So here I sit, having never ever written a report for anything in my life (outside of school, of course), and I’m wondering, “Man, what should I write about?” I feel obligated to do something since I won a PC (I won a PC? Really? I still don’t believe it . . . ), but I have no idea where to start.

Really, this all started back at PC: Indy, where I managed to scrape into Day 2 at 7-5 despite not having playtested at all. My roommates for the trip, Heath Scheiman (one of the owners at the store where I game) and Ben Weinburg (a gamer at said store) told me that me that an aggressive GLEE build was the best deck out there, so I took their word for it. All I did to get ready for Day 1 was quibble over a few cards with them. In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder what I was doing throwing out suggestions when I had not played a game with the deck in my life—maybe that’s how I ended up with Coast City in my deck. (To be fair, I did win the games where I flipped it up and got to keep G’Nort behind my best dude.) I started 5-0 on the day but didn’t pick up my seventh win until round 11. Oh, well—I still made it to Day 2.

The drafting began, and I thought to myself, “Undefeated to make Top 8, huh? OK, let’s just make some money.” The goal for the day? Make as much money as possible. I went 2-1 in the Avengers pod and then reeled off five in a row only to face Craig Edwards in the last round and lose a game I should have won. Still, I was pretty happy to be taking home $2,900 (at the time, the biggest paycheck I had taken home from any gaming event) for 25th place, especially considering my lack of testing leading up to the tournament. Actually, I only got $2,850, as Heath and I agreed to a split since we were seated at the same table. He finished right behind me, so I shipped him the $50 (after apologizing profusely because I should have won the last round) and all was well.

After Indy was out of the way, some talk about So Cal was thrown about, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the trip or not. It was a few months away, and it was taking place around my girlfriend’s birthday. I thought I was done, so I told everybody that I was out. It was rough, because Heath was going, Ben was in, and Prosak was back in town and was obviously going as well. I kept getting asked and saying no, until one day, Heath said, “Buy her an iPod for her birthday so you can go.” Pure genius, and might I add—Best. iPod. Ever. I could already see myself gaming in LA.

The following week, I started testing, or at least, I intended to start testing. You see, I game all of one night a week. The tournament schedule at the local store alternates weekly from Constructed to Sealed Pack/Draft. Afterwards, another draft is usually held, so by the time that it’s over, it’s 1 or 2 a.m. and everyone is ready to leave or has done so already. Needless to say, that doesn’t leave much time to test Constructed. I must admit that all the drafting left me feeling confident about Day 2—I even went so far as to say that if I could muster at least an 8-2 record on Day 1, I would be looking at the Top 8.

So, since I was suddenly planning to go, I was faced with another dilemma: What should I play? As long as I’ve been gaming, I’ve liked decks that control the game, ultimately winning by playing game-ender or somehow getting into a situation that the opponent just can’t deal with. Prosak told me that New School (Maybe Old School New School now? At any rate, the NY version.) was still good. It seemed like a deck that I would enjoy playing, so I started to fool around with it. For those of you who don’t know me (pretty much everybody), Constructed formats are less than appealing to me because I only like to play decks that I will have a good time with. I abhor Sentinels and have never been a fan of aggro, off-curve strategies. Even Titans, Prosak’s deck of choice, which I put in the category of aggro-control, is just not my style. As far as deck choices go, New School seemed like my best option short of some sort of Gamma-Doom build, and that deck just didn’t seem plausible to me. It’s really all about live, live, live until (hopefully) turn 8, (sometimes 7), when you can Gamma Bomb as much as you need to. New School might seem the same way, but at least you’re doing it with characters and being somewhat proactive about it. New School also seemed much more consistent, because it lets you tutor a lot more. Don’t get me wrong, the deck can run out of gas, but then again, what deck doesn’t occasionally do just that?

I wasn’t yet sure that New School was going to be the deck, but I started tinkering with it to see if I wanted to make any changes. The deck that I started with was pretty much the NY version with Silver Surfer instead of Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria. Sadly, I had to start our by goldfishing with the deck—Prosak yells at me still because he insists goldfishing does nothing to help you prepare. I agree that you really need a live person to play against to see how a deck runs, but what I really wanted to do was narrow down deck choices/card slots. I found that I almost never wanted the early Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom—he just sat there until turn 4 when his text finally turned on. I cut it down to three, then two, then finally tried it out with one and found that one was the right number for me. Boris was only a tutor target for me in the games I played, and I never had a game where I thought, “I wish I had drawn Boris.” Also, I wanted to be able to curve out against decks where I feared Flame Trap. This was much harder to do with Boris taking up so many slots. He was a dead card if I wanted to go the curve strategy, and I thought there were enough times that I would want to do this to warrant cutting down to one copy. This also led me to add an extra Entangle, as I would want to draw it occasionally rather than having to tutor for it every game.

Another change I made was to bump the copies of Robot Sentry up by one, because the card is just that good. I wanted to run four because I always wanted to draw one (assuming, of course, that my opponent hits a 2-drop), but in the end, I couldn’t find the room, so I was content with three.

