Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

If you read my last article, then you’ll know that I’ve been struggling to find suitable topics to write about every week. The DC Modern Age metagame didn’t present enough unique decks for me to continue analysis on the format, so it appears that the only option I have left is to begin writing about Golden Age decks in preparation for Pro Circuit Los Angeles. However, one of my editors gave me an amazing suggestion and proposed that instead of going through the formal cut-and-dry explanation of how to play new decks, I should review the histories, evolutions, and applications of past archetypes. My articles have been extremely focused on play mechanics and actual deck performance, and I feel that I’ve been neglecting some of the other important aspects of this game, such as deckbuilding and metagaming. By writing about a single deck’s journey through the timeline of competitive Vs. System, I’ll be able to talk about multiple concepts at once and discuss two things that are important for the well-being of Vs. System: history and the metagame.

Why is history important for the health of Vs. System? For starters, knowing your history is the key to controlling the present. By analyzing the past, you can learn what mistakes were made in terms of deck construction and metagame predictions, and avoid making those same mistakes later down the line. You can see what worked and what didn’t, and possibly even find a concept that can be drastically improved upon when combined with cards from newer releases. If you can’t find an answer to the metagame, sometimes looking through old decks and archetypes will turn that light bulb on and get the innovative wheels turning. There are tons of undiscovered gems in the depths of the Metagame.com coverage that are months or years old and haven’t been fully explored. Also, going over the history of competitive Vs. System is a nostalgic experience for everyone who remembers the days when Brotherhood and Fantastic Four were the decks to beat and Sentinels couldn’t compete unless it ran Longshot, Rebel Freedom Fighter. It strengthens the community because by sharing memories of tournaments we can connect as players and as people. We can remember when the game was two sets young and the possibilities for the future seemed endless, while players who weren’t around in the days of Origins get to see a part of the game they’ve never experienced before. If nothing else, these articles should be an entertaining exploration of the history of competitive Vs. System for veteran and novice players alike.

However, I also want to use these articles as a way to give a real-life example of something much more complex—metagame shifts. The metagame is a strange machine; it’s nearly impossible to figure out before a big tournament, but about a week after the event has concluded, it all makes sense and you smack yourself for not knowing seemingly obvious things beforehand. I know it sounds like standard, common-sense advice, but you really need to make sure that you know exactly what the metagame will be like before attending a big event. It’s not always that easy, though, especially when you’re going into an unknown environment or the card pool is so huge that you could’ve easily missed an important deck in testing. Also, metagames can shift drastically between tournaments, so don’t assume that a $10K is going to mirror the environment of a tournament a month later. Examining a deck’s evolution based on metagame shifts is a good way to show and explain why things change, and how to better predict when it will happen.

What I plan to do for the next few weeks is give you a real, in-depth example of how the metagame shifts and how you need to be prepared to shift with it. I am going to cover the evolution of a deck, starting with its unnoticed debut at $10K Origins 2004 and finishing with where it stands today. I am going to elaborate on all the incarnations this deck has been through in the past two years, and since it’s going to take a lot of time for me to go over everything, this article will be divided up into a multiple-part series. Hopefully, by going through the intricate history of a deck’s progression, I’ll be able to show everyone how important it is to adapt to the metagame, as well as revisit the past and apply long-forgotten concepts and decks to the present.

The deck I’m going to cover is none other than Child Lock. I am choosing this particular deck because throughout the course of Vs. System history, it has been through so many different builds and win conditions that it is the perfect example for showing adaptation to a metagame. Also, Child Lock was the deck that got me my first 10 PC points and an invite to Pro Circuit Atlanta; I feel that it’s the only deck that I have ever truly known well enough to discuss confidently in this much detail. So, for the next few weeks, I’m going to explore the history of competitive Vs. play, Child Lock and its evolution, and the drastic shifts the metagame has experienced.

Many players may be unfamiliar with the Child Lock concept, so before I get started, I’ll review what it actually is. Child Lock is in no way, shape, or form a win condition, or even a specific deck like some players believe it is. Rather, Child Lock is a strategy that you can use either to stall until the later turns or control the board by protecting your characters. A Child Lock involves having Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl and Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards in play and then playing A Child Named Valeria every turn to prevent your characters with a cost of 3 or less from stunning. Technically, you could use any version of Invisible Woman or Mr. Fantastic to satisfy A Child Named Valeria’s requirements, but the low cost versions are preferred because they’re automatically protected by Child’s effect. Add in a way to keep all of your characters reinforced and you can slowly build up a massive board of 1-, 2-, and 3-drops without taking any damage throughout the entire game!

It’s not that simple, though. In addition to those three cards, you need to have a reliable way to search out Child every single turn. If you fail to play the plot twist, your opponent can easily wreck your board because all of your characters have weak stats and (most of the time) your deck won’t run any form of alternate defense. It’s extremely important that any Child Lock–based deck you play has multiple ways to protect itself, starting on turn 4 at the latest. It’s nearly impossible to recover from a turn where you don’t get a Child, so Child Lock is an extremely fragile concept as well as an extremely powerful one.

