Words cannot express how difficult it was for me not to start this article with a pun. Far superior to sarcasm, I love puns in the same way that Richard Edbury loves Britney, Marge loves Homer, and Barry White loves everything he can get his hands on. Apparently, this places me rather in the minority, so in the interest of not alienating my readers (who I love almost as much as a good pun) this week, any double meanings are entirely unintentional. With any luck, there will be a nice picture of Daryl Hannah as a mermaid somewhere in this article that will do more than a thousand puns ever could.

Today’s article is all about splashing characters. For those of you not familiar with the term, this refers to taking characters who aren’t affiliated with you main team and playing them, regardless of the fact that you never intend to team them up. Once you look past the base synergies of a particular team, you’ll often see various reprobates who somehow seem to have stood in the wrong queue on “team joining day” that would be ideal for what you’re planning to do.

Historically, I’ve found that many players are quite reluctant to include these misplaced souls in their tight-knit groups. Assuming, however, that you can handle the extra breakthrough you might take, such characters can really push various teams over the top.

There are assorted criteria for splashes, so let me break things down just a little bit.

Big Guns vs. Little Shooters

As characters get higher and higher up the curve, you become less and less concerned with taking boatloads of breakthrough from a splashed one. To this end, most recruit slots of cost 6 or more are prime candidates for splashed characters. Witness the dominance of Magneto, Master of Magnetism leading a big pile of metal robots at $10K events around the globe, or of Apocalypse helping out all and sundry as necessary on the eighth turn.

The smaller splash drops can be a little more of a liability. Classic Oldaker Doom deck players frequently found that in the late game, their Puppet Masters fell victim to the harshest type of retaliation from big drops that could conveniently do massive breakthrough on its tiny frame. Longshot, too, occasionally went from winning Wild Vomit players the game to losing it when he got beaten up in the late game in the most savage way possible.

In the first instance, I would suggest that any splashes you consider at lower drops must be disproportionately useful to the concept of your deck, because they do have the potential to be the weak link in the chain. As someone that went through a phase that involved splashing Prankster all over the place, I can very much attest to this.

Utility vs. Size

Normally, characters are splashed either for some synergistic ability or just because they’re very big compared to the on-team options. Again, at lower drops, whatever utility is afforded has to be higher to offset breakthrough issues. Size splashes tend naturally to occur higher up the curve and are generally rarer. There is little point in splashing a statistically large 2- or 3-drop, as it will soon get dwarfed, regardless. However, a certain superstar known as Luke Cage, Power Man is definitely a more enticing option.*

When you take splashes to their ultimate extreme, it’s possible to make some pretty impressive decks that exploit the wider synergies available above and beyond natural team affiliations.

One great example of this is the stall deck popularised by Jeremy Gray at $10K Minehead last year. To the best of my understanding, this was built by Team Misunderstood and given the name “Big Men.”

Here’s the build from Minehead:

4 Puppet Master

4 Medusa

4 Rogue, Power Absorption

3 Blackfire

3 Scarecrow

4 Mr. Freeze

1 Scorpion

4 Magneto, Master of Magnetism

4 Apocalypse

3 Onslaught

1 Mimic

4 Entangle

3 Flame Trap

4 Pleasant Distraction

3 Fast Getaway

4 Burn Rubber

4 Swift Escape

3 Batplane

This deck completely eschews the idea of playing on-team characters, and instead exploits the wider synergy of its characters’ abilities to slow down the game and make attacking really unappealing to the opponent. Interestingly, it was originally an experiment in what would happen if you just took the biggest splashable characters you could find at each drop, up to the 9-slot with Onslaught, who was pretty much the biggest splashable guy around at the time. Gradually, it evolved into what you see now. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, it has changed a fair bit since the event at which it had its best money finish.

There were clearly sacrifices made, such as the inclusion of a huge number of effects to deal with breakthrough, but it seemed to work. I have encountered a couple other very successful decks that run on a similar idea—focusing on one route to victory over team affiliations.

This deck was a rather extreme example, but in more conventional decks, I would still recommend thinking a little more widely about what the best drop is for each slot. The results could be fan-splash-tic.

Darn.

Pun.

I’d better go.

Tim “Can Resist Everything but Temptation” Willoughby

timwilloughby [at] hotmail [dot] com

*Luke is actually a force unto himself—a splash that doesn’t make any ripples as he seamlessly joins your team. It turns out that everybody loves him enough to welcome him with as much reinforcement and team attacking as he needs.