Cloak, Child of Darkness? RUJK?! (Say the letters rather than try to pronounce it if it doesn’t make any sense.) No, he was really in there, if for no other reason than to have an alternate 4-drop if my opponent had Null Time Zone for my Reign on turn 4. I never played him in the tournament (OK, you got me—I played him in the game where I drew no Signal/Ride or Doom and no Alfred until turn 6 . . . and then lost), but that was why I included him in the deck.

Silver Surfer over Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria was Prosak’s idea—maybe you read about it in his article a few months ago about New School. I wasn’t convinced initially, but after some testing, I found that I, too, liked the Surfer. In Prosak’s words, “You have to think for another turn if you don’t have evens.” What it came down to was that Silver Surfer allowed me to have a lock with either Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man or Shimmer after turn 8. Basically, what my opponent does doesn’t matter, because I always have the initiative and all his or her dudes are always exhausted, which means no attacks back. This, coupled with the fact that the deck naturally prefers odds for Psimon on 7, will just win most games. Also, I never want to replace my Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius, especially when he’s equipped with a Power Compressor.

I added another generic team-up card simply because the only time I ran into trouble was when I didn’t hit an early (before turn 4) Marvel Knights character. Adding the team-up increased my chances of being able to use the silver bullet characters, which would let me pull out a game without having dead cards like Midnight Sons pollute my resource row. Sounds pretty lame, I know, but it happens more than you’d think. It’s like Lacuna randomly being amazing because you don’t have to have the team-up to use Glorious Godfrey (GG) or Robot Sentry, activate Alfred, or turn on Dr. Doom’s text. Yes, in those instances, I could search the team-up out if I had Lacuna in play, but a lot of the time, you don’t have a card that you want to discard until much later in the game. Millennium was the spare team-up of choice because I hate having to search for the team-up with Alfred. At least this way, if I have to do it, I get to draw an extra card.

Wait, only one extra team-up? Well, yes, this was how I originally built the deck. For me, the final piece of the puzzle was Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. Believe it or not, he’s amazing, and here’s why. He’s a 7-drop that has good stats, he doesn’t have loyalty, he’s another Fantastic Four guy to discard to Surfer if I don’t have a team-up (it’s happened a couple of times . . . seriously), but the biggest reason is that he’s good against off-curve strategies that win the die roll and choose odds. On turn 7 in these matches, you can’t just rely on the “replay Doom, Mystical Paralysis, Mystical Paralysis, tutor for Reign of Terror, Reign your guys” plan. So, Thing is the answer. He Reigns your opponent by himself, and he’s a big dude besides. Sadly, I could not play him in the Top 8 because I misregistered my deck with four copies of Marvel Team-Up and no Ever-Lovin’ Blue Eyed.

I think I’ve gone on enough about the deck, so let’s move on to the PC. If you’re looking for detailed match descriptions, sorry to disappoint—I don’t do that. In fact, I throw away the score sheets as soon as I’ve used up all the slots. I’m way too lazy to keep track of notes while I’m in a match and then transfer all of that into a report. If that’s what people are looking for, I might start in the future, but, for now, this is what you get.

Minor detour here—I can’t rightly go into the PC section until I recount our lovely trip to California.

After searching some online sites for the cheapest airfare we could find, Prosak the Master finally managed to book us some roundtrip tickets for about $200—off to a good start already! Unfortunately, because my girlfriend’s birthday was on Wednesday, we could not leave until Thursday morning. Our flight was at 9:30 a.m., which wouldn’t have been too bad, except that it took off out of Indianapolis, which is about a two-hour haul from Cincinnati. Factor in the time change, wanting to arrive at the airport about an hour early to be safe, and at least one person of the four invariably being late for our early morning rendezvous, we set our meet time for 6 a.m. We definitely left at about 6:30.

Despite the half-hour setback, we made good time to the airport with no major drama. At the airport, we saw Mark Slack, Sammy Gilly, and Dair Grant. We checked our bags and moved on to the security line. Wait . . . a line? Yes, a freaking line about 50 people long at 8:30 in the morning on a Thursday. Perhaps that’s a common occurrence, but I was certainly not expecting it. Fortunately, it moved pretty quickly and would have been even faster if Prosak didn’t hold us up with his Super Security check. I guess that’s the price you pay for being a thug.

We made our way to our gate and waited for the flight to start boarding. They called our rows, so Ben immediately went. Heath, Prosak, and I decided to chill for a while, thinking that we would wait until everybody else got seated. We sauntered down the hall for all of two minutes, but when we made our way back to the gate, it was closed! One of the flight attendants was outside finishing up whatever it was that needed to be done and let us on. I guess we won’t be doing anything before our next flight takes off.

