When I first started playing this game, my Vs. grandpappy sat me down on his knee and told me a story that I would like to share with you. Grandpappy had a very bony leg, so we can make this short: “Play the best deck.” The best players play the best decks. The best decks usually have the best cards. “Best” is a judgment call, so it is often useful to define such terms at the beginning of a conversation. I tend to think of success and achievement in terms of outcomes. Outcomes can be a very powerful source of feedback. Touch the hot stove and you get burned. Very powerful.

Make a great deck, play it, and win a bunch of money. Also very powerful. But players play for many various reasons. I hear that some folks play this game for the pure enjoyment. There is a secret community of casual players running incarnations of X-Statix builds and trying to put a bunch of plague counters on your Clench Virus. Therefore, positive outcomes can mean different things for different players.

These articles are typically aimed at advanced players or professional gamers, so we will talk about outcomes in terms of tournament rankings, monetary earnings, or even advancing past a prior point of tournament success. It is hard to obtain the greatest positive outcome in a tournament without optimal cards and outstanding decks. There are many instances where great players field sub-par decks—and those players may end up with strong performances—but there are times when great play cannot supplant a poor deck choice.

Say Hello to My Little Friends

If you want to dominate the competition, it will be useful to find the very best cards. The best cards give you the best weapons. You don’t want to be caught bringing your underpowered popgun to a nuclear war—where’s the fun in that?

Card evaluation is a key skill in a game that offers roughly 1,000 new choices every year. Over time, you may have identified a trend that occurs at large tournaments: often, a small number of the total available Vs. System card are used in the construction of the majority of top performing decks.

This may be due to a lack of creativity, the inability to think outside of that proverbial box, or the fact that the card art is just that good. A more likely explanation is the power of those cards in relation to the other cards available in a given card pool. The Fate Artifacts and Dr. Light, Master of Holograms will likely be top quality cards until they’re dethroned by superior choices. Pro Circuit–winning decks are usually built on the backs of the strongest cards in the game.

Gamers throw around the idea of broken cards. It may be rare to find a broken card or broken combination in this game, but it is not rare to find outstanding cards that do the very best job at the mission they are trying to accomplish.

Enemy of My Enemy is not a broken card, it is just one of the very best search cards available in the game. Searching for characters is a key aspect of the game; therefore Enemy of My Enemy may be perceived as one of the very best cards in the game. Cards fall into a number of different categories. In the general sense we have characters, plot twists, locations, and equipment. More specifically, we have offensive and defensive characters, ATK pumps, DEF modifiers, and cards that serve utility functions like search, replacement, and so forth.

Card evaluation is always relative to the metagame, so what might be considered strong can shift from tournament to tournament. Still, card evaluation and selection are always important factors when constructing a deck.

After a player selects “the best cards” for the goal he or she is trying to accomplish, that player must assemble those cards in a meaningful way. When I began playing this game, I threw together all of the big characters, huge ATK pumps, cool locations, search cards, and defensive tricks I could. My Gotham Knights decks had it all. In terms of performance, they actually offered very little. A lack of focus and repetition supporting my win conditions often resulted in anemic performances.

Picking the best cards may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient. You might select great cards, but they have to work in a strong, synergistic way to accomplish your goals. Random curve decks can result in Constructed victories, but to move beyond a run-of-the-mill, combat-oriented curve deck you must look for something more.

That “X” Factor: Finding Something Special

Effective decks have focus. In some of our recent lessons, we talked about the advantages of win conditions and their importance. Win conditions are supported by the cards in the deck and we want to see those cards with regularity. For example, Cover Fire has been a strong defensive card in defensive-minded decks fielding characters with range. To make the card effective, a key characteristic has to occur repetitively on your character cards; if you don’t have range, Cover Fire is useless.

The repetition of the range characteristic makes it possible to “turn on” the effectiveness of Cover Fire. But you can only have four copies of Cover Fire in your deck. If you are trying to get to much later turns, then you may want to find effects that replicate the same basic intent of Cover Fire. We have seen this done effectively with Helping Hand—you now have eight cards that serve a common purpose.

Sometimes players find such consistency and power with cards that appear to be suboptimal. I am not a huge fan of effects that give characters low bonuses in Constructed decks. If you show me a card that simply gives a character +1 ATK and +1 DEF, I will show you a card to file away in your dustiest shoebox. There are terrible cards that offer a character +2 ATK or a +1 ATK / + 2 DEF bonus. Cards get pretty good when they provide modifiers of +3 or more.

Yet history has shown us that small modifications can become quite powerful when they offer redundancy. If you are working with an offensive-minded deck, then you might have selected characters with great offensive stats. (The natural ATK values of your characters would fall above the average when compared to other drops at the same recruit cost.) Redundancy can be great if your tricks offer additional modifiers to the ATK values of those characters. You capitalize on the strength of your characters and establish a theme. Themes that have a good win condition and achieve redundancy can be very strong.

Look at some simple examples: G’Nort, Shock Troops, and Trial by Fire all worked to give the old GLEE decks redundancy within a powerful theme. In the more recent Checkmate/Villains United decks, a seemingly weak card like Threat Neutralized offered defensive redundancy when joined with Knightmare Scenario and Knight Armor. And if you think redundancy is powerful in Constructed, it can be backbreaking in Sealed Pack play.

Play it Again!

Like most Vs. enthusiasts, I have been perusing the cardscapes of the new Herald of Galactus set. I have been admiring specific cards and searching for synergies. Heralds of Galactus offers a Sealed Pack player a chance to see later turns, but the ability to stall must be “turned on” by redundant effects. There are a number of ways to get to late turns: you can use characters to exhaust the opposing characters, you can try to leave opposing characters un-recovered, or you might try the old defensive routes. There are several means that lead to a given end.

After playing lots of games that ended on turn 5 or 6, I wanted to tempt the later turns in the format. While drafting, I looked for a repeatable collection of effects that would allow me to meet my stall deck’s win condition. My card-playing good buddy later told me that a couple of the particular cards I had selected were really sub-par. Truthfully, they were. But when they were dropped into a deck to create a theme and redundancy, they were all-star top picks.

I 3-0’d the Draft and proved a point. Sometimes, grabbing cards that establish redundancy and support your win condition can result in redundancy in the “W” column. This may not always work, but it has historically been a strong tool for many decks. Before you crack your next Sealed Pack, it may be worth finding a theme that is aided by redundant effects. If you grab a mess of those effects, then your deck will have a better chance of operating the way it is intended to over time. Two copies of a defensive effect are better than one but worse than four if you have a defensive strategy.

You might also find some success building decks like this when new sets introduce cards that support an older theme. If we ever see additional cards that power-up a character and offer a good effect, they may be worth working into a retired Good Guys build to breathe some life into a sleeping classic. Until next time, think about redundancy. Until next time, think about redundancy.

Class dismissed. Class dismissed.

Jeremy “Kingpin” Blair (7-drop, TAWC) is a card flipper and student of the game from the Southeastern part of the United States. If you have constructive comments or questions, feel free to contact him at Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.