Hello and welcome to Rogue’s Gallery! I’m Mark Slack. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been playing Vs. System since its release in 2004. I’ve had some good finishes and some bad finishes, mostly bad, and mostly because I wasn’t able to convince myself to play a good rogue deck from my deckbox instead of some off-the-net contraption for which everyone was prepared. After every one of those tournaments, I cursed my decision and wished I’d had the guts to play the rogue deck.
The people I will be writing about have guts. And they have wins. Lots of wins.
Everyone wants to be the player who wins the tournament with the deck no one’s ever seen before. Winning the tournament is awesome, but winning the tournament with a brand new deck is the mark of a true master. Adam Prosak did it at Pro Circuit Los Angeles. Anthony Calabrese did it at Pro Circuit Indy. Ian Vincent did it at PC: San Francisco. Hmm, that’s the last three Pro Circuits—I seem to be noticing a trend here.
Of course, there’s one particular rogue deck that has everyone buzzing. Might as well start the column off with one of the most outstanding rogue decks of the year, right?
Stephen King
The New New Brotherhood
PC: L.A. 2006
9-1 after Day 1
Characters
4 Barnacle
4 Rem-Ram
4 Kleinstock Brothers
4 Chrome
4 Amelia Voght
4 Senyaka
4 Joanna Cargill
4 Spoor
4 Anne-Marie Cortez
2 Scanner
Plot Twists
4 Air Strike
4 The New Brotherhood
4 Boot to the Head
3 Call Down the Lightning
3 Meltdown
Locations
4 Planet X
Stephen is one of the best players in Vs. System who no one seems to have heard of. He has multiple high finishes on the PC and has been one win away from Top 8 contention three times now—a trend that unfortunately continued with this event.
The deck actually originated as an attempt to build a better Faces of Evil deck. As Stephen told me, “My teammates Ryan Lockard and Dan Bridy have had a lot of success with TNB decks in the past, so they were eager to build a new version. Ryan is definitely the most creative member of the team, and we had built a lot of TNB decks that tried to team-up, using cards like Detective Chimp. This also let the deck play Scandal to fetch copies of The New Brotherhood. It was basically an attempt to build a more powerful Faces deck, but it ended up being way too inconsistent.
“Tommy Ashton decided to try building the deck with a reservist theme, and it ended up being a lot more impressive than it looked. Instead of using search cards to set up copies of TNB, the deck could just draw a bunch of cards with its combat pumps and hit TNB reliably. Naturally, I was hesitant to play a deck with four copies of Barnacle, but it did rather well against our early gauntlet of Teen Titans, High Voltage, Good Guys, and Heralds stall.”
The deck was one of several in Stephen’s team’s box. Like everyone else, they had their share of broken decks before the November bannings, but once the hammer came down, they were free to come back to the decks they each liked. Of the team, only Stephen and Tommy Ashton decided to play the new TNB.
The metagame surprised them when they arrived. “We had a pretty standard gauntlet that we had prepared against. We expected some High Voltage, Teen Titans, Heralds stall, Curve Sentinels, Good Guys, Doom-based decks, and possibly a few Rigged Elections decks. I wasn’t expecting very many dedicated stall decks because of the time constraints. Anand Khare’s stall deck was excellent for the format, but it was almost impossible to win in thirty-minute rounds with 9-drop Galactus. The deck had long and complicated turns with Poison Ivy, Dr. Light, and similar stall cards, so getting to turn 9 was just a dream. Using Press the Attack on 7-drop Galactus never really occurred to us.” With something like a third of the field playing some variant of stall, the metagame was quite different from what anyone expected, but Stephen was still able to blow through the tournament, dropping his only match to eventual Day 1 champion Matt Oldaker.
Notes
One great thing about TNNB is that it’s easy to play. You play a character, you turn it sideways, wash, rinse, repeat. The character base is essentially set. Every Brotherhood character with reservist and a cost of 4 or less is in the deck, and every Brotherhood character without reservist isn’t. This leaves you a bit shorter on 2-drops than you might want to be, but the best games for the deck start with a 1-drop on turn 1, then two 1-drops and Amelia Voght on turn 2. Obviously, that start doesn’t pop up too often, but it’s hard to lose when it does.
Take the odd initiatives. The average hand will kill your opponent on turn 5. Evens isn’t a disaster, but you’ll be much more likely to kill on turn 6 than on turn 4.
Just as with old TNB, you should mulligan for TNB. Unless your hand with TNB in it is otherwise unplayable (something like TNB and three other plot twists), you should almost always keep a hand with TNB, and you should always ship a hand without it.
It’s important to know the rules for Amelia Voght. You can’t play her for free and then put The New Brotherhood into her place in the resource row; you have to reveal the characters for her after you’ve replaced. You can, however, play her for free, then recruit another character from your resource row, and then replace that character with TNB. Always drop Amelia for free first so that you can do this.
