“A second flood; a simple famine; plagues of locusts everywhere;

Or a cataclysmic earthquake I’d accept with some despair.

But no . . . you sent us Congress. Good God, sir, was that fair?”

                   - 1776: The Musical

By now, I’m sure that most avid Metagame.com readers (at least the Vs. System players) are aware of the fact that we have a world record holder actively playing on the Pro Circuit. Alex Jebailey, who I hung out with a bit in So Cal and who is a pretty decent fellow, apparently survived thirteen hours of shaking his groove thang while playing some game called “Dance Dance Fever” . . . or something to that effect.*

Not to be outdone, I would now like to share my own personal achievement which, to my knowledge, has not been replicated by another active Pro Circuit competitor. Yours truly, Michael V. Barnes Jr., is the only Vs. System pro ever to have sat in the hot seat across from Regis Philbin on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Now, while I hope everyone is duly impressed (and not saying, “Of course he had to find something to brag about after his poor showing in So Cal”), I’m guessing that more than a few of you are wondering why I have not shared this fact with everyone before now. The simple truth is that I don’t like to talk about it. It doesn’t have anything to with modesty or such. It actually has more to do with the fact that . . . um . . .

. . . ionlywononethousanddollars.

A History Lesson

If you missed that last part, don’t worry about going back and rereading it—it isn’t important. What’s that? What was the question that I missed? Sigh. Alright . . . if you must know:

Who was the first President of the United States to be inaugurated under his nickname?

A)     Abe Lincoln

B)     Teddy Roosevelt

C)     Jimmy Carter

D)     Bill Clinton

Well, if you answered B) Teddy Roosevelt, then you answered the same way I did—WRONG!!! The correct answer is C) Jimmy Carter. So now you know my sad story and my failed quest to become a millionaire.

Oh? You think you could have done better? Well, time to put your money where your mouth is! Here is one of my favorite trivia questions:

          Which individual did not sign the Declaration of Independence?

A)     Benjamin Franklin

B)     George Washington

C)     John Adams

D)     Thomas Jefferson

Hey! No fair searching for the answer on Google! Make your choice, then read on for the answer.

By far, the most popular answer choice to the question is A) Benjamin Franklin. Any moderately educated American will know that the other three men were U.S. Presidents (our first three, as a matter of fact) and will thereby assume that Franklin is the odd man out. Well, that stream of logic is well thought out, but wrong nonetheless. Franklin was one of the three delegates from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress.

The next most popular answer is C) John Adams, mostly because a good number of people have no idea who he is! Second President of the United States, people! Anyhow, that choice is also wrong. John Adams was the sole delegate from Massachusetts and probably the main adherent for the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. However, he was obnoxious and disliked . . . but I’ll get to that in a moment.

There are a handful of people who answer D) Thomas Jefferson to this question. Hello?!? He wrote the Declaration of Independence! I suppose the Continental Congress could have said something like, “Thanks for writing this up, Tom . . . now get lost!” But they did in fact let Jefferson, one of two delegates from Virginia, sign the Declaration of Independence.

The choice that almost no one answers is B) George Washington, which is in fact the correct answer. I’m certain that most people recognize him as the first President of the U.S., so they assume he must have been involved with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. However, General Washington was actually a bit busy at the time leading the bedraggled American troops in the Revolutionary War. He was involved in the drafting of the Constitution, but that wasn’t what I asked!

Well, I hope you have been sufficiently chastened. Let that be a lesson to you not to lock horns with BigSpooky when it comes to trivia!

Vs. System and the Lights of Broadway

To be fair, I would have answered this question incorrectly had I been asked five years ago. But I attended an event in 2000 that gave me a lot more insight into the history of the Continental Congress.

First, a little background. In addition to trivia, one of my great passions is music—specifically musical theatre. I realize that’s not a popular interest for those in the TCG crowd. However, from the first time I heard Phantom of the Opera in high school, I was hooked. Since then, I have immersed myself in hundreds of musicals, from classics such as West Side Story, to modern classics such as Les Miserables, and even to dark underground musicals such as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (which is a musical that a lot of Vs. System players would thoroughly enjoy). Needless to say, I have an affluent knowledge of Broadway theatre.

