Alex Tennet is a prestigious player with a rather impressive resume. He has posted numerous good finishes including winning the inaugural $10K Indianapolis and placing Top 4 at last year’s $10K Columbus. Today, he's put himself in a position to make a run for the Top 8. He is 11-5, which means that he'll need a strong 3-0 finish in this pod in order to make it to tomorrow's round of play. Standing in his way, however, is a murderer's row of exceptional Vs. players. Nick Little, Donnie Noland, Anthony Justice, and Jason Green are all powerhouses and looking to stand in Alex's way. He came into this pod having gone 3-0 in his first draft, where he drafted the JLA / Secret Society ally deck, and then having gone 1-2 with his second pod, in which he drafted JLI resource restriction. He felt that he could have done better in the second pod if he'd acted a little sooner. "There were plenty of signals to switch to JLI 4, but I didn't switch in time. I feel that if I would have switched a bit sooner, I could have 3-0'd it. It was much easier than this one."
Opening up his first pack, I figured that he would probably be predisposed to the decks he was used to, which are JLA ally–based decks. When he looked at his first decision, he was faced with a Balance of Power, Magnificent Seven, Scarecrow, Psycho Psychologist, and Hector Hammond. This is a pretty decent pack for a player looking to go with the willpower / Fat Dudes deck that was popular during the first pod. Both Balance and Hector are very important cards to that strategy. They provide big walls that tend to bounce attacks. However, Alex wanted to stick to the decks that he knew best and selected the Magnificent Seven. It didn't commit him to a deck type, like selecting HH would, and it would let him go either JLI 4 or JLA / SS, depending on the cards that came.
His second pick had a decision for him. He could take the Ted Kord ◊ Blue Beetle and lock himself into JLI 4, or he could take a Wonder Woman, Avatar of Truth, which would likely be played in either of the decks he wanted to draft. He chose to go with the more versatile card and put the Wonder Woman into his deck. Pack 3 provided him with a rather lackluster Captain Boomerang, "Digger" that solidified his decision to go JLA / SS. He then chose a Charaxes, Killer Moth over a Straight to the Grave, which is really an either/or pick. It should be noted at this point that in taking these cards, he has been letting cards such as Zazzala ◊ Queen Bee and Infestation go by that would have easily put him into the JLI / Injustice Gang concealed deck that was so rampant in draft two. I asked him about this after the draft, and he told me that he didn't really know how to draft the deck, and since it's such a complicated deck, not knowing how to draft it is the surest way to lose with it, which I thought was a very fair assessment. He rounded out the first pack with notables such as two Balance of Powers (the one he opened lapped!), another Magnificent Seven, a Maxwell Lord, and a Hal Jordan, Hard-Traveling Hero. After examining his deck after the first pack, it wasn't clear in which direction he wanted to go. It wasn't his fault, though: this draft was very dry for the deck he wanted to draft. Ally is a very difficult deck to draft if you can't get the characters for it. His plot twists were very good, but that means nothing if you don't have the ally characters to trigger.
The second pack featured a bomb in the form of Scarecrow, Fearmonger. He then picked a Secret Origins over an Oliver Queen ◊ Green Arrow, Emerald Archer. His next pick yielded the first really good ally character he'd seen, Illusionary Warriors. They're exceptional at bouncing attacks back, which lets you in to attack on your opponent's initiative. With the number of power-up cards he'd drafted so far, it looked like he might be headed in the right direction again. His next pick was a Zazzala ◊ Queen Bee that he took over a Tasmanian Devil. At first I thought he'd decided that after he'd seen all of the cards going around, he'd switch and give the JLI / IG deck a try. When I asked him about it later, he said that the only reason he took it was because of the Illusionary Warriors he'd just picked up. He rounded out his picks with another Digger, a Poison Ivy, Kiss of Death, a third Balance of Power, and a Kimiyo Hoshi ◊ Dr. Light. When he took a look through his deck after the second pick, I notice a bad sign—he didn't have any 3-drops. He had a good collection of 2- and 4-drops, but there wasn't any meat in the sandwich. Unless he picked some up in the third pack, things were going to be rough.
His third pack offered him a difficult choice. He had opened Crystal Frost ◊ Killer Frost, who is one of the best ally cards in the set. Unfortunately, he also opened Glass Jaw, which is one of the best plot twists in the set. Decisions, decisions. After much deliberation (and time being called), he plopped the blue card into his deck. The next pack had a veritable treasure trove of good cards for a dedicated SS drafter, which Alex sadly wasn't at the time. Slaughter Swamp, Funky's Big Rat Code, and Sinister Citadel are all incredibly powerful cards that any Secret Society drafter would clamor to get. Alex was resigned to take the Darkseid, Heart of Darkness, though, to help fill in his curve. There still wasn't a 3-drop in sight, though, and the next pack didn't help matters. All he could manage out of it was a Batman, Hidden Crusader. When he finally got a pack with a 3-drop in it, there was an Nth Metal staring him in they eye as well. Alex let out a long, resigned sigh as he put the incredible equipment into his pile. He had given up on three drops. It was time for plan B—draft a bunch of 1- and 2-drops and just go one-two on turn 3. He started picking up any Chomins or other 1-drops he could find to help fill out his curve. He got a late Funky's Big Rat Code as well, which should help him get his rather even three-team deck off the ground. All in all, he wasn't too happy after the last card was drafted.
"I think the best I can do realistically is 1-2. 3-0 is completely unrealistic." We had a long talk about the card pool and how there weren't any cards that he really needed in the draft. "It was strange. With the exception of the Scarecrow, I didn't see any of the real power cards from the set. If there were any at this table, and since the drafters at this table were very good, I wouldn't have seen any even if there were, my deck might have ended up better."
It just seemed from my perspective that the card pool didn't support the deck he was trying to draft. If he had been more receptive to a JLI / IG deck or the willpower deck in the beginning, he might be singing a different tune. There were a plethora of good cards for both of those decks, and they kept coming around. That leads me to believe that there's only one drafter of each of those decks at the table. This unfortunately means that Alex was likely sharing cards with at least four of the other drafters at the table. That's why the card pool looked so dry. I'll be interested to see the decks that came from this pod to see if my observations were correct.
Alex and I also talked for a bit about the presence of two Barry Allen ◊ The Flashes in the draft. With as many IG concealed cards as there appeared to be in this draft, I thought that the value of the normally mediocre Flash would have gone up. Those decks tend to have only a couple of small characters in their visible area which provide perfect targets for the Flash. Especially with the power-up capabilities that his deck has, I think that they would have worked wonderfully in Alex's deck. He agreed with me, but said that he wasn't willing to commit to them this draft.
Regardless of the outcome of his draft, Alex is going to need to pull a serious rabbit out of his nonexistent hat to make the 3-0 record he needs to make Top 8. However, I'd be lying if janky decks hadn't pulled it off before. In fact, Nick Little pulled a very similar stunt earlier in a pod very similar to this one. Nick's deck had a slightly better curve, but was seriously janky regardless. Maybe whatever supernatural force that possessed Nick in his 3-0 run can take hold of Alex and help him get the record required to advance to tomorrow's play.