On my walk home from work today, I saw forty-nine English flags. I know it was forty-nine, because I counted them. That is approximately forty-nine more than one could reasonably expect to see on a relatively short walk through an English town on most days. Clearly, something is up with my country at the moment, and what is up is the World Cup.

Don’t worry, I won’t be explaining the offside rule, commenting scathingly on the questionable calls of various referees, or even bemoaning the unfortunate combination of injury and lack of promised flair from my own side. If you want to hear me talk about football, then come to England, put a drink in my hand, and watch me go. No. As much as the prospect of England winning the World Cup for the first time in forty years fills me with a childlike glee that is, perhaps sadly, larger than any I had as a child, the thing that I like best about big sporting events is the change they invoke on huge swathes of the population.

You see, on my walk home, in addition to seeing forty-nine English flags, I saw a country with a sudden common interest—a source of hope, a talking point, a newfound reason for the press to be populated with something other than bad news. Coat the Statue of Liberty in some psychosomatic ectoplasm and you’ve got yourself a party; we’ll bring the football songs.

Of course, there is one Englishman who could legitimately feel that a few of the flags might have been waving for him just lately. There haven’t been a great many English players on the Pro Circuit, but there has been one winner: Ian Vincent. In this time of national pride, allow me to extend it a little to talk about the fellow who walked away with the big check in San Francisco.

From time to time, I hear people complaining about how much money top footballers or the biggest movie stars earn. They earn a lot of money. If you piled it all up, it would probably fall over. You could try to pile it up again, but it would probably just fall over again. While you’re working on your piling, though, you might come to a realization. The same one I came to. The footballers and movie stars who earn that much are at the top of a very big pile of footballers and movie stars. The ones on the top do well, but that is because they are the best. The phenomenon isn’t limited to the industries where you hear about it. If you are the best in the world at more or less anything that people care about, then chances are that you earn more doing it than anyone else. If anyone wants to get a piece of the pie, then all they have to do is do better than those on top. A couple of weeks ago in San Francisco, Ian Vincent did just that. His reward? A trophy, a check, and a reason to wave a flag or two.

Ian would happily admit that he is more of a thinker than a player. He has the entertaining habit of thinking about virtually nothing but Vs. System for a good month or so before a big event. For the more whimsical members of the team he’s on, who don’t get to play as much due to lots of event coverage, there is a fun little game called “bait an Ian.” This involves mentioning some rarely played card, ideally with a wacky ability, and then watching Ian go through every possible use for it within the context of any decks he is building; the current Constructed format; Draft; Sealed Pack; and possibly his favorite format, two-pack Sealed. Very occasionally, one of these cards will make Ian’s deck, but more often, it just creates an entertaining ten minutes or so of watching Ian pace around, trying to work out why the card was good enough to get mentioned in the first place.

The decks of Ian Vincent tend to fit two main criteria. They are very, very powerful, and they are not the same deck that everyone else is playing. He was the member of our team who coined the phrase, “If it doesn’t feel like cheating, it probably isn’t powerful enough.” This was the case with the Teen Titans deck he played at the very first Pro Circuit to a nineteenth place finish. And even in the super-powered Silver Age format, it looked as if Deep Green had enough clever, powerful plays to have game against pretty much everything in the field, going from being the aggressor to being a careful control deck depending on the situation. Even Ian’s Draft decks are treated with the sort of thought that many would save for Constructed decks; he can frequently be found leafing through stacks of commons looking for the synergies that others have missed. In San Francisco, he was having great success with X-Men Energy builds sporting X-Treme Maneuver one minute, and taking the Blackbird Blue plan and romping to victory with it the next. Vs. System is a game that rewards preparation, and a fair proportion of the time when Ian sits down at a major event, he is already well ahead of the game. All that is left is to reap the rewards.

For a living, Vincent works for the government. All the government hired killer jobs were taken, so he contents himself with something clever involving lots of numbers. I like to think of him as a pen pusher, but in reality, about the only time he picks up a pen these days is to scribble down notes about some game or other. While he is pushing pens by day, the rest of the time, Ian is all about the games. The perfect illustration would be the way that he celebrated his Pro Circuit victory. The dinner was mandatory, as most dinners tend to be, but was a pretty quick affair. There was gaming to be done, and Ian had prototypes of two of the games that he has designed all ready for testing. They had been on hold while he got ready for San Francisco, and he was not about to lose the chance to game just because he had picked up $40,000 earlier in the day. One of Ian’s games has been published so far, and it seems likely that more will follow soon.

Of course, Ian is far from infallible. Sometimes he thinks far ahead enough that he misses what is going on right in front of him. The story from the Pro Circuit involving replacing Ahmed Samsarra, White King was funny for most reading it, but it was probably funniest for those who know Ian fairly well; he had been proudly pointing out in the weeks prior to the Pro Circuit that with the number of defensive tricks in Deep Green, his King was virtually impossible to KO.

What the future will bring for Vincent, who regularly tests with a collection of London players and some of the top Canadian players like Dean Sohnle, seems very much up to Vincent himself. He has professed that the formats he feels most comfortable with are the ones with a card pool big enough for innovation that is hard to see coming. He has a preference for Marvel format Draft over DC, as he likes complicated formations that aren’t too easily broken up by the more common flight in DC sets. Bearing this in mind, it seems likely that his next big Pro Circuit appearance will be in at Pro Circuit So Cal in November.

Ian has been to California once. He left with a lot of money. Now that he can no longer slip under the radar in Vs. System, it will be really interesting to see what he comes up with for his return visit.

Have fun and be lucky.

Tim “Still the Team Scrub” Willoughby

timwilloughby@hotmail.com