Neil Reeves got off to a fast start with his Team X-change deck, and after a couple of rounds of play, I had a chance to talk to him about why he and fellow PC: Indy Top 8 competitor Gabe Walls played their deck. They worked with a pretty large group of players for this event that included many Dutch TCG pros as well as the TOGIT gang that cooked up the X-Stall deck for the last PC, but the two of them eschewed the decks chosen by the rest of the team.
Almost everyone else from the squad seemed to be playing a hyper-aggressive Honor Among Thieves deck that bore more than a passing resemblance to early incarnations of The New Brotherhood. Neil’s deck is quite the opposite (as you would expect from the X-Statix affiliation). It slowly and inextricably takes control of the game, and if it can’t win on the wheels of Professor X, Mental Master, it can burn an opponent out with Vivisector, Myles Alfred.
It was the decidedly non-aggressive nature of the deck that pushed Neil to play it this weekend. “It’s just by far the most controllish deck in the format. I’ve never liked to attack people with things. I wanted to play the control deck. I don’t know if it is the best deck. It’s definitely not the most consistent deck, but it’s a control deck, and the longer you play, the more mistakes your opponent can make—hopefully. That’s the plan at least.”
To Neil’s mind, the longer the game goes on, the more chances he has to take advantage of his opponent’s misplays. Whether it be bad formations, basic misplays, playing into his deck’s tricky cards, or even repeatedly forgetting to draw and discard with Gravesite, he just wanted the person across the table from him to make mistakes.
“It’s like the theory of poker,” explained Reeves. “David Slansky’s theory of poker is that every time your opponent makes a mistake, he brings you that much closer to winning the game. It almost seems that every game with this deck is winnable. The longer you go, the more formations they have to make, the more guys they have to play . . . They just run stuff into your guys. I have a lot of defensive plot twists, and they just send their guys into your guys when they shouldn’t.”
Neil and his group put a lot of time into testing the format and all of the match-ups they were anticipating. Marvel Knights was of particular concern for them, and they expected to see a lot of it this weekend. “We figured out in testing with this deck against Marvel Knights that the Knights player has to play extremely conservatively. All they need to do is get to turn 8 with the initiative and play that Dr. Strange dude. They just ship all my guys out and attack me for something like 50. And I just can’t beat that.”
“But,” leered Reeves with an arched eyebrow, “if they make bad attacks and lose some guys along the way, the Marvel Knights player won’t have enough guys for the all-out attack on turn 8. As long as my opponents have as long as possible to make mistakes, I think they will. If they make a mistake, I get that much closer to winning. That’s the plan.”
Its not that Neil is going to be content to just expect mistakes. He took some less traveled roads on his way to the final build based on his playtesting. Neil, in his typically misleading aw-shucks fashion, downplayed the differences and tried to dismiss his build as boiler plate. “It’s a stock deck. I thought the Gravesites might be unique. I think they are insane in the deck. If I hit my nut draw and they hit their nut draw against most decks, my draw should win. Apparently someone on Metagame.com had a list with Gravesite in the deck so it is just a stock X-Statix list.”
Neil thought on that for a moment and then amended his statement. “We didn’t play all the cards everyone is playing actually. We didn’t play any Phats. We found that they just weren’t good enough. Like they were awful vs. Marvel Knights because they get punked by M&M and they’re not really good any other times, so we took out the Phats and added more Vivisectors—” he knocked on the table repeatedly as if playing Myles Alfred over and over again, “—you know the one that goes 5, 5, 5. It’s really good in the mirror, and it’s one of your best turn 7 plays against non-Marvel Knights if your Zeitgeist gets to keep its counter. If they get the counter off of your guy, you are probably going to play another Zeitgeist, but for the most part you nug them twice.”
Slowly, it began to dawn on Neil that maybe this wasn’t a stock deck that he was playing. “Hmmm . . . we took out the Phats. We added stuff for the mirror match—Vivisectors and the Gravesites—our Star of the Show count is down a little bit. You kind of need it early against Marvel Knights, but it’s not a must, and you only need one in the mirror match on like turn 7.”
With a couple of slots opened up by scaling down on the number of Star of the Shows, he was able to address the glaring weakness he had identified in the Marvel Knights matchup—assuming people found the correct strategy against his deck. “We cut those down and put in two Psychovilles. That’s something else not a lot of people are playing. Against the Marvel Knights deck when they play the turn 8 Dr. Strange dude and just kill you? Well, that card alone on that turn basically saves you like 20 endurance. We thought a lot of guys were going to play the Marvel Knights. You know . . . exhaust all your guys with Spider-Man, play Dr. Strange and shove all your guys out of the way? Well, you can bring your Professor X back and they have to run through him. Then you get to play Spin Doctoring, and they have to run through him again. We added the Psychovilles literally at the last second.”
“Oh and the Sunfires too,” Neil realized. “Our deck is infi different from the stock decks. We have all those X-Men in our deck. Sunfire is there because the biggest match-up problems we were having were with Sinister Syndicate and Wild Pack decks. Yeah, our deck is just like everyone else’s except for like thirty cards!”
Neil compared the finished product to the Common Enemy decks at the first Pro Circuit. “You might not have any really dominant matchups, but at the same time, your bad matchups are just not so bad. It’s like 60/40 and 40/60 across the board—and that’s if your opponent plays perfectly. When my opponent makes a mistake, it might go from 40/60 them to 60/40 me. Every mistake they make I gain some advantage.”
It didn’t look like Neil’s opponents were making quite nearly enough mistakes to suit his tastes. After starting off 2-0 with the deck, his weekend took a downturn with three straight losses. In the fifth round, he ran afoul of a Crime Lords/Underworld deck with Asmodeus and Untouchable. We’ll check back later on in the day and see if he was able to get the seven wins needed to advance to Saturday’s action.