middle of the event. Everything is already done!

If you’re the kind of person who loves math (and we know you are, because Duelists are always carrying calculators), here’s some numbers for you. The player capacity limit for YCS San Diego is 2,976. We made 3,200 Decks, just in case we needed extras.  Each Deck is made from ten packs, and contains ten Starfoils, ten Rares, and thirty common cards.

That’s…

32,000 opened booster packs,

160,000 cards sorted and typed in,

And 350 man-hours of work to get them ready!

This kind of YCS in unprecedented, so we hope you enjoy this inside look. Keep checking in to see all the happenings over the weekend!