We made it to Houston a couple of hours later and boarded the next plane, which was bigger and slightly more comfortable—instead of feeling like I was sitting on a rock, it was more like a hard wood. The captain informed us that the flight would be about three and a half hours and that there would be a complementary in-flight movie. Yeah, it was free to watch, but if you didn’t happen to bring headphones, it set you back $5. Luckily, Ben found some headphones in the seat pouch in front of him and lent them to me, since he had the ones that came with his iPod.

The movie was mildly entertaining, but it was made much better by the fact that I would have had absolutely nothing to do if it weren’t on. This flight seemed much longer than the last, probably due to the fact that we had already spent two and a half hours in a plane. Finally, we arrived at LAX.

In the baggage claim, Prosak made a call to his buddy Niles and asked for an ETA, as he had said he could provide us with a ride to the Con. I’ll make a long story short—after about an hour of waiting, we decided we’d split cab fare to the site. Niles’s alibi? Something to do with burning cows on the highway causing a traffic jam.

Catching a cab was no problem, but the ride was. I didn’t think it could get any worse than the plane, but boy was I mistaken. You know how riding in the back seat of a car kind of sucks, especially when there are three people and said people are fat? Alright, Heath is skinny, but Prosak and I, not so much. Well, I discovered that in a taxi, this is only amplified. Sadly, there were no burning cows to be spotted. I mean, bad beat for the cows, but man, what a story!

Forty-five minutes later and $25 poorer, we arrived at the convention center. It was a nice-looking place and all, but really excited me was the hotel. You see, I haven’t stayed within walking distance from a Con in ages, and I had forgotten how great it is. Not only that, but we checked into our room and found it was on the Concierge level—you need your passkey just to be able to go to that floor! And oh my, The Players’ Club. Free sodas (pop, as we say in the Midwest), bottled water, hors d’oeuvres (man, I just spelled that right without having to spell-check . . . I swear!), cookies, and breakfast! Without a doubt, this was the best place I had stayed at for a Con. Thank you, Heath, for being in the Marriott Players’ club!

Now, back to our regularly scheduled event—the PC.

Day 1

As I told you before, I don’t take notes, and I really don’t want to try to dredge up all of the matches from memory. I will, however, bring up a few things that stick out.

By far the coolest thing I did on Day 1 was win on turn 6. That’s right—New School got the turn 6 kill. It came against the Both Guns Blazing deck piloted by Billy P. My guys were actually bigger than his, and I was able to attack each turn and keep his character count low. Really, this matchup is all about Doom. It’s really hard for that deck or similar ones to deal with him if you’re doing anything else at all. I just remember Press the Attack on Spider-Man for the win, putting him exactly to 0. He thought he was going to go off with Rigged Elections on the next turn, but I had the initiative and would have tutored up Psimon for the win. His deck auto-scoops to that guy, but then again, a lot of them do.

To give you an idea of how unfair Doom is against that deck, I’ll go over my last match of the day against Matt Oldaker. He was playing his team’s newest crazy concoction, a A Child Named Valeria lock deck with Scarlet Witch, Eldritch Enchantress for the win. Child is another of my favorite cards, but decks containing it pretty much scoop to anything with Doom in it. It is a card, though, that a lot of the decks in the environment just can’t deal with. If you can get the engine going, your opponent just looks at you for the rest of the game until you win.

Our match started out with each of us playing an Alfred. I rolled my eyes at the thought of another mirror match, but to my chagrin, I found out it was not when he tutored for a Utility Belt, a card that totally wrecks me, on turn 2. Because of the Belt and a Fizzle on his part, my plays for turn 1–4 were Micro-Chip and Alfred. I was pretty sure I was going to lose that game, as I wasn’t drawing any more tutors or Dooms. On turn 5, I played GG to go with my Alfred. On turn 6, he burned me for a ton, but I finally drew a tutor, and the good Doctor made his appearance. I played two Reign of Terrors from my hand, and he was left with two guys. On turn 7, I flipped Midnight Sons to team up with Fearsome Five and played a Bat-Signal. In a last ditch effort, Oldaker asked, “Shimmer?” But I got Psimon, and he promptly scooped.

As for other match-ups, I was 3-0 against Avengers and 2-0 versus Squadron. Melissa Gold ◊ Songbird, Sonic Carapace is not so good against me. I like the match-up against the aggressive Squad decks because they don’t have the nightmare cards that I was getting wrecked with in our playtesting: AIDA and Foxfire. (On a side note, I really think they should errata the earlier team-ups to be actual Team-Ups.)

At the end of Day 1, I was really happy to be at the 8-2 that I had set as my goal. The downside was that I had the worst tiebreakers, but that wasn’t nearly as important as getting to where I wanted to be. Unfortunately, Prosak whiffed, but Heath and Phimus were into Day 2 at 7-3. They both played Curve Sentinels (man, I hate that deck).

Topping things off, we were done with Day 1 by 6:30. That was amazing—good job, UDE. My roommates and I hoofed it over to Outback and were later joined by our judge buddy Prakash Madhav, who Head Judged the $10K. After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and our room.

Tomorrow: Day 2, and the Top 8!