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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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Deckbuilding With Doug Tice

Patrick Sullivan

March 18, 2006

With his first 4 rounds all ending in victories, Doug Tice is well on his way to picking up his third $10K Top 8. With a good showing in his last Sealed pool and a solid history in Draft, a 4-0 or 3-1 in this pod will put Doug in a great position to add his name to the short list of three-time $10K Top 8 finishers.

The first thing that stood out about Doug’s pool was his . . . less than exciting rare collection. Man-Bull, Absorbing Man, Kristoff Von Doom, Pretender to the Throne, Power Play and Mikhail Rasputin greeted Doug as he sifted through his cards. Then, Doug got to work. In contrast to Alex Brown, who I covered at the beginning of the day, Doug was extremely thorough in sorting through the various iterations of his Sealed pool. For starters, he went through his plot twists, trying to find some powerful cards that would give him specific direction. He found Bum’s Rush, Shrapnel Blast and Retribution, directing him toward the Morlocks. His Brotherhood characters also seemed deep, and he tried a rough build of Morlocks and Brotherhood, which yielded something close to a playable curve. His Hellfire Club characters fell well short of a cohesive set of cards, and those were pushed aside. His X-Men characters got a shot next, and those were paired up with the Morlocks and Brotherhood. It seemed like Doug was just trying to get a feel about which teams were possible to use and which were going to fall short.

Doug then pushed his teams aside and looked at his cards in the context of Mutant traits. He laid out all of his Mutants by curve and found that he was most abundant (and had a fuller curve) in the Energy and Mental traits, while he had very few Physical Mutants. With all of this information processed, Doug then went about building a Brotherhood Morlock reservist/evasion deck with a couple of Energy and Mental tricks. Doug was pleased to see an abundance of reservists, which meant he could play Rem-Ram as a way to reliably smooth his curve. Between two copies each of Julia Carpenter, Freedom Force, Beef, Spoor, Empath, and Storm, Leader of the Morlocks, he eventually cut Beef and one of the Carpenters. Lastly, Doug only had two 5-drops (Sunder and Polaris), and he had to decide between adding a third 5-drop and playing one 7-drop, an Emma Frost, White Queen. Doug finally said, “I guess I’m going to win on 6,” cutting the clunky 7-drop in favor of Wolverine, The Best at What He Does, which just barely beat out Kristoff Von Doom for the last slot.