I was shuffling through all of my cards the other night. There are large, white boxes that line the closet of my game room, stacks of folded playmats, and binders housing my favorite cards. I have a rainbow of aluminum capsules tucking away all of the greatest decks in our game.

For a while, I had taken my favorite decks and tried to foil out the cards for keepsakes. In the end, I could not find enough foil copies of Flying Kick to complete my quest. There is an entire box of Marvel Origins common and uncommon cards sorted by playability and team faction. There must be over three thousand cards. As I collected more cards and cracked more boxes, I invented systems to organize and display the vast expanse of hero cardboard. I have an old, library card catalogue-style drawer system sporting the abbreviated labels of each set. At the front of the drawers are my favorite picks of the set, its rares, and cards of note. Over the last year, I have been prone to buying play sets of the common and uncommon cards. They come sorted by set number and organized beyond my laziest dreams.

Under the card catalogue there is another box of tins. On it, there is thick, black, permanent marker labeling it the “box of broken dreams.”  I have playtested for Golden, Silver, and Modern Age tournaments. I have X-Statix contenders and Doom decks strewn with Marvel Knights and Spider-Friends. Rather than breaking them down, I left them assembled in the hope that new cards would support their rise to tier 1 status. Most of the decks were fun ideas or contained powerful synergies, but could not dethrone the decks du jour.

There are binders of printouts from tournaments, old net decks, ideas that I had scribbled down, and revisions of old articles. Amid the wonderful Vs. System clutter, I found the beginning of my tournament report for Pro Circuit L.A. 2006. While my team and I had many strong tournament finishes, PC: L.A. might be remembered as a sort of dark spot for us. Not a single one of us made the top 75 in that PC, Tim Batow lost a foot race to someone three times his size, and Mike Barnes ended up signing foil copies of Barnacle for a wily British import by the name of Alex Tennet.

I had started the tournament report in the airport on the way to L.A. We had the typical long flight from Florida, and I awaited the reunion with my card-flipping friends. It’s always great to make a little cash and win some card games, but over time I’ve favored the people I’ve met over the checks I’ve cashed.

At the time of this article’s publication, we will be in the throes of the greatest PC to hit the southern hemisphere. There will be bright ideas and wondrous accounts of triumph, but PC Champion hopefuls will certainly feel the sting of defeat. I have experienced that feeling more times than I want to admit. Overall, I think I’ve learned just as much from failure as I ever could from victory. Whether it be hindsight or the ability to learn from past mistakes, it might be worth examining some of our professional low-points for better guidance in the future. The following are some excerpts from the original tournament report:

Tournament Report PC: L.A. 2006

November 16, 2006

It’s Thursday night, and I’m watching busy travelers shopping and bustling. Airports are like mixed drinks: they are a conglomeration of anticipation and anxiety, and often leave you with a headache. Minutes before my connecting flight out of North Carolina was scheduled to take off, the small, Napoleon-esque man at the crowded check-in counter interrupted the beeping carts, cell phone conversations, and credit card solicitors to bring me bad news. In a somewhat metallic, high-pitched voice, our attending airline employee droned that our flight would be delayed for two hours.

On my connecting flight, our crew chose to forgo the typical consideration offered to sleeping passengers in order to bring us every single piece of connecting gate information plausible. I knew where my fellow passengers might walk to depart on their subsequent journeys to every city from Albuquerque to Salzburg. The whole time, I was considering the fact that we were flying. Man had taken flight, but had not yet invented the technology to adjust the volume of announcements made on said flights.

Onlookers watched as I spread my deck across a cleared table at the food court. With a couple of hours to waste, it seemed like fate was telling me to put in some study time. I read over some recent writings by Alex Brown and Adam Prosak, and pillaged important notes I’d stripped from my team’s boards. For me, it has become a Pro Circuit ritual to read and review in the final hours before competition. I impose a no-change ban on my decklist 24 hours before the big event, and I stick to my guns unless we fall into some amazing last minute information.

I went to the fountain and got a drink of water. We all ride that line between a mildly reasonable amount of sleep and those last minute, cram-session games. I consult the masters on my team in the hope that I might steal away a piece of their understanding and ingenuity. It never works, but I keep trying.

Because I have a day job, I tend to be the last guy to show at a PC. I rarely see the convention centers on a Thursday, and this trip looked like it would offer nothing different. I would land in L.A. at 1 AM Eastern Standard Time. My mind was tired, but I felt our deck was strong.

