Some of you may be familiar with Jeremy Gray. He’s a buddy of mine who tends toward the rogue side of the game, and he’s come up with some crazy, crazy things that have gotten him a long way. For instance, he played a Puppet Master–based deck known as Gray Stall at $10K Minehead, finishing in the Top 4. While that was a terrific rogue deck, the one I’m looking at today is a bit more off the wall. Jeremy played it at Pro Circuit New York and went 8-4 on Day 1. It was known as the Witching Hour deck.
The Witching Hour deck is one of my favorite decks of all time. It was completely out of left field—no deck in the history of the game has worked similarly, and only the Fiddler on the Roof deck has come close since. No one was expecting it, no one knew how it worked, and no one at the tournament knew the best way to stop it. Unfortunately, most of Jeremy’s losses were early in the day, or it would have spent a lot more time in the feature match area.
Witching Hour is itself a wonderful rogue card. It’s powerful enough to win the game, but only if you’re focusing on it specifically. It’s a card that begs you to build a deck. It lets you cheat your resource points, which is huge, but it seems like the effort you’d put into loading your graveyard would get you killed before you got to the Witching Hour. The only way to know that, though, was to build the deck, and many people didn’t bother to build it. Most people shake off that little voice in the back of their heads that screams, “Build me!”, but Jeremy listened, and the result was a deck that had no problem at all with the Sentinels-loaded PC: NY field.
Jeremy Gray
PC: New York 2005
Witching Hour
Characters
4 Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom
4 Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius
1 Kristoff Von Doom, The Boy Who Would be Doom
4 Lacuna, Media Darling
4 Nekra, Nekra Sinclair
4 Rama-Tut, Pharaoh from the 30th Century
2 Robot Destroyer, Army
3 Shelob, Queen of Spiders
4 Steel Wind, Cyborg Cyclist
Plot Twists
1 Crowd Control
1 Devil’s Due
4 Gone But Not Forgotten
4 Marvel Team-Up
3 Mystical Paralysis
3 Not So Fast
3 Reconstruction Program
4 Witching Hour
Locations
4 Doomstadt
4 Latveria
There have been several errata to cards in this deck, so let me summarize here. Gone But Not Forgotten is now banned. Rama-Tut had, at this point, been errata’d to read, “When you recruit Rama-Tut . . .” rather than “When Rama-Tut comes into play . . .” as a result of the Dr. Light, Master of Holograms–based Light Show deck, which won by returning Rama-Tut to play with Dr. Light’s ability. At the time, Witching Hour’s text allowed you to recruit characters from your KO’d pile. Because of a powerful interaction with press, Witching Hour has since been errata’d to put characters into play from your KO’d pile instead of allowing you to recruit them, so the Rama-Tut / Witching Hour combination no longer works. Witching Hour still has untapped potential, though. Rogue deckbuilders, keep your eye on this card.
Jeremy first built this deck after PC: Amsterdam, and I had the pleasure of losing to the first incarnation repeatedly at the Amsterdam airport with my Titans deck. He spent quite a bit of time tuning the deck, and it was his pet project for the entire two and a half months between that PC and New York. During that time, he pestered us unmercifully about playing against the deck, while the rest of us were trying to come up with “actual good decks,” as somebody put it, to play in the Big Apple. Jeremy, of course, chose to play the deck with which he had the most experience. The rest of us had a terrible tournament.
The heart of the Witching Hour deck was a bit complicated. The goal was to play Witching Hour on turn 6 with a Latveria and a way to control Dr. Doom. You also had to have at least one Gone But Not Forgotten in your resource row, along with a Team-Up of Doom and Underworld, and Devil’s Due. Once you had those things, you played your first copy of Witching Hour. Your KO’d pile should have been relatively full of things at that point due to Nekra and Steel Wind. You’d play as many characters as you could manage, including at least one Rama-Tut if the copy of Witching Hour you played was your only one. For every character you played, you lost 2 endurance, but once you played your characters, you could KO them to Devil’s Due and gain that 2 endurance back, or gain 4 or 6 if you had multiple copies of Gone But Not Forgotten. After you’d put all your characters into play, used their abilities, and then KO’d them to Devil’s Due, you would play Witching Hour again. Because of your extra Nekra and Steel Wind activations, your KO’d pile should be that much more full. Rinse and repeat. After three Witching Hours, you would be out of resource points, so you’d play Crowd Control, put all your characters in the back row, and wait for your opponent to deal 8 or so combat damage. You’d do this every turn until time ran out, at which point you would have an insurmountable endurance lead. Alternately, you could pile all your Devil’s Due counters on one character and attack for huge amounts. Jeremy killed two people with an enormous Kristoff von Doom, The Boy Who Would be Doom.