In 2000, I attended a performance of 1776: The Musical and instantly became hooked. The show is a retelling of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike the watered-down version of events that you read in your history books in elementary school, 1776: The Musical depicts the difficulties the Continental Congress faced in agreeing upon the direction of the country. The aggressive move for independence by the liberals (led by John Adams) came into direct (and often violent) conflict with the conservative stance of unity with Great Britain. The fact that Adams was so difficult to get along with (“obnoxious and disliked”) didn’t help the liberals’ cause.**

The show is so full of great quotes and sentiments that I could probably write an entire article just about my amusement with them. However, I know that you didn’t come here for a history lesson. So I’ll get to the point of the musical that relates to our deck today.

One thing many people didn’t know about the original drafting of the Declaration of Independence was that Jefferson included a clause that mandated the abolition of slavery. Of course, there was considerable uproar about this, since the entire economy of the southern colonies was based on slavery. As a result, the southern colonies refused to adopt the Declaration of Independence until the abolition clause was removed. This unfortunate decision led to another reprehensible century of slavery, as well as to the Civil War—one of the darkest times in this nation’s history, indeed.

 

 

Political Pressure is a card from Marvel Origins that has not received nearly as much play as it probably deserves. While it is not strong against every deck, it can be absolutely devastating to decks that rely on playing several characters on certain turns (such as Evil Medical School or Teen Titans). Moreover, Political Pressure can effectively end a game when a player is able to “lock” the board with a control card like Hounds of Ahab.

Our challenge today is to develop a deck that can utilize Political Pressure to its fullest advantage.

Doom and Luthor – Double the Terror, Double the Fun!

Without a doubt, the team I look forward to abusing the most from the new JLA set is the Injustice Gang. While the wisdom of filling your opponent’s hand with cards may seem questionable, the team seems to have answers for every conceivable problem that could arise. Lex Luthor, Nefarious Philanthropist shuts down opponents’ plot twist use to one per turn. Floronic Man, Alien Hybrid makes sure that your opponent can’t abuse his or her locations. Finally, Abra Kadabra can prevent any discard effects that might cause problems for you (such as . . . I dunno . . . maybe Bastion!). Toss Unmasked in the mix, and your opponent will have virtually no way to pare his or her hand down.

Of course, your opponent could conceivably drop several characters in a turn. To combat this trick, we’re going to incorporate Political Pressure into the build. We could probably find a way to search for the card. However, we always want to have at least one copy in play, so we’ll need to put in four copies. While that may seem a bit excessive, having extra copies of Political Pressure can be beneficial in eliminating some of the endurance payments required to reuse a single copy.

We could prepare a fairly formidable build using only characters from the Injustice Gang. But what fun would that be? Besides, we might be able to create an even stronger synergy by combining the opponent draw strategy of the Injustice Gang with another team that has some strong disruption techniques. Does such a team exist? Okay, I’m going to cut out the cheap jokes—we’re going to team up with Doom.

Doom opens up a very strong combo with our strategy. Since our primary goals are to stockpile our opponent’s hand and control the board, Reign of Terror becomes an extremely potent weapon. If we can clear our opponent’s board on turn 4, then Political Pressure will ensure that we don’t see more than one recruited character per turn.

The Build

So, let’s make a quick checklist of the basic plot twists we’ll need for our concoction. Obviously, we’ll need the four copies each of the aforementioned Political Pressure and Reign of Terror. In addition, the Team-Up Gang Up is tailor made for our strategy, as it nets you a card and increases your opponent’s hand size. To protect against problematic power-up decks (such as Big Brotherhood), we’ll also include a single copy of Unmasked.

