One of the unfortunate side effects of running tournaments is that organizing and playing are often mutually exclusive. I ran Superman, Man of Steel Sneak Preview tournaments this past Saturday and Sunday at Neutral Ground. I was planning to build my own Sealed Pack with which to challenge players between rounds. I was planning to award an extra pack to anyone who defeated me. What I did not anticipate was how the time constraints of the new one-game/half-hour rounds format would conspire to keep me from playing this weekend. I had the deck built and ready to go, but the rounds just flew by. The deck remained in my pocket, unproven on the field of battle.

Otherwise, the tournament was a blast. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and we cut our main events to a Top 8 Booster Draft on both days. I am happy to report that the new set seems well suited for both Booster Draft and Sealed Pack formats, with plenty of plot twists and enough affiliation diversity that the decks don’t all feel identical.

We had a funny situation where one of the players ignored all of the time announcements for deck construction, despite plenty of tournament experience, and he ended up delaying the start of round 1 by ten minutes. I put a bounty on his head as punishment. Any player who beat him would win a pack that round—a pack that came out of the offending player’s prize pool. Two players beat him in the Swiss and happily took a pack from him, which he could easily afford, since he ended up winning the tournament.

Cosmic and invulnerability added a new wrinkle to both the tournament tapestry and many players’ brows as everyone tried to grapple with the new mechanics and rules. Parasite, Rudy Jones seemed to cause more problems than any other card. More than once, players would ram Parasite into a card with symmetrical stats and then attempt to recover it as a 10 ATK/10 DEF character. The card is good, but not that good. Parasite definitely requires a little chicanery to pull off properly . . . and maybe even a plot twist or a power-up.

Speaking of plot twists, I was shocked that so few players chose to use Female Furies. Reasons ranged from players mistakenly assuming that it was team stamped to simply not wanting to KO a character. To me, +3 ATK seems powerful enough to justify its inclusion in any Sealed Pack deck. The same is true of Armagetto, which is team stamped. You obviously don’t want to go around munching your own characters willy-nilly, but in Vs. System, characters have limited shelf lives. There may even be an advantage to sacrificing a defender during an attack to nullify a combat trick.

One of the cards that surprised me this weekend was Prankster, Oswald Loomis. More than one player could be heard muttering about anatomically challenging feats he or she wanted Oswald Loomis and his controller to perform after having every draw dictated by the opponent from turn 2 onward. If your opponent misses even one key drop from the fourth turn forward, you will likely be able to win that game.

One player who caused more than his fair share of muttering on Saturday was Kevin Singh. Kevin was the top seed coming out of the Swiss rounds during the largest Sealed Pack event we ran that day, and although he did not fare as well during the draft, I managed to save his Sealed Pack registration so we could get an early look at a successful build.

Kevin Singh

Superman, Man of Steel Sneak Preview

Sealed Pack