Jeremy’s justification for playing the deck was that it beat Curve Sentinels, which was, at the time, a perfectly valid reason to play any deck. And boy, did it beat Curve Sentinels. The games weren’t even close; the Curve Sentinels player could stack his or her deck with all the best cards and still not be able to beat an average Witching Hour draw. Yes, we tested it that way. Also, PC: New York was the last Pro Circuit at which Overload was legal, and the deck just didn’t care about Overload. There was no one character important enough to Witching Hour that Overloading it was worth the time. In fact, this was one of the original decks that didn’t care about the combat phase.
Curve Sentinels was the gorilla on top of the Golden Age metagame for PC: New York. It won the tournament and put six players into the Top 8. Sentinels typically won in combat on turn 6. Bastion, along with the Savage Beatdown / Nasty Surprise / Overload combination, allowed Curve Sentinels to dictate the combat phase and win the game. But when the opposing deck didn’t actually do anything during the combat phase, Sentinels typically had very few ways to disrupt it. The Witching Hour deck went off on turn 6, and by the end of the turn, it had usually gained 30 or 40 endurance. After that turn, Jeremy could play Gone But Not Forgotten as a resource every turn, recycle Witching Hour three or four times a turn, play Crowd Control every turn, and gain much more endurance than the opponent could deal.
Titans was also a relatively good matchup. Because Witching Hour had no single character that it cared to have in play, Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal; Terra, Tara Markov; and Finishing Move were all essentially blank cards. Titans did have a few ways to win the game, though. Foiled could put both decks down a resource so that Titans had more time to win in combat, and Teen Titans Go! tricks could allow Titans to win the game on turn 5. The latter was an uncommon draw, and the former was stopped by the Not So Fasts included in the deck.
Evil Medical School was, frankly, a horrible matchup. Fizzle on Witching Hour ended the game. But Jeremy didn’t expect to see much Evil Medical School because of how complicated that deck was to play. He only played against one, and as expected, he lost to it. Such is life with the metagame deck.
On the flip side, life with the metagame deck is good when you get to play against the matchup you prepared for. Jeremy played against eight Curve Sentinels decks on the day, losing to one because his deck wouldn’t cough up the cards he needed, but taking down the other seven. In Jeremy’s final round, he was paired against John “Bam Bam” Rich, who was playing Sentinels and recognized a bad thing when he saw it. He told Jeremy to make the biggest Kristoff von Doom he could. Kristoff won the game at 110 ATK / 111 DEF.
Jeremy also did well against other decks designed to beat the Sentinels. He would have been in bad shape against Number One Dream, but luckily, he didn’t have to play against it. The most common anti-Sentinels deck at the tournament, though, was Doom control, which aimed to win with Gamma Bomb. Jeremy’s deck could end every single turn with no characters in play and still beat Gamma Bomb. All of the action happened during the combat phase, and Jeremy would be in the lead by hundreds of endurance points by then.
Cards like Witching Hour aren’t often made anymore. There is always a huge potential for brokenness in a card that lets you play characters without paying resource points for them. Nothing even remotely similar to Witching Hour has been released since, which should tell you just how powerful the deck could be. Over the last two years, many people have played Witching Hour decks in various tournaments, and more often than not, they have finished with good records. Witching Hour is one of those decks that will, every once in a while, rear its ugly head to beat you in a totally unexpected way.
In that vein, one card that you all might look into is Project Ragna Rok from the new Hellboy Essential Collection. First, if you don’t have the Essential Collection, go buy it. It is one of the coolest sets of cards ever made. But Project Ragna Rok is one of those cards that encourages you to do unorthodox things in order to win the game. The best way to put counters on Ragna Rok is to KO your own characters with the ability. Is there a deck that can KO its own characters from turns 3 to 6 and win during the recovery phase? Do you need to splash Wild Pack cards into the deck so that you can use Powell to search for Ragna Rok and put it into your resource row on turn 3? Will you run out of characters to KO? Should you use the Thule Society’s Army theme to make sure you always have characters? Is turn 6 too slow in an environment full of Quicksilvers and Sinister Syndicate? These are important questions. But the most important ones are: Can I win the game with a Project Ragna Rok deck enough times to win a tournament? And will that be fun? I’m betting it is.
For all the rogue deckbuilders out there, this is the lesson of Witching Hour: occasionally, a time will come when that pet deck is perfect for the tournament you’re going to. The metagame is right, your cards are right, and that perfect storm has come together for your favorite deck to take down a major event. Maybe you have that [Project Ragna Rok] deck, and the metagame has started to lean toward control decks that win in the late turns. Keep your eyes open and don’t miss your chance, because it may not come again. Pull the right deck out of the box and win some games.
Thanks for reading.
Mark Slack
Ms243@evansville.edu