From a defensive perspective, it doesn’t get much better than Mystical Paralysis. We’re hoping and planning to keep the field isolated to a single character per turn. So, we’ll probably only need to use Mystical Paralysis once or twice in any given game. Since we’ll have some accelerated card drawing and plot twist searching, three copies should be sufficient. On offense, the Injustice Gang has an absolutely ferocious ATK pump in All Too Easy. At five cards in your opponent’s hand, All Too Easy is the functional equivalent of Savage Beatdown. However, as anyone who has played Injustice Gang will tell you, your opponent will quite often have ten or more cards in hand during later turns. Any ATK pump that can potentially allow one of your characters to attack five spots up the curve must be worth playing.

Our final plot twists assist in the character search department. One thing we will find when we look at our characters is that there is a very specific set of characters we want to play on each turn. To assist in this endeavor, we will need strong character searchers. Fortunately, Secret Files enables us to search out any affiliated character. The downside is that our opponent will be able to do the same. But, given our strategy, this is not much of an issue. Of course, we can’t always rely on having Secret Files at our disposal. Since we can’t play more than four copies of any non-Army character, we’ll undoubtedly have backup characters at most of our drops. Running Vicarious Living, however, can turn our backup characters into our primary drops. In addition, Vicarious Living can search out unaffiliated characters and affiliated characters . . . which might be relevant for one of our late character choices.

There’s really only one location we need to look at for this deck—Injustice Gang Satellite. With our opponent limited to one character on the board and holding quite a few cards in hand, Injustice Gang Satellite essentially reads, “Activate, discard an Injustice Gang character card >>> Win the game.”

Our character selections will be the backbone of the deck, as playing the correct character on each turn should enable us to create our “Satellite Lock.” At 1, we have the power of Doom’s butler. Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom can search out any plot twist in our deck that we need to establish board presence. Of course, we can’t use him until we control Dr. Doom, and we aren’t playing Doomstadt. So, it is not absolutely imperative that we play him on turn 1 (though it would probably be nice to be able to do so).

Turn 2 is important from a search perspective. While we really don’t need to have a character until our all-important 3-drop, we will need to have an Injustice Gang character on the field to use Secret Files. One no-brainer at 2 is IQ. His effect is formidable without accelerated card drawing. If you add two or three extra cards drawn by your opponent each turn, then he could do around 20 points of damage per game through his effect alone! As a backup, we’ll include three copies of Captain Boomerang, George Harkness. While not nearly as strong in this deck as IQ, Captain Boomerang can be effective against decks that lean heavily on specific low drops (such as Squadron Supreme rush and Teen Titans).

Turns 3 and 4 are devoted to two specific characters—Lex Luthor, Nefarious Philanthropist and Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius. Whatever happens on any other turn, we would like to hit these two characters every game. Lex Luthor puts a significant lockdown on opposing plot twist use, and Dr. Doom ensures that opponents won’t be able to dump plot twists from hand prior to Lex’s effect triggering during the build phase. Because of the high importance of having these characters in play, we want to mulligan for a hand that will enable us to have a copy of each at the right time.

Our backup characters at 3 and 4 are mostly formality. The Shark, Karshon has flight, range, and pretty good size for a 3-drop (assuming your opponent has at least six cards in hand). However, his most significant uses in the deck will come either as a discard for Vicarious Living to search Lex Luthor or as an under-drop in later turns. Along those same lines, The Joker, Headline Stealer is a sizable character at 4 with a pseudo-Doom effect. He will never be a preferred play on turn 4, but he is not a bad under-drop on turn 5 if we need to recruit Boris to search out a card.

Turn 5 has some important toolbox characters with which to deal with specific threats. Decks like Big Brotherhood and League of Assassins are not overly threatened by plot twist disruption, thanks to the powerful locations they wield. So, we will need a card to deal with locations. Fortunately, such a character exists within the Injustice Gang in the form of Floronic Man, Alien Hybrid. He takes a potentially threatening location out of play for a turn by sending it back to your opponent’s hand, and prevents further locations from emerging.

Another type of threat we must consider are decks with discard effects. Filling up an opponent’s hand is a bad idea if your opponent can use a character like Bastion or Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man to dump those cards for powerful effects. So, we need to include of copy of Abra Kadabra to prevent those discard effects from crippling us. Bastion is not much of a threat if he is unable to get rid of all those lovely character cards in hand!

