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The Sentry™
Card# MTU-017

While his stats aren’t much bigger than those of the average 7-drop, Sentry’s “Pay ATK” power can drastically hinder an opponent’s attacking options in the late game.
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The Kids are Alright

Tim Willoughby

November 18, 2005

It turns out that if you’re looking for a name for your daughter, calling her Valeria will equip her with remarkable powers. Sure, her name will sound a bit like some sort of medical condition, but that will be made up for by her ability to do incredible things in beatdown metagames. Being able to ensure that one’s characters are unstunnable is a pretty neat trick, and the recent addition of Catcher’s Mitt facilitates the complete shut-down of the combat step.

Various players in the field at Pro Circuit LA are making the most of the awesome power of A Child Named Valeria. Their modus operandi vary slightly, but ultimately center on winning outside the combat step. The names of those playing the deck are not ones that it would be sensible to ignore, either.

Craig Edwards came second at the very first Pro Circuit with Rigged Elections, and he has an updated decklist that appears to owe quite a bit to the list that Tim Batow did very well with at $10K Chicago. The Midnight Sons engine creates a multi-teamed defense that bears elements of New School strategy, including Shimmer where necessary to allow the deck to go off without needing as many copies of A Child Named Valeria. This frees up some Alfred Pennyworth activations for searches that will actually win the game. The deck requires only a single copy of Rigged Elections to go off, and it has Null Time Zone to help force through its victory condition. While not necessarily as quick as Edwards’s build in Indianapolis back at the start of the Pro Circuit, this build has a far superior defense, making its win almost inevitable.

In terms of defensive power, though, nothing can really come close to competing with the build coming out of Virginia in the hands of Matt Oldaker and Jason Hager. The deck is focused solely on keeping up an unending supply of copies of A Child Named Valeria with a little help from Mr. Rama-Tut, Pharaoh from the 30th Century, who can conveniently fetch back the powerful plot twist as necessary—and indeed be returned to life himself with some help from the Avalon Space Station. This feels very similar to the build of Pablo Molina, which made Top 8 two weeks ago at the $10K Gen Con UK, but it trumps it with its win condition. With Scarlet Witch, Eldritch Enchantress, the scads of unstunnable tiny characters pull double duty, and the Virginians’ minions put out more damage with help from a Team-Up to turn them into Brotherhood characters.

Looking to the $10K in England, there was another novel deck involving A Child Named Valeria that has picked up some interest. Sam Roads’s “Both Guns Blazing” deck, sported by a whopping seven teams, used the combined powers of Dr. Light, Arthur Light and Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal, Sharpshooter, with Cosmic Radiation fueling the fire from the many activated ability–powered characters. William Postlethwait has taken a good list and tweaked it to add an extra trick, as if it didn’t have enough tricks already. A single copy of Rigged Elections can come out of nowhere to win in some match-ups (for example, against other Child decks) in which being able to stun an opponent’s entire board for a few turns just isn’t good enough.

On a more classic note, Dean Sohnle is again rocking his Fantastic Fun deck, making the most of the fact that there is a metagame open enough to discourage players from running too many “hate” cards, which are known to make the chirpy Canadian’s day a little sadder. There aren’t a huge number of tweaks or clever variations in the deck, although Dr. Light, Master of Holograms is doing his naughty little fandango to keep Dean’s board busy. With all of his equips, he gets to draw enough cards that he doesn’t really need any search to find A Child Named Valeria and the Cosmic Radiations that power out an obscene amount of burn.

Of course, some Child decks do like to attack for the win, though typically it will be very much on their own time. Roy St. Clair finished second at a $10K with a fatter-than-normal build of Fat Bat. This weekend, he has a 61-card build that maintains the same ethos of stalling out to turn 7, when large numbers of characters + Cosmic Radiation + Batman, The Dark Knight enable him to draw his entire deck and attack for an egregiously large amount. Press the Attack finishes things off if necessary. If things somehow go on to turn 8, Roy has Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd in order to keep the initiative for the rest of the game. In a format without Overload, Batman, The Dark Knight is truly a force to be reckoned with.

The final installment in the ongoing series of the A Child Named Valeria show features a few extra big beaters. Arnaud Vilain’s build uses Jean Grey, Phoenix Force as an additional stall element in order to survive long enough to drop Anti-Monitor, finishing off opponents whose beatdown plans have been frustrated. In a strange riff on the X-Stall deck brought by Eugene Harvey at last year’s PC LA, this build has the extra resilience that Valeria can afford.

The interesting footnote to each of these decks is that there is one deck in the format that may well have the number of most, if not all, of these builds. The Squadron Supreme has a hugely aggressive early game, which allows it to get in some serious early endurance loss, and then Other-Earth, which can allow for one big attack to go straight through the defenses of your typical Child-based deck. Additionally, Golden Archer gives the deck an out even if Other-Earth doesn’t show up. Teen Titans can also potentially race the slower Child Lock decks by using Red Star in a similar capacity. When children play with fire, bad things happen.