Paul Ross has nothing on the Kingpin. He may be a lot smarter, talk with a stylish Aussie accent, and sport the debonair head judge gear, but the sheer amount of e-mails your class has submitted over the last couple of weeks has been impressive. As a rule, I work to respond to each question and help make the information presented in each article usable. If I see a trend emerging in a number of questions, then those topics will be covered during the “Questions from the Class” section in relevant articles.

Keep the questions coming and keep working with this information. It has aided my personal growth and is intended to aid your own development. As a reward for your readership and hard work, I felt like it was time for a field trip. Fieldwork represents a very practical and important aspect of education and training. The Kingpin’s School of Hard Knocks presents some complicated information and theory waiting to be translated into practice.

National Hotspots: Tough Tournaments

There are rumors that California has some of the toughest local tournaments in all of the United States. There are states that house some of the most gifted players, and then there are states that house power cells of such players. For the size of the state population, Oklahoma and Indiana are certainly national leaders in the “power per capita” category, but the player base in some of the national Vs. hotspots can really turn up the heat at local competitions.

Enter the local tournaments. If you attend a Pro Circuit Qualifier in North Dakota with five players, there is a limited opportunity for growth. You likely playtest with that bunch of players on a regular basis, and there is not going to be very much exposure to new techniques, strategy, and information during the event. It’s fun, and everyone likes to have fun and win great UDE playmats and packs, but the best players attend these events for the practice and the opportunity for development.

Get Your Face Smashed

I enjoy losing on a regular basis. It is important to have your deck smoked, your errors exploited, and your face smashed by superior players. This game requires a sharp learning curve. The only way to climb that curve is through research, practice, and a series of humbling defeats. I have enjoyed an off-season of sweet victory on the PCQ circuit. In Florida, there used to be several PCQs a month, and many times, it seemed almost easy to land that Visa Prize Card. Unfortunately, after that run of fortune and string of victories, I scrubbed out at the very next PC. The tournaments did not aid my growth, there was not enough opportunity for development, and I paid for it in PC beatings.

Times have changed in Florida. There are fewer PCQ opportunities and a greater level of competition. I am more likely to Top 8 during a $10K event then at a Florida PCQ. At least at a $10K, I have the opportunity to play a wide variety of players. In my last two PCQs, each event was seven rounds. Of those fourteen rounds of regular play, my opponents consisted of thirteen professional players. Three of those opponents were $10K champions, two had achieved a PC Top 8 berth, and seven of those players had ranked in the top twenty in at least one PC.

Needless to say, I got my face smashed. At that level of competition, there is very little room for error and play mistakes often cost you a game. I haven’t won a PCQ in over six months—I’m usually happy just to get a chance to play in the Top 8. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Class Field Trip: All-Pro Top 8

Sealed events are quickly becoming my favorite. While perusing my local tournament boards and upcoming events, a Sealed event in deep South Florida caught my eye. It would be a four hour drive, but offered a chance to play the new Heralds of Galactus set the day after it had become tournament legal. When I walked in the door, I noticed a litany of professional players and familiar faces. There were fellow Metagame.com writers, $10K champs, and the occasional unknown native gamer. Out of the approximately twenty-five players in attendance, it was likely that twenty of them had landed checks from UDE in amounts greater than $2,000 over the last nine months. The face smashing was about to commence.

Sealed Pack offers players multiple opportunities. There is the necessary card evaluation and chance to practice with cards that would never find a place in the world of Constructed play, but there is also a more basic appeal. Sealed Pack is a more skill-intensive format than most other tournament formats. It is crucial to make the best card selections, formations, game-based decisions, and attacks. It is quite easy to let a game slip away with one or two slight mistakes, timing errors, or miscalculations. That level of specificity and need for perfect play makes Sealed Pack the ideal place for skill development and growth.

I am sure that Stubarnes will provide us with all of the best highlights in his tournament report from this event. My intent is to cover some information that should be applicable for the upcoming Pro Circuit LA and that will—more generally—help you prepare for such events in the future.

The Equation: Limited Ratios

The Heralds set hearkens back to some of the older sets. It brings us the playable equipment à la Crisis, the playable 1-cost characters à la Green Lantern and Avengers, and a playable long curve à la the first block of sets released.

Off-curve has been a playable strategy in most of the recent sets. In the last couple of sets (maybe the last four), it has been the dominant strategy. Short-curve and off-curve decks are still possible in this set, but late game options will also be prevalent. Rather than try to best brilliant Sealed Pack strategy writers with my own top picks and Draft strategies, I would like to address the building of the curve.

Off-curve decks may want to run a curve that looks something like this:

Five 1-drops

Five 2-drops

Five 3-drops

Four 4-drops

One 5-drop

This may not be ideal, but it represents a rough approximation. A short curve may adjust the character counts a bit at the bottom and provide more options and consistency at the 5- and maybe 6-drop slots, but there is sure to be a resurgence of the classic curve in this set.

