If you’re a regular reader of my weekly feature here on Metagame.com, you should notice a few things about this installment of the Week in Review. Today’s article is a few days late and only covers a single topic: this past weekend’s Pro Circuit in Atlanta. The event was certainly an exciting one, and there’s a lot to talk about.

Naturally, the most important part of the tournament (from my point of view) is the fact that I finished third. I don’t want to turn this into a tournament report, though, so if you’d like to hear about how I bumbled my way to a money finish (and you probably don’t), you’ll have to wait until I actually write one, and that may very well never happen.

But, I digress.

The format for the Pro Circuit was Marvel Modern Age. It was, in my opinion, the best Constructed format that this game has had to offer. Many decks were solid contenders, and several more hovered on the brink of viability. Even if you aren’t familiar with a single MMA deck or you haven’t tested a single game, there’s still a very good reason for you to care about this format’s diversity. As it happens, the Pro Circuit wasn’t the last word on the format. This season’s Constructed PCQs are all Marvel Modern Age, and there will be an MMA $10K event this weekend in Austin, Texas. While the PC may have defined a metagame, the environment will continue to be refined for several months to come. Before all the players out there get to the task of re-breaking the format, though, let’s take a look at the results we got from Atlanta. A good place to start is the Top 8 decklist roster, which can be found here.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are three Squadron Supreme decks. Squadron was clearly the defining deck of the tournament. More than one in three players piloted it, and for good reason—it’s extremely fast, consistent, and powerful. In addition, there are several ways to build the deck. Runner-up Shane Wiggans’s version is a meat-and-potatoes list that has four of every critical card and a few odd combat enhancements to fill in the remaining spots in the deck. Winner Vidianto Wijaya’s list, on the other hand, has a little bit of tech thrown in: Enemy of My Enemy can fetch Hawkeye, Clinton Barton, while characters like Firestar, Hellion and Electric Eve can serve to hasten a victory.

The question is, which build is better? The answer, of course, is that it entirely depends on what you’re looking for. Shane’s version is undoubtedly easier to play and more likely to get a draw that simply crushes all opposition. Vidi’s deck, while not as likely to spring both Albert Gaines ◊ Nuke and Other-Earth on you, has a little more versatility to get out of tough situations.

The big check went to Vidi, though, so let’s just say that he broke the format and move on.

The next deck that made a big splash in the Top 8 was X-Faces. Only three teams, representing about five percent of the field, played this deck, but most of them made money. An excellent matchup against traditional curve decks like Squadron, combined with the ability to put an obscene amount of ATK on the table, made this the breakout deck of the tournament. Brian Gates and I played very different lists, and I can tell you unequivocally that my deck is the inferior one. One of the strongest features of Brian’s X-Faces deck is its ability to run both Mob Mentality and Brave New World, rendering cards like Hawkeye and Wonder Man ineffective. Unfortunately, my team completely missed this little combo in testing. Whoops. On the other hand, Brian’s deck has a card or two that I don’t agree with running (such as [Marcus Daniels ◊ Blackout]), and it’s missing a few that I wouldn’t consider leaving out (like Time Breach). In short, the X-Faces deck is complicated, both in its structure and in the way it plays. It will take you quite a bit of playtesting to settle on a good list that you can navigate well.

Moving on, we find two Mental decks. Matt Oldaker and Quang Nguyen both played trait-based control builds. While their lists are dramatically different from each other, they have the same sort of game plan in mind: dominate combat by reusing defensive plot twists, and then seal the game with Rachel Summers. This strategy is incredibly straightforward, and many teams didn’t even think to test it. While certainly top-tier, this deck didn’t go all the way in Atlanta because of its vulnerability to Squadron’s explosive draws. It’s a fine matchup on paper, but any reactive deck will naturally run into games where it doesn’t draw its tools and simply can’t find a way to win.

The last deck in the Top 8 was Hellfire Club, played by Niles Rowland. This deck confuses me a bit. On Day 1, after every round, I would ask Niles what his record was. His reply often was that he was undefeated. Also after every round, I would confirm that he was, in fact, playing a Hellfire Club deck. You see, we built this deck in testing. The list couldn’t have been more than ten cards off from what Niles played in the Top 8. Our Hellfire deck lost to everything. Everything. It got thoroughly steamrolled by anything we ran against it. Are there some critical card choices here that make Rowland’s version superior to all others? Is Niles such an excellent player that he managed to navigate a generally dismissed deck to an excellent finish? Or, is he just the luckiest man alive? I honestly have no idea. In general, Hellfire is just another control deck, but it’s anyone’s guess how well it can perform in a metagame full of Squadron and Faces.

Now, these four archetypes weren’t the only decks in the tournament—not by a long shot. All manner of other decks were played, but there were only two that showed up in any great number. The first of these was Avengers/Brotherhood. I lump them together because they tend to do similar things, and it’s very easy to integrate aspects of one of these decks into the other. Wonder Man is not out of place in a straight Brotherhood build, nor is Amelia Voght terrible in a build that plays nothing but Avengers. In general, these builds enjoyed disproportionately little success for one reason: people were ready for them. Avengers was the ten-ton gorilla in the format coming into Atlanta, and the first item on the agenda of most testing teams was to build a deck that could beat it. Every deck in the Top 8 claims a good matchup against reservist decks. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should discount them. The metagame may very well shift favorably toward Avengers when other decks start diluting their effectiveness in the matchup by metagaming against each other.

The second archetype that made a sizeable appearance but did not enjoy a great deal of success was the Morlocks. This deck can suffer both from inconsistent draws and the possibility of being completely run over in aggressive matchups. In general, I would say that Morlocks is a second-tier deck. It doesn’t have the raw power of the other aggressive decks, and it doesn’t have the consistent board control elements of the control decks. Perhaps there’s a way to build the deck specifically to dominate the Faces and Squadron matchups—I hear Momentary Distraction is pretty good. What showed up in Atlanta, though, just didn’t appear to be up to snuff.

That about covers it for Marvel Modern Age. Of course, lots of other things happened at the PC. Drafting made up fully half the event, but as it’s both infinitely more complicated and not as relevant now, I’ll let someone else talk about it. (Nate Price, where are you?) And, of course, there’s the issue of which teams did well and why. I’ll leave team comparisons to the forums, where I’m sure threads are already popping up about exactly who won the day.

I will be back on Metagame this weekend, doing more Marvel Modern Age coverage from $10K Austin. As always, the coverage will be coming in live, so be sure to check it out. And, of course, I will be back next week with another installment of the Week in Review. Until then . . .