Okay, I have a confession to make. Doing Metagame coverage is not as easy as it looks. Running around from match to match and trying to get reports that are interesting and informative when the rounds only last 30 minutes and there are twelve rounds in a day can be exhausting. While still writing my feature coverage from round 7, I was told that I needed to cover a round 9 match that had already started! I ran to the feature match area, quickly looked around at the four matches in progress, and chose the one with the coolest decks. The battle was between Tim Batow's
Xavier's Dream deck and Alex Etzel's Fantastic Fun deck. The Xavier's Dream deck has been the talk of the tournament, using Beast to start the Xavier's Dream clock a turn early and using
Total Anarchy and
A Death in the Family to make sure that no stunned characters stay in play. Since the Fantastic Fun deck tries to win by using
Advanced Hardware and
Cosmic Radiation to burn the opponent out, this made for a very unusual game of Vs.—neither player planned to win by attacking!
First, let's give you a little background on the players. Tim Batow is the winner of $10K Vegas and a Top 8 finisher in $10K Chicago. Alex Etzel got ninth place at PC: LA and finished in the money at PC: Indy. Both players were 5-3 going into this round.
I got filled in as to the action I missed on the first couple of turns.
Turn 1.
Turn 2
Turn 3
Tim played
Longshot, used him, and missed.
Alex used a
Signal Flare to find
Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards and flipped a
Baxter Building. The two equipment search effects found a
Flamethrower, which was promptly placed on Invisible Woman.
She-Thing attacked
Longshot and used the Flamethrower on Tim. Tim used
Bat-Signal to find another
GCPD Officer and the players moved to turn 4 with Tim at 39 and Alex at 48. Alex's endurance total is largely irrelevant to this match, since Tim's victory path is through Xavier's Dream and not through endurance loss. From now on, I'll just list Tim's endurance total, and I'll count down the ticking time bomb of
Xavier's Dream when it starts.
Turn 4
Once Alex was done, Tim activated Alfred to search for a
Fizzle. He also activated
Longshot, naming
Pleasant Distraction and
GCPD Officer, but failed to find what he was looking for. Alex looked disappointed that Tim didn't name
Beast with
Longshot, because that meant that he already had the critical character in hand. Tim recruited
Beast in front of the
GCPD Officer with the exhausted Longshot in the support row.
An attack with
She-Thing into
Beast prompted a Tim to flip
Marvel Team-Up,
Total Anarchy, and
Xavier's Dream. Beast was reinforced by the GCPD Officer. Beast then went to the KO'd pile, and Tim dropped to 37. Mr. Fantastic swung in at Longshot for another 5 (32). Invisible Woman (with a Flamethrower) attacked into the Officer and was powered up. Tim then powered up his GCPD Officer. Alex tried to get in a
Cosmic Radiation before Invisible Woman would KO, but the
Fizzle fetched earlier in the turn put an end to that. An activation of Frankie Raye with Advanced Hardware knocked Tim down to 28 before he put his first counter on Xavier's Dream . . . Tick.
Turn 5
Tim, with an empty board, played two GCPD Officers. Alex frantically began searching for damage with Baxter Building. He would need to deal 28 damage this turn in order to win before the Xavier's Dream time bomb went off. He played another Invisible Woman with a Pogo Plane and a
Human Torch, Johnny Storm. After that a
Signal Flare fetched
Ant Man, who joined the field. This was a curious play, since Ant Man didn't add much threat to the board, and with a Pogo Plane out, using the Signal Flare to fetch a copy of Thing could have allowed Alex to search out and activate
Four Freedoms Plaza next turn. His formed up as follows:
Front Row: Mr. Fantastic with Advanced Hardware, She-Thing with Advanced Hardware, and Ant Man.
Support Row: Invisible Woman with a Pogo Plane, Franke Raye with Advanced Hardware, and Human Torch.
Tim declared no attacks and passed. Ant Man attacked a GCPD Officer, who was reinforced by his brother and then used to Bat-Signal for Alfred. The Officer and the Ant (sounds like a good movie title . . . well, maybe not) both got stunned, bringing Alex down to 27.
Mr. Fantastic attacked the other GCPD Officer for 1 endurance (26). Then the remainder of Alex's team attacked Tim directly at full force for 16 breakthrough, bringing Tim to 10.
At this point Alex asked the question that everyone asks when first faced with a loss to Xavier's Dream: “If he is at 0 endurance on the turn he puts the last counter on Dream, what happens?” The answer is that the Dream player wins, because the Dream effect happens at the start of recovery, before endurance totals are checked.
Armed with this knowledge, Alex tried to
Have a Blast! the Dream during recovery, but Alfred was discarded to power a
Fizzle.
Tick . . .
Turn 6
Alex opened with a use of Mr. Fantastic, revealing a Four Freedoms Plaza. “Do you see it?” he asked his opponent, eyeing his Pogo Plane. “You saw the Four Freedoms Plaza. I messed up on my Signal Flare.” If he had gotten Thing, he could have used
The Pogo Plane to get Four Freedoms and another Have a Blast.
His only shot at this point was to use the card-drawing power of
Antarctic Research Base to draw Thing or Have a Blast. Alex had two equipment cards in his and two shots at victory. Rather than draw, Alex decided to just flip his top card face up. The tension built as Alex flipped his first card . . . HAVE A BLAST!
Tim was floored, and the crowd went wild! Tim had another
Fizzle to stop the
Have a Blast!, but he would have to discard his last character in order to play it, and thus he would be unable to discard to
Xavier's Dream. If Tim had just had one more character in hand, he could have won the game, but it was not to be. After an exciting conclusion to a battle of two unusual decks, Alex Etzel was in good position to make Day 2, with a 6-3 record. Tim will have to fight to win at least two of the next three rounds.