The London $10K now stands in the annals of Golden Age history as the day in which the world was first exposed to the power that is Fantastic Fun—a monumentally powerful Fantastic Four deck that uses equips to their absolute best.

Canadian Dean Sohnle began creating the deck shortly after he started playing the game, working on the maxim that card drawing is good. To anyone familiar with various TCGs, this shouldn’t come as any great revelation. Wiser writers than I have waxed lyrical about the power of card advantage for years.

Within the Vs. System, card advantage is often supplanted by board advantage as the most important element of the game. Decks such as Teen Titans and Curve Sentinels (especially now with Hounds of Ahab) will typically dominate the game by maintaining a favorable position on the board. A card in the hand is typically not as valuable as a card in play*.

Equipment falls under an interesting category within the whole card/board advantage debate. At the most basic level, equips represent card disadvantage. On a normal turn in a curve deck, one would expect to play a resource and recruit a single character. Given that one’s hand size increases by two every turn from the draw, there is a convenient equilibrium there. Once you start playing equipment on characters, your overall hand size can rapidly diminish. Equipment isn’t typically very tricksy, as unlike your average plot twist, it has little surprise value. It won’t naturally increase your board presence in terms of quantity, though the quality of characters you recruit could rise.

To cut a long story short, equipment is often pretty bad. Even if it costs you no resources to recruit, it will still cost you a card in hand and a slot in your deck that could have been something more surprising and tactically effective. Worse still, if and when your opponent finds a way to remove your equipped character from play, he or she will have removed multiple cards in one go. Ick.

So, how on earth can Dean’s deck seriously compete for the title of “Best Deck in Golden Age,” you ask? If you look at its results, it’s clear that something is working very well within the deck. Let’s have a quick look at the list . . .

Characters
2 Ant Man
1 Franklin Richards
1 Frankie Raye
1 Human Torch, Hotshot
1 Invisible Woman, Sue Storm
4 Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl
4 Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards
2 Mr. Fantastic, Stretch
2 She-Thing
2 Thing, Ben Grimm
1 Wyatt Wingfoot

Plot Twists
3 Signal Flare
1 Salvage
1 Foiled
4 Cosmic Radiation
4 A Child Named Valeria
2 Thinking Outside the Box

Locations
1 Pier 4
1 Baxter Building
4 Antarctic Research Base

Equipment
4 Advanced Hardware
1 War Wagon
4 Unstable Molecules
2 The Pogo Plane
4 Flamethrower
1 Fantasticar
2 Personal Force Field


The deck addresses some of the typical problems with playing equipment quite effectively. Firstly, let’s take a look at its curve. Hardly a curve, is it? Dean has unabashedly moved to include a disproportionate number of low cost characters with many different names. He is essentially a swarm deck. While this does mean that he will have many characters in play to be able to equip, it seems to make life even worse in terms of ensuring that you won’t run out of cards in hand. Additionally, your characters will be smaller than most, meaning that in theory, you’ll get beaten up by opponents quite a lot. Hardly ideal.

What is hard to appreciate from the just the deck list, however, is the power of the card drawing and card filtering effects that Fantastic Fun runs. Firstly, there is the location Antarctic Research Base. Drawing a card every time you equip a character means that all of a sudden, any inherent card disadvantage that might be involved with equipment is largely diminished. It won’t ever increase the size of your hand, but it’s certainly a good start. The deck runs two copies of The Pogo Plane to ensure (through aggressive mulliganing and search) that it will find this pivotal location in good time.

In order to play all of these small characters, though, more card drawing is needed. Enter Baxter Building and Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards. They both have similar effects—revealing a number of cards from the top of your deck, taking one equipment from them, and putting it into your hand. Anything else goes to the bottom of the deck, which we will get to shortly. These two cards will effectively raise your overall hand size each time they’re activated when you are running as many equipment cards as Fantastic Fun clearly is. Compare them with Cerebro, Doom’s Throne Room, or Talia, Daughter of the Demon’s Head, and it becomes clear that these effects are a cut above if you alter your deckbuilding strategy such that they will hit fairly regularly.

As an added bonus, there is the amazing synergy between these cards and Thinking Outside the Box. I would strongly recommend that any cards with a Fantastic Four character on their illustration never be underestimated. Whether it be through clever mulligans, Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards, or Baxter Building, Thinking Outside the Box allows large amounts of draw manipulation, which means that when you’re drawing cards, they will typically be of above average quality. The deck even has Signal Flare and The Pogo Plane as shuffle effects, so if there are undesirable cards that you know you’re about to draw, you can take a chance on improving over them.

