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A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about the extensive changes being made in the European Organized Play structure. There had been some debate among the online community as to whether the changes were for the best, so before I delve too deeply into this week’s article, I’d just like to say that from my perspective the changes are bearing fruit. From a strictly personal point of view, I have been able to attend more tournaments in the past two months than I had in the previous twelve. Our local Vs. System scene seems to be picking up some momentum, as well. We’ve seen attendance rise and new players come into the game. In fact, I’m writing this the night after competing in a Day of the Hero tournament at my local store (Final Fantasy Games in Luton). I had the pleasure of playing a chap by the name of Nick who had just picked up the game a few days before. It’s really gratifying to see new players starting up, and I hope you all do your best to encourage them.

As with last week’s article, this edition of Basics is specifically targeted toward the new player. I hope that something here will prove useful to you in the early stages of your Vs. System experience.

Last week, we began to explore the Constructed format and touched on some basic guidelines for building an on-curve deck. This week, I will explore another direction for constructing your deck—off-curve.

Basically speaking, if you go off curve, it means that you are not using all your resource points on a single character each turn. Often, you will recruit multiple characters per turn, or possibly spend your resource points on other abilities. I won’t go into incredible detail about constructing your deck, because one of my fellow Metagame.com writers, Shane Wiggans, has already penned a very good article on the subject that I suggest you take some time to read (when you’re done here, of course).

There are a couple of different ways you can go off curve. One is to play a short-curve deck. In such decks, a 5-drop is often the highest-cost character. One example of a short-curve deck would be Good Guys, which has done quite well in tournament play recently.

Short Curve

This particular decklist was used by Nicolas Cuenca to win $10K Boston this July:

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the deck’s highest-cost characters are indeed 5-drops (Fire and John Henry Irons ◊ Steel, Steel-Drivin’ Man). This deck is more than capable of winning the game on turn 5 and consistently does. Because of this, there is no real need to include higher cost characters. You may also question the number of cards of which there are only one copy. Last week, we mentioned that having fewer copies of a particular card reduces your chance of drawing it. . . that is, unless you have efficient search mechanisms. This deck has a few powerful search cards. Enemy of My Enemy is used to get a character you need, while Kooey Kooey Kooey can get you absolutely anything. Sue Dibny can fetch you a 2-drop, Ted Kord can get your valuable equipment, and Shayera Thal ◊ Hawkwoman can find equipment or your 4-drop. These cards give the deck incredible consistency and allow you to include plenty of “one-ofs” in the build. If this particular deck is of interest to you, then I seriously recommend checking out Graham Van Leeuwen’s analysis of the deck. It goes into a lot of specific details and is well worth the read.

If you’re looking to construct a short-curve deck of your own, then you need be sure that your deck can win the game early. For example, it’s not a good idea to build a short-curve deck out of characters with stall-based abilities. Your deck needs to be aggressive enough to win on turn 5 or 6, or have some devastating alternate win condition. The Good Guys deck wins so often because it uses the ally mechanic to create very large characters that are more than a match for the opposition. It also has the backup of using Fire’s ability to cause direct, non-combat damage (also known as “burn”) to the opponent.

Another recommendation I would make is to ensure that you have plenty of alternative characters that you can recruit. You’re probably not going to see the best results if you only include four copies of a specific character for each turn. Here’s a scenario for you. Let’s say that you build your own version of Good Guys and use four copies of Fire with no copies of John Henry Irons ◊ Steel. You’re playing an opponent who has a strong, defensive, curve deck and you haven’t been able to push through enough damage to win by turn 5. Turn 6 rolls around, and your opponent recruits his or her 6-drop, but you are left with no decent recruit. By diversifying your character roster, you’re making contingency plans that could save your bacon. Be sure to include relevant characters, though. John Henry and Fire are in this build for a reason, and their inclusion in no way diminishes the potency of the deck. Don’t make the mistake of putting characters into the deck just because they share a team affiliation. For example, I would not put a copy of Tasmanian Devil in this deck. Sure, he’s a JLI 5-drop, but he adds nothing to the ally theme and recruiting him would disrupt the synergy of the characters in play.

Weenies

Another option for going off-curve is to run a “weenie” or “swarm” deck. This strategy follows the formula of recruiting multiple characters per turn and very often won’t recruit anything higher than a 3-drop. The idea behind this is that you are able to swarm over the opposition using your manpower advantage. The most successful decks of this type have always been able to give their characters a seriously aggressive ATK boost to make up for the difference in natural ATK and DEF statistics. Team attacks are often utilized to take out significantly larger characters controlled by your opponent.

One of my favorite decks of this type was the Wrecking Crew Combo deck used by Anthony Shaheem at Pro Circuit San Francisco. Anthony finished in ninth place with this very aggressive build.

This list seems a bit complicated at first glance, but after a couple of games, you’ll begin to feel comfortable with it. The premise is fairly simple: By having a vast selection of characters to choose from, you are able to make multiple recruits per turn and then have them attack for vast amounts of damage. This particular deck worked by using Kooey Kooey Kooey to search out as many copies of The Wrecking Crew as possible, and then wipe out the opposition’s board and endurance with numerous attacks of incredible magnitude. It was not uncommon for three characters (all costing 2 or less) to team attack for a combined total 30 to 40 ATK.

There are a couple of inherent problems with weenie decks. First, because you are playing multiple cards per turn, you can quickly run out of cards in hand. If you’re building a deck like this, you want to include some way of maintaining a healthy number of cards in hand. One particularly popular way to do this is to use Birthing Chamber. Since you’ll probably have multiple characters out, it should be quite easy to get the most out of a card like Birthing Chamber. Another problem with weenie decks is the potential to suffer a lot of damage at the hands of your opponent. Because your characters are small, it’s generally not too difficult for them to become stunned or for you to suffer significant breakthrough. If you are going to use more than one team affiliation, you want to be sure that you have a way to team-up your characters so that they can reinforce each other. Other cards like Catcher’s Mitt are also worth considering.

Overall, I tend to find off-curve strategies more fun to play than on-curve ones, and you normally have a great deal of options available to you on any given turn—often more than with a standard curve deck. But off-curve decks can be a bit trickier to build because you have to be sure to maximize your recruits and have the support you need to play multiple cards per turn.

Deckbuilder Challenge Cup #5: “Batman’s Pants”

At the time of writing this, my article with the new Deckbuilder Challenge #5 has not yet been published, so I have no Top 5 decks to bring you. In light of this, I am just going to restate the challenge for those who might have missed it.

This challenge is entitled Batman’s Pants because it’s going to be very tight and restricting.

Batman’s pants are indeed tight, but they are effective. They keep him warm, safe, and sound. Can you make a deck that consistently performs as well as Bruce’s underwear?