You may have heard of TBS. “The Ben Seck” works at Upper Deck Entertainment now, and is lead designer on one of the upcoming Vs. sets. TNL you might be less familiar with. At least not as a walking acronym.

“The Nick Little” is playing one of the more intriguing decks in the field today, a controlling and defensive little number sporting largely X-Men characters, with a few special tweaks to put it over the top.

While the majority of players in the field are playing very aggressive decks, Nick relies on going over the top with defensive tricks, eventually running more aggressive builds out of gas, at which point the actual winning is a mere formality.

While various Squadron Supreme decks are going nuts with Ape X and Image Inducer, Nick can make life very tricky for people with his Beast, Feline Geneticist, who fetches Acolyte Body Armor to become a character who is really quite troublesome to remove. With a little help from X-Treme Maneuver and Eye of the Storm, he can blunt most attacks in the early game and, if need be, he has System Failure for the Faces of Evil matchup, and Mental Domination for general “making people sad” purposes.

In the same way that Sentinels were always most powerful on opposing initiatives, simply stopping opposing attacks from being successful then attacking back for the win, the X-Men and friends work a pretty powerful mojo in their own way. Their biggest splash character is Exodus, who has a nifty inclination to show up right on time for Nick. While there is no strict “character search” in the deck, Little gets a lot of use out of Worthington Industries. Of course, this will not find the Brotherhood 7-drop. However, Jean Grey, Red has a nasty habit of replacing quite a few resources on turn 6. Since Exodus is a reservist, the chances of his being in the right place at the right time are pretty high.

In many respects, TNL seems to have a Mental deck that is about three weeks further on in development than many of the other Mental decks being sported this weekend. With the extra equips and a solid 7-drop whose effective endurance gain can be huge, it seems that the areas where it isn’t being all about “X-Men Mental” are the most insane bits in the deck.

In testing against some of the best players in the world—who knew his decklist—Nick found that he was about 50–50 in his worst matchups. In today’s field, with many players wholly prepared for his stonewall defences, it seems likely that he will do far better than that.