I love Gravesite. Out of everything in Marvel Knights, it’s easily my favorite card. Incredibly versatile, it’s a real skill tester that presses the limits of a player’s ingenuity and ability to adapt both when you’re running it and when it pops up on the other side of the field.
It’s a complicated card, as all “synchronous” cards are. It’s easy to look at Gravesite and write it off as giving both you and your opponent the same advantage. One can even look at it and see that it places its controller at a disadvantage—your opponent isn’t expending a card to use Gravesite’s effect and you are, and under some theoretical models that can be looked at as card disadvantage. “Gravesite is -1 to card advantage” isn’t a statement that I completely agree with. Are you losing a card? No. Vs. System is unique in that as long as a card is in the resource row, you haven’t lost it, per se. But is the opponent getting an effect for free while you are committing one card’s worth of effect potential? Yes. And this does have to be compensated for.
If you’re going to play Gravesite, then like it or lump it, you are making a commitment of resources. Debate all you like about whether that’s a full card’s worth of advantage, half a card’s, or even as little as the one copy’s slot in your deck; it is an investment you are making that your opponent is not. The following can be done to balance this out:
Have a deck built to use Gravesite. I can’t stress this enough! As good as Gravesite can be, you can’t just chuck it into anything and expect to come out smelling like a rose. You need to understand the card and the advantages it can give you on a mathematical level and then build your deck accordingly. Otherwise, your opponent might get just as much use out of it as you do. In addition, if you’re playing against a deck that happens to be very good with Gravesite, you may very well be out of luck. It happens. Single cards have bad matchups just as entire decks do, and while a single piece of tech that happens to fold against the top three archetypes in a format might not be worth playing, the only things that really wreck Gravesite are Underworld variants. Mephisto, Soul Stealer loves this card. There’s nothing you can do about that. But in any other matchup, your deck can be optimized to make better use of Gravesite than virtually any opponent’s deck.
The second thing you can do to ensure that you succeed with Gravesite while your opponent does not is simply to know how to play it better than he or she does. As simple as skeptics may say this card is, I’ll go out on an opinionated (but in my mind, well supported) limb and say that they’re dead wrong. This is easily one of the most skill-testing cards in the game right now, and the decisions it presents are rarely easy. You can’t just use Gravesite as an accelerator that gets you to your key proactive cards. If you do, you’ll see a benefit from it, but you have to assume that that’s what your opponent will default into—your opponent will use it to hit his or her ideal characters at the ideal times, and if your opponent already have those plays ensured, then he or she will look for whatever effects best support his or her business-as-usual plans. But that won’t be enough against you. Why? Because you’re smarter than your opponent is and you know there’s more to the card than that.
The first step towards accomplishing these two goals is to understand what Gravesite can do. First and most obviously, it digs for stuff. It allows curve-based decks without character search cards to fill their drops more reliably. The exact percentage of effectiveness gained depends entirely on when you activate Gravesite and how long a game runs, but it’s significant. In addition, it also allows decks based on key off-curve characters or key combos to draw into those core cards at a similarly increased rate. If a deck has character or plot twist search options, then Gravesite is likely superfluous and will not provide as much of an advantage. If, however, your strategy does not have such options available, or if you prefer to take a very light approach to your key cards or curve, then Gravesite can be an incredibly balancing factor.
Continuing along those lines, Gravesite makes single card tech far more viable. While Boris and Alfred Pennyworth can serve as the heart of toolbox engines, most decks don’t have the option to use them, and while a pair of Betrayals can sometimes be drawn into by any deck on or before turn 7 and a pair of Flame Traps can result in one copy seeing play by turn 4 or 5, you’ll still play a lot of games where you just don’t draw your two-of cards. It happens, but Gravesite helps to ensure that it will happen a lot less. In order to take full advantage of Gravesite, it needs to be played in a deck that is built with its metagame in mind; otherwise, you’re accomplishing two mortal sins of using this card:
A – You’re not taking an advantage of that which most opponents will also be deprived.
B – You’re not using one of the key strengths you’re affording yourself.
It’s one thing not to use your cards to their utmost potential. It happens all the time and some decks just can’t use every effect and advantage a card can generate. But in the case of a strategically synchronous card, this is an exceptionally poor move to make. It’s not hard to look around your metagame, see a bunch of Titans and Fantastic Fun, and decide to run two Flame Traps. The same goes for Curve Sentinels and Betrayal. These alone are two very easy decisions to consider, and odds are good that at least one of the two will prove useful in your metagame. Consider them staple complements of Gravesite in anything other than Underworld decks. Beyond that, be creative. You’ll be surprised what’s viable when you can use just two copies but still reliably draw into one.
