Three big pieces of tech made the most impact at this event—Total Anarchy, Betrayal, and Overload/Nasty Surprise.

Total Anarchy saw a ton of play from a handful of people. David Bauer had the most success with it, running several copies in his Curve Sentinels build. Why? It wrecks Titans.

So many characters in Teen Titans go down to Total Anarchy—Tim Drake ◊ Robin, Young Detective, Dawn Granger ◊ Dove, Hank Hall ◊ Hawk, Pantha, both versions of Roy Harper, and Beast Boy all get burnt to the ground. KO’ing is good, but it’s only the beginning—it’s one thing to KO an opponent’s characters instead of stunning them, but it’s another thing altogether when doing so deprives the opponent of his or her preferred drops because of loyalty. That’s exactly what David Bauer did all day long in Columbus. Terra, and often Garth, were denied the right of even seeing play. Wiping someone’s board and then denying that player his or her choice 4- and 5-drops? Yeah, that’s kind of game breaking. You know . . . slightly.

Beyond that, Anarchy is great against Cosmic Cops if you can press some KO’s with it in the early game. As Bauer remarked in an interview between rounds, “What’s that? You’re going to draw three cards . . . Sure! Make that Batman a 10 ATK/10 DEF!” Provided you can time your offensive actions properly for even a single turn, the entire infrastructure that Cops depends upon can be torn down. Heck, it’s even decent against X-Stall, ridding the field of Puppet Master.

Betrayal made an appearance in Rob Leander’s Titans deck, as well as in a few decks run by other players. In the Sentinels/Titans matchup, Betrayal was Titans’ equivalent to Total Anarchy—provided that the game went to turn 7, even a single Betrayal backed up by a Garth could mean multiple stuns. When you’re bringing down Bastion and Nimrod without attacking (and without any need for initiative), Magneto and his swarm of Genoshas sort of lose their oomph.

It’s useful against X-Stall, as well, especially if the deck is running not only Mimic, but also Scarlet Witch. In the mid-game (when Betrayal becomes playable), X-Stall is dependant on its 2- and 4-drops to generate the effects it needs to survive into the late game, so it really doesn’t matter what gets stunned. The deck will be hampered severely by whatever it loses.

At the same time, the errata issued for the card means that Betrayal can also be used against its controller. You can activate it in response to an attack to knock off one of your own characters. Using it in this way, it functions surprisingly well as a poor man’s evasion. With a player like Rob Leander backing it, this card is bound to see some play in the near future.

Last up, several decks (mostly Curve Sentinel) were packing four copies of Overload and four copies of Nasty Surprise. Widely attributed to Team Misunderstood, the cards stand well on their own as they were intended, but Curve Sentinel players were abusing the synergy between the two cards. An attack would be declared from the Sentinel side of the board, and once the attack was legal, the Sentinel player would pump the defender with Nasty Surprise and promptly Overload them for the stun. The attacker would then ready, and could be used for another attack.

Curve Sentinel fits this trick exceedingly well because it’s attacked in the early and mid-game quite a lot—Nasty Surprise works well on its in such a situation. Many builds of the deck are already running Overload, so the cards for the combo are relatively easy to fit into existing deck lists. Although it’s not quite as promising as Total Anarchy (which should be in every CS deck by about next week), Nasty Surprise/Overload will see a lot of play over the next few months.

So, those are the three big pieces of tech that are likely to be imitated in the wake of $10K Columbus. Cool tricks for widely used decks always spice up the environment, and a lot of metagames will get a bit more interesting as a result of this event.