The other day, a friend of mine busted out a box of Vs. and asked if anyone wanted to draft. He was just trying to get the rares, make sets, and prepare decks for the upcoming Pro Circuit Qualifiers, so the draft was generously free for everyone involved. I had to this point only played games of Brotherhood against the X-Men with the preconstructed decks, but I had watched a couple of drafts and read the commentary of Dave Humpherys here on Metagame.com, and overall, I thought that I had the basics of the Vs. System down. In any case, I have found the game thus far to be enchanting and even addictive. You would have probably jumped at the chance to draft, too.

Now going into this draft, I had a couple of broad thoughts in my head compensating for my lack of Limited experience. First of all I had heard that Sentinels and Doom in particular were difficult to draft because of the commonalities. Many of the best Doom team cards require you to have Dr. Doom, and having the good Doctor is clearly not something you can assume. What if the guy to your right just took your Diabolic Genius?

In my first pack, I opened Nimrod: Mutant Hunter. Though I had heard that drafting Sentinels could be difficult, I figured I would be able to pick up a couple of army Sentinels in order to make him good enough to splash, so I took him. To my eyes, Nimrod's ability seemed very strong, especially if I didn't have the initiative on the turn I played him, and he also had flight, range, and a respectable body. In the meantime, I passed Bishop and several other X-Men.

There was a lot of "table talk" during this draft, as it was very friendly and many of us had never drafted before. As such, I learned that Bishop was a very good 2-drop and picked up a couple of him. I scooped up Nightcrawler: Kurt Wagner and the devastating Wolverine: Logan. Somewhere along the line, I grabbed The New Brotherhood and Savage Land along with sundry Brotherhood characters, Mutant Nation to fix my teams, enough army Sentinels to make Nimrod playable . . . and an additional foil Nimrod!

Yes, friends, my deck really came together.

That is, I learned a lot.

Interestingly enough, I was able to win my first match against a Doom deck. The Doom player actually had a great curve, with Boris, Kristoff, Doomstadt, Latveria, and tons of relevant plot twists (including Faces of Doom to go grab his copy of Dr. Doom: Victor von Doom). I lost the first game after being crushed in a wave of plot twists, but came back the next game with some kind of insane curve involving The New Brotherhood and Mutant Nation making my deck look great. Everyone said I was just lucky with my "three-team pile," but I didn't understand . . . at least not yet.

You see, one of the beautiful things about the Vs. System is that you are never really resource deficient in a concrete sense. You might not be able to put exactly what you want in your resource row, but you can always make your drops if you have an extra army Sentinel that you don't care about . . .

But, of course, it's just that kind of thinking that gives you a three-team pile for a deck. In my subsequent matches, I learned more and more about the strategic deployment of plot twists. I had some good ones for my deck; Mutant Nation in particular gave everyone fits. ("You can't pump Cyclops with Savage Land! . . . I mean, 'never mind.'") But overall, my deck was wholly outclassed. I thought that having the initiative on turn 2 would be great—I always seemed to have Nightcrawler in my hand—but I was repeatedly slowed down by Puppet Master as my opponents' more focused decks came together.

In addition to having too few plot twists in my deck, I severely undervalued equipment. Hopefully that is a mistake I will not make in future drafts. In some games, I had a quick beatdown set up, but I would run into an early member of the Fantastic Four covered in a Personal Force Field and would therefore have no good attack (but my opponent sure would). In one particularly lopsided game, my opponent played Arcade, slapped on Borrowed Blade, and proceeded to KO my entire board! Arcade is already a little bit bigger than some of the options I had for the same turn, but with Borrowed Blade on top, he was a guaranteed kill for most of my deck. Throw in one or two defensive plot twists, and this fairly unspectacular two-card combination made the game impossible for me to win very early.

The last thing that I learned is that Bigger is Better. I mean, sure, I had Blob. He's big and everything . . . but my cards never came together the way I wanted. I mean, do you play Sentinel Mark II or Wolverine? Easy decision, right? If you don't play Sentinel Mark II, you now have the choice between it and Blob the next turn. Again, your choice is easy. So on turn 5, if you play Nimrod, he won't have the repair counter you wanted so badly that you polluted the entire rest of your deck with random army Sentinels!

One thing that I did not notice until it was far too late is that increases in character size in this game are not flatly arithmetic based on cost. That is, if I staple together Nightcrawler: Kurt Wagner and Bishop on my fourth turn, they together aren't as big as my opponent's third turn Wolverine: Logan, let alone his actual fourth turn play. That made taking cheap but efficient early game attackers very problematic once I started hitting turn 4. My plan of playing more guys, even if they were smaller, just resulted in a pile of KO'd losers.

Besides having difficult build decisions, characters in my resource row, no equipment, and inefficient late game plays, the biggest problem I had coming out of this draft was that if I had just stuck to the Sentinels, I would have had an excellent deck, maybe even run the table. I probably passed at least three Reconstruction Programs, not knowing that they are good enough for any deck to draft, Sentinels or no. I could have had one or two excellent Sentinel locations as well, which would have helped my resource issues tremendously. In the end, I had Blob protecting no one especially well, Wolverine stuck in my hand, and a bunch of opponents who all had very good plot twists—including "my" Reconstruction Programs—which they used to wreck me repeatedly.

So after an initial win, I finished 1-3.

The next time I draft, I'm going to approach my choices differently. Rather than taking cheap and efficient attackers early, I am going to take big characters that will help me close a game—It's not how you start, after all, but how you finish, that matters. Moving forward, I am going to value good non-character cards, like plot twists and locations, more aggressively. These cards do double duty: in one sense, a character in the resource row does essentially the same thing as a plot twist or location, but when you flip it face up, that plot twist or location gives you more utility than just the resource point a character would. That resource, for instance, can help you win a fight or stun a much more valuable character on the other side. Though this may seem like something very basic—and certainly I understood this principle in abstract prior to the draft—saying concretely that you will value plot twists over small characters can only help to focus decisions down the line.

You should always be able to get enough cheap characters for your draft deck. As far as I can tell, most of the time the difference between two different 2-drops is not that significant. No one will argue that Sentinel Mark II is better than Nightcrawler or Cyclops, but on offense, that Sentinel can knock out those excellent 2-drops just as easily as they can knock it out going the other way. But when you take even a great 2-drop like Bishop over a significant character for your mid or end game, or even a trick that would allow you to prevent a late game KO, you may be creating a hole through which your opponent can crawl to grab victory.