sorceryguide.com
Article By Gothic Frog

Every Sorcery: Contested Realm Format, Explained

Every way Sorcery is actually played — Constructed, Sealed, Draft, the OP pipeline, and the casual variants — laid out so you can pick the right one.

formats organized-play rules

There are two things in Sorcery: Contested Realm that newer players regularly conflate, and conflating them costs games.

The first is a format — a rule set with deck-construction restrictions. Constructed. Sealed. Draft. These are the three rule packages defined in the official 2024 rulebook, and they determine what your deck can look like and how the cards get into your hands.

The second is an organized-play tier — which sanctioned event pipeline a tournament belongs to. Cornerstone. Grand Contest. Avatar of the Realm. These determine the stakes and prize structure and qualification path, not the rules of the game itself.

A single event uses one format inside one OP tier. SCG CON Washington DC on May 29 2026 is a Grand Contest (OP tier) using Constructed (format). Gen Con's Team Sealed event is the same Grand Contest tier, different format. Cornerstone Championships at your local store can run any format — store's choice. Mix up which is which and the announcement copy on event pages stops making sense.

This article walks through every format Sorcery actually has, then the OP pipeline they're played inside, then the community variants worth knowing about. By the end you should know exactly which one you want to play next.

Format vs organized play — the distinction

A format is a rule set. The publisher defines three: Constructed, Sealed, and Draft. Each has its own deck-construction rules — minimum sizes, copy limits by rarity (or none, for Limited), Avatar restrictions. The Constructed 60-card Spellbook + 30-card Atlas was finalised with the December 2025 Gothic rulebook update; the limited formats use the smaller 24+12 deck profile. Those numbers are the format.

An OP tier is a sanctioned event level. Cornerstone is local-store. Grand Contest is regional. Avatar of the Realm is global. Each tier has its own promo prize support, eligibility rules, and qualification path to the tier above. None of them specify a format — the format is layered on top by whichever event you're playing.

The 2026 pipeline reads: Gothic Store Kit → Cornerstone Championship → Grand Contest → Avatar of the Realm. Crossroads, which ran in 2025, was replaced by Grand Contest for 2026. Same regional-tier function, different name, broader scope.

With that distinction locked in, here are the formats themselves.

The deck-construction formats

Three formats. One additional product that ships as a tournament-legal deck out of the box but doesn't have its own rule set.

Constructed

The flagship format. You bring a deck you've built yourself from cards you own. The deck-construction rules from the official Constructed format page:

  • 1 Avatar. Any of the 34 playable Avatars across Alpha, Beta, Arthurian Legends, Dragonlord, Gothic, and the Draft Kit promo Spellslinger. (Every Avatar Explained walks the full roster.)
  • Spellbook: at least 60 cards. Your minions, magics, auras, and artifacts. 60 cards is the minimum, not the cap — many competitive lists run 62–65.
  • Atlas: at least 30 cards. Your sites. The Atlas is its own deckbuilding problem, not filler. (Threshold and Sites covers why.)
  • Collection: up to 10 cards. Gothic-era addition. A flexible mid-game toolbox accessible during play — Sorcery's answer to a sideboard, but referenced during the match (some cards literally read "cast a Townsfolk from your Collection") rather than swapped in between games.
  • Copy limits by rarity. Ordinary: 4. Exceptional: 3. Elite: 2. Unique: 1.

The 60-card Spellbook was a December 2025 change. The earlier number was 50 cards plus a 25-card Atlas; the new shape was finalised with Gothic and is explicitly described as Erik's original vision for the format, made possible once the card pool got big enough to support it. Roughly 1,000 unique cards are now Constructed-legal — nothing has rotated since Alpha.

Constructed is what every sanctioned competitive event you've heard about defaults to. Cornerstone Championships in 2026 run Constructed unless the store chooses otherwise. Every announced 2026 Grand Contest main event is Constructed. Avatar of the Realm in November will be Constructed.

Strategic implication: Constructed rewards meta knowledge, sequencing, and matchup preparation. You're building against the field, not against random packs. The Bardsword "Month into Gothic" report covering SCG CON Atlanta noted 16 distinct Avatars in the Top 17 — the format is unsolved and choice-rich, which is the kind of environment that rewards practice with a specific list over breadth across many.

Who plays it first: experienced TCG players coming in from Magic, Lorcana, or Flesh and Blood. If you already think in terms of mana curve and matchup spreads, Constructed is where that thinking transfers.

