The name is Willoughby, Tim Willoughby, and he’s gunning for you!
For those of you who are unaware of Mr. Willoughby’s existence, all you have to do is visit this very site (www.metagame.com) and do a quick search for his insightful articles on tournament preparation and competitive Vs. System play.
Competition is Tim’s middle name. He’s a man whose interests include card shuffling and other extreme hand sports (just take a peek at www.superhandz.com and you’ll see what I mean), and he mentioned at the start of our interview that he had spent the previous two hours playing online FreeCell—on a 63-game winning streak—simply because he saw a leader board and the win count sparked his competitive side.
Tim, a university student who has worked for the film industry, tries not to let his studies interfere with his Vs. play. Kidding aside, however, he is a very strong student. He’s hoping to make it to PC New York, which takes place just after his final exams, but his eye is on PC Amsterdam right now and he’s really looking forward to the new format. “I’m pretty excited about Amsterdam, just because I don’t think anybody can be a hundred percent confident of what the best deck is before they show up. Modern Age is really good for the game because it forces everyone to go out and innovate. Despite the fact that there are hardly any primary teams, it seems that there is a massive amount of variety in terms of what is broadly viable.” Tim, along with his group of playtesters, Team I Heart Britney (a team that includes Richard Edbury and Simon O’Keeffe, both top-ranked $10K performers who made the Top 8 in London), plan to test through a significant number of those deck possibilities in order to be fully prepared for the PC. “We have a big pile of decks that seem perfectly reasonable for the ’Dam.’”
The Line on Tim Willoughby
Tim is currently ranked 244th in the world in Constructed play and 564th in the world in Sealed Pack play. He placed:
145th, PC Indy, Indianapolis, Indiana
1st, Gen Con Indy $10K, Indianapolis, Indiana
14th, Gen Con UK $10K, Minehead, Somerset
22nd, EU $10K, Wien, Wien
13th, London $10K, London, London
The rankings are somewhat misleading, however, as Tim doesn’t play as often as many of those ranked above him. “I haven’t played any PCQs in quite a while, largely because I think it’s a little harsh to keep playing them when you have enough PCCs to be qualified for the next PC events. The money is nice, but I would feel pretty shabby about taking a slot that someone else might really need.” While I praised him for his chivalry, he told me that it’s more selfishness than selflessness guiding that rationale. “The UK community is fairly tight knit and small at the moment, and I’d like to have as many friends as possible to hang out with on the [Pro Circuit]. I am being selfish—just not about money.”
That “selfishness” and his impending graduation have hampered his ability to play in tournaments on a regular basis. School also kept him from PC So Cal, which means that we don’t have a strong idea of what his ranking really should be. But with his repeatedly strong performances in $10K events and his knack for winning PCQs, he’s sure to rise much higher in the rankings when he gets into gear again this summer.
Tim on Tap
Tim hit the London $10K armed with a Curve Sentinels deck and I Heart Britney counters, once again professing his unabashed lust for the newly married singer (although he’s repeatedly denied it, we all read his metagame article . . . ). “Turns out that I Heart Britney badges make the best repair counters for Nimrod ever. I think people take Sentinels too seriously because they focus on these guys with big intimidating names like Bastion and Magneto, when really it’s all about Rod and Mark.”
He tested the Sentinels deck for only four days and then tweaked it to his liking. “I did fiddle about with it a bit, making space for copies of Latverian Embassy for the mirror, more Hounds of Ahab than is standard (I think), and multiple Sentinel Mark I’s so that I could beat up on Canadians.” No, Tim isn’t being a stereotypical English colonialist, wishing to pull us Canuckistanians back under the Imperial fold (although if he watches a Sarah Polley film, he may well change his mind). Rather, he’s referring to specific people and their decks, namely the London $10K champion, Dean Sohnle. “I met Dean in the week before the $10K, and he is testing with us for Amsterdam. It was pretty obvious that he was going to do very well at the $10K, but there was no way that any of the rest of us could ever learn to play his deck. Plus, it would be a bit lame to copy his creation [during] its big debut.” Not unaware of the danger of Sohnle’s deck, however, Tim “seriously considered running [Micro Sentinels] in order to beat him and the one other Canadian deck in the room (Fat Bat).”
That’s Sir Tim to You, Peasant!
Come Amsterdam, Tim will have to discard the Curve Sentinels and find an alternative, no matter how many Canadians are in attendance (and he had better hope David Fielder isn’t reading this, or he may face a Sucker Punch in the feature match area). When it comes to Modern Age, Tim is leaning towards Marvel Knights, feeling that they will somehow be involved in the majority of the PC decks. “To be honest, I haven’t personally had as much time to test as I’d like just yet. I really need to make sure that I pass my degree. So far, something with Marvel Knights looks like a strong possibility. I have to be careful how much I say so that I don’t get ‘roffled’ by John O.” He added, “I think that one way or another, it will all be about Midnight Sons. It seems like the format may well polarize between the decks that do silly things with it and the ones that can largely ignore what it is doing.”
