As always, I’m thrilled to find the odd little bits of creativity that people run in established decks, and $10K Seattle didn’t disappoint in the slightest. The following are my top four picks for interesting single card tech that appeared at the event.

Micro-Sentinels:  

While they were only played in a handful of the 21 Curve Sentinel decks in competition for the day, Micro-Sentinels had a stunning impact. Not just because they worked well, but because . . . come on! It’s freakin’ Micro-Sentinels!

While Total Anarchy does a decent to awesome job of teching against Teen Titans, it’s less than proactive for Curve in a matchup against Blitz. Is it useful? For sure. But at the same time, it’s often not enough to stave off a flood of 1- and 2-drops if the opponent’s build can shunt out that kind of offense. Micro-Sentinels can really help in that situation, especially with Hounds of Ahab giving a guaranteed source of board presence. If you’re infecting just two characters with Micro-Sentinels, that’s pretty decent, and if you’re infecting more or flipping multiple copies, they get to be downright nasty.

All in all, the Micros serve two purposes—they fend off the honed hyper-fast decks that have been engineered to outspeed Curve Sentinels while at the same time adding more fuel to the Sents’ KO theme. It’s been said that Hounds of Ahab gave Curve Sentinels their second win condition, and this is something I agree with. Micro-Sentinels requires cutting a few drops from a jam-packed archetype that can be difficult to find space in, but it looks as if those drops can really be worth it, as the payoff is an even stronger secondary path to victory.

Oh, and it wreaks havoc on Fantastic Fun—bad news for what is otherwise one of the deck’s best matchups.


Forced Allegiance:

A lot of players were running serious off-team tech. Mark Moonrider popped up in a lot of F4 Burn decks, mid-game supplements like Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr made their way into Curve Sentinels, and a lot of the more random team-up decks were running additional characters beyond their two main affiliations. The answer for several players was Forced Allegiance.

In case you’re not familiar with it, I’ll recap: Forced Allegiance is an ongoing plot twist that, when flipped, allows you to name one team affiliation and then overwrite all your existing team affiliations with the chosen one. You lose some of the diversity of having mixed teams and can create loyalty issues for yourself, but in the proper deck it can be exceedingly good. Case in point: Jeremy Hardwick and a few other players were using it to fit non-F4 characters into F4 Burn and then ready them over and over with Cosmic Radiation—cute trick.


Daredevil, The Man without Fear:

The all star of $10K Orlando returned with a Vengeance and was teched into more than just Curve Sentinels this time around. A wide variety of curve decks were using Daredevil to take down Curve Sentinel decks in the late game, allowing themselves the luxury of an attacker that can’t be Overloaded when swinging into Bastion. Like in $10K Orlando, the card seemed to get mixed results, but its popularity was undeniable.

 
Betrayal:

Okay, okay, Betrayal isn’t exactly new tech. Not by a long shot. It’s been run successfully in Teen Titans for quite a while, but it is a rarity in Curve Sentinels, and a lot of the latter were running it. The main reason? The obvious concern of mirror matches. But a handful of players also thought of using it as a poor man’s evasion, stunning their own characters in desperate situations to create a Sticky Situation effect. While the original printed version of the card states that Betrayal has to target an opponent, the errataed version does not, stating only that the card requires a target player. Always useful? No way. But it’s a nice little trick that can save that off-turn Mark II or Boliver Trask from becoming a gateway to your endurance.

Out of the four, it looks like Micro-Sentinels may be the big winner. Expect to see it take hold in major tournaments over the next few weeks, especially in metagames with lots of TNB Blitz decks that favor off-curve plays.