Our primary drop at 5, however, is one of the latest incarnations of Dr. Jonathan Crane, Scarecrow, Psycho Psychologist. There are several characters in the game that can burn your opponent for several points of endurance loss each turn. However, most of these characters have activated effects. Scarecrow, on the other hand, has an extremely potent burn effect (particularly in this build) that does not involve exhausting him. In essence, you can burn your opponent for several points of endurance loss with a character and then attack him or her with that same character. What a deal! If you toss in the fact that Scarecrow can substitute as a 6-drop in a pinch, then he borders on absolutely broken!

Our final characters rest at our 6-drop position. Anyone who has drafted Injustice Gang knows that they have an unaffiliated ally in the form of Dr. Destiny. While he is not a part of the team, his effect fits very nicely into the deck strategy. Since he can be searched out using Vicarious Living, we’ll only need a single copy. Of course, we won’t always have an extra copy of Vicarious Living at our disposal. So, we need to consider a backup to Dr. Destiny. While there really aren’t any Doom or Injustice Gang 6-drops that fit the burn strategy of the deck, the Injustice Gang does have a potent late drop in The General. If you have to play defensively, The General very nearly ensures that your opponent will have to attack twice to keep him stunned—not an easy prospect if you manage to keep your opponent limited to one character on the field! On offense, his 13 ATK is high enough to take down pretty much any 6-drop in the game. While you may get stunned back, his effect will make sure that he doesn’t stay stunned for long.

That does it for the build. Let’s take a look at what we have created.

Vote Luthor/Von Doom 2008! (60 cards)

Characters (29)

4 Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom

4 IQ, Ira Quimby

3 Captain Boomerang, George Harkness

4 Lex Luthor, Nefarious Philanthropist

2 The Shark, Karshon

4 Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius

1 The Joker, Headline Stealer

1 Abra Kadabra, Citizen Abra

1 Floronic Man, Alien Hybrid

3 Scarecrow, Psycho Psychologist

1 Dr. Destiny, John Dee

1 The General, Wade Eiling

Plot Twists (27)

4 All Too Easy

4 Gang Up

3 Mystical Paralysis

4 Political Pressure

4 Reign of Terror

4 Secret Files

1 Unmasked

3 Vicarious Living

Locations (4)

4 Injustice Gang Satellite

The general strategy of the deck is to take even initiatives so that you can use a couple of copies of Reign of Terror to clear your opponent’s board on turn 4 (especially helpful against Teen Titans, since they can’t recruit Terra). If you have Political Pressure and Injustice Gang Satellite up and running, then it should be feasible to clear the board every turn.

With the combination of board control and burn, your games shouldn’t often last past turn 6. However, if you feel the need to have a 7-drop available, there are some excellent ones that fit the deck theme well. Power Princess, The Last Utopian is another character that punishes your opponent for having a large number of cards in hand. [Genis Vell ◊ Captain Marvel] is absolutely enormous at 19 ATK / 18 DEF. Many players don’t play him because his effect is a bit of a drawback. However, in a deck that wants your opponent to have extra cards in hand, he could be a great choice.

Well, I’ve rambled on long enough. I’m out of here for this week. If you have any questions, comments, or fashion tips, feel free to send them my way at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com. Until next week, I am Michael Barnes—not at all obnoxious and liked by many, many people.

* Yes . . . I know that the name of the game is “Dance Dance Revolution.” I was just trying to give Alex a little bit of grief. It doesn’t always have to be short jokes about Tim Batow!

** There are several lines in the show where Adams is referred to as “obnoxious and disliked.” One of my favorites is, “Mr. Adams . . . you are obnoxious and disliked. That cannot be denied.” I suppose the primary reason for enjoying this line so much is that my little brother (who is also an insufferable liberal) changed his name during college from Mitch Barnes to Mitch Adams. He claims that he was going for a more respectable name for his acting career. I figure that any man who would change his birth name deserves any comments he gets about it. The fact that he really is obnoxious and disliked only sweetens the deal.