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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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When you draft with three Vs. packs, you will only collect 42 cards, and you must build a deck with a minimum of 30 cards. This means you only get to cut 12 cards from your final deck, so you must be careful not to collect too much chaff. If you do, though, it’s not the end of the world. You can fill out your deck with weaker characters or situational plot twists that can suffice in a pinch.
As you draft, pay attention to how many cards you have that will fill out your deck. If you find yourself frequently running low on playables at the conclusion of a draft, you may be doing too much gambling on cards outside the team you’ve chosen to draft your deck around or on cards that only work in combination with other cards. Instead, you may need to focus a little more on the marginal generic cards and characters within your primary team or teams. It will take a number of practice drafts before you will get a sense of how open to keep your options and for how long.
What to Look for in a Draft
Teams
 The Brotherhood, X-Men, and Fantastic Four can all be drafted fairly consistently thanks to high numbers of common characters spread through various lower resource point costs. While the same holds true for Doom, his team is a little trickier to draft since many of the non-character cards (and even some of the characters) of this team depend on having Dr. Doom himself in play. This will generally translate to having a much better draft deck when you have at least one copy of Dr. Doom than when you don’t.
The Sentinels are the hardest and riskiest of the five teams to draft. They don’t have common characters above a cost of 3 meaning that this team is not going to reliably provide you with any type of a late game in a draft deck. The very fact that other drafters will know this weakness as well means that many cards designed for Sentinels decks may keep getting passed around, and you may pick up many relatively strong cards late. If you happen to be the only person drafting Sentinels, you might have some exciting stuff going on. In this sense, even teams that don’t have as many common cards can still prove interesting in draft because there isn’t as much fighting over their cards. Nevertheless, in general, I’d stick to the first few teams mentioned above until you have a decent amount of experience.
I’d be remiss not to make note that there are only four common 6-drops. The Brotherhood has two (Sabretooth, Victor Creed and Mystique, Shape-Changing Assassin) and there is one each in Doom (Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom) and X-Men (Colossus). If you’re playing FF, be prepared to splash for one of these guys. The Fantastic Four are the big winner in the uncommon department, though, having the only non-rare 7-cost character, and it’s an Ever-Lovin’ Good . . . um . . . Thing.
If you are presented with two similarly powerful card choices on two different teams, this info can be helpful. For example, if you haven’t drafted a 6-cost character in the first set of packs, you might want to start drafting some Brotherhood cards in anticipation of seeing a 6-cost Brotherhood character in the future. If you draft those Brotherhood characters in advance, you won’t just be splashing yet another team. Of course, there are no guarantees, but the gamble could easily pay off.
It is extremely unlikely that you will manage to draft all of your characters in just one team, and if you are able to accomplish this, it means you were lucky to have selected a team that wasn’t popular at your table in this particular draft. In general, you should try to keep your characters limited to two teams as much as possible, only splashing big characters and extra characters to fill in your “curve” at cost points where you don’t have enough in your two teams.
Selecting Your First Few Cards
It may come as no surprise that the first cards you should take from packs are those cards that are hard to come by and ones that will fit into almost any deck. And what cards are those? Well, first and foremost, you should draft characters between the cost of 6 and 8. You may not be lucky enough to open or be passed others if you decide to pass the ones you see. The first large character you get will usually make it advisable for you to draft other characters in the same team.  On the other hand, your big drops are at a size where reinforcement and team attacks become less relevant, so don’t let them lock you too far into a team, unless they have team requirements for their recruitment. Some prime examples of 7-cost characters you’ll be glad to put in any draft deck are Wolverine, Berserker Rage and Magneto, Master of Magnetism, and you’ll be glad to get your hands on a character as sizeable as Thing, The Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing, even if you don’t have any other teammates out to produce his effect.
Thus far, I’ve mainly discussed the importance of taking powerhouse characters, but having a good selection of plot twists, locations, and equipment is also important. While it should be rare that you draft equipment as one of the first cards out of a pack, there are many perfectly acceptable choices amongst locations and plot twists. Even among the commons, there are plenty of desirable options. You want to make sure you get your fair share of combat tricks that will help establish a good board position. Once you solidify a number of characters that truly shine, you should be taking cards like Flying Kick and Acrobatic Dodge over most characters that don’t really stand out. Team-specific combat bonus modifiers, cards that help you search through your deck, and other cards that help you maintain characters on the board, such as Children of the Atom, also rank very high.
In general, I’ve found defensive modifiers to be more exciting than offense ones, which is the opposite of the trend I’ve noticed in Constructed. A good defensive trick is likely to make a whole series of attacks your opponent sets up no longer tenable. When your opponent has the initiative, a defensive trick can turn a disastrous turn into one where your opponent finds he or she is unable to make any other good attacks. And he or she may have left his or her characters vulnerable to your counter attack. In Limited, defensive tricks seem to be less frequently trumped by their offensive counterparts than in Constructed, where offensive tricks are all over the place and generally outmatch your defensive modifiers. You still want a balance of these cards in your draft deck, though, lest you encounter a situation you can’t bust through.
Reading Signals
Besides trying to find the best card to add to your deck, you should pay close attention to how many cards are out there for each team. With that information, you can make some guess as to which teams are being drafted most aggressively by the other players. Once you start getting packs that you’ve already seen, beginning with the pack you opened, if you can remember the original contents of those packs, you may be able to start more accurately judging which teams are being drafted. For example, let’s say you are doing a four-person draft, and you note that there are two solid Fantastic Four characters in your first pack. When you get that pack back with four fewer cards, you notice that all of the other players have opted to take non-FF cards. In that case, it might be a good time to start drafting Fantastic Four characters the rest of the way.
A Sealed Pack Practice
In preparation for next week, take a look at the Sealed Pack pool below that I just opened. I’m going to try to see how many different builds of this card pool people come up with here at UDE. I’ll be discussing the strengths and weaknesses of various builds and trying to relate specific cases that come up in this card pool to broader principles of Limited play. Anybody who takes the time to build a minimum 30-card deck from this list should send me (DHumpherys@metagame.com) his or her version by the end of the weekend, and I’ll try to incorporate those decks as a whole into the analysis as well. When sending me a deck, please let me know if you’ve already had the chance to play Sealed or Draft with Marvel, and if so, how many times. The character are sorted by cost, from lowest to highest, to facilitate the deck-building process for those of you looking through this.
Ant Man
Destiny
Frankie Raye
Lorelei
Phantazia
Random Punks
Shadowcat
2 Tibetan Monks
Archangel
Avalanche
Human Torch, Johnny Storm
Luke Cage
Pyro
Sentinel Mark I
2 Skrull Soldier
Iceman
Medusa
Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff
Sentinel Mark II
Thing, Ben Grimm
Blob
Spiral
Storm, Ororo Munroe
Titania
Dragon Man
Nimrod
Scarlet Witch
Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom
Rogue, Powerhouse
Magneto, Master of Magnetism
Dark Phoenix, Cosmic Entity
Four Freedoms Plaza
Yancy Street
Doomstadt
Orbital Sentinel Base
Negative Zone
Advanced Hardware
Borrowed Blade
Unstable Molecules
Children of the Atom
The New Brotherhood
Micro-Size
Reconstruction Program
Search and Destroy
Burn Rubber
Cover Fire
Entangle
2 Flying Kick
Not So Fast
Overload
Surprise Attack
2 Tech Upgrade
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