Deck creation is an official stage of the tournament, also known as Forging of Alliances, and is a timed 30 minute period before the first round.

Players simultaneously open their sealed decks. Each player constructs a single Alliance deck by selecting three different house pods from amongst all house pods provided by their sealed decks. Each selected house pod must be from a different house.

A house pod is the set of twelve cards dedicated to one house within a single Archon deck (each Archon deck always consists of three house pods from three different houses).

Players may perform deck calibration between rounds by substituting one or more house pods with one or more of their unused house pods from the Archons decks they opened at the beginning of the tournament.

Sealed Alliance format tournaments use the Playstile 2LO structure and are played over a series of qualifying rounds, with each round featuring any number of two-player matches, and each match consisting of one game.

Players are eliminated after losing two matches, also known as “two loss out (2LO).”

Qualifying rounds continue until a predetermined number of players make the top cut (usually eight players). The size of the top cut and the number of qualifying rounds needed to reach it depend on the number of players at the beginning of the tournament.

After concluding the qualifying rounds, the remaining players who have qualified for the top cut proceed to the finals. The finals consist of single-elimination matches until only two players remain.

The final match is played as a best-of-three series. In other words, for the match to be resolved, players continue to play games until one player has won two games.