I sat down to talk with Eric Wood after his feature match win against Rian Fike in round 8. A 23 year-old economics major at the University of Washington, Wood flew to Gen Con So Cal with friends Jason Dawson and Chris Price so all three could compete.
Wood credits Dawson with getting him involved in the Vs. System TCG after his interest in other games faded, and the two of them have participated in Vs. tournaments since the launch of the first $10K event at Wizard World in Philadelphia. There, Wood played Big Brotherhood to the Top 8. The New Brotherhood brought him to the Top 8 again at the Columbus $10K. He competed with Sentinels in the San Diego Comic Con event, where he admitted, “I didn’t do so well in that one.” Wood hasn’t yet hit as high a money return as he’d like, but he’s happy to be involved again in a game. Says Wood, “It gives me an excuse to get out, spend some money, buy some cards, and travel around and play.”
Despite the poor finish at the Comic Con tournament, Wood decided to go with Wild Vomit for the So Cal Pro Circuit. “It seemed like a good choice, since it works pretty well against everything but Doom and Common Enemy. The drawback is that when it loses, it really loses. If I can’t get Longshot out fast, it’s pretty much going to be a loss. But the deck does play pretty quickly—I think all of my games have been fifteen minutes or less.”
Wood felt that his deck was more or less standard for the archetype, but he did point out some personal variations. He added Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters to get the most possible use out of Longshot, and four copies of Search and Destroy as tech against Spider-Friends, Teen Titans, and other Sentinel decks. It stood to reason that with a deck full of Wild Sentinels (24 of them, to be exact), the extended art promo version of Wild Sentinel being offered at So Cal would be very tempting. Wood expressed an interest in the card, and mused that while he probably wouldn’t be able to collect sufficient coupons, “I still really want to get some of those!”
Wood saw a wide range of decks at the event. He came expecting to see Common Enemy, Teen Titans, Sentinel, The New Brotherhood, and Spider-Friends, and wasn’t struck by anything particularly unusual in the metagame. “We figured we’d see all those. I wasn’t really surprised by anything I saw here, since the metagame at the Pro Circuit is different than it is anywhere else. There’s always all kinds of weird things happening here.” He played against a variety of decks—Sentinels, Dr. Doom, Teen Titans, Spider-Friends, and The New Brotherhood—and noted, “I hadn’t seen a lot of the Web of Spider-Man cards before. I was in school when the set came out, and I didn’t really ever pick any up. We figured we’d see Spider-Friends, though, so they really weren’t much of a surprise.”
Eric’s not a fan of the new tournament format, this event being the first one he’s played that uses the shorter, one-game round system. He felt that the older system was a better one. “I remember when they were asking all the players about changing it, and I didn’t really like the idea. I don’t think it saves that much time, since they ended up adding more rounds. And then there’s the waiting twenty minutes or half an hour between rounds. Each round has been like that. This brings so much more luck into winning a round, and I usually try to eliminate luck as much as possible as a factor in winning. The three-game match really helped with that. People should be able to play three games in one hour. They should just stick with the time restrictions and shrink it down that way.”
Overall, he and his friends have enjoyed the tournament. Dawson had the best record of the three after round 8, having won five of his games. “He’s playing My Beloved. We were playtesting on the plane, and I couldn’t beat it with Teen Titans, and I should have been able to. But there are some decks we figure only Jason can play, like that one or this Child Lockdown he built a while ago. We look at them and think ‘what is all this?’ But he can play them.”
With a 4-4 record going into round 9, Wood needs to win his last two rounds in order to make the 6-4 cutoff and move on to the Sealed Pack portion of the tournament. “If we don’t make it into tomorrow’s part, we’ll probably play in the $10K. The Marvel Block will be a lot of fun. We like the older Marvel decks, not so much the new ones that came out with DC. So that should be good.” Like everyone else, they’d ideally continue on to the next tier of the Pro Circuit. If they don’t make the cut, it sounds like the $10K will be a good substitute and an enjoyable event.