Jason Hager's “New School” redux of his masterpiece, Evil Medical School, isn't the only cool deck making waves at PC New York. Tim Batow's deck, piloted by himself and four others, has seen a great deal of success over the course of the day, and it might have the potential to go the distance.

 

Tim's playing Xavier's Dream! The deck is similar in concept to others that appeared just over a year ago and focused on the Dream. But instead of focusing on stall, this deck seeks to accelerate the process of getting its win-condition plot twist onto the field. At the same time, the deck KO's characters to keep anything from being stunned when the Dream checks its condition. Wow.

 

While KO'ing an opponent's characters helps suppress damage and keeps those characters from dishing out massive pain, A Death in the Family isn't Batow's only KO'ing tool. In fact, it's arguably more important to KO your own characters—you can generally control when an opponent's characters will become stunned, as you are the aggressor in most cases, but you can't count on tying down an opponent's entire board and preventing him or her from attacking you in turn. That's where Total Anarchy fits in. It's also where this deck becomes brilliant.

 

Every character in this deck is small enough to be KO'd by Total Anarchy's effect.

 

If an opponent swings at you, you've got the GCPD Officers and Dazzler to offer reinforcement, and your stunned characters will be sent immediately to the KO'd pile where they can't get in the way of Xavier's Dream. It's insane, but judging by Batow's results thus far today, as well as by those found by his teammates and fellow testers of this deck, it's crazy enough to work.

 

GCPD Officer is more than just a meat shield. It also gives Longshot something to call alongside “the card that I really want to draw into.” Longshot first accelerates the deck toward Xavier's Dream while giving you cops as if they were cereal-box prizes. Then, the Rebel steers you toward the random cards that you need to lock a win: Pleasant Distraction, A Death in the Family, and Total Anarchy are likely the top three from the post-Dream point in most games. Alfred can of course search for the Dream as well, and once you get your hands on it, he can take on the same duality that Longshot does. He's a great card that fetches you answers to random questions of the face-smashing variety. A deck packing four copies of Fizzle can make exceptional use of the added accessibility Alfred affords, and the single copy of Flame Trap can clear your board or pin down FFun or EMS as needed. Neat stuff.

 

The deck basically plays a lot like Evil Medical School until turn 4. In fact, many of Batow's opponents thought he was playing that for the first few turns of their matches. The deck stalls a little with passive-aggressive tactics to contain the enemy's ranks, and then it drops Beast on turn 4 and just kicks back. Total Anarchy keeps the road clear on your side, and A Death In the Family does the same for the opponent's side of the board. Most decks just can't win in two turns from that point. Xavier's Dream checks for its win condition before the game checks for a loser via endurance, so as long as an opponent doesn't prevent the third token from being placed, he or she only has two turns to take you down from turn 4. That's brutal, and it's a keystone of the deck's tempo.

 

Because of the speed at which it can win and how well it deals with singular threats, a matchup with any curve-based deck such as, oh say, Curve Sentinels (which I hear is popular nowadays) would be favorable. The more characters an opponent has on the board, the more complicated things can get, so The Brave and the Bold and some Teen Titans builds could be the trickiest adversaries. In addition, The New Brotherhood Blitz could rip the deck in half before it even sees Beast and Xavier's Dream, provided that Dazzler and the cops don't show up as often as needed. Still, it looks like a great deck against CS, Evil Medical School, Fantastic Fun, and several other major archetypes.

 

The future of this strategy is a bit questionable. It's a brilliant deck but a hard call for this weekend, let alone the future beyond PC New York. Nevertheless, the deck is remarkably promising, and if it continues to do well here on Day 1, we might see players imitating it quite a lot over the next few months.