Only a week and a half to go! In ten short days, competitors from all around the world will be gearing up to play the new Silver Age format at Pro Circuit San Francisco. It’s been an interesting month of testing, and I can tell you for certain that you’re going to see some very interesting decks coming out of this tournament. Some of the top teams will be sporting never-before-seen archetypes in an attempt to win the day. All in all, you can expect San Francisco to be one of the most exciting and innovative tournaments in Pro Circuit history. You’ll hear more about the PC in the coming week as preview articles appear to gear everyone up for the main event.

Even before the PC, though, there’s another Constructed event on the horizon; $10K Brisbane is this coming weekend, and it might very well provide some insight into the action from San Francisco. Be sure to check out the coverage beginning Saturday on Metagame.com.

And looking at even nearer events . . . what about what’s already happened? Metagame has adopted an Infinite Crisis mentality, and this week’s articles delved even deeper into the strategy surrounding the new set.

As per usual, Rian Fike kicked things off on Monday. He brought his usual assortment of entertaining anecdotes that culminated in the analysis of a brand-new deck. It’s called Justice Farm and combines Justice League International and The Kent Farm. The rest of Rian’s article is as un-categorical as it is excellent, so as always, I think you should take a look.

Also on Tuesday, Steve Garrett came back with an article about his first PCQ experience. In case you don’t remember, a couple of articles ago Steve detailed his experiences in Hobby League. Once you’ve gone as far as you can go in Hobby League, PCQs are the next logical step. Steve details how he found an event to attend, how he chose his deck, and what it was like to play in the tournament. If you’ve never played in a PCQ and are considering giving it a try, this is a good place to look for pointers and a description of what PCQs are like.

R&D also made its first appearance of the week on Tuesday when representative Justin Gary continued his series on Infinite Crisis design. Justin was the lead designer for the set, and he covered in great detail some of the challenges particular to it. For example, did you know that design on the set had to begin before the comic book Infinite Crisis storyline was even written? Naturally, designing a game around a mythos that doesn’t exist yet is a daunting task! R&D did a fine job, though, and Crisis has more than exceeded expectations.

On Wednesday, Michael Barnes brought in a new installment of Breaking Ground. This week’s deck is built around Mary Jane Watson, MJ. Michael finds a good deal of synergy between her and the Avengers and accordingly comes up with a pretty spectacular team-attack build. As always, after Michael chooses his theme, he assembles the deck card by card in a very methodical and understandable way. It’s a good method for building any deck. While this one has more of a casual bent, I’m sure that one of Michael’s articles will surprise everyone and produce a top-level deck out of nowhere one of these days. (I’m serious!)

Also on Wednesday, our resident mathematician returned with another in-depth look at one of the more technical challenges of Vs. System. Shane Wiggans’s topic of choice this week was initiative choice. Like so many other things in Vs. System, the choice of initiatives doesn’t seem like an overly complicated one—after all, there are only two alternatives to choose from. However, one of those is right and the other is wrong, and there’s an enormous amount of information involved in making the decision. Shane goes through different factors and circumstances that might influence the decision one way or another. For the technical-minded, this is an excellent read to help you improve your game from the very start.

For Thursday, Alex Brown and Doug Tice came back with an Infinite Crisis Sealed Pack double whammy. For his part, Alex came back with a continuation of his article from last week. An already impressive breakdown of his first Crisis Sealed Pack experience has turned into a veritable tome of helpful hints on how to construct a deck using the new set. Doug began a new series that delves even more deeply into Crisis (if that’s possible) by covering each team’s strengths and weaknesses in Sealed Pack and Draft formats. This week, his focus was on the Checkmate team.

Friday might as well be named Willough-day because Tim Willoughby has claimed it for his own. In this week’s Two Turns Ahead, Tim writes with enthusiasm about the upcoming PC: San Francisco. He feels the same way about the event that I do—it’s sure to be one of the most innovative tournaments in Vs. System history. Tim goes through some of his top choices for Silver Age cards that haven’t seen a great deal of play so far. He also provides us with some straightforward recommendations on deckbuilding and predictions for the tournament. Check it out!

Finally, the week closed out on Saturday with Ben Kalman’s exploration of the Checkmate team. I’m glad Ben’s back to writing about the mythos behind each Vs. System expansion—his articles are informative and interesting and an especially valuable resource if you don’t have the time to check out the comics. His exploration of Checkmate is so in-depth that this week’s article only covers the team’s existence before the Crisis storyline. There’s a “to be continued” at the end, and I’ll certainly be sticking around for next week’s article.

That’s it for me. Let’s just say that UDE has a lot of exciting things on the way! The first of which, of course, is the quarter-million dollars they’re giving away at Pro Circuit San Francisco. I’ll be there, but if there’s something you’d like to send my way beforehand, you can always reach me at anand@metagame.com. Until next time . . .