Apparently, the recruiters of the universe have been doing their job well. Armies are everywhere. Other than GLEE, the two most-played decks are Qward Stall and Robots and Soldiers. These decks try to take advantage of the fact that Army characters are immune to the “four per deck” rule, and they aren’t unique. This means that they show up in greater frequency, both in players’ hands as well as on their boards.

As I was walking around, I saw this put to the test. I saw an unlikely matchup between a Qward Stall deck featuring Kyle Rayner, Ion and a Robots and Soldiers deck. It was turn 9, and the Qward player had just played Anti-Monitor. This would have been bad news for the Robots player if his board weren’t so savage. He had four copies of Soldiers of New Genesis on his side as well as six copies of Superman Robots. I almost lost my balance as I was walking by because I just couldn’t look away. Duty prevailed, however, and I was able to break away and continue my march around the room.

I hadn’t taken two steps before I was faced with another monstrosity. Not only did I find another good Army deck, but the man at the helm was none other than Antonino DeRosa, whose personality is so big that his body can barely contain it. He is piloting a wonderful Qward Control deck. The deck reveals another one of the advantages of playing Army characters: they are expendable. They are about as cheap as characters come, and you always know that there are going to be more where the original came from. That explained why he was playing Evil Star in his deck. With so many expendable characters, he needed something to make them useful in the late game. Evil Star lets him KO his superfluous characters to KO his opponent’s most threatening character. That’s all ninjas are really good for, anyway—hiding in the shadows until it’s time to kill something.

These Army characters have made watching the matches today a lot of fun. Who knows— if they keep doing well, we may see some of them in the feature area. Stay tuned for more coverage here at $10K Indianapolis!