Table 1: Milton J. Figueroa vs. Jacob Hershberger

Figueroa was playing The Brave and The Bold against Hershberger’s Curve Sentinels. Hershberger’s deck was teched nicely, packing Total Anarchy to help in matches against Titans and by association, The Brave and The Bold. But despite both players hugging the curve and hitting their ideal drops pretty tightly, Figueroa managed to build up a veritable hoard of characters on his side of the field. He kept the pressure on Hershberger for the entire game, never letting him get more than two characters on the field during most turns in the early and mid-game, and Dick Grayson ◊ Nightwing, High-Flying Acrobat with boost on turn 6 spelled bad news for Sentinels in the late game.

Turn 7 saw Magneto, Master of Magnetism arrive to protect Bastion and a Sentinel Mark V, but a team attack for a total of 42 laid Bastion low, and by the end of the turn all Hershberger had left was Magneto, Master of Magnetism . . . a very tired Master of Magnetism at that, as Raven prevented Magneto from readying. Turn 8 was an utter slaughter, as Figueroa continued recruiting more and more unique characters while all Hershberger could muster was a second Bastion. The good guys took the field and Figueroa took the game.

Table 2: David Bauer vs. Michael Gemme

Gemme and Bauer pitted X-Beats against Curve Sentinels, and the mutant control initiative went to work from the beginning of the game. Gemme somehow thought Total Anarchy would help him in the early game, but though both players curved it was Gemme who most frequently felt the loss of his characters to the KO’d pile. The result was a fast game that rarely featured more than two characters on either side of the field, and with the ability to dominate via sheer numbers advantage in combat served Bauer well. His win was assured by turn 5, and it took him very little time to seal the deal.

Table 3: Bret Bumbalough vs. David De Michele

The match between Curve Sentinel player Bret Bumbalough and Teen Titans expert David De Michele was also one-sided, as Bumbalough missed his curve repeatedly. Michele’s draws weren’t perfect, but Terra on turn 4 and Garth ◊ Tempest on turn 5 gave him the infrastructure he needed to rebuke every attempt Bumbalough made to turn the tide. The game took quite a while to play out due to Bumbalough’s careful play, but it still ended by turn 6, and David De Michele took the win.

Table 4: Justin Desai vs. Vaughn Forrester

In the closest match of the four top tables, Justin Desai played Common Enemy against Vaughn Forrester’s Spider-Friends deck. Forrester did an admirable job of using evasion to protect his board presence, and he whittled away at Desai’s endurance total well into the mid-game. However, the game ran long, and though Forrester was able to use Ezekiel’s ability for five cards on turn 7, he didn’t have an 8-drop, nor a high-drop play for turn 9. Against Common Enemy that’s certain death. The deck makes its reputation on its strength in the late game, and when it got there, it destroyed Forrester, despite his intelligent and observant play.

Round 9 featured a great deal of seemingly one-sided matches. Call it luck, call it momentum, call it spirit or endurance, but there was a definite difference in the air as there often is in the late rounds of a premier event. The experienced players ramped up their play for the final push towards the Top 8, and the inexperienced fell by the wayside along with the unlucky.