It’s been an interesting day here at the Pro Circuit, with 70 percent of the metagame running the GL/EE engine and great players everywhere slugging it out for a shot to get to draft tomorrow. To give you an idea of just how wacky things have been here this weekend, let me list the players with PC Top 8s—generally considered the cream of the crop in Vs. System—who were sitting on the bubble going into round 12.

Mark Slack

Jason Hager

Steve Horowitz

Adam Horvath

Dustin Pidgeon

Eugene Harvey

Adam Prosak

Joining these folks are a host of notables, including the entire group of The Socialites (Matt Oldaker, Heath Baker, Anthony Justice), Kim Caton, Andre Muller, David Bauer, Dair “Little Spoon” Grant, and Dean Sohnle. All of this means that many of these players will be paired up against each other for the final round of DC Modern today, resulting in a bloodbath for the name players who will be reduced to playing in the $10K and side events for the rest of the weekend.

Big names already knocked out include Adam Bernstein, Antonino De Rosa, and former Pro Circuit metronome Matthew Tatar, who will miss out on a chance to make yet another Top 20 appearance later this weekend.

On the other end of the scale is what we have been informed is the YMG/KGB alliance that includes Your Move Games (profiled earlier) and Alex Shvartsman’s King’s Games crew from Brooklyn. Out of the fourteen players the teams brought here this weekend, seven of them were sitting in the Top 32 or better going into the last round, and at least two more were scrapping for one last win to make Day 2.

Combo piece here. First things first . . . Congratulations to Whitney Sitzler, who took home the first prize at the Vs. System Scholarship Series event here in Indy. A former PC player, Whitney piloted her TNB deck through a field of 28 other teenagers to take home a cool $1,000 for her efforts on Friday, making her the first female in memory to win the title of a major TCG event. Coverage policy here at Metagame.com is generally to treat the girls just like the guys—as competitors battling it out for a share of thousands of dollars in prize money. Whitney provided further proof today that when it comes to the Vs. System, winning knows no gender.

The other bit for this entry is a little goofier, but that too is just another element of gaming, right? You know how some cards earn local nicknames from their players that sometimes cross over boundaries (for example, G’Nort is typically referred to as Gee’Dawg, or Gee’Unit)? Well, instead of nicknames, two cards in the current format are actually players. Don’t believe me? We have photographic evidence to prove it.

The other player card is a bit more obvious, as Arizona resident Phimus Pan has his own Manhunter Duplicate (Pan). Interestingly enough, both of the cards are in the format, but Slack chose to leave Salakk riding the pine this weekend. Phimus, on the other hand, is playing one of his own namesake in place of an extra Evil Star. As of this writing, both players are still in the running for Day 2, though Pan has admitted, “I’ve drawn Pan in two separate games today, and both times I wished he was the stupid Evil Star, instead.”

So, we mentioned Darwin Kastle’s 0-4 start earlier today and laughed briefly at Craig Edwards’s misery as he was stuck playing (and losing to) teammates, but the truth of the matter is that Team Your Move Games is tearing up the field. The leader of the tournament right now is none other than front man and YMG founder Rob Dougherty, who through eight rounds has yet to fall in defeat. Right behind Rob is Anthony Shaheen at table 4, Nick Cuenca at table 6, Jacob Rabinowitz at table 13, and Edwards, whose only losses thus far have come to his teammates. He is sitting at table 17 with a 6-2 record.

The interesting part about YMG is that, unlike in Magic, where they are generally regarded as pretty soft drafters, they are more than capable of tearing up the Sealed Pack rounds in the Vs System. In fact, one of the first times I realized how different this game was from anything I’ve played before was right here in Indy a year ago, when Dougherty and former YMG member Alex Shvartsman both went undefeated in the Draft portion of the event.

Sensing something fishy in these winning YMG ways, I asked Dave Humpherys (a former dragon wearer himself) if Vs. R&D had been slipping tech to the New Englanders on the sly. Da Hump punched me for my impudence and then explained that UDE had actually modified what YMG was playing this weekend, not through any suggestions on the format, but because the UDE Store was completely out of Trial By Swords—none of the YMG guys were able to buy those cards to put them in their decks. It will be interesting to see not only how the team finishes today, but also how they do tomorrow with the very interesting Avengers and Green Lantern Corps Sealed Packs.


New Gods FTW - 4:17PM

Vidi Wijaya squared off against Michael Jacob in round 7, with both players running interesting, non-GLEE based decks. Jacob’s deck is designed to abuse Superman, Blue, though thus far on the weekend, it seemed that Jacob had been heaping most of the abuse on . . . his deck, which he regularly called terrible. Wijaya’s playing the Team Realmworx Shadow Creatures deck that we profiled earlier today. Realmworx has had mixed results thus far, with most of their players hovering around .500 and Ryan Jones and Alex Gellerman a bit above that mark.

I walked up to the table on turn 4 just in time to hear Jacob say, “5, 10, 15, 20 . . . are you dead? What’s your life?” “38,” Wijaya answered. “Huh . . . take 34,” said Jacob as he shoved six Soldiers of New Genesis sporting three different Supercycles, plus a Lois Lane, down Wijaya’s throat, dropping Vidi to 4. Jacob won that one to improve to 5-2 on the weekend, but he explained that future success was far from a guarantee. “That was my best draw this weekend by far. I didn’t get to abuse Blue that game, but 34 endurance loss on turn 4 is pretty good. There’s no way I’ll get that lucky again.”