The common belief about Child Lock is that it was pioneered by Craig Edwards and the YMG/KG coalition at the inaugural Pro Circuit Indianapolis in the form of Rigged Elections. While it’s true that PC: Indy 2004 was the first time A Child Named Valeria was in a Top 8 deck, a handful of players were experimenting with this powerful plot twist as early as $10K Origins 2004, including Edwards himself. At the beginning of Vs. System, the big decks were The New Brotherhood, Big Brotherhood, Common Enemy, and Wild Vomit, all of which relied on winning through combat and combat alone. Theoretically, Child Lock would be a great strategy in this metagame, because by stripping away your opponent’s only means of winning (endurance loss caused by attacking), you could easily take control of the game and do whatever you wanted to finish it. However, at this early stage of Vs. System, there weren’t many options available to allow the Child Lock player to access Child consistently each turn and stay alive until turn 8 or 9. The two most effective non-character search cards in Marvel Origins were Boris, Personal Servant of Doctor Doom and Four Freedoms Plaza, so for the first-ever $10K event, players were split on exactly how to build their decks. Of the eight players playing A Child Named Valeria, three used a Common Enemy team-up and five used a straight Fantastic Four deck.

The Common Enemy build’s biggest selling point was it allowed access to Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom as a way to search out Child. These decks chose to finish the game with Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria and the infinite loop with Press the Attack because it was pretty easy to maintain a board of four or more characters that could remain exhausted. The inherent problem with Child Lock decks during this time period, besides being inconsistent due to lack of search effects, was the ability to only play four copies of Child per game. To protect your board until turn 8, not only would you have to hit all four copies of Child, but there would also be one turn where you would be completely vulnerable. Assuming you play Child as soon as possible, meaning turn 3, you could only play each copy once and protect yourself on turns 3, 4, 5, and 6, but not on turn 7. If you planned to protect yourself on turn 7 instead of turn 3, your characters could end up getting KO’d early on and then you wouldn’t be able to set up the lock in the first place. And this is assuming that you are able to search for and play a Child every single turn; in some games, you can get bad draws and not see the search cards you need. The Common Enemy build allowed you to re-use your precious copies of Child through Rama-Tut and Dr. Doom, Diabolical Genius. For reinforcement, the deck either naturally reinforced or equipped Personal Force Field to as many characters as it needed to. Seeing as Origins was one of the first $10K events, players were still getting a grasp on the game, and many card choices seem extremely awkward by today’s standards (such as Common Enemy decks playing only two copies of Reign of Terror). Here is one list I really like, as it resembles modern-day Child Lock much more than the other lists played at the $10K.

The straight Fantastic Four deck is very similar to the Fantastic Fun deck that is synonymous with Dean Sohnle. However, without Flamethrower, there wasn’t much potential for a straight burn deck, so the build was much more offensively oriented. Essentially, the deck was an alternate version of the Bumper Cars deck that saw some tournament success early on. It relied on Four Freedoms Plaza as its search engine and played all of the low cost versions of the main Fantastic Four members to ensure that Child could protect them (specifically, the same versions of Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic as the Common Enemy build, along with Thing, Ben Grimm and Human Torch, Johnny Storm). Child prevents all of your characters from stunning, and when you have three or four copies of Fantasticar in play, those characters can run rampant on your opponent’s board without fear of being stunned back. So, instead of using the protection of Child as a way to stall out the game, Fantasticar Child Lock used the plot twist as a Bamf-like effect and simply beat its opponent down. However, this version suffered from the same inconsistencies as the Common Enemy build did. If you couldn’t find that one missing character to get Four Freedoms Plaza online, then you were out of luck. Child wasn’t as essential to this deck’s survival as it was to the Common Enemy version because it also played bigger characters as an emergency plan in case Child couldn’t get online. If all else failed, you could just curve out and hope to outplay your opponent during the combat phase. Here’s the most focused list I found in the $10K archives:

Before you ask why there’s only one copy of Four Freedoms Plaza in the deck, remember that Have a Blast! hadn’t been released yet and The Pogo Plane acted as your second through fourth copies of the card. Don’t worry; I couldn’t understand why this list wasn’t running four copies of Four Freedoms Plaza either when I first saw it.

What Child Lock was really struggling against at this stage was Reign of Terror. With Common Enemy being a pretty popular deck, a double-Reign on turn 4 wasn’t too uncommon when your opponents got a good draw, and even if you did manage to play Child, your characters would still bounce back to your hand. Luckily, though, the weekend of $10K Origins was also the weekend of the DC Origins Sneak Previews, so help was most definitely on the way.

For $10K San Diego, the metagame stayed pretty much the same, which is to be expected when no new cards are added to the card pool. Some TNB players decided to switch to Big Brotherhood, probably as a result of Hodack’s success at $10K Origins, and a Medium Brotherhood variant was also created. Gamma-Doom was introduced as the first popular stall deck, proving at the time to be a more reliable way of getting to turn 7 or 8 than Child Lock was. Ka-Boom! found a home in nearly every deck as a way to destroy Lost City and take away Big Brotherhood’s main source of power, which was detrimental to the Freedoms Plaza version of Child Lock that ran only one copy of the location. Overall, $10K San Diego yielded nothing new in regard to Child Lock or even really the metagame, although champion Quang Nguyen’s Mutant Nation deck was an unexpected and pleasant surprise.

With the addition of DC Origins, the card pool was going to change soon—just in time for $10K Chicago. The new set opened up thousands more possibilities in regard to deck construction. Most players had their eyes on Have a Blast! as an easier way to counter the increasingly popular Big Brotherhood decks, and the other power cards from the set, such as Fizzle, attracted attention. But lurking among the shadows was a card most players immediately dismissed as unplayable, yet it had an amazing amount of synergy with A Child Named Valeria and another Fantastic Four card from Marvel Origins. Would this abusive combo be unleashed at Chicago, or would the players who discovered it wait until the Pro Circuit to unleash it? How much impact would DC Origins have on the metagame dominated by Brotherhood and Common Enemy? Would the metagame make its first major shift before Pro Circuit Indy? Stay tuned for next week’s article, which should cover the time frame between the first Pro Circuit Indy and Pro Circuit New York, and even more changes to the Child Lock strategy!