This is going to be an article about operations and methodology. Even if you have seen a decklist on a website or even played it with your friends, that doesn't mean that you have been getting everything that can out of that deck. Even the simplest decks, like Gabe Walls's Longshot/Sentinels deck from Origins, require particular play techniques in order to operate at peak performance.

4 Longshot, Rebel Freedom Fighter
14 Sentinel Mark IV, Army
26 Wild Sentinel, Army
4 Combat Protocols
4 Cover Fire
4 Reconstruction Program
4 Underground Sentinel Base


Gabe's deck is very simple. After all, two thirds of his list is made up of only two different kinds of Army Sentinels and not much more. You would assume that the deck is all about early swarms of 2 ATK/1 DEF Wild Sentinels curving up into the beefier Mark Ivs . . . but that's not all. The reason this deck plays with such redundant characters is because of Longshot.

The presence of Longshot in this successful deck also implies how to build a deck using what is arguably the strongest 1-drop in Vs. Longshot requires that you "hit" two correct guesses. Therefore, he is most effective in a deck that can play two different classes of Army cards. If you want to play Longshot in a new Wildebeest deck, great! Half the luck you will need to draw extra cards will be taken care of by the presence of redundant Wildebeests . . . but you will still need to play another class of redundant cards (such as another volume of Army cards or a character with multiple copies of multiple versions) in order to really abuse Longshot's card drawing as Gabe did to such great effect.

So given the strength of this mislaid X-Man, the cardinal rule of the Wild Sentinel deck is to mulligan into Longshot if he is not in your opening hand. Though the deck can technically win without a turn 1 Rebel Freedom Fighter, because of the high concentration of Army Sentinels in the list, Gabe's percentages go up dramatically if you are able to name "Sentinel Mark IV" and "Wild Sentinel" even once. Even constrained by the Vs. System's rigorous resource row, the presence of an extra two or four Army Sentinels in hand will give you more options on successive turns, including not just characters to recruit, but power-ups, bluffs, and survival past the opponent's Flame Traps and other resistance.

Now this is a very basic principle, but I chose it because we are discussing the absolute simplest deck in all of competitive Vs. play to date. What happens if we hit a more convoluted listing?

4 Sabertooth, Feral Rage
4 Darkoth
4 Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff
4 Avalanche
3 Lorelei
4 Savage Land
3 Foiled
4 Toad
4 Phantazia
4 Destiny
2 Genosha
4 The New Brotherhood
4 Flying Kick
4 Ka-Boom!
4 Savage Beatdown
4 Not So Fast

This is a version of The New Brotherhood that Mike Clair played to win the Edison, NJ PCQ a couple of months back. It is important for a number of reasons (which we will get into later) and is also very challenging to play correctly. The reason is that Mike's deck, especially in the early game, is both strange in its redundancy as well as under-powered.

At the time Mike won his qualification, Fantastic Four was the expected deck, and he played against that team of more efficient aggressive creatures many times on his way to the PC slot. Mike's first advantage was that most players thought that 1-drops sucked. When you look at the 1-drops Mike played . . . you can certainly sympathize with that stance. It's not like he has a powerhouse 2 ATK/1 DEF card drawing machine like Longshot, or even a temporarily 2 ATK/1 DEF Wild Sentinel. Mike has a bunch of junk on turn 1 with 1 ATK/1 DEF being his efficient beatdown . . . Lorelei . . . 0 ATK Destiny?

Yet consistency is in fact why Mike's deck is so strong, even if you might not see that simply by looking at the cards he played. Like Gabe with his Longshot, Mike would try to mulligan into a copy of The New Brotherhood in his opening hand; failing that, he would settle on a Savage Land. That is The New Brotherhood's standard operating procedure. Period. If you play with this as your baseline, you will be advantaged every time against your opponent, compared with not playing this way. If you don't know about it, the inherent weakness of your 1-drops will show through, and 1-drops sucking may well be the result.

Now even though we want The New Brotherhood down, it is about the only plot twist that we want in our resource row. I know that this is difficult to understand as a basic proposition, because we are trained to play our blues down so that we can preserve the opportunity to play out characters and equipment. I am not advocating playing characters in the resource row per se, but if we can help it, The New Brotherhood is the only plot twist we want down. The rest of our resource row will hopefully be green (Foiled proved useless and has since been cut).