Who should not start here: brand-new TCG players. A 60+30+10 deck is a deckbuilding project, and building a deck before you've played enough to know what cards do is the most expensive way to learn the game. Start with a precon (below) or with Draft, where the deck is built during the game.

Draft

The most-loved format in many of Sorcery's enthusiast pockets, and the format the publisher has invested most in making accessible. The official Draft page defines it:

  • 1 Avatar. Either drafted (a few Avatars appear in Gothic boosters) or supplied by the pod — the Draft Kit ships four copies of Spellslinger as the suggested default Avatar for Limited play, replacing Sorcerer in that role.
  • Spellbook: at least 24 cards (built from your drafted pool).
  • Atlas: at least 12 cards (built from your drafted pool; the Draft Kit also supplies basic Sites — Spire/Streams/Valleys/Wastelands — so you're never short).
  • No copy limits. Drafted cards are exempt from the rarity restrictions Constructed runs. Whatever you drafted, you can play.
  • Pod size: ideally 8 players. Each player opens one of their three boosters, picks a card, and passes the rest. Three packs, three rounds, with pass directions alternating left → right → left.

Pack contents: Sorcery boosters since Beta have been 15-card packs. Gothic boosters keep that shape inside 36-pack boxes — the Gothic set page confirms the box configuration. The mod's draft simulator on Tabletop Simulator mirrors paper exactly.

Strategic implication: Draft rewards adaptability and on-the-fly synergy reading over deck mastery. You're not casting your favorite line because you can't bring your favorite line — you're casting whatever showed up. Every pod is a different micro-format. Reading signals (what colors / archetypes the players on your left are taking) is a meaningful skill in a way it cannot be in Constructed.

Who plays it first: new players, weirdly. Draft sidesteps the deckbuilding-before-experience problem. The Sorcery TCG team explicitly designed the Draft Kit for this audience — the basic Sites supply the threshold floor, Spellslinger gives you a vanilla "draw an extra card" engine, and 30+ minutes of building happens with cards already in your hand. The shortest path from "I've never played" to "I'm playing a real game with real choices" goes through a Draft pod, not a precon.

Where you play it: at locals running Draft nights, at any Cornerstone Championship whose store has chosen Draft (the format is store's-choice at Cornerstone), and at Gen Con 2026 where Draft pods are confirmed on the program alongside Constructed and Team Sealed. On Tabletop Simulator the official mod runs full draft logic — see How to Play Sorcery Online for the setup.

Sealed

The other Limited format. You don't draft — you open packs and build your deck from whatever was in them. From the official Sealed page:

  • 1 Avatar. Whatever came in your packs, plus the Draft Kit's Spellslinger default if you have one and didn't open any Avatars.
  • 6 boosters per player. That's your full card pool — typically 90 cards before you build.
  • Spellbook: at least 24 cards. From the cards you opened.
  • Atlas: at least 12 cards. From the cards you opened.
  • No copy limits. Same as Draft — whatever's in your pool is playable.

The pack count means Sealed pools are bigger than Draft pools (90 cards versus the 24-pick Draft total), so you're working with a wider menu and fewer hard constraints. That's the meaningful difference.

Strategic implication: Sealed rewards deck-construction skill more than Draft does. You see your entire pool at once, you have time to count threshold curves, you can sequence sites with full information. The trade is that you have less shaping of your pool — in Draft your decisions during the pod determine what shows up in your deck; in Sealed the packs determine it, full stop.

Where you play it: at SCG CON events as a side format, at SorceryFest in Europe, and at Gen Con's Team Sealed event (where two players share a pool and build coordinated decks). On TTS, the official mod handles pack-opening; SorceryLimited.com is a separate community-run simulator that pairs cleanly with TTS for low-friction testing.

Who plays it first: anyone who likes the deckbuilding puzzle of Limited but doesn't want pod-dependent variance. Sealed is more solo, more puzzle-like, and the typical event format at major cons because it doesn't need the strict pod sizes Draft does.

Preconstructed (the not-quite-a-format format)

Precons aren't a separate format. They're products that ship as Constructed-legal decks with no assembly required. Two product lines matter for new players:

Beta Elemental Precons (October 2023). Four 53-card decks — one per element. Avatar of Air, Earth, Fire, Water. Each deck is 36 spells + 16 sites + 1 Avatar, sized below the current Constructed minimums but tournament-legal at casual events and a great teaching tool. The four-pack box sells around $200, the standard two-deck box around $40-66 depending on retailer. The cheapest legitimate entry point to the game.