One card Tim cautions us to look out for, however, is Hounds of Ahab. “I have heard some rumors about people doing shifty things with Hounds of Ahab in Amsterdam, and considering how powerful they were in London, [they] might actually not be too bad.” He isn’t, however, prepared to accept rumors at face value, knowing full well what team competition is like. “I’m kind of new to the whole ‘limiting information about decks’ thing, though I’m sure that every team spreads fun rumors to all the others.”
Still, Tim expects a brand new level of competition, namely due to what everyone seems to be talking about—the lack of what many people view as staple cards. “Not having Overload and lots of amazing generic plot twists makes things a little bit more fun in my opinion. Note that overload has its own section somewhere above ‘amazing.’ It just does everything.” We discussed the entire Overload debate, and he’s not sure that an errata is the answer, as some people have called for. “I think that if anything is getting errata’d in the whole trinity of Overload/Savage Beatdown/Nasty Surprise, then it should be the other two. Overload itself is really well designed, but falls down a bit when you can easily use it to start stunning things that you don’t really have any business stunning. Having your 5- or 6-drop double-Beatdown/Overloaded is pretty lame, really.”
Besides, there’s always Not So Fast, right? “Well, Not So Fast is something I’ve been championing for a while now, but depending on the rest of the metagame, it is often just awful. Ideally, there would be some clever ruling made, such that nothing needed to be errata’d (kind of like what was done so that you couldn’t Tamaran/Overload opposing Dawn Grangers). Life gets really tricky once the floodgates on errata are opened.”
Willoughby Pub Draught
Asking Tim what he thought of the Marvel Knights set on the whole, he told me that he really liked it. “It has lots of team-affiliated plot twists, which makes Sealed Pack a little more interesting, and the higher number of commons is great. Plus, the general power level of all the teams seems bang on.” He’s also keen for concealed, a keyword that “seems good enough to see some play, but not completely bust in two, which is about right for a set mechanic as far as I’m concerned.” And one aspect he’s particularly happy about is the fact that the team-stamped plot twists often have alternate uses for non-team characters. “Yeah, they seem about the right level that you can hate draft them and still get a bit of use from them.”
Booster Draft, in general, is a topic Tim likes, as he’s one of those players who thrives on the challenges and complexities of the draft. “Anything that makes draft more complicated gets a big thumbs-up from me. There has been a danger in previous sets that [it’s a reasonable] strategy to take plot twists high, then draft the best card from each pack that makes a curve.” Tim feels that this set is different, with more thought needed on what to take and what to hold off on—especially with so many useful plot twists floating around.
Tim’s Top Five Marvel Knights draft picks are “War Wagon, Midnight Sons, Crime and Punishment, Roscoe Sweeney (Ian Vincent’s lovechild), and Spider-Man. Once I have Midnight Sons, quite a lot of stuff shifts up dramatically, and I also have an irrational love of Swan Dive.”
Are they all first picks? “I wouldn’t actually first pick Fixer. I think Roscoe should probably be within picks one through three, but I quite like to remain a little flexible in my first picks. I just thought he deserved a mention somewhere because Ian Vincent loves him just a little too much. I like to stay pretty flexible to start with in a draft, but I’m always very happy to see a War Wagon, and Marvel Team-Up is probably better than most characters. I have first picked all the others on occasion, but what with university work, I haven’t had the opportunity to draft nearly as much as I’d like for Amsterdam. So, I’m probably way behind the curve.”
The Final Word(s)
For the naysayers of Modern Age, Tim says, “Personally, I’d rather have a balanced format, or at least semi-balanced, such that there isn’t a clear tier 1 that is miles above everything else. Decks that rule get pretty boring pretty quickly.”
Is that true even if Tim is the one playing the ruling deck? “Within reason, yes. I was playing Sentinels in London, and it did feel like it was the best deck aside from Dean’s. I very nearly didn’t play it because I wasn’t overly happy about the idea of mirror matches, which tend to be a little bit random. When one deck rules a format, it tends to be that the format becomes lots of copies of that deck and lots of decks designed to beat it. So far, mirror matches for most decks haven’t been the most exciting. I really like the Titans mirror because there are massively huge numbers of opportunities to screw up, making it pretty skill intensive. For most other mirrors, initiative and draws seem to be the most important element. This is, of course, assuming pretty homogenous lists.
“Within our group, once we have a deck that we like, we play quite a lot of mirror matches, as it gives you a really good idea of what the deck does from both angles. It also lets you learn from twice as many mistakes in a single match. At the moment, sets are being released frequently enough that the metagame is never truly static, especially when you hang out with as many wacky deckbuilders as I seem to. So, I’m not sure that the ‘best deck’ is ever static, really. Even Curve Sentinels has had a bit of a facelift with the addition of the doggies, who can completely dominate the mirror and have re-validated Boliver Trask’s inclusion in the deck, which was previously gravitating away from low drops.”
Also known by his screen name Kergillian, Ben Kalman has been involved in the Vs. community since day one. He started the first major player in the online community, the Vs. Listserv, through Yahoo! Groups, and it now boasts well over 1,300 members! For more on the Yahoo! group, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Marvel_DC_TCG.