Traditionally, deck designers live for exploiting a small environment. The fewer the cards, the easier it is to identify the dominant strategies and work around them. I talked to a few of the best-performing and best-recognized players in today’s tournament and asked them what they thought about deck design using only the first set, and how they thought things would change with the addition of more sets.

Gary Quinn, about to play for Top 8 in the last round, had a lot to say on the subject. He characterized deckbuilding in this environment as reactive. The biggest step in choosing the cards for your deck is metagaming against what you expect the field to be. With such a small pool of cards, and most decks public knowledge, that’s easier than you’d expect. However, there isn’t a magic bullet that can take everything down.

“If you say you understand the format, you’re deluding yourself.” – Gary Quinn

Quinn is playing a mid-range FF deck that tops out at Apocalypse, a tweak that gives Quinn a silver bullet against late-game control decks. Overall, the deck is about consistency, using the best characters and hitting every spot on his curve thanks to Signal Flare. He thinks one card that’s been under-explored is Tech Upgrade. With Mr. Fantastic, Stretch, it can ensure explosive fifth turns.

Canada’s Michael Thicke is known as the inventor of the “Wild Vomit” Sentinels deck, a refined version of which has put Neil Reeves, Gabe Walls, and Mike Turian within striking distance of Top 8. The deck is choked with Wild Sentinels and Sentinel Mark IV’s, meaning that drawing cards off Longshot is all but guaranteed. With Underground Sentinel Base, players can be staring down three 12/6 Mark IV’s on turn five. Not pleasant. It’s telling, however, that Thicke chose to run New Brotherhood this weekend. He believes it’s the deck that can best punish bad draws on the part of his opponents.

Thicke says that the environment is completely explored. Everyone knows everything. The best you can hope to do is key your deck to beat certain matchups, but even that isn’t as easy as it sounds. Every major deck has a backbone of forty cards that are non-negotiable, and of the remaining twenty, only about eight are worth mucking with. Thicke is worried that the problem will persist even after the addition of later sets, because most decks will be dedicated to a single team, and as such, will still be drawing on a limited number of “best” cards. Ideally, he says, the designers will work to ensure that collaboration between all the different teams will allow for the development of new strategies.

For Neil Reeves, a look at the four best decks in the environment tells you the problems with a small collection of cards. Three of them have one key card that they should try to mulligan into. The New Brotherhood decks need their signature card, the Sentinels need Longshot, and the Doom decks need to be able to make a 4-cost Doom. He echoes Thicke when he worries about the linking of new and old teams. He anticipates that the designers will grow the game to allow more complex workings between factions, and that the narrowness of deck design will disappear.

Anthony Justice, playing a monstrous Doom/FF concoction disagrees with Reeves. Between Boris and Faces of Doom, the Doom decks are given a great deal of flexibility, and that ability to match an opponent’s strategy is what makes it, in his opinion, the best deck to play right now. It can afford to run single answers, like Flame Trap, that can dismantle an opponent’s offence. And once it survives to the late game, his big men should take the day.

Justice isn’t too concerned about working within a confined space. He cites the late arrival of Entangle to public consideration as evidence that even within a limited pool there are big innovations that can bring a new strategy to prominence.
                       
Junior Game Designer Danny Mandel anticipated a lot of these concerns and had a lot to say on the subject. First he wanted to draw attention to the fact that out of a set of just over two hundred cards there are plenty of viable decks: Sentinels, Doom Control, FF/Doom, and two different brands of Brotherhood. That kind of competitive diversity is shocking from such a small pool of cards.

Secondly, he stressed that the last thing the designers wanted to do was hand players set after set of prepackaged decks. The tightrope they walk is regulating how easy it is for teams to work together. At one extreme, decks won’t play with more than one affiliation because to get them to work together forces a sacrifice in card quality. At the other, team affiliations are no restriction to deck construction, and players are free to use the best cards from every team in their deck, defeating the purpose of affiliations entirely. At the front of the design process is making new and interesting ways for teams to work together, broadening the deck design experience.

Also, Mandel talked about the way that older teams would grow with the release of new sets. Obviously a priority is on giving the new teams an identity and cards that allow them to be competitive, but past teams will not be neglected. They’ll benefit from the addition of generic plot twists, of course, but more than this the new sets will contain cards specifically affiliated to older teams. It’s here that Mandel takes things in an unforeseen direction. Rather than give the Brotherhood a new efficient beater or give Doom a new plot twist to wreck people with, he envisions printing cards for older teams that can play up strengths and strategies that haven’t been used. It’s much easier to print a handful of cards that allow teams to work in new ways than it is to print new cards that play on existing themes and manage to be interesting without being strictly superior.