Flashback to September 2006

September 30, 2006

Genius does not happen all at once; sometimes it is a gradual building of information that leads to enlightenment. My good buddy and teammate John Hall sent me a somewhat cryptic message entitled, “Quickill Tim”:

Tim Batow: you know the deck is pretty good

Tim Batow: when Enemy of My Enemy is too slow

Tim Batow: there are some flaws with the list

Tim Batow: I could see it being outraced by voltage

Tim Batow: and I could see it losing to double Betrayal

Tim Batow: but I was pulling off turn 3 wins like 30% of the time in fishing

Tim Batow: and winning the other games on 4

vampirelord54: uh oh

Tim Batow: that’s the 2-drop Quicksilver, Inhuman by Marriage

Tim Batow: keep this on the DL

vampirelord54: rofl Quicksilver abuse FTW

vampirelord54: ok

Tim Batow: but the deck is just insane

Tim Batow: the turn 3 kills I was getting

vampirelord54: really?

Tim Batow: were when I played Ted Kord ◊ Blue Beetle on 1

Tim Batow: and then a Fated up Quicksilver on 2

vampirelord54: it just doesn't seem nutzo by looking at it

Tim Batow: swinging for 14

Tim Batow: and then on turn 3

Tim Batow: Black Panther, King of Wakanda with Flamethrower, and then three ATK pumps

Tim Batow: I’ll give you an example

Tim Batow: the worst ATK pumps you could probably draw

Tim Batow: are 2 The Royal Guard and 1 Flying Kick

Tim Batow: give +7 ATK

Tim Batow: plus his base of 3

Tim Batow: and the Fate Artifacts

Tim Batow: so 7+7 = 14

Tim Batow: 14*2 = 28

Tim Batow: 28+14 (the damage from turn 2) = 42

Tim Batow: Panther swings for 9

Tim Batow: 51

vampirelord54: ....

Tim Batow: and it’s really not that unrealistic

That’s pretty much how it all started. Tim is a deckbuilding genius and always thinks of great ideas before other people even read all of the cards. He’s a machine. Sometime prior to this message, our team had invented a Rigged Elections deck abusing the now-banned Valeria Von Doom and A Day Unlike Any Other. We could win with that deck on turn 4 greater than 75% of the time, but the new deck blew it out of the water. We had found our PC deck, and spent the next two months testing, tweaking, debating card slots, and building decks that abused Betrayal and Meltdown. Nothing in our gauntlet could stop the deck.

February 22, 2007:  Time for Some Learnin’

We’d built a ton of decks, including some strong stall versions of Doom. Barnes and Wiggins posted some strong results with a stall deck focused around the Heralds of Galactus, but in the final hours we assumed that stall would be a minimal part of the field. Besides, our speed deck crushed competing rush decks like High Voltage.

We basically missed the prediction game. While our decks from past PCs were generally some of the better metagame choices, our groupthink had locked us into believing that the field would be faster than it really was. The now infamous stall decks and Doom / Moloids decks ruled the show. There were also some fresh perspectives on the Brotherhood. The high number of Teen Titans and High Voltage decks that we predicted didn’t show up in force, and we ended up bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

I finished my Day 1 performance by missing the cut at 5-5. For once, I was really prepared for dominating Draft. Each evening for weeks preceding the PC, I’d spent hours practicing with pro players online and working on my card evaluation. I built mock-up decks and practiced playing all of the most viable strategies. In the end, all of my preparation should have been spent thinking outside of the box and working up alternate deck ideas. There are some relevant cliches about eggs and baskets, but you generally get the point.

It had always been fairly painful to think about that weekend. After putting some time in between that PC and now, I realize that there were some pretty strong lessons learned. I now make every tournament prediction with a high level of skepticism. If you think you have prepared broadly for an environment, keep on testing. Hopefully you will catch all of the relevant angles and make the right call, but a strong dose of humility will appropriately keep you guessing about and preparing for the unexpected.

Class dismissed.

Jeremy ‘Kingpin’ Blair (7-drop, TAWC) is a psychologist and aspiring Pro Circuit Champion from Tampa, Florida. He is currently working on learning from the past in order to achieve world domination in the future. If you have constructive comments or questions, feel free to contact him at Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.