Unexpected Developments: The Other “Team” in Green Lantern Corps

 

Green Lantern Corps Sealed Pack enters the spotlight this week! It is the format for the first Draft pod at the PC and the entire $10K at PC: New York (Sealed Pack on Day 1 and Booster Draft on Day 2).

 

 

In Sealed Pack, you are often forced into two or more teams out of necessity. You simply cannot get the optimal number of characters at each cost point from a single team. The challenge is figuring out the best mix of two or more teams that work together as a whole. Sometimes you will combine you best set of characters with the team that provides you with the best non-character options.

 

In a Booster Draft, you can often build a deck consisting of only one team. If you pull this off, you reap the rewards of having a consistent deck—you will always be able to team attack, reinforce, and use your team-stamped plot twists and locations. The tradeoff for that consistency is the reduced number of options you have over the course of the draft. With fewer teams in your deck, there are fewer team-stamped cards left in each pack that comes to you. So, aside from offering you additional options, synergies between teams and powerful cards outside your primary team should draw you into other teams.

 

In Marvel Knights Sealed Pack, there are a number of cards that encourage a player to play multiple teams. Foremost amongst them are the three common double-loyalty characters: Blade, The Daywalker; Elektra, Agent of the Hand; and Deathwatch. Cards like Brother Voodoo also perform exceptionally in team-up decks. The plot twists with generic effects that are augmented if you control two specific teams, like Hell's Fury and Moving Target, are an additional reward.

 

The Green Lantern set steers away from these types of rewards and explores what can be done with a different type of stamping—willpower.

 

  

 

From the outset, willpower was viewed as a trait that could be drafted much like a team of its own. The more characters with willpower you have in your deck, the more consistently you will be able to make use of effects that count characters with willpower or the total willpower in play, pay the cost on willpower-stamped cards, and target with willpower-stamped cards.

 

While characters with willpower on different teams would suffer from an inability to reinforce and team attack (barring a team-up), you would open up many new options based on how you drafted willpower into your deck. Depending on how committed you were to including willpower, you would have different options that aren't necessarily easily accessible on team-stamped or generic cards.

 

Willpower can also affect dynamics in a draft. Some cards with the willpower stamp are harder to use than others, especially those that count total willpower, so by spending your high draft picks on characters with high willpower, you might be able to corner the market on cards that would be too challenging for the other players to use.

 

 

While there are lots of splashy effects you can get via high willpower values, you can also get a lot of mileage by playing characters with any willpower at all (1 or greater). Sometimes a little willpower can go a long way! If you are debating which of two similar characters to draft or play, and only one has willpower, you should consider the many options you gain by selecting the character with willpower. If you are mid-draft and figure you don't have enough characters with willpower to take advantage of cards that reference “total willpower,” there are still plenty of reasons to get a little willpower into your deck.

 

For one, there is the cycle of common equipment cards (Catcher's Mitt, Chopping Block, and Light Armor) that cost 1 less to recruit onto a character with willpower 1 or greater. Having characters with small willpower will also help you team up via Hard-Traveling Heroes, provide some defense via Helping Hand, get stunned characters off the board via Sweeping Up, and replenish your endurance and resource row via Recharging the Ring. With Rain of Acorns, your small characters can hold huge foes at bay during your attack step. And last but not least, as long as you manage to keep him alive, G'nort ranks high up there on the list of rewards by providing +1 ATK and +1 DEF to all of your characters with willpower.

 

Book of Oa falls into its own special category. The card filtering effect it provides is quite amazing, so you might give any characters with willpower 2 or greater a second glance.

 

 

In contrast to the last group of cards, which don't discriminate between whether you have a character with willpower the likes of Hal Jordan or Kreon, there are a number of cards that do. They make cards such as Ch'p and Alan Scott shine despite their lack of other powers and otherwise mediocre stats.

 

Once you've drafted a number of characters with a large willpower, you should strongly consider taking cards that look at your total willpower. But it isn't out of the realm of possibility to make good use of just a few such characters and a few supporting cards and stay away from cards that do look at total willpower. For example, you might not have any small characters with a high willpower but have many high cost characters with a high willpower. If so, you can reasonably expect to utilize cards benefiting from high willpower by the end of the game.

 

There are a number of cards where you need a specified threshold of total willpower. A lone character with a load of willpower can often meet the cost on these cards. But let's first take a look at common cards that reward a single character with lots of willpower. Stealing the Light is very hard to evaluate in terms of its power level. Anytime you are giving up an attack, you had better be getting a strong effect in return. While this card can be hit-or-miss, it has the chance of snagging a character out of your opponent's hand that would otherwise have seen the battlefield, possibly leaving him or her without any play on a subsequent turn. Uppercut is another card that improves along with increasing willpower. The lack of breakthrough associated with the card makes it not so effective with high cost characters, but it is an excellent way to attack up the curve.

 

Malvolio turns high willpower characters into deck manipulators, Remoni-Notra can turn them into KO'ing machines, and Battle of Wills can make them fearless while attacking.

 

 

When it comes to counting up your total willpower in play, the Green Lantern team shines. Emerald Enemies and Anti-Matter can lend some assistance, especially at certain cost points or by bringing their own nasty effects to a deck. Meanwhile, the Manhunters only provide a couple of options.

 

There are a lot of cards that become more reliable and powerful when you have a lot of characters with sizeable willpower. You have access to construct characters, such as Light Brigade, at a moment's notice. You also open the doors to just about every effect under the sun. Katma Tui, Black Hand, and Ganthet gain endurance, Guardians Reborn recovers stunned characters, Emerald Twilight KO's stunned characters, Central Power Battery draws cards, The Ring Has Chosen searches your deck for characters, and Q Energy exhausts characters and causes endurance loss.

 

 

While everyone is fighting over drafting characters with high willpower and their related non-character cards, don't hesitate to find your niche in the other fraction of the set. It isn't just all leftovers! Goldface might not fit so well in a willpower-centered deck, but he knows how to get the job done. Kilowog and Rocket Red are two similar cards that reward you for staying focused on a single team rather than dabbling around for the highest willpower you can find.

 

Manhunters as a general rule won't be caught up in the struggle for access to willpower cards and they can support some exciting Draft decks. Furthermore, they can make much better use of some other cards like ¡Ólé! and Shock Troops, thanks to their specialty of churning out characters via Manhunter Engineer, Manhunter Guardsman, Manhunter Soldier, and Sleeper Agent.

 

  

 

On the whole, it seems like there are many options for varying degrees of commitment to willpower. I'm looking forward to seeing the extent to which pros prioritize willpower in their drafts and what impact willpower will have on Sealed Pack play.

 

Comments are welcome at DHumpherys@metagame.com.