The reasons for this are many, but the main ones involve maximizing the strength of The New Brotherhood. When Mike qualified with his original version, he included Darkoth, an off-team character who could turn The New Brotherhood back "on" with a strategic sacrifice. Mike's list, however, played only two Genoshas and no Magnetos. By the time he handed his deck over to Matt Boccio, the New York contingent—led by Matt—made several key changes. This is the version Boccio used to win the Philadelphia 10K event:

4 Destiny, Irene Adler
2 Lorelei, Savage Land Mutate
4 Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr
1 Mastermind, Jason Wyngarde
2 Phantazia, Eileen Harsaw
4 Pyro, St. John Allerdyce
4 Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff
3 Rogue, Anna Raven
4 Sabretooth, Feral Rage
4 Toad, Mortimer Toynbee

4 Not So Fast
4 Savage Beatdown
4 Surprise Attack
4 The Mutant Menace
4 The New Brotherhood

4 Genosha
4 Savage Land

You will notice that there are still 1-drops, but that those have become more erratic. One Mastermind? How does that make sense? The Big Brotherhood decks play crazy amounts of characters with the same name so that they can power up consistently. Why would Boccio mix up his already inherently weak 1-drops?

The reason is again The New Brotherhood. Boccio played so that he could have three different 1-drops in play on turn 2 as much as possible. Each lousy 1-drop with +2 ATK would do a lot more damage than the +1 ATK yielded by a power-up. Even if it is not the case with some other teams, it is better with The New Brotherhood to play out more 1-drops if possible rather than chaining up resource costs because of the presence of (especially multiple copies of) The New Brotherhood. Think about it like this: If I play out Destiny turn 1 and Pyro on turn 2, I have 6 ATK with one copy of The New Brotherhood. But if I play out Destiny on turn 1, and Mastermind and Lorelei on turn 2, I have 8 ATK instead. Now what if I have multiple copies over the course of the game? More characters down mean more damage. Smaller characters trading with more expensive ones on the other side due to powerful bonuses makes the deck annoying as well as dangerous.

Matt furthermore changed around the greens: He cut Ka-Boom! You would think that Ka-Boom! would be good as a The New Brotherhood reset, but you would be wrong, or at least inconsistent. Blowing up the enemy's locations doesn't come up often enough when you need to reset The New Brotherhood to warrant Ka-Boom! Genosha, on the other hand, you want firing on turn 5 with Magneto in play every time if you can. So you play four of each.

Magneto/Genosha is a killer in this deck. Because of how aggressively Mike and Matt structured the early game, a successful Genosha for four will many times end the game. You draw four cards, and an alarming amount of the time, you end up with 20 endurance loss in your hand. The inclusion of The Mutant Menace and Surprise Attack is the other key change in Matt's deck from Mike's. With The New Brotherhood, probably the most successful deck in the world of Vs., many players were setting up Overloads to defend. They would be able to punish players for too many Flying Kicks applied to their 0 ATK old women, and certainly for crazy pumps with Savage Land and Savage Beatdown. While the latter cards are too good to cut, Boccio decided that instead of fearing Overload, he would fight around it. While Surprise Attack may not have the same effect on the table as Flying Kick, it straight up causes more endurance loss in the early game while punishing players tentative in their use of defensive twists. Many times, they should just Overload one of the annoying 1-drops early, because no matter how much they want to double up against a Flying Kick, it might never come. Furthermore, while many players are set up to defend with Acrobatic Dodge and Burn Rubber, few can take a fist full of Genosha-fueled Surprise Attacks straight to the face.

In this sense, The New Brotherhood is arguably the hardest deck in the game to play perfectly. While all decks have to worry about formation, reinforcement, which characters to recruit, and which cards to play down, The New Brotherhood has the added the additional tax of resource management. When do I flip a second Savage Land to reset The New Brotherhood? How many plot twists do I need to draw into in order to unlock this waiting Flame Trap board? Answering these questions on top of correctly attacking and defending with what amount to fundamentally weaker characters is a challenge that is mitigated only by the overwhelming strength of a single ongoing plot twist. Tricks like knowing to hold your blues (again, if you can) while KO'ing your own greens, planning for damage packets measured against the opponent's available endurance total, should help your understanding of what makes this deck tick, how to play it better, and how to beat it from the other side of the table.