The DC side of the event started the day with a lot of Titans decks in play, but when the dust settled, the Top 8 looked more like this:

3 League of Assassins
2 My Beloved
2 Brave and the Bold
1 Arkham Inmates

That's right, not a single Teen Titans deck made it to Sunday, though Mike Dove finished in ninth, saying that he had a chance to beat every deck he faced but threw away two of his matches to costly mistakes. The question must be asked: Why did Titans fail so badly, when they are clearly the strongest DC-based deck in the Pro Circuit?

There are actually a couple of reasons people have used to try and explain the failure, but the most noticeable was the presence of so many League of Assassins decks. League isn't particularly strong in a more diverse field, but when the metagame is heavy in Titans and mirror matches, League suddenly became the best deck in the metagame. Tower of Babel absolutely goes to work on all of the tricks that makes the Titans deck so strong, thus shutting down part of the aggressive combo nature of the DC universe's current favorite team.

Another reason the Titans decks struggled today is that they lost some important cards from the complete deck that handicapped Titans players all day long. Teen Titans Go! is swell, but when you take away Press the Attack, you remove one of the elements that help push the deck over the top. Titans players also found themselves missing important disruption plot twists like Overload and Finishing Move, and removing Savage Beatdown made the deck a bit slower, giving League players more time to stabilize and play their fat.

Talking to Danny Mandel about the decktypes in the Top 8, he seemed pleased by the relative diversity we would see on this side of the bracket for Sunday. It would have been even cooler if Ben Seck had managed to notch one more win on the day for his Darkseid's Elites deck, as that would have given a new Superman deck a place in the Top 8 as well. As it was, Seck finished in the money in twelfth place.

Marvel

If anything, the Marvel side of the tournament was even more diverse than the DC bracket. The archetype breakdown for the Top 8 looked like:

2 Fantastic Four
2 Common Enemy Cosmic Combo
1 Curve Sentinels
1 Wild Vomit
1 Common Enemy
1 Solitaire Stall

Since the Marvel field itself was quite varied, and there were 125 players in the field, it's difficult to describe how things played out. The Hoffmans, both running their Common Enemy Cosmic Combo deck, finished with eight wins apiece. For most of the tournament, the combo elements of Cosmic Radiation plus Team Tactics took their opponents by surprise, but even when people learned what to expect, the deck proved able to ram its combo through if given enough time. Speaking of Cosmic Radiation, even one of the Fantastic Four decks got into the action on that one, proving that the card has a lot of potential, at least in this more restrictive format.

Two Sentinels decks will also be playing on Sunday, proving the robots still have the potential to be a menace to the field, even if they don't always execute as well as you'd like them to. The fact that one Wild Vomit version of the bad robots made it's way through such a large field means that the deck certainly isn't dead, provided your Longshot luck holds constant. Also placing a single deck in the field each were Common Enemy, the deck many players considered to be the strongest in the format, and Solitaire Stall, the Billy Zonos deck that is similar to the X-Men Stall deck developed by Team TOGIT for the PC, though it certainly goes about executing the same plan in a different way.

Just seeing which decks win each side of the bracket tomorrow will be interesting, but once that happens the real fun begins—every player earning money on each side of the bracket will be rooting for his or her champion to double their prize money. Stay tuned, true believers—there will be a lot more excitement tomorrow!