Greetings from the world of tomorrow!

Yes, I am now a regular on the Friday shift. But entertainingly, by the time that many of you read this on Friday, I will already be some way into Saturday. Time differences have a nasty habit of making my head spin, too. So, what dizzying insights does Captain Friday have into the incredible Vs. technology that exists between five and eight hours into the future? Well, this week . . . not a whole lot. With great power comes great responsibility, and rather than spoil how the show will end for you, I will instead recap how we got here.

Think of this week’s column like an episode of a hit sitcom where a large amount of the content is clips from previous editions. Now imagine that this is a good version of one of them. With fun segues and everything. I do have a theme, and it will ultimately lead into something new and special, but I want to be sure that there’s a little bit of context there. If I had a lot of experience writing for some situation comedy, I might reference how even the most mediocre punch line can be made hilarious with the appropriate setup. As I don’t, I’m just going to have to hope that we’re all still laughing by the end. If not, then my “middle name of the week” will have to be a doozy.

This week, I’d like to talk a little about stall decks. They have existed in one way or another throughout the history of the game. When an opponent starts making a filibuster action against you, it isn’t always the most fun experience you can have. But that hasn’t stopped people from reveling in it, safe in the knowledge that they have something really impressive to show you at some point later in the game. With the right setup, a stall deck can deliver a punch line that will knock you right into next week.

In essence, there are two elements to any good stall deck. There is the eponymous stall element, which will delay the end of the game until a suitably impressive finisher can be found. Rather than winning a war of attrition over the course of a few turns of skirmishing, stall decks would much rather drop their Gamma Bomb and put things away decisively when they finally do act.

In the beginning, there was Doom. Technically there were probably things before Doom, but let us just assume that the time before he came along was quite dull enough that superheroes and villains didn’t really fight each other; they just sat around, watching best-of episodes of sitcoms and wondering what was happening over in England (which is technically in the future). With Latveria also being in Europe (and hence in the future), Doom was technologically always a little bit ahead of the game, equipped with all the stall cards he needed to comfortably ramp up to turns where he could go infinite with either Sub-Mariner, Ally of Doom or Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria. Both, along with a little help from Press the Attack, have a nasty habit of attacking relentlessly until opponents are very dead. At the time, the boundary between control and stall decks wasn’t completely clear. Doom had an amazing late game, but it was perfectly happy getting its beat on a little earlier should the opportunity arise.

Once Dr. Doom realized how much fun it was locking up the early game, he decided that attacking for an arbitrarily large amount just wasn’t enough. Megalomania will do that to a guy. Somebody immensely clever (or just rather ticked off at the world) discovered that there was a way to blow up the planet. Not just the once, as happens in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not even twice, as was the unfortunate fate of the Death Star. With the combination (both sneaky and cheeky) of Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria, Avalon Space Station, and Gamma Bomb, it was possible to unleash a maelstrom of destruction the likes of which Vs. System had never seen before. While many were still proclaiming turn 8 to be a myth as they attacked with their colossal Sabretooth, Feral Rage, Gamma Doom was regularly getting itself all the way up into double digit turns, sometimes not even trying to win the game so much as to force opponents to admit that they were facing an un-winnable situation. This was in those heady, happy times of three game matches, though, where time was as immortal as the threat of the nuclear holocaust that Dr. Doom held in his iron fist.

With ample provisions to keep the board controlled, including more tap and bounce effects than Riverdance (even thinking about Michael Flatley exhausts me and leaves me feeling slightly scared), Doom was the early leader in terms of stalling things out. Where one man would lead, though, others would surely follow.

William “Huey” Jensen decided that the Fantastic Four should be allowed to join in the fun of having turns in which the attack step was a non-factor. His deck focused on the power of A Child Named Valeria and the ability to fetch it using Four Freedoms Plaza. His was just one of many decks looking to use A Child Named Valeria to make the mid-game somewhat irrelevant. The powerful plot twist was taken to heart by players around the globe. The Ben Seck used it to keep things safe until Batman, The Dark Knight could hit play and become disconcertingly large with a little help from Cosmic Radiation. He won a $10K for his trouble.

A Child Named Valeria has allowed for fair amounts of off-curve play, which is highly conducive to bringing the middle of the game to a grinding halt. With the recent addition of Catcher’s Mitt, the powerful Fantastic Four plot twist can happily shut down a combat step completely, assuming that all of a player’s characters are smaller than your average bear.

As the Golden Age metagame moves towards beatdown following the removal of both the craziest combo deck yet to hit Vs. System and the Overload that has historically kept more aggressive decks down, it will be interesting to see where stall will fit. Overload was the brakes on the format, and with it gone, we might be seeing some potentially devastating early turns that could put real pressure on any deck looking to stall out. There is no reason for a deck to hold back from aggressively using its combat tricks to win the game as soon as possible (rather than to maintain favorable board position). Once The New Brotherhood or efficiently-sized Fantastic Four characters start to use combat tricks to burn through opposing endurance totals, stall will become a bit of a nightmare.

With Rain of Acorns and massive amounts of strong recovery effects, the Corps has the tools to survive the very early game. And as time passes, their defenses only become stronger. Anyone who has faced Sinestro, Green Lantern of Korugar when he cannot be attacked due to some sneaky tricks with either the 4-cost Kyle Rayner or Coast City will attest that winning the game with beatdown can get really complicated. Katma Tui , with her huge DEF value and endurance-gaining shenanigans, only serves to add to this sort of frustration. With Kyle Rayner, Ion slowing the game down further, the later turns can be reached.

The interesting thing about playing a Green Lantern stall deck is finding the appropriate way to win the game. Personally, I am a big fan of the combination of Hal Jordan, Parallax and some number of Zero Hours. This will fairly reliably end the game in your favor, but unfortunately, there are quite a few more things to consider with final win conditions. Nothing is fun about facing another stall deck and finding that it has an even stronger win condition. There is quite a lot of potential for naughty things to happen in Green Lantern stall mirrors. If you recruit a boosted Kyle Rayner, Ion on turn 8, you run the risk of your opponent recruiting Hal Jordan, Reborn, which can make winning a little trickier. Ganthet can also end up pretty over the top in many matches. So what other options are there? Surely, winning the game on turn 9 or so shouldn’t be so tough? There are a few viable options. Both Imperiex and Anti-Monitor have a nasty habit of ending games with a certain degree of finality, and it has even been suggested that when two stall decks face off against each other, it might be prudent to be the faster one by accelerating into Zero Hour a turn early with Sensei.

Both the buildup and the punch line of a good stall deck require you to tailor your moves to those of your opponents’. Know your audience and make sure that at the end of the game (at the very least), you are laughing.

Have fun and be lucky,

Tim “Check out the Extra Letters at the End of My Name” Willoughby BSc (Hons)*

timwilloughby (at) hotmail (dot) com

* Yes, for those of you following the soap opera that is my life, I did pass my degree, netting myself exactly the mark I would have chosen to get had I the option. Thanks to everyone who emailed me enquiring about how I got on. The reason I didn’t reply was that I wanted to build a bit of dramatic tension. What can I say, I am a stall player!