More interesting single cards abound this weekend, and another group of interesting picks came to the forefront.

Get Him My Petsss: Wow! Tim Rivera may go down as the first person in history to play this card at a PC. Formerly looked upon as completely horrible, Get Him My Petsss has proven an effective tool for Syndicate variants to use against X-Statix. Since X-Statix decks are slow to press major offensives and often are difficult to attack into anyway, Petsss gives an incredible amount of mid- and late game disruption. Multiples can utterly shred a loner strategy, and with the ability to KO characters like Zeitgeist and Professor X in one fell swoop, it can literally mean game.

War Wagon: A lot of players are running random War Wagons. While Judge, Jury, and Executioner gives more potential KO’ing power, it doesn’t fit into swarm decks very well due to its cost limitation, but War Wagon is virtually effortless to use in decks like Wild Pack Swarm and Sinister Syndicate/Crime Lords. A great way to fill out a turn and a natural fit for rush decks due to its burn effect, it seems to be making an impact where it’s being used. While War Wagon was an obvious pick for Marvel Knights variant decks, the surprise here is that it’s seeing play in so many other deck types.

Lacuna: Lacuna is seeing a great deal of play in Underworld team-up decks, where she can not only fish for Marvel Team-Up and give her brand of pseudo card advantage, but also can act as a generic benchmark for Hypnotic Charms. She makes insane combinations of teams possible as long as Underworld is one of the teams being mixed, and while her ability to fish for Marvel Team-Up is nice, she was seeing a lot of play in decks that were running her strictly as a backup 2-drop and discard fodder. “What do you do?” “I sit in the KO’d pile to make Hypnotic Charms awesome.” Good work Lacuna! As odd as it may be, this is likely going to fuel some crazy team-up deck in the very near future.

Dracula’s Castle: This card outperformed expectations by a wide, wide margin. In the case of Underworld decks that ran it, the players using Dracula’s Castle were surprised to find that because Gravesite is so common in the environment, they practically always had extra characters to ditch, meaning that a turn 2 Castle could be worth as much as 18-21 extra endurance. That’s a beating. Players have also been using it as a generic renewable +1 DEF every turn, and for that it’s seeing play in a random assortment of non-Underworld decks. While I’m unsure of how long the latter trend will last, it does seem reasonable to think that Dracula’s Castle might spark a retreat of Gravesite from the metagame.

Jetpack: Jetpack was everywhere. The equipment of choice for Blade, Eric Brooks, it filled out basically every deck imaginable aside from X-Statix. It’s especially good in decks based around Hounds of Ahab, where lower drops that can stun up the curve are especially valuable.

Crime and Punishment: Many decks were using Crime and Punishment as a random ATK pump strictly for its raw power. There’s not much to be said about—even without the Overload combo, people miss their Savage Beatdowns, and with a bit of planning, the drawback attached to Crime and Punishment really isn’t that bad in many situations. As much as we’d like to think finesse and skill can overcome raw power on a wholesale level, history has just proven time and time again that the biggest generic pump in the format will always see play. This wouldn’t have been a pick of mine for a sleeper hit, let alone a real hit, but a lot of players were running it and it looks as if it’s successful enough to continue to see play.

The field is wide open for a huge lot of new single-card tech, and more will definitely emerge over the next few weeks. Firestar will undoubtedly be hot, teching Syndicate/Crime Lords and Wild Pack Swarm. Lots of other ideas are sure to emerge. If there’s one thing I love about Vs. System, it’s that it’s a constant treasure trove of tech, and with a wildly diverse metagame and a huge amount of creativity, it looks like Marvel Modern Age will not disappoint tech-philes.