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The Sentry™
Card# MTU-017
While his stats aren’t much bigger than those of the average 7-drop, Sentry’s “Pay ATK” power can drastically hinder an opponent’s attacking options in the late game.
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Unless you were at the Origins Convention this past weekend, you probably haven’t had a chance to play with DC Origins cards in Limited yet. Here’s a taste . . .
 The most striking difference between limited play in DC as compared to Marvel is that you will have much easier access to 5 and 6 cost characters. With two exceptions, all four teams have two common characters at all cost points from 3 through 6. The League of Assassins only sports Ra’s al Ghul at a cost of 6, and the Teen Titans just have Arsenal at a cost of 3. Then again, the Teen Titans have one of the better 3-drops out there if you manage to come up with both of the Hawk and Dove duo. As for the large guys, there’s even a common unaffiliated character, Brother Blood. While there are no common characters at cost of 7, there are a number of common characters whose normal costs plus boost total 7 or more. In fact there is one such character in each team meeting this criterion, and again, Brother Blood follows suit.
The norm for playing Sealed Pack in Vs. will also be switching from four packs to five packs. Taken together with the greater abundance of characters at higher cost points, there will usually be plenty of characters to fill out your character cost ‘curve’ as you see fit when playing Sealed Pack. For example, from four sealed packs of Marvel, you received on average 4.5 characters at cost 5 and 2.9 at a cost of 6. With variation on these numbers, you could get into some tight squeezes. The average of these characters per pack is higher in DC, and with five packs, you should receive on average at least 7.5 characters at every cost from 1 through 6. You also gain more flexibility in your selection of characters at given costs thanks to boost. I discussed issues related to this in my preview of Dick Grayson, and I plan on revisiting these considerations in upcoming articles.
Loyalty makes character selection a lot trickier. In general, you need to be very committed to taking characters of lower costs in the same team if you plan on drafting characters with loyalty. At minimum, you need to make sure you have plenty of backup plans at costs where you have one or more characters with loyalty; otherwise things can start spiraling out of control once you miss earlier plays. But don’t shy too much away from loyalty, either. A reasonable percentage of characters with loyalty have this characteristic because the game’s designers and developers think the characters would be too good if they were to just get splashed into any deck. In other words, when you are looking at a character with loyalty, there’s a good chance that at least one person at UDE thinks that character is broken! The caveat to that is that some cards are a lot scarier from a game development standpoint in Constructed than they are in Limited play, so don’t assume that just any character with loyalty will be a star in your Limited deck. In a later article, I’ll go into detail on the precautions you need to make in your character selection during deck building when taking loyalty into account.
 The components of what makes a good Limited deck haven’t changed too dramatically. Most of your experiences still hold true as to what types of cards work well, how many cards of each type you want to include in your deck, and so on.
The priorities you place on which cards to take first in a draft, on the other hand, do change dramatically. There are now more than enough 5 and 6 cost characters to go around so now you probably want to be drafting cards to place in your resource row very highly. Cards like Tag Team, Break You, Combat Reflexes, and Mega-Blast are amongst the cards you want to be selecting first from your packs. After those picks you are more flexible than previously in taking the best characters for your team at any recruit cost, rather focusing on the higher costs. Ultimately, at some point in the draft you still have to pay careful attention to getting an adequate number of characters at each cost.
Which are the good teams to draft in the new set? Well, personally I’m a fan of the Gotham Knights, followed by the Teen Titans and Arkham Inmates. The League of Assassins seems to be the trickiest to draft because so many of their cards feed off of locations. They are both good with and against locations, and there just usually aren’t enough locations present in the Limited environment for this team to shine. Still, there are plenty of cards within the League that work just fine without locations; so don’t ignore them. Ubu is one of the better 3-drops around, Bane (as Ubu) has a nice power, and Ra’s al Ghul, Master Swordsman can do some mighty fine treasure hunting. (And don’t feel too sorry for the League. In Constructed, you can make your deck solely out characters and locations if you wish, and there are plenty of strong locations in popular decks to be fending off.) Gotham Knights have plenty of buff common characters, especially if you can pull off the loyalty on the likes of Cassandra Cain and Lady Shiva, Sandra Woosan. Dick Grayson, Nightwing and Tim Drake, Robin are no slouches either. It’s harder to point out the standouts in the Teen Titans—they just so happen to work well together as a team, and with few exceptions, you are getting a good deal on each of them. In Arkham, you get some powerhouses in Killer Croc and Mr. Freeze, and you can prey on exhausted characters with Charaxes and friends.
Besides playing Limited DC as a standalone, we are also eager to hear what you think of limited using both Marvel and DC Comics boosters together. In particular, we’d like feedback on the Crossover option (see section B-15 of UDE Tournament Appendix B for details) both in theory and once you have given it a try. How do you think it compares to drafting within one set? What do you think of the team-up rule in general?
I welcome comments at DHumpherys@metagame.com.
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