Prophets of Doom (December 2025). Four 52-card Gothic decks — Harbinger, Necromancer, Savior, Persecutor. Each ships with an alternate-art Dan Seagrave Avatar. Aimed at "new players learning the game or collectors expanding their arsenal," per the Gothic set page. The same role as Beta precons, two years later, with the Gothic mechanic mix.

Both lines are playable as printed, not full Constructed-legal at competitive minimum sizes (they're under 60-card Spellbook). At a Cornerstone event running Constructed you'd want to flesh out the Atlas and Spellbook to minimum sizes; at a casual game or a Cornerstone running Precon format (Star City Games has run Precon brackets at past Crossroads events), they're plug-and-play.

Strategic implication: zero. The deck is the deck — every game with a precon is a game where the structural mistakes are someone else's. That's the point.

Who plays them first: absolutely everyone, at some point. The cleanest way to introduce two friends to Sorcery is to hand each of them a different Beta elemental precon and play five games on a kitchen table. (Is Sorcery Worth It in 2026 covers the buy-in math.)

The organized-play pipeline

The pipeline is a tier ladder, not a format. Each tier uses one or more of the formats above, but the tier itself is about the level of competition, the prize structure, and the qualification path upward.

In 2026 the pipeline reads: Gothic Store Kit → Cornerstone Championship → Grand Contest → Avatar of the Realm. Crossroads, which served as the regional middle tier in 2025, was retired and replaced by Grand Contest for the 2026 season. The directory's Play & Compete section is the canonical index of every event, league, and matchmaking server this pipeline runs through.

Gothic Store Kit (the foundation)

Not technically a championship tier — it's the floor of the pipeline. The Gothic Store Kit is the publisher's product for regular play at participating local stores. Stores order kits, run regular Sorcery nights with promo support, and players show up to learn the game and try out limited formats in a structured environment.

The kit is the prerequisite for the rest of the pipeline. Per the 2026 Cornerstone announcement: "Stores must support regular play through the Sorcery Play Network and host Gothic Store Kit events before qualifying to run Cornerstone Championships." You can't host a Cornerstone if you haven't been running Store Kit nights first. The directory's Where to Buy section lists the participating local stores running these kits.

Format: whatever the store wants. Constructed casual nights, Sealed teaching events, Draft nights, learn-to-play sessions for newcomers.

Cornerstone Championships

The local store tier. Launched in pilot form the weekend of July 19, 2025 with five stores and expanded for 2026 to broader participation. The 2026 Cornerstone page describes the kit structure:

  • 8 players per kit. Stores can order multiple kits based on expected attendance.
  • Format: store's choice. Constructed is the default for most communities; Sealed and Draft are equally valid. The publisher's framing is "decide what best suits your community."
  • Kit prize support: 1 foil alternate-art Den of Evil for the champion, 8 non-foil alternate-art Den of Evil for participants, 1 foil alternate-art Cranky Overseer for the judge, 1 foil Swap for the community champion. (The 2025 launch kit had a different promo lineup — Dispel, with Day of Judgement for judges and a Champion Playmat — but the structure is the same.)
  • Availability: Q1–Q3 2026.

2026 Cornerstone Championships announcement key art

2026 Cornerstone Championships announcement art — via sorcerytcg.com

Strategic context: Cornerstone is where most competitive players actually play in any given year. The pipeline narrows fast above this tier — there are thousands of Cornerstone-eligible stores, hundreds of actual Cornerstones run, and only a couple dozen Grand Contests above them globally. Cornerstone is the realistic competitive ceiling for the median dedicated player.

Who plays it: anyone with a local store running Sorcery. If you have a store within driving distance and they've run Gothic Store Kit nights, Cornerstone is the natural next step. Check the Sorcery Play Network to find events near you.

Grand Contest (the regional capstone)

The new-for-2026 regional championship tier. Grand Contest replaced Crossroads — the function is the same (regional gathering across multiple Cornerstone communities), the scope is wider, and the brand is reset.

Format: Constructed at the main event. Side events at major cons typically include Sealed, Team Sealed, and Draft.

Qualification: Open entry at the venue level — you don't qualify into a Grand Contest, you just register and play. The OP pipeline runs in reverse: Grand Contest produces qualifications for Avatar of the Realm rather than requiring qualifications to enter.

