One of my more memorable articles was one of the last in the Totally Freakin’ Broken series, in which I totally disregarded the missions, statements, and structures I’d established to discuss the realities of exhaustion and fatigue on the Pro Circuit. The result was a good deal of accolades, a little bit of controversy, and some new friends—one angry Australian who, for a time, felt I was slamming Luke Bartter, and one Blob, eating chicken. The latter still hangs out with me on Wednesday nights.

So, I’m going to go ahead and break my own mold yet again to (hopefully) deliver something that will promote innovation in the metagame. And it all starts with last weekend’s $10K Detroit event.

For those who missed the coverage, Juggernaut has arrived. Eight of the thirty-eight Curve Sentinels decks present at the event were running him either as an alternate to Magneto or as a splash to complement everyone’s second-favorite helmeted mutant. In the end, two of these decks climbed into the Top 8 and then ended up facing each other in the finals. However, several other players of renown who didn’t quite make the Day 2 cut were also using him, and the cool part was that everyone seemed to be dealing with their extra card slots differently. Permit me to explain.

When using Juggernaut in Curve Sentinels, you’re likely doing one of two things. Either you’re dropping Magneto entirely for four copies of Juggernaut, or you’re splashing him in over a single copy of Mags. If you do the latter, like $10K champ Loren Nolen did, your deck will be built pretty much the same way it was before you went crazy and decided that “this deck needs more Juggernaut.” But if you rotate Magneto out entirely, or at least focus on Juggernaut, your deck needs to change to compensate.

There are three big issues to deal with. The first is that without Magneto (especially if you’re running Hounds of Ahab), Cover Fire gets nerfed quite a bit. Especially in Teen Titans matchups where Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal can snipe rangers on the chain in response to Cover Fire’s activation, it’s difficult to keep those Cover Fire numbers decent and sometimes equally difficult to get any utility from it at all. (Remember that Cover Fire checks for ranged characters at resolution, not at activation, so if Roy starts taking people down on the chain, you get to watch your hearty DEF bonuses shrivel into nothingness.) Thus, Cover Fire may need to be removed.

The second issue? Without Magneto, those Genoshas are only going to give you two cards apiece. Whether or not you think that’s enough is up to you. While my instincts would generally be to run around screaming, “Noooo!” with my arms flailing in the air like a man on fire, there’s actually some good math to support both approaches. We’ll look at this more later, but you can safely ditch all four copies of Genosha from your deck to explore other options if you aren’t using Magneto.

The third and final issue is that you’ll have mirror match problems. As Detroit runner-up Chris Vanderginst discovered, though Juggernaut may be awesome against Titans, FFun, Betrayal, and a wealth of other decks and tech, he’s just no match on his own for a CS deck packing Magneto. The mirror match can be exceptionally poor, and tech must be used to compensate for that.

You can look at any of those three issues as problems or possibilities. While they are challenges, challenge breeds innovation, so what we’re going to discuss today is how to back up Juggernaut.

The most interesting engine I saw was UDE Netrep Tay Howland’s. Tay kept the Genoshas in his deck and ran three copies of Juggernaut, and that was that. It looks like a horrible move at first—what if he doesn’t win on turn 7? He’d be down on resources and would have no follow-up on turn 8 because Juggernaut can’t attack!

Well, Tay’s operating on a golden rule of Juggernaut—if it’s not over on turn 7 or 8 when Big Brown attacks, it’s probably dang well over, anyway. Those extra two cards are naturally better than if they were rowed plot twists, so the card advantage is still there. It’s really very solid in theory and is likely the best option for bringing down Titans, FFun, and EMS when combined with a few copies of Micro-Sentinels (which Howland was also using). The problem is the mirror match, against which this support engine just loses. Juggernaut with two extra cards per Genosha and backed by Bastion just can’t take on a Magneto with four extra cards per Genosha that is also backed by Bastion. The minute difference in base numbers is definitely significant. But the card advantage on the Magneto side of the table, blended with Magneto’s ability to fly over Juggernaut, smack someone small for a lot of damage, and then be a wall, is game breaking.

After seeing what went on in Detroit and speaking to the players running Juggernaut, it seems that anything more than a one-copy splash needs Betrayal. Flat out, the mirror match is that bad and even a single copy of Betrayal can make everything better . . . provided you use it at the right time. Don’t wait until your opponent has already begun attacking to flip a Betrayal—the opponent can and will gladly stun whatever it was he or she just attacked with, essentially negating the advantage Betrayal could have given you and turning it into a really big Surprise Attack. The challenge is figuring out how to balance the tech. Two Betrayals can be inconsistent, as (assuming you do not mulligan) you have only a 51 percent chance of drawing into one by turn 7. Three Betrayals bumps that up to a respectable 67 percent, essentially taking the ratio from a one in two chance to a two in three. How many games do you have to win in a Top 8 match again?

Three Betrayals is a huge amount of deck space for a card that is dead in many matchups, but the reality is that 20–25 percent of the field at PC: New York will likely be conventional Curve Sentinels. A Betrayal and a Juggernaut in such a match will be an auto-win in most cases, and for three deck slots, that’s really not that big of a problem. In addition, catching a Betrayal in the early game against Evil Medical School and any number of other popular team-ups can be quite good, so they aren’t entirely dead.

While I’m tempted to get into a lengthy endorsement of a janktastic Gravesite-enabled Curve Sentinels deck, that’s probably reaching. But three Betrayals and three or four Micro-Sentinels, with Acrobatic Dodge being played over or with Cover Fire (as $10K Detroit winner Nolen did), is definitely my bet for the best build of CS one could muster. At present, such a deck has very few dead cards in most metagames, and if Evil Medical School and Teen Titans’ recent surge in popularity continues into next week, then such a tech engine should do marvelously well.

The Detroit $10K did a lot for the upcoming PC: NY metagame. Juggernaut will be a force to be reckoned with if properly supported, and the lessons learned from the Juggernaut-related successes last weekend need to be carefully applied. If you’re a CS user who’s been considering Juggernaut but haven’t been sure of what to run him with, study the coverage and decklists for yourself; while I’ve got my own opinion, there is more than one strong option to choose from. Though PC: LA was all about new decks (X-Stall) and tried-and-tested skill (as manifested in Teen Titans’ eventual domination), it seems as if PC: NY will be more focused on tech. Of course, nobody knows for sure, and that’s what makes this level of competition so exciting!

There are many unproven decks, players, and tech out there that will come to a head less than two weeks from now, and a delicious volatility is brewing. While Juggernaut’s usage and support seems to be verging on finalization in the minds of most players, a lot of other issues are still out there. Only one thing’s for sure—creativity will again run rampant at the latest Vs. System Pro Circuit!