There are many reasons why people play TCGs. For some, it’s the collectible element—chasing down oddities and misprints, completing sets, and getting cards signed by artists. For others, it’s all about the competition—the burning desire to win when there’s something important on the line, and the incredible release of victory. Other people get their kicks in other ways. Everyone is ultimately looking to have fun, but this fun comes from all sorts of sources.

Personally, I’m a fan of the way that deck construction gives you a bit of space for freedom of expression. As fun as it is to take the latest decklist from the Metagame.com coverage of a $10K event or a PC and bring it to bear on your enemies, there’s a whole different magic to doing something a little unexpected. I love to win in a manner that causes your opponent to question his or her own perceptions of what cards are “good” or “bad.”

The common lingo for a truly original, cunning, or otherwise unexpected use of a card or cards with spectacular effect is “tech,” which is short for technology. As a fairly wordy individual, I love this sort of slang, though I must warn you that it can be ridiculously addictive. In the last week, I have referred (perhaps rather unnecessarily) to the following things as tech:

·        That my local supermarket has a tray of little plastic spoons next to the yoghurt section.

·        That the train I took down to London had sockets to plug laptops into.

·        That if I position a mirror just right, I can watch TV from my bathroom.

As you can see, it’s easy to take things too far.

In Vs. terms, though, tech is a beautiful thing when it works. When John Rich put Genosha into Curve Sentinels and started drawing lots of cards on turn 7, causing his build to win more fights than his opponents’, that was tech. When Rob Leander put Betrayal into Titans to punish them for being controlled by a big metal-o-maniac mutant, that was tech. When Eugene Harvey realized that X-Corporation was, in fact, ideal for both stalling out the game and ensuring that Jean Gray hit the KO’d pile at just the right moment, that was tech. I’d like to think that when the team I was on played Home Surgery in Titans alongside Heroic Sacrifice in Indianapolis, that was a pretty nifty bit of tech (courtesy of Mr. John Ormerod, in whose shadow I’m more than happy to lurk).

Unfortunately, tech is a hard thing to quantify or search for with any consistency. It doesn’t take very long for tech to turn into jank, which is tech’s less distinguished relative without the good looks or the success. Equally, once everyone knows about tech, it often won’t have the same impact. In a world where knowledge is power, little things, like the internet, that allow knowledge to be transferred easily make original ideas fleeting at best.

As I’m sure that everyone you know who plays Vs. already reads my articles*, it seems a little redundant for me to even attempt to throw any sort of ’nology your way. Instead, here’s what I hope is a helpful little framework for getting you to come up with more tech and less jank.

1. Look at your metagame

For once, I’m not talking about looking at this website, although that might still be very appropriate. Get an idea of what you expect to be playing against in the event you’re preparing for. If your clever use of cards isn’t going to do much against what everyone else is doing, then just how clever can it be? If every single person in the room is playing Overloads, then finding a way to make your Stilt-Man absurdly large on turn 5 might not be a winning scenario. A slightly more cunning play might be to start running Not So Fast or Sucker Punch so that you can turn the tables a little.

2. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel

The notion that you can create an entirely new deck is a little self-indulgent. While I haven’t seen anyone else playing a Skrull Soldier/Team Tactics deck quite like mine, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that someone had tried. I’m sure that he or she realized, like I did, that it’s basically rubbish. For those of you that want to try it, feel free to email me for the list. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. In that instance, I was going out of my way to be clever and different and use cards that nobody else was using. It isn’t cheating to use good cards.**

As an exercise, I would first recommend taking an existing deck that is broadly competitive and work out where it struggles. Then, see if you can change a few cards to make that matchup better. Most games of Vs. I play seem to be pretty close. Maybe all of my opponents are of a similar level as me (possible). Maybe I’m awful at the game and can never put opponents away fast enough (probable). In general, I find that games are won by small degrees. If you put enough of those together, then you are winning with tech.

3. When things are so good that they’re bad

There will realistically only be so many slots in a deck where you can reasonably fit tech cards before you start weakening the overall impact they will have. You can be original, but if you try to take it too far, it will occasionally bite you in the rear. Take Britney and one of her less celebrated album tracks, “Email My Heart.” Methinks that’s taking being different and clever a little too far.

This shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a suggestion not to be innovative. Rather, there is a point at which you have to realize that your latest prized creation just isn’t competing in the current metagame. Put it in your ideas bank and move on.

In testing for $10K London, I had a merry little afternoon playing against Robo Sapien, who was clearly always going to be playing Sentinels. At the end of this, two things were pretty clear: Trogdor the Burninator, my pet burn deck, just wasn’t consistent enough to win in a Sentinels-heavy metagame, and Robo Sapien had shown himself to be by far the better dancer of the two of us. Trogdor may yet come back, but he went on the shelf for London.

4. Two heads are better than one

Loathe as I am to admit it, it is very hard to be truly original. Writers and artists ultimately take inspiration from the world around them, and in the case of the world around card players, there are typically lots of other card players. Everyone’s brain is wired a little differently, and on occasion, someone else’s opinion will be exactly what you need to put all those pieces together. The only real tech that I came to the London $10K with was Latverian Embassy in Sentinels, added for the mirror and various crazy combo decks that I knew I’d be facing (including the one that won the whole shooting match). This actually came up when I was testing against a Doom deck that completely dominated me, more through the Embassy giving me really hard decisions than through anything else.

Interestingly, I know of at least one Sentinels player in the London $10K that was a jump ahead of me. He played Have a Blast! in his robot build so that he wouldn’t get hosed by Doom’s local office. Good tech? Potentially.

5. There are no bad threats . . .

My final thoughts regarding the successful application of technology relate to the idea of threats and answers. Cards will typically fall into the active or the reactive category. Savage Beatdown and Sabretooth, Feral Rage are examples of definite threats to your opponent, while Not So Fast and Black Cat, Master Thief are more likely to be answers to whatever your opponent is doing.

I would generally recommend being careful about going overboard with answers, as there is always the danger that they won’t marry up with the threats you face. When this happens, you have dead cards in hand, and with frustrating regularity you’ll be deader than an X-Statix sidekick.

Ideally, all your cards should be good on their own and not rely so much on benefiting from saucy combinations when they happen.

Until the next time, have fun winning with “surprisingly good” cards.

Tim “Second-Best Dancer in the World” Willoughby

timwilloughby (at) hotmail (dot) com

*And if they don’t, tell them to.

**Unless the good card is called Raigeki. That feels like cheating to me.