Prize structure: From the Crossroads predecessor structure, which the 2026 Grand Contest tier inherits: regional foil Tower Promos for all participants, top-8 receiving all three Tower Promos in foil, top-4 receiving extended-art rainbow-foil Avatar promos, plus a Dust multiplier. The 2026 lineup adds City of Glass alternate-art prize cards by Adam Burke at SCG events.

The 2026 confirmed Grand Contests:

  • SCG CON Washington DC — May 29, 2026. First Grand Contest of the year. Star City Games is the partner.
  • SorceryFest Leeuwarden — July 3–5, 2026. The European Grand Contest, in the Netherlands.
  • Gen Con Indianapolis — July 30 – August 2, 2026. Multiple Grand Contest events plus Team Sealed, Draft, and learn-to-play side content.
  • Plenty of Games, Melbourne — Asia-Pacific Grand Contest. The 2026 anchor for the AP region.

More Grand Contests are likely to be announced through the year; Sorcery Play Network is the canonical event listing.

Who plays it: competitive players willing to travel for a long weekend, players close enough to a major convention or event partner that the trip is feasible, and players from the Cornerstone tier looking to play in a higher-stakes constructed field.

Avatar of the Realm (the capstone)

The first world championship in Sorcery's history. November 13–15, 2026, in Boston — confirmed in the most recent Avatar of the Realm announcement (the event was originally slated for earlier in the year and was rescheduled to Q4 to allow for venue selection and operations build-out).

Avatar of the Realm announcement key art

Avatar of the Realm announcement art — via sorcerytcg.com

Format: Constructed, by the post-Gothic 60+30+10 rules. Side events and side activities are scheduled alongside but the main bracket is Constructed.

Qualification: Invitation-based via Grand Contest top finishes. The exact slot count and breakdown haven't been published as of writing — Erik's Curiosa has signalled the qualification details will land closer to the season's regional Grand Contests as the field shapes up. Watch the organized play page for updates.

Who plays it: the top finishers from the year's Grand Contests, plus any directly-invited competitors at the publisher's discretion. The 2026 worlds is the first one — qualification standards in 2026 are likely to be looser than they'll be from 2027 onward, when the pipeline has a full year's results to draw from.

Strategic context: the worlds event is intentionally a Boston hotel ballroom, not an arena. The expected attendance is in the hundreds, not thousands. That's honest sizing for the game's current scale and the right framing for what a first-year worlds looks like.

Casual + playgroup formats (community-driven)

Beyond the three official formats and the OP pipeline above, the community has built a small set of additional play modes worth knowing about. None of these are required reading for a new player — but if you've been playing for a few months and want a different challenge, these are the established detours.

Two-Headed Dragon (2v2 multiplayer)

The most-developed community format. Built by Beasts of the Bay and featured at SorceryCon 2026 as an official side event, so the community / publisher line is genuinely blurred.

The format: two teams of two players, 9×4 grid (vs. the standard 5×4), shared 30-life total per team, individual hands and mana pools (only life is shared). Teammates can review each other's hands and discuss strategy at any time. Two banned cards (Courtesan Thais, Roots of Yggdrasil) and minor errata to Deathspeaker and Imperial Road for multiplayer balance.

Two variants:

  • Standard 2HD. Each player brings their own deck under regular Constructed rules.
  • Unified 2HD. Teammates coordinate decks in advance with shared card limits across the combined pool — one of each Unique, two of each Elite, three of each Exceptional, four of each Ordinary across both decks combined.

Strategic implication: the 9×4 grid is fundamentally different geometry from the 5×4. Adjacency relationships, flyer ranges, threshold spread across two Atlases — all of it changes. Two-Headed Dragon is the closest Sorcery has to Magic's Commander in the sense that it's a community-defined multiplayer format that produces a meaningfully different play experience from the 1v1 default. It is not a Commander analogue in social terms — Commander tables average four players, 2HD is fixed at two teams of two.

Where you play it: at SorceryCon, at organized Bay-area meetups, on the 4-player TTS mod (a separate Workshop subscription from the standard 1v1 mod), and at any playgroup willing to coordinate four people and the extra board space.

Cube draft

The third-party / community draft format. A cube is a curated card pool — typically 360–540 cards — that a host owns and brings to a session, and from which a normal Sorcery draft is run.

