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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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| Deck Profile: Sabes Barriga |
| Jason Grabher-Meyer |
| May 08, 2005 |
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 Hold the phone and stop the presses. The Longshot/Superman Robots deck is undefeated.
If you’ve been following the coverage, you noticed my comment earlier about a player running Longshot with Superman Robots and no other consistent card to hit with Longshot’s effect. I was briefly, albeit mildly disparaging. I thought there was no chance the deck could succeed.
I was wrong. Its record is 4-0. Check out this baffling deck list!
Characters
4 Longshot
24 Superman Robots
Plot Twists
3 Thinking Outside the Box
4 Cover Fire
4 Ka-Boom!
4 Home Surgery
4 Foiled
2 A Death in the Family
4 Bad Press
2 Betrayal
Locations
3 Phantom Zone
2 Xavier’s School
That’s right—a whole lot of Superman Robots are tearing up the Mexican countryside.
While it’s difficult for the deck to hit with Longshot due to its lack of a secondary army character, Barriga has been winning consistently. The deck mulligans into Longshot and then, depending on the matchup and what happens over the game’s turns, Longshot looks for either Cover Fire or Bad Press. Bad Press is protected by Superman Robots’ effect, preventing an opponent from fighting out of its lock and giving the Robots time to dig for more of their own or for more bad publicity to throw at the opponent.
Once the odds of pulling a Bad Press or Cover Fire are narrowed because copies have been drawn or found with Longshot, the deck can still effectively dig using Thinking Outside the Box. It’s a brutal strategy.
Ka-Boom! and Foiled help slow down the game and keep decks like Evil Medical School, Gamma Doom, and Common Enemy from reaching their all-important late games. Teen Titans loses ground to Ka-Boom! while the one big threat that can ruin this deck, Total Anarchy, is Foiled right out of Curve Sentinels. Phantom Zone and Betrayal add to the Titans and Curve Sentinel hate, respectively. There really isn’t any subtlety here. Barriga knows what he wants his deck to do and he’s committed large blocks of cards in order to ensure that he can do it.
 Home Surgery is just stylish—almost all the deck’s characters cost the same, so they can all recover each other! Longshot can also be kept around, solving the problem created when he’s targeted in the early game and thus wiped off the board before he can cause some real damage. It’s a great pair of tricks branching from a single card, and the ability to recover anything at the cost of sacrificing a single attack makes it extremely difficult to deal lasting damage to it. When this deck controls the initiative, it can pick and choose how many characters it wants to leave open to serve as medics, and when it doesn’t control it? Well, the odds are good it already controls more characters than the opponent can safely deal with.
If a game actually gets to turn 8, or at least to 8 resources, the deck explodes, dropping two boosted Superman Robots to give up to a +17 ATK/ +17 DEF bonus. That’s the optimal situation and not one that happens often, but you can understand how even half of that type of pump can win the game.
Despite looking like a risky deck, it’s actually dangerously consistent and able to hit a Robot or two as needed. It has a lot of defensive options, and it uses them to proceed to a point where it controls the game. That point can come in the mid- or late game, and this deck’s dynamic approach to its core strategy is one of the things that makes it unpredictable. Besides, who takes a look at a turn 3 Superman Robots after a turn 1 or 2 Longshot and thinks they’re going to have a fight?
The answer is “everyone Barriga plays,” now that he’s undefeated and sitting at the top tables. He’ll have his work cut out for him, but it looks like this may be the breakthrough deck of the event! |
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