At table 2 this round, two of the four remaining undefeated players—Craig Edwards and Stephen Silverman—are battling it out with the new combo deck. This new deck, also know as “The Dr. Light Deck,” “Rama-Tut Combo,” or simply “Jar,” has taken the tournament by storm. This isn't a feature match, per se, because the mechanics of each deck setting up to build infinitely large characters doesn't make for particularly good reading. Instead, while these players play next to me, I will try to explain how this new deck does its thing.
The general premise of the deck is to play
Dr. Light, Master of Holograms with a copy of
Rama-Tut in the discard pile,
Devil's Due and a team-up in the resource row,
Cosmic Radiation in hand, and some form of Dr. Doom in play. This may sound difficult, but it's actually quite easy to accomplish with the number of search effects these decks play. On the turn the deck tries to go off (once all of these elements are in place), it uses Dr. Light to return
Rama-Tut to play. Since Doom is controlled,
Rama-Tut returns
Cosmic Radiation from the discard pile to the hand.
Rama-Tut is sacrificed to
Devil's Due, putting a +1 ATK/+1 DEF counter on an arbitrary character.
Cosmic Radiation is played, readying Dr. Light, and the process is continued until every character has ATK and DEF in the billions.
With the optional combo piece of
Gone but not Forgotten in play, the player also gets to gain infinite endurance. With another optional combo piece of
Valeria Richards, the player draws his or her entire deck. This usually happens on the fourth turn.
Anyway, as I write this, play is winding down on the feature match. (Stephen Silverman won, in case you're interested.) At this point, I'm going to take a few minutes to speak to each player about his experiences with the deck up to this point. I should also note that Craig Edwards and Stephen Silverman created their decks independently and never met before playing this match.
Metagame.com: What motivated you to play this deck?
CE: It's the most broken deck in Vs.System.
SS: I didn't want to play Curve Sentinels, did horribly at the PC with
Xavier's Dream, and my friends and I worked on this. We saw the
Press the Attack version, thought it was really bad, and made this.
Metagame.com: What do you feel is the most powerful aspect of this deck?
CE: It's incredibly redundant and your victory condition is a 3-drop. You can win on turn 3.
SS: The fact that the only way you can lose is through bad draws.
Metagame.com: Before this match, have any of the games you've played been close?
SS: Yes, I had one close game; I had to topdeck in my last feature match.
Metagame.com: What do you feel is this deck's greatest weakness? Are there any decks you were really apprehensive about playing today?
CE: 4-drop Doom.
SS: Bad draws and 4-drop Doom.
Metagame.com: Are there any cards not in your build of the deck that you regret not having played?
CE: No.