Cube draft is not an officially supported format. The publisher doesn't sell Cube product. But Curiosa.io's deckbuilder supports it (the cube authors define their pool in the tool), TTS supports it (the mod has a cube-import flow), and the realms.cards web client open-source project explicitly lists Cube Draft as a supported mode. If your playgroup includes a cube curator, Cube Draft is a high-quality way to redraft the same card pool over and over and develop deep limited skill that's transferable to retail draft.

Strategic implication: cube curators tune for balance — the pool is designed to make every color combination viable, which is a stronger guarantee than retail Draft can offer. The result is a tighter Limited environment that rewards reading signals and synergy more than gambling on bomb packs.

Where you play it: at any local with a cube curator. Ask in the Sorcerers at the Core and Sorcerers Summit Discords, both of which have running cube nights.

Casual / kitchen-table play

The publisher's official position on casual play is that the game is designed for it. The Sorcery: Contested Realm wiki describes "kitchen table" sensibilities — narrative experiences alongside competitive ones, no requirement to follow tournament construction minimums in informal games. A two-precon kitchen table game between two friends is a fully supported play experience and a different one from the same matchup at a Cornerstone Championship.

If your goal is "play Sorcery with a friend on a Sunday afternoon" and not "advance through the OP pipeline," casual is the right answer. Two Beta precons, a kitchen table, and an evening will tell you whether the game clicks. No rules-lawyering, take-backs allowed, learn as you go. The How to Play page explicitly frames the casual mode as a first-class use of the product.

How to play each format online

The short answer is the same answer for every format: Tabletop Simulator. The official Sorcery TCG mod supports Constructed, Sealed, and Draft with full mechanics inside the same install. The 4-player community mod adds Two-Headed Dragon. There is no native digital client for Sorcery — TTS is the platform, with Curiosa.io as the deckbuilder you bring to it. The directory's Deckbuilders & Tools section catalogs the full set of mods, simulators, and companion sites.

How to Play Sorcery Online covers the full setup — Steam, the mod subscription, Curiosa deck import, finding opponents through the Sorcery League matchmaking Discord. For format-specific notes:

  • Constructed on TTS: Curiosa export → TTS import → play. The least friction of any format online; your deck is already built.
  • Sealed on TTS: the mod handles pack-opening. SorceryLimited.com is a separate web tool that pairs cleanly with TTS for low-overhead testing.
  • Draft on TTS: the mod runs full pod logic for up to 8 players. Lower-coordination versions run via three-person Discord drafts where one player passes virtual packs.
  • 2HD on TTS: use the 4-player mod (Workshop ID 3166403381), not the standard mod.

If you're trying to learn a new format and don't want to invest in cards first, the TTS path is the standard answer.

Picking your first format

Bottom line, by player profile.

New to TCGs entirely. Start with two Beta elemental precons on a kitchen table. Don't try to build a Constructed deck before you've played five games. Don't sign up for a Cornerstone before you've played twenty. The precon path gets you playing legitimate games at the lowest possible cost and the lowest possible deckbuilding pressure.

Coming from Magic / Lorcana / Flesh and Blood. Start with Sealed at a Cornerstone if there's one near you, or Draft on TTS if there isn't. Limited formats teach you what cards do, with built-in deck construction, in a single afternoon. From there move into Constructed once you have a sense of which Avatar and which elements you want to commit to. The standard advice "play Limited before Constructed" applies harder in Sorcery than in MTG because the card pool is small enough that one Sealed event teaches you a meaningful percentage of it.

Coming back to Sorcery after time away. Constructed at a Cornerstone, with a list you've vetted against the current meta. The format is fluid — Bardsword's meta reports are the best current source — and a deck that was strong in Arthurian Legends may be straight-up unviable post-Gothic. Update your reference points before you sleeve up.

Trying to qualify for Avatar of the Realm. Constructed at Grand Contests. The only path. Cornerstone wins don't qualify for AOTR; Grand Contest finishes do. Travel calculus matters here — Grand Contests are sparse, and most competitive players in 2026 will hit two or three for the year.

Looking for a multiplayer experience. Two-Headed Dragon on the 4-player TTS mod, with three friends. The community format is well-developed enough to be worth investing in, and SorceryCon and Bay-area events have given it real legitimacy.

Just want to play with one friend casually. Constructed at kitchen-table sizes, or two precons across the table. Skip the tournament minimums; play what's fun.

The format you start with is reversible. None of these decisions lock you out of anything later. The cost of trying Draft when you should have tried Sealed is one afternoon and one Cornerstone fee. Start somewhere, fix your aim by game three.

Where to go from here

Sources

Related reading