Avalon Space Station’s combo potential with this card is also worth mentioning. In combination with Gravesite, Avalon basically becomes a reverse character search tool, allowing you to build up a stack of characters that you can call back to your hand as needed. It lets you both dig for extra characters to improve your chances of hitting the ones you need and dump characters that you currently have no use for in exchange for valuable plot twists (while still permitting you access to the characters later on). That’s great, and if you’re playing any sort of deck that already uses Avalon Space Station, consider adding Gravesite. They’re that good together.
Of course, Gravesite tears through decks. That makes Emperor Joker happy, and while that’s certainly a very conditional aside, it’s worth three sentences. Which are up right about . . . now.
Possibly the most significant thing about Gravesite is that it destroys anticipated tempo. Going into a matchup, you should have two strong ideas about tempo: what yours will be like and what your opponent will be looking to establish. Giving everybody an extra draw each turn totally wrecks those anticipations. While Gravesite should not be added into just any deck, one can say that on both theory and base mechanics levels, it neatly destroys the expected tempo of any deck it can be placed in or used against. By understanding how Gravesite can affect the decks it is played against and how it affects your own deck, you are automatically at an advantage once Gravesite hits the table. You’re ready for it and your opponent isn’t, and that’s not something to be underestimated. If you play with the expectation that you will activate it without it being disrupted by a certain turn and your opponent does not, you essentially turn all of your risky decisions into good ones and all of his or her conservative decisions into poor ones the moment Gravesite is activated. The cards you didn’t hold onto—those Overloads, Beatdowns, and such—can suddenly get replaced at an accelerate rate. Meanwhile, the copies your opponent conservatively held onto start piling up in duplicate in his or her hand. Is that necessarily a damning situation? Probably not. But if you could have Overloaded on turns 3 and 5, and instead only Overloaded on turn 5, that’s a potentially big advantage that you’ve cost yourself. Gravesite is possibly the most deadly weapon in a tempo fiend’s arsenal.
So, that’s what you can do on a base level with the card. Now let’s discuss where the card does and does not fit.
In addition to decks that can already tutor for key cards, Gravesite is also potentially awful in Teen Titans. If every time you use USS Argus you can immediately Terra it into oblivion so as not to disrupt your draws, then you’re fine, and seeing Gravesite on the field won’t make you cringe. But if you aren’t drawing any cards and are only searching out one per turn via Argus, then the card drawn by Gravesite can very easily become the card discarded by Gravesite. While this can feed Garth ◊ Tempest new tricks, it’s nothing compared to the advantage that an opponent can get by, you know, actually using Gravesite for more than a free version of Garth Aqualad. Half an Aqualad, at that.
It fits incredibly well into X-Stall and Medium and Big Brotherhood. Neither of these decks have methods for searching out their characters, and while X-Stall can Cerebro for X-Men, it can’t do so for Imperiex, Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff, Mimic, or Puppet Master. In X-Stall, you gain an extra method of sending Jean Grey to the KO’d pile, and it affords you the luxury of being able to use so many alternate drops in the deck that Weapon of Choice becomes a viable decision for inclusion. That is one of the cards I play right now, and while it gets some laughs, it doesn’t have issues with much—not even with taking down Cosmic Cops and Fantastic Fun, thanks to a huge emphasis on direct stun (like I said . . . Flame Trap and tempo control).
For Medium and Big Brotherhood, the card is great. Go ahead and Foiled! it—the deck has enough combat dominance that it often won’t care. Building that dominance through extra discards that get recycled by Avalon Space Station is great and increased reliability in hitting Avalon and Lost City is even better. I have not been a big advocate of either of these decks for the past several months, despite them seeing some impressive performances in the hands of experienced players; Gravesite makes me reconsider my stance, especially on Medium Brotherhood where Insignificant Threat is seen more frequently (and can be accessed easier via Gravesite’s increased draw).
Gravesite is not for the weak at heart netdecker . . . at least not yet. It takes creativity and a whole lot of skill or practice to use*. It’s not a splashable card in the same sense that Betrayal is. But it is exceptionally good, and in the right hands, it can turn several Tier 2 decks into Tier 1 or 1.5 decks. Give it some serious thought before building a new deck in the future—it’s an amazingly powerful tool that is worthy of consideration as part of the basic deckbuilding processes.
-Jason Grabher-Meyer
Have you got a favorite piece of tech that you feel others may not know about? Give me a shout at Jason@metagame.com and tell me all about it!
*Being a self-described luck sack, I attribute my success with it to “practice.”