Well, It Depends on How You Define Half – 4:40PM

“Thank God, we just passed the halfway point.” – Antonino De Rosa, after completing round 7 of 12 in Constructed today.

• Adam Bernstein: Wow, I get to play Darwin Kastle at the 0-4 table.

Me: What are you doing at the 0-4 table?

Nick Little: He won the last one . . . nobody ever Day 2s after they win one.

Adam: Oh God, don’t write that . . .

Adam would go on to lose to Darwin and drop from the tournament.

Also unexpectedly sporting bad and worse records are Antonino De Rosa at 1-4; and Nick Little, Gabe Walls, and Anthony Justice at 2-3.

• In a fourth round match, Matt Oldaker was down 2–30 at the end of the sixth turn, and his opponent had eight guys and the initiative for turn 7 to Oldaker’s Dr. Light, Master of Holograms and Katma Tui. Matt recruited Krona on his turn and then blunted a huge team-attack with two Helping Hands while gaining 5 endurance with Katma Tui. On turn 8, he brought Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern and Rot Lop Fan into the fray and ended up smashing his opponent, making a huge comeback from what looked like an unwinnable situation.

• Tillman Bragg is the responsible party for adding Shadow Creatures to Nick Little and company’s GLEE deck. Adding a distinctly metrosexual flavor to the Tennessee native’s style, the deck has been renamed GLAM.
  
• Craig Edwards has looked rather sullen for the last two rounds, as he’s been forced to play against YMG teammates in back-to-back rounds. He lost first to Rob Dougherty in a feature match, and then fell to Anthony Shaheen in the next round, dropping his record to 2-2 on the day. I pointed out that there are twelve rounds today and there couldn’t possibly be enough YMG members playing to face many more teammates. Craig’s response was something along the lines of, “Yeah, only four more teammates left to play. Hope I at least win a couple of the coin flips there.”
  
• Checking in at the dealer tables, the hot cards for this weekend were Willworld, Roy Harper ◊ Speedy, and Prison Planet, though even as late as this morning, many players were still searching around for a few important uncommons like Birthing Chamber.

An Extended Art Willworld is also being given way to the Top 64 finishers in the $10K that starts tomorrow. Just showing up at a Pro Circuit event gives you perks above and beyond the thousands of dollars in prize money!

Adult Film Stars from West Virginia – 11:35AM 

In a show of team solidarity, this particularly hairy set of gentlemen is sporting 70’s style adult film star mustaches this weekend. Photographer Craig Gibson was able to grab an action shot of the swarthy Vs. System experts who look more like Super Troopers today than card players, but the true glory has to go solely to Matt Oldaker and his feature match photo that Gibson grabbed yesterday. He calls this particular look “The London Gentleman,” but a bystander watching his first round feature match dubbed it the equally appropriate “Big Boss Man” look. Whatever the case, he has hirsute fetishists everywhere green with envy.

Gen Con is a great place to get news about gaming, and Upper Deck Entertainment made some big announcements here this weekend regarding gaming in general and the Pro Circuit in particular.

This weekend kicks off season two for the Pro Circuit, and most players already knew that Indianapolis at Gen Con and Los Angeles at Gen Con So Cal in December were already part of the schedule, but the other stops on the circuit were as yet unknown. That all changed this morning when Scott Elliot told the record 340 Pro Circuit competitors in attendance that the Circuit will also be heading to Atlanta in March and New Orleans in June. The last in particular earned a cheer from the players and the staff alike. Also officially announced this weekend was that PC So Cal will be all Avengers Draft.

Also announced was the fact that Upper Deck has secured a license to create a World of Warcraft TCG, thus ensuring that gamers the world over will be completely unable to escape the addictive online role-playing game in pixels or in real life.

Gabe Walls, Adam Bernstein, Neil Reeves, Nick Little: all experts at Vs. System, all teammates, and all complete and utter buffoons. Alright, fine, that’s perhaps a little harsh (and I like all of these guys), but I’ll lay out the evidence for you, and you can make your own decisions. There are already a few versions of this story, so picking which lie to believe will be a tough one.

Nate Price told me that they were all sitting around playing Tiger Woods Golf last night when someone threw a controller after losing, knocking their Constructed decks off the table and onto the floor and mixing them with some Green Lantern Corps Draft decks. Everybody just picked up a pile of sixty cards and ended up playing those here at the Pro Circuit, which is how some folks ended up with (shhh) Sleeper Agents in their decks while others are playing (more shhh) . . . Shadow Creatures? I couldn’t be making this one up if I tried.

Walls has a different story. He insists they broke the format last night during long hours of playtesting, which is why they are running such interesting choices in what are otherwise relatively standard Green Lantern/Emerald Enemies decks.

The last and perhaps most truthful story comes from good man Neil Reeves, who handed me his decklists while shaking his head and saying, “Full-blown tilt.” Pressed for an explanation, Neil said that they were all goofing around last night and didn’t like their decks. Somebody mentioned that they should call Anthony Justice and get his decklist, but it was 2AM and no one could find his cell phone number. Then person X piped up and said that he thought the West Virginians were playing Anti-Matter guys in their GLEE deck, and thus an idea (good, bad, or otherwise) was born. Will the last-minute change work out for one of the most dominant teams in the Vs. System? Check back twelve rounds from now and we’ll have an answer.