Hitting the 8-Drop

The big boys are back. This set provides multiple roads to the later turns that Vs. hasn’t seen in Sealed Pack play for over a year. If you really want to go, then there are ways to get there. But with so many players acclimating to turn 6 tempo and victory before turn 7, it is going to take some practice to get back to the thinking and skills necessary to drop that eighth resource.

Let’s take our curve and examine the probability of hitting each drop in a 30-card deck. I have made the assumption that we want to maximize hitting a curve with eighteen to twenty characters. The statistics show that this consistency would allow us to hit each spot in our curve at a rate greater than eight out of ten games.

To understand the following information, it is important to recognize that we are playing fewer 2-drops and thus using the 2-cost character(s) for our mulligan condition. If you kept a hand without a 2-drop, you have a 62% chance of hitting a 2-drop on turn 2. You would have an 80% of hitting the 2-drop on turn 2 when you mulligan for one. In turn, you have an 82% chance of hitting your 3-drop on turn 3 if you are packing four copies, and given three copies of your 6-drop, you have a 91% likelihood of hitting one on turn 6 with no mulligan or search. Here is the curve and card counts with an estimated percentage of games in which you are likely to see each drop:

Three 2-drops: 62% without a mulligan, 80% with a mulligan

Four 3-drops: 82%

Four 4-drops: 89%

Four 5-drops: 93%

Three 6-drops: 91%

Two 7-drops: 85%

This curve will serve you well—it was designed to hit the maximum number of drops in the most situations. But in Heralds Sealed, we need to hit those drops with a great deal of consistency and move to turns later than 7. Playing an 8-cost character is viable in most decks with support, and it would be useful to calculate the chance of hitting your late curve if you change your character counts for the early game. If I am going late, then I am less likely to pack in two 1-cost characters because it leaves me pressed for room in my end game. I do not recommend ignoring the 2-cost characters, but one adjustment in an environment with late-game opportunity involves combining the playable characters in the 1- and 2-cost spots into a single count. To clarify, I may have a total of three slots available for any combination of 1- and 2-cost characters. If you want to get risky, you might want to play more low-drop characters and fewer 4-, 5-, or 6-cost characters. This may be done if your deck has an additional way to secure such characters (like a key search card) or improved card drawing.

Theory to Application: I Got to Draft!

When building my Sealed Deck, I was consistently able to hit a curve of characters with costs 2-8. I ran the following build:

Three 2-drops

Four 3-drops

Four 4-drops

Three 5-drops

Three 6-drops

Two 7-drops

One 8-drop

I had two cards that allowed the deck to draw a card and I had landed a copy of Creation of a Herald. In concert with a certain world-eating 7-drop, I was able to get the cards that I needed on most turns. I believe I missed one 5-drop and one 2-drop out of seven games. After achieving a 5-2 record, I snuck into the Top 8 Draft and played a very different style of deck. During the Draft, I was able to pick up the following curve of characters:

Five 1-drops

Five 2-drops

Five 3-drops

Two 4-drops

Zero 5-drops

One 6-drop

This deck certainly required a different tempo and character count. The deck was reasonably strong, but lost to a powerful, card-drawing stall deck piloted by a Florida player who once went undefeated in fourteen rounds at a $10K event. I got my face smashed.

The Bus Ride Back from the Class Trip

A four-hour ride home gives you time to reflect on the things that went well and the things that worked out during the course of a tournament. This exodus from the South Florida gaming swamps was no different. There were several opportunities for growth in this tournament. A game was lost by me making a boneheaded attack into the wrong character, my opponent lost a game by the misuse of a plot twist that may have allowed him to end the game if he’d swung a large character into my hidden 1-drop, and players made mistakes all day by misusing cards based on a misunderstanding of the tempo of their decks.

The Sealed and Draft environments for Heralds are different from those of the three or four sets that came before, but not so different that we have never seen anything similar. There are good aggressive and defensive options, the hidden area is amazing, and there are playable locations, plot twists, and equipment. In the end, players need to study some of the Draft strategies offered in early sets, rethink the curve and recalculate the probability of hitting certain drops, and consider practicing with early and late game tempo.

Your homework is to practice Heralds Draft. Figure out the three styles of decks that may be built in this environment and practice matching your decisions with the tempo of each deck. Use the equations presented in earlier lessons to understand the character needs of the decks, and prepare to play a very different game at Day 2 of PC: LA than you played at Indy.

Class dismissed. It may be noted that your forged parent permissions for this field trip have all been filed for my records.

Jeremy “Kingpin” Blair (7-drop, TAWC) is a card flipper and student of the game from the southeastern part of the United States. If you have constructive comments or questions, feel free to contact him at Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.