After drafting Green Lantern with Gabe Walls for the last pod, I felt that I had a fair handle on the methods and merits of a very aggressive draft strategy. When I sat down with Bulk Lao, who is among the top five ranked Sealed players on the planet, for some reason, I expected to see something similar to Walls and company’s strategy. Boy, was I wrong.

As is ever the case in an evolving metagame, whenever one set of players develops a strategy for winning, there will be those that are looking for the plan to counter it. Bulk had opted for his Green Lantern picks to be about as defensive as is possible in Vs. System for the format. By picking characters with “more junk in the trunk,” it would be possible to blunt the offense of many decks before taking control in the late game. As defensive effects tend to be drafted slightly less often than offensive ones, this seemed like a fair plan.

Bulk picked Krona first and continued on his way with In Remembrance, Katma Tui, and Superwoman. If ever there were a defensive deck, it would be this one. With Neil Reeves, who has a predilection for more aggressive moves, directly to his left, there was a nice little bit of cooperation tacitly going on. Bulk’s plan obviously included getting aggressive at some point—indeed, he did mention the power of “switching gears” to throw off opponents. To that end, when a powerful offensive trick appeared, it still made it to the pile. In pack one, this meant a sixth pick Cosmic Conflict, and in the following packs, there was another one to create a few surprises.

There were two big issues for Bulk at this particular pod though. Firstly, there was not a single Mouse Trap to be found for him at any time. Either it wasn’t opened, or perhaps it had gone surprisingly early. Certainly, Gabe Walls had defensively drafted two copies in his previous pod, citing them as his worst nightmare, so he may have done the same again from opposite Lao at the table.

The other problem was filling out the curve neatly. There were certainly some nice drops throughout the packs for Lao, but he seemed a little top-heavy. At the same time, he was dangerously low on 4- and 5-drops, which are typically at the center of the action. A copy of Willworld looked like it might be helpful in smoothing out the problem, and in pack three, Bulk was aggressively going for 4-drops, including Abin Sur and Manhunter Excavator. All in all, team affiliations were not high priorities for Lao. He was confident that whatever endurance could be saved by reinforcing could just as easily be saved by having a higher DEF value. The theory was sound enough, but unfortunately for Bulk, the packs didn’t seem to favor him this time.

It will be interesting to see how he does in this pod, as he really needs a 3-0 to make Top 8, and his deck is far from devastating on paper.