Speaking of replacing in your resource row, pay very careful attention to what ends up down there. You always want your extra characters (usually extra copies of 4-drops early and extra copies of 1-drops late) to be the fodder for cards like Boot to the Head and Call Down the Lightning. Don’t ever put plot twists into your resource row unless they’re called The New Brotherhood. If you have a choice of characters to replace, choose the high-cost characters over the low-cost characters, since your best turn 5 play is usually going to involve playing at least two characters.
Get into the habit of placing your characters into you resource row and then recruiting them, so that you don’t forget when you have Senyaka in play. Also, on turn 5, you’ll frequently want to play a character out of your resource row and not replace it, so remember: the characters go face down into the row first, then into play.
Don’t forget that Meltdown does something other than destroy equipment. The ability to replace a face-down resource can be wonderful in this deck, effectively drawing you a card when you don’t see any equipment you want to destroy. And gaining 2 endurance will randomly win you games.
Matchups
Unfortunately, Stephen finished one win away from the Top 8. Still, he wouldn’t have lasted long had he got there; his worst matchup at the PC was any kind of stall deck. Since that deck was so prominent in the Top 8, it will heavily populate your PCQs, so I can’t recommend—
Wait, what? Dr. Light, Master of Holograms was banned on January 19?
Well, that’s lucky.
The Dr. Light banning is one of the best things that could have happened to this deck. The Donkey Club stall deck that put four people into the Top 8 can be a rough matchup for TNNB unless the TNNB player draws very well, but a lot of that matchup depends on being able to use Puppet Master twice or more a turn with the Dr. Light / Puppet Master / Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose interaction, as well as on Dr. Light being able to return Deadshot, Floyd Lawton to play. The loss of those two tricks may make Donkey Club stall unplayable and certainly makes it a favorable match for TNNB. Stall decks were played more than just about everything else at the PC, and the Dr. Light banning ripped the heart out of them.
After the banning, you can expect the old guard of Golden to return: Titans, Voltage, Doom, and a good dose of Quicksilver-based aggro decks.
Your Matchups
This deck pounds too hard for Titans, which can’t win if it can’t keep a face-up character in the first four turns. If you have odds, Titans players can’t stun a character with Terra and then stun another with Terra as a defender, which they almost need to do to keep you from destroying them on turn 5. There’s very little they can do to keep the pressure off for long enough to get Roy Harper online.
Voltage and Quicksilver are 50/50 depending on draws and initiative. Voltage is slightly faster than you are, but you can bring a huge amount of firepower to the table on turn 5. If you have odds and you survive turn 4, you should win. If you don’t survive turn 4, or you’re on evens and are not able to kill on turn 4, you’ll probably lose. Quicksilver is almost entirely based on their draw—the god hand kills every deck, and a bad hand turns it into an awful off-curve deck. Meltdown on Amulet of Nabu is usually enough to get Quicksilver stunned on his first attack against your deck, which kills the deck’s tempo and its chance to win.
Doom depends on the build, but it’s mostly going to come down to how many TNBs you can draw before turn 4 and how many Reign of Terror the Doom player draws by turn 4. You have to put enough pressure on that you can just mop up in the late turns. Unfortunately, at that point, the odds are in Doom’s favor. It’s extremely easy to have two Reign of Terrors right now, and two Reigns are often more than enough to win the match.
Changes
As always, you never want to take a deck straight out of the PC without a few changes. Many players have been removing the two Scanners and three Meltdowns for an extra Call Down the Lightning and four Kaboom!s (a change Stephen agrees with), but that was before the banning of Dr. Light. After the banning, a few changes are in order.
Meltdown is mainly meant to deal with Quicksilver and the Fate Artifacts, so if you see a lot of that in your area, keep the Meltdowns in. If you’re expecting high numbers of Voltage in your area, a single Meltdown on the right Advanced Hardware or Flamethrower can mean the difference between a win and a loss.
Kaboom! would have been added to deal with a location-heavy environment such as the one at PC: LA, but since that doesn’t exist anymore, it’s a lot less likely to make the cut. Kaboom! could still be a good choice, but it depends on your local metagame. If it’s filled with TNNB, Quicksilver, and Voltage, you may want to stay away. In fact, in an unknown metagame after the Dr. Light banning, I wouldn’t put them in.
I am personally a big fan of Scanner, despite the changes above. It is one of the best cards in your deck when you’re on evens because if you got close to killing your opponent on turn 4, Scanner will almost always finish the job for you. In a stall-oriented metagame, Kaboom! would often be a better card, but with the metagame pendulum swinging back toward aggressive decks, a reliable off-initiative attacker is worth its weight in gold.
Conclusion
Like all rogue decks, once they win something, they become much more common. This deck in particular is going to be popular at your local PCQs simply because the cards are so easy to get. There are only two different rares in the entire deck, and both are extremely easy to acquire at reasonable prices. There are no high-end rares like Enemy of My Enemy and Straight to the Grave to find. The deck is a pile of sixty easy-to-get cards, although prices are already going up simply because of the success of the deck.
But this deck is representative of most successful rogue decks. Find a theme or an interaction to abuse, and abuse it to the best of your ability. Don’t get exotic and don’t get tricky. Stick to your guns and make your deck better at what it does best, and that $40,000 could be in your future.
Until next time,
Mark Slack