Beginning to get the feeling that it’s no coincidence that Dean Sohnle has a one hundred percent record for winning $10K events he plays in? It continues.

There are a couple of rare Fantastic Four plot twists that have long been felt by many to be amongst the most powerful in the game. Aside from the aforementioned Signal Flare, which is clearly pretty good, both Cosmic Radiation and A Child Named Valeria frequently feel just a little too good when you start playing them in this or comparable decks.

Cosmic Radiation in equipment decks is a fairly common inclusion, as with equipment like Advanced Hardware and a Mr. Fantastic, Stretch in play, it can lead to an awful lot of damage. Dean’s deck runs a colossal number of powerful activated abilities, many of which are provided by equipment and all of which feel just plain rude when played more than once a turn. As he is Canadian, I can only assume that he picked up such rudeness in England (where he currently lives). Having War Wagon activated more than once against you really hurts. Watching your opponent use Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards to stack his or her deck for the rest of the game is pretty hard to stomach. When Franklin Richards allows your opponent to recruit Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl on turn 3 while still having 2 remaining resource points for equipment, it is not uncommon to start rethinking your “make big guys and turn them sideways” plan.
           
Of course, then there is also the burn that kills you. Typically, Fantastic Fun won’t kill you in one turn, though it is definitely pretty quick. In this sense, it isn’t exactly a combo deck like the Rigged Elections or Witching Hour decks are. It’s just a deck with absurd amounts of synergy that goes about winning in a slightly different way.

A Child Named Valeria is, in my mind, the most powerful defensive plot twist currently available in Vs. System. If all of your characters are small enough to benefit from its effect, then it’s really not very hard to engineer situations where opponents cannot expect to attack for any damage at all. In a deck running Personal Force Field and The Pogo Plane, both of which give reinforcement, forming up to stymie even a deck full of flight and range (like Curve Sentinels) can be done without major problems. For Fantastic Fun, though, it seems like a bit of a waste to use Child, as it is commonly referred to as just a defensive trick. What seems a lot more fun is to make Thing, Ben Grimm and friends simply massive with some combination of Advanced Hardware and Flamethrower, and then to attack opposing characters in safety. With Pier 4, a 15 ATK/5 DEF Thing, Ben Grimm is entirely possible. A couple of copies of Cosmic Radiation can even let Ben do a little bit of burning, as you can activate each Flamethrower once.

So, where is the downside with this deck? Does it have particularly bad matchups? Well, any deck involving Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius can be a bit of a problem. Likewise, in theory there are characters or plot twists designed to attack small characters that would make life rather tricky for this deck. I would, however, strongly recommend that players not underestimate the facility that Fantastic Fun has to work around such bumps in its road to victory. This is not a straight-up combo deck, and as such, it is a little harder for the tower of cards it wins with to be knocked over. One need only read the coverage of Dean’s semifinal match against Common Enemy to see that even against a good player with a deck full of answers, it is possible to punch through the win one way or another.

The real issue with the deck, which likely explains why it hasn’t surfaced sooner in such dominant fashion, is that it’s quite ridiculously complicated to play. At $10K Amsterdam, I suggested to Gary Wise that learning to play it from just the deck list is like trying to learn Japanese with just a Japanese dictionary. He suggested that if you swapped the Japanese dictionary with a copy of Harry Potter, you would be closer to the mark.

One of the downsides of having a deck so full of synergy is that it means there are always a lot of options to consider. It is relatively rare that you will recruit a character whose cost is equal to the number of resources you control beyond turn 3, and even when you do, it is entirely likely to be the incorrect play. You need to keep track of cards on the bottom of your deck as vigilantly as a bridge player counts suits. A pen and paper will not help here, as you don’t want to give your opponent knowledge of your exact deck order. Formation steps are far from straightforward, and the optimal timing for playing your different effects will vary depending on board position and matchup.

If you can do everything necessary to play this deck, I promise you that you will improve your overall rules knowledge and play skill. It also seems likely that you will improve your win percentage in the current Sentinels-heavy metagame (one of Fantastic Fun’s best matches) and have a lot of fun in the process.

Have Fun! Play Fun!

Tim “Activate a 'Write an Article about Something You Never Even Knew You Wanted to Know About'” Willoughby**

timwilloughby (at) hotmail (dot) com

*Though it may be worth two in the bush.

** Yes, I am broken with Cosmic Radiation.