Pro Circuit So Cal 2005 was one of the lowest points of my TCG career; I missed the Day 2 cut for the first time, and despite a reasonable showing in the Sealed Pack $10K with a set I knew little about, I lost money on the trip. But PC: So Cal would turn out to be an important milestone for me. I had a cool time hanging out with some great people,* discovered pumpkin pie, and was determined never to show up to a PC so unprepared again.
I made good money at the first Pro Circuit, finishing nineteenth as part of a British team with John Ormerod, Richard Edbury, and Tim Willoughby. We all made a profit on the long trip, but the team disintegrated soon after. But teams make a massive difference in Vs. System, and without one, I was really struggling. It was time to do something about it.
All the really good players I knew were disorganized, so in January, I did something shocking and new: I stopped complaining, got off my backside, and set up a new Vs. team. If you don’t know what team I’m talking about, that’s because we like it that way. Losing games because someone scouted your teammate and recognized your shirt or accent is really lame, so we have a policy of keeping ourselves to ourselves.**
The next step was to start playing a lot more. The old Vs. brain was starting to get rusty from lack of use, and it was going to take a few months of two to three workouts a week to get it back into shape. By the time Marvel Modern Age was upon us, it was starting to bristle with ideas again.
My pet Marvel Modern Age deck was Thunderbolts / X-Men. You might have missed the mass of those at the PC. Okay . . . you might have noticed that there weren’t any at the PC, but that’s probably because the deck wasn’t all that good. It did, however, teach me to play a whole new style of deck. If you want to do well in the short term, then you should stick to what you know, but if you want to grow as a person and do well in the long term, then you have to be willing to step outside your comfort zone and try something new.
This deck was certainly new. It under-dropped once per game (preferably on defense) and used recovery effects plus X-Treme Maneuver to maintain its board presence. Then, on turns 6 and 7, it would bring out Mystique, Freedom Force and Beetle à Mach 4, New Team Leader and use their leader abilities to swing for the kill. It would have been really good if it hadn’t had an unfortunate habit of losing to Morlocks, Squadron, and X-Faces . . . pretty much our entire gauntlet at the time.
Even then, my thoughts were on Silver Age, as I generally only go to two Pro Circuits a year and was really excited by the prospect of 2,000 cards to choose from and no Dr. Doom or A Child Named Valeria to plan around. Eventually, the Infinite Crisis Sneak Preview came around, and the entire format was turned on its head.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that this was the most powerful set since Origins. New versions of Flame Trap, Total Anarchy, Have a Blast!, Fizzle, Ka-Boom!, and Foiled! all stuck out like they had big neon lights on them. I’d last sat down with a teammate and a spoiler list for DC Origins, and the end result of that session can still be found in the Metagame archives. The day after the Sneak Preview tournament, I was doing it again.
Tom Reeves had been obsessed with the Brotherhood of Assassins for a long time, so he grabbed Checkmate and promptly filled the hole in their curve at 4 with Merlyn, Deadly Archer. Meanwhile, I slowly wrote off the chances of the other three teams in the set. By the end of the day, we had a League / Checkmate build that smashed Squadron senseless. I was pretty sure this was the deck I was going to play in San Francisco and was delighted to have a month to practice with and tweak it.
When the ability to abuse the uniqueness of Fate Artifacts became known, we didn’t panic. Metallo, John Corben plus Sewer System (so that he can attack concealed or protected characters) gave us some defense, but the uniqueness rule was fixed before we’d fully tested it.
One week before the PC, Bobby Rana’s Shadowpact deck made a major showing in Golden Age, and boy did I feel stupid for writing that team off so fast. Sewer System and Metallo went back into the deck, but we were still losing because Merlyn was completely useless against Shadowpact. What we needed was an on-team 4-drop who could burn Shadowpact’s already low endurance total even lower. One copy of Deathstroke the Terminator, Lethal Weapon later, and the panic was over.
This had cut into my time for Draft preparation, but I still had four archetypes I was comfortable with—three more than I did at Indy, where my only plan was to force Titans. It was time to pack and fly the ten hours to San Francisco.
My top tip for traveling is to keep your deck in your carry-on luggage. I’ve never lost a bag yet, but it’s reassuring to know where it is at all times. This time, I’d failed to follow my own advice; all my deck tins were in my carry-on except one, which could have been in the checked luggage with Fruit Bandits and my latest board game prototypes or on the dining room table.
It would be twelve nervous hours before I could find out which was the case, but the flight was made far more bearable by having sixty on-demand movies and the occasional drink.
The guy at customs must have thought I’d gone insane when I was so jubilant about finding a small orange tin in my luggage. I’m guessing he put this down to me being an eccentric Englishman, as he let me go without feeling the need to test for illegal substances.
I arrived in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon. It’d been a long (thirty-two hour) day, so I didn’t do much more than grab some food and the traditional Mountain Dew and meet up with my roommates.*** I had not seen these guys since So Cal, and a Pro Circuit wouldn’t be a holiday without them.
PC Thursday should have been all about the Last Chance Qualifiers, but that wasn’t the case in San Francisco. Everybody was heading down to the convention center to pre-register, and a surprisingly large number of people were buying cards, too. And not just any cards—copies of Hope and Justice League of Arkham were selling out fast.
A quick chat with a well-known player about how Bad Press was suddenly worth running in an Anti-Green Lantern deck was enough to confirm to both of us that the rumors were widespread. The guy whose deck we were talking over may not have understood the true nature of the conversation, but I’d like to thank him anyway.
Bad Press would be worse than useless in Deep Green; not only is it the wrong color for Merlyn, Deadly Archer, but we’d also need to draw two copies in order to buy the time that our slow deck needed. Instead, I opted for Sage, Xavier’s Secret Weapon, confident in the knowledge that Enemy of My Enemy would allow me to search for her and trusting that I wouldn’t need any of the other splashed characters in the same matchup.
After some roast beef sandwiches, it was time to get some sleep. I knew I’d be awake before the alarms went off, but we set two just to be sure. Join me next time and I might get around to talking about the Pro Circuit itself.
Ian “Still Cruising at 26,000 Feet” Vincent
* Rather than being the stress monkey that some of you may have witnessed at previous tournaments.
** I guess that’s going to get a lot harder from now on.
*** Do not under any circumstances give this stuff to Tim Willoughby; you really don’t want to see anyone that hyper.