With the second draft over, all the players in contention are crunching the numbers to see who is still capable of making Sunday. Michael Dalton is the first lock into the Top 8, making him the first player to appear in three final days at the Pro Circuit. There is a cast of stars who are very close behind him—Dave Spears and Hans Joachim Höh are only a win behind, and $10K stars Dean Sohnle and Alex Brown are in the next pack. TOGIT resident genius Eugene Harvey, Neil Reeves, Karl Horn, Phimus Pan, and Matthew Tatar all sitting on eleven wins.

The target number of match wins is fourteen, but there is an outside possibility that a player with that many may miss out. The tension for these players is palpable, and we’ll see in three rounds who is able to outlast their competitors and enter the final stage.

Sometimes even the Pros make mistakes. Dave Spears was playing a Feature Match against Neil Reeves, and on the fourth turn, Neil was team attacking Dave’s Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage with a Quicksilver and Hank Pym ◊ Yellowjacket. The game had been played in a lighthearted fashion, so Dave, thinking that it really didn’t matter which 3-drop got stunned, nonchalantly said, “Stun whatever you want.”

Neil took advantage of this and stunned Hank Pym, thus readying his Quicksilver and allowing him to attack directly. Dave, aghast at his mistake, tried to reason his way out of it, saying that he wasn’t allowed to give Neil the choice. But eventually they worked it out, and Dave swallowed his pride and 4 endurance. Dave was still able to pull the game out on turn 6, but he only won by a whisker. I’m not sure I would have wanted to be in the area if that mistake had cost him the game.

You wouldn’t like Dave Spears when he’s angry . . .

Aaron Weil has been riding the PC rollercoaster. After an unblemished Day 1 Constructed performance, he had a terrible first Draft—he went 0-3. So, when I came up to ask him what went wrong, he knew what was up.

“Everyone has been coming up to me and asking what went wrong!” Aaron lamented. “My deck wasn’t great and there was a statistical chance I would miss my first and second drops, but I had everything go wrong. I was Masters of Evil with two Heinrich Zemo ◊ Baron Zemos, so I really wanted the even initiatives. But it seems people knew what I was playing, as they all won the roll and chose the evens. Dave Spears knew exactly what was up in our game.”

But things were looking up for Aaron as he fanned his second Draft deck to me. In it was Hawkeye, Leader by Example and a Monica Rambeau ◊ Captain Marvel, amongst other good characters. “My curve is great, but my plot twists stink. I should be able to do much better this Draft.”

The Australians turned up in force at the Pro Circuit and are itching to add to the single Top 8 performance of Scott Hunstad at PC Amsterdam. Leading the charge is Alex Brown, who is jokingly referred to as “the best technical Vs. player in the world”—a sly comparison to former WWE Wrestling Champ Bret Hart. A true grinder, he is known for spending hours tweaking literally the 59th card in a deck. Drafting at table 1, he 3-0’d the competition with his mix-n-match Kang-X Draft deck. He even beat Michael Dalton’s brutal 4x Faces of Evil deck. This tied him for first place at eleven wins with Dalton, David Spears, and Neil Reeves. Impressive company, indeed.

In fact, the Australians who made Day 2 went into the Draft with a plan of forcing Kang Council and splashing either Thunderbolts or Squadron Supreme. This strategy went extremely well for them, with two players (Alex Brown and Andrew Corney) going 3-0 and the other three Australians (Randall Hughes, James Kong, and Paul van der Werk) going 2-1. Never was there a more impressive display of the archetype than in Andrew Corney’s feature match with Kristian Kockott, where Andrew ended up on turn 8 with five Kangs on the table!

Even the best have their bad days. At every PC, if you don’t make Day 2, you still have a chance to redeem yourself at the $10K event on the following day. You might think that this event would be easier, considering that the better players are still playing in the Pro Circuit . . . but think again. Out of the huge field of 240 players, there are two Pro Circuit Champions, nearly half a dozen PC Top 8 competitors, and scores of players with $10K Top 8 finishes. PC Amsterdam Champion Adam Horvath and PC LA ’04 Champion Ryan Jones are just some of this number. But it’s good to know that if you come to a Pro Circuit and don’t have the best of luck on Day 1, it won’t be a total waste. With the convention and the $10K, there’s still plenty to do. Hopefully you can play a PC Champ having another bad day!

UDE recently changed its tiebreaker policy concerning end-of-game procedure. Previously, if a game went to time and both players were not in the negative endurance zone, they played another turn. If they were still at the same endurance at the end of the extra turn, they would continue having turns until the there was a difference in endurance totals. The policy has now changed so that if the players are still tied for endurance at the end of the first extra turn, the match is awarded to the player who didn’t have the initiative. This was a time-saving measure because most of the time, the player without the initiative on the next turn would lose the game anyway.

Now, this occurrence happens so infrequently that I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen in all the hundreds of matches I have watched. But Alex Jebailey was the unfortunate first victim of the new rule, and he might have been able to win, even though he didn’t have the initiative on the theoretical extra turn. Sometimes you’re so close . . . and yet so far away.

FTN’s Michael Dalton came into the Draft planning to take either Squadron Supreme or Faces of Evil. After taking a few Thunderbolt characters and Squadron Supreme characters, he ended up with a very solid but unspectacular opening pack. In the second pack, it all changed. After seeing a mid-pick Faces of Evil, he decided to dip his toe into that strategy, and then received another three(!) Faces of Evil over the remainder of the Draft! He also picked up excellent characters such as Speed Demon, Second Chance Speedster.  

Dalton did say he was worried that the strategy might be over-drafted at the first table, but he also said, “The first Faces was just in case. But when I saw the second one, I knew that it had been under-drafted.” A classic case of the counter-counter strategy, Holmes. Case closed.

9:00 AM: Draft Strategy Supreme

A lucky 109 players woke up this morning with a chance to win $40,000, and to do so, they need to battle through nine rounds of Avengers Draft. This format was previewed at the last Pro Circuit in Indianapolis, where Faces of Evil decks ran rampant in the format. But there is a change in the wind. Many pros have predicted that this archetype will be over-drafted, so they have changed their strategies accordingly. The Australians, known experts in the Booster Draft format, prefer drafting the deeper (and arguably more flexible) Squadron Supreme affiliation. Team FTN has been practicing hard for this format with their much vaunted “Hippo Draft” web program, so look for them to head to the top of the standings and stay there. I’ll be following a few pros today to find out what they consider to be the most important cards.

On the other side of the room, the $10K is getting ready to start with the relatively new Justice League of America set. Pro Circuit New York winner Adam Bernstein was unfortunate not to not make Day 2 at the PC, so he will try to make back-to-back $10K wins following his win in the same format under a month ago. Joining him will be most of the other unlucky players who didn’t make Day 2. Keep looking on Metagame.com for more updates on both events!