Of course, you don’t really need me to tell you all of this. I like to credit my readers with a little bit of street smarts, and part of that comes from recognizing that the only good films that have numbers at the end are ones that aren’t actually part of a big long sequence of films (unless, of course, they are Star Wars, which exist apart from regular films*).

Here is the formula played out.

Deathrace 2000 = good

Blues Brothers 2000 = bad

The Magnificent Seven = good (even if it is a rip-off of Seven Samurai)

Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode (also known as Halloween H20) = bad

In films, the original tends to be the best. Clarity of thinking here is key, though. If you write a series of films as a series from the start, then they can still work. The clarity is still there. The story always intends to go on for however many films, so everything is tickety boo.

In Vs. System, quite the opposite is true. I took “The Rise of the Machines” as my title for this week’s article because it is a nice little reference to the growth of the importance of technology. Technology used to be just such trivialities as getting a VCR to work or learning how to use computers—in short, anything that your parents might have had trouble or asked for your help with. Upon entering the TCG world, though, thing get significantly more complicated. Here, tech is the faerie dust that allows the magic to happen. It is the final tweaks on decks that create the best possible build.

Having just gotten back from PC Indianapolis, I was a little surprised at the number of people whose carefully reasoned opinion was that the format was not the greatest one around and contained lots of “random” mirror matches. I’m sure that those people were equally happy to moan about the Sentinels metagame in New York. Well, I’m the meta-moaner, here to moan about everyone who is moaning. Both in New York and in Amsterdam, play skill and appropriate amounts of tech proved invaluable to rise above the various other robots playing the same old decks.

In a new or dynamic format, “tech” will definitely exist in one way or another, but it won’t be as visible or potentially powerful because nobody can be quite as sure of what they’ll be running into at events. It’s quite easy to end up more steps ahead of the metagame than is actually appropriate. When tech is redundant, just as when everyone has it, it ceases to be tech at all. Bad tech is not tech.

An ex-girlfriend of mine used to thoroughly enjoy mocking me for paragraphs like the last one, which included lots of uses of something that is, outside of gaming, a nonsense word. We would be out shopping for groceries, and she would point out a special offer for lots of food that I very much like in a reduced price bundle deal and ask if this was tech. I, of course, grudgingly had to admit that it was, and that massively uncool I was.

In the environs of this article, though, I feel pretty safe in decreeing that tech is at its absolute best in formats that less creative souls might consider flat or similar. Team FTN seemed to have the format cracked; between including Helping Hand, Trial by Sword, No Man Escapes the Manhunters, and appropriate numbers of important drops (like a pair of Rot Lop Fans), they decimated what at first glance appeared to be a homogenous field. In New York, the Sentinels players who understood what mattered and included Latverian Embassy and Apocalypse were the real winners.

Particularly in Indianapolis where there were plenty of search cards available, the value of small deck tweaks was of great importance. A single card, if needed, could be fetched far more often than mere probability suggested that it would naturally show up. And Vs. is a game where single cards can swing matches.

While I understand that prodding people with sticks and telling them to be creative isn’t especially helpful, it is exactly what I get from my editor, and I’ll be damned if the pointy stick I’ve been running through a pencil sharpener doesn’t get a little bit of use somewhere.

The problem with finding good tech is that it requires a good understanding of matchups and of what actually causes a particular deck to win or lose. For example, in Indianapolis, I saw a lot of copies of Roy Harper ◊ Speedy being used to KO various characters (especially Shadow Creatures and Soldiers of New Genesis) with gay abandon. Roy was, for a while, considered to be pretty good tech in the field, but there were some slight issues. He can only be used so much before the collateral damage inflicted on your own hand is greater than the harm he does to the opponent. While I’m not suggesting that he hadn’t earned his spot in the GLEE deck, I believe that he was never really there as the primary threat to that sort of thing. I also believe that using Rot Lop Fan for hidden characters, or more surgical Speedy strikes, might have been the strategic tech best employed for certain matchups. Even just realizing that ordering attacks correctly could be very important in a field where players were running Helping Hands could well be considered tech, given how much of the field did not appear to have factored in this consideration.

Each piece of tech is a tiny edge, and in a format where things are very close, the accumulation of these tiny edges is what makes a champion.

Now that I have convinced you, alls I need to do is convince Hollywood to get it right straight away. Alas, methinks this might take a little longer.

Work smarter and harder.

Tim “Has Just Realized that the Fact that Terminator 2 was Better than Terminator Rather Makes the First Half of His Article Moot but Doesn’t Mind” Willoughby

timwilloughby@hotmail.com

* Incidentally, a group of friends and I discovered this year (while we were meant to be passing our respective degrees) that the best way to watch Revenge of the Sith is with a copy of Appetite for Destruction on a personal CD player. It’s not quite the same as the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz interaction, but trust me, the fights become resplendent when complemented with visceral 80’s guitar solos.