Whatever Pete McCook might lack in Vs. experience, he makes up with enthusiasm.

The 40-year-old has been playing Vs. since Web of Spider-Man and has so far played in only three or four sanctioned tournaments. While Vs. is more or less his first ever TCG, he has played a lot of miniature games and war games, as well as Dungeons and Dragons in the “old days.”

“You could say [I have] a wealth of experience in gaming but limited experience with card games, although I find Vs. great fun and very satisfying to play,” Pete said. This hasn’t stopped him, however, from making the long trek from his home town of Canberra (Australia’s national capital) to the sunnier center of Brisbane for Australia’s third $10K. He is one of only two Canberrans at the tournament, and the other, PC: LA competitor Ross Schafer, is a former Brisbane local who used this event as an excuse to see his family.

Pete has the hardest occupation of all, as a stay at home dad with four sons under ten years of age. He’s also a sometimes university student. Three of his boys already play Vs. (the eldest, Jake, actually has a higher sealed rating than his dad, and is a keen chess player), and the youngest will surely pick it up . . . right after learning to walk and talk and other fundamentally pointless skills.

While his best performance in a tournament to date was in a constructed PCQ in Sydney, where he qualified for Top 8 with a borrowed Curve Sentinel deck, he generally prefers Sealed Deck. “I prefer Sealed because I don’t have to think about it too long, and the extra element of luck can sometimes make me look better than I am. And, of course, there’s nothing like the feeling of cracking open a virgin pack of cards. Mmm . . . cards.”

For this reason, Pete sought the advice of the two most experienced players in the group he plays Hobby League with at comic store House of Heroes (http://www.houseofheroes.com.au). “I sent out an urgent plea for help, especially to Michael Pittman] and ‘Pez’ (Pasquale) Laria, who are the only two Canberrans I know who have played in a $10K before,” Pete said. “‘Pez’ is an insane Spider-Man fan, so I knew what to expect from him, and I’m just lucky [Michael] didn’t follow form and try and convince me to play his Arkham Inmates deck. “In the end we figured that I could either play the format front-runner in Curve Sentinels, or try to play something a little different that hopefully would be good in the current metagame.”

With Sentinels and Teen Titans still sitting pretty on top of Tier One, Pete and his friends looked to their Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man for possible answers. Spidey was renowned for having some great tools against both Sentinels and the Titans, but he was also known for having a few shortcomings.  Chief among Peter Parker’s woes was the lack of a hard tutor and a good finisher. The Canberra crew looked to the new Marvel Knights affiliation for an answer. Pete’s deck looked like this:

“Strange Spider”

Characters
4 Dagger, Child of Light
4 Stick
1 Daredevil, Protector of Hells Kitchen
4 Puma
1 Moon Knight
4 Daredevil, Matt Murdock
1 Firestar
3 Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man
1 Luke Cage, Power Man
4 Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man
2 Dr Strange
1 Ezekiel
1 Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch
1 Spider-Man, Cosmic Spider-Man
 
Plot Twists
4 Savage Beatdown
4 Spider Senses
4 Wild Ride
3 Acrobatic Dodge
3 Costume Change
3 Midnight Sons
3 Nice Try!
2 Spider-Tracer
 
Locations
2 Avalon Space Station

Wild Ride and Dr Strange seemed to be just the ticket, while the MK Dagger offered a consistent way to realize the team-up. Pete said the game plan for his deck was—without falling too far behind in the early to mid-game—to focus on the late game. In this stage of the game, Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man and Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man could gum things up, especially combat, and allow Dr Strange to boost on turn 8 and send his opponent’s team into the hidden zone. His deck desperately wanted evens, but with Sentinels expected to be the most popular deck and favoring evens, Pete was hoping that he’d get it a lot of the times regardless of who won the die roll to choose the initiative.

His deck also packed Spider-Tracers to minimize the impact of Bastion and a few other toolbox cards for specific match-ups. “I accept that my deck will be weaker against fast, aggressive decks, and particularly burn strategies . . . but it’s hard to build something that beats everything,” Pete said.

At the time of writing, Pete had won his first round, but lost the second to a Curve Sentinels deck with an unexpected Apocalypse on turn eight, as well as the third where the combination of a Hounds lock and loyalty-screw on his part made his game fall apart.
“Fingers crossed.”