At the end of the fifth round, only eleven players remained undefeated. Of those eleven, all but two are running the ubiquitous Green Lantern/Emerald Enemies deck. The two non–GLEE club members are Chris Donati and Luke Evich. Both are running decks using teams from the much maligned Man of Steel expansion, with Donati playing his personal variant of Superman, Blue Abuse and Evich running an innovative Superman Robots and Soldiers of New Genesis swarm deck. Both are taking full advantage of players being unprepared for their decks and looking to tackle the GLEE invasion head on.
Chris Donati hails from Santa Barbara, California and tells me he has been working his unique take on the Superman, Blue Deck for a few weeks now. “It doesn’t really abuse Superman, Blue – it mainly just uses him once. It has been designed to beat the GLEE decks, and so far that’s all I’ve played.” Chris has some curious card choices in his deck, ranging from Big Bear to Blood Fury. I asked specifically about the choice of Blood Fury over the much more popular No Man Escapes the Manhunters. He explained that “we tried Swing Line first, because flight was kind of important in order to stun G’Nort. But in the end, I needed a more quality combat pump.” The choice seems to be working for him – he just won yet another GLEE matchup to go to 6-0. He only requires one more to get him a berth into the draft day, but he’s looking forward to even greater things than that.
Luke Evich’s deck is even more unconventional, with his only characters being Superman Robots and Soldiers of New Genesis. He uses Armies of Qward to team them up, but the most important thing is that the majority of his plot twists are combat related—¡Ole!, Heat Vision, Shock Troops, and No Man Escapes the Manhunters. With the Robots becoming increasingly large every time one of their brothers appear, the attack pumps mean than even the largest characters can be taken down. Luke has decided to have the luxury of one specific anti-GLEE card—Phantom Zone—which allows him to negate the effect of Dr. Light, Master of Holograms. It seems to have done him well, keeping him undefeated near the halfway point of the constructed portion of the Pro Circuit.
So if you think that this format is completely solved, you may want to think again – if these guys can come up with innovative ways to combat the Green Machine, maybe you can too!