Let’s take a little trip back in time. The year was 2006. Yeah, long trip, I know. The place was Gen Con Indy, at the DC Modern Age Pro Circuit. The usual suspects were there, and a few of them were in the Top 8, but a Sunday first-timer took home the trophy. Anthony Calabrese won the tournament using a curve build of the previously much-maligned Secret Society by taking games all the way out to turn 8, where Psycho-Pirate reigned.

Anthony and Team VI_I (pronounced Team Sixty One), a conglomeration of St. Louis and Cincinnati residents, took the deck to two 8-2 records and several 7-3s. Anthony, one of the 7-3 players, made it to the Top 8 on the back of a strong Draft day and then defeated three worthy opponents to win the big check. In one of the more predictable Pro Circuit metagames in recent memory, Anthony and his team looked away from the big two decks, JLA / JLI (dubbed Good Guys) and Checkmate / Villains United, and found a rogue deck that could bring the format to its knees.

Anthony Calabrese

Champion, PC: Indy

4 Ted Kord ◊ Blue Beetle

4 Manhunter Clone

4 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster

4 Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose

4 Deadshot, Floyd Lawton

4 Hector Hammond, Mind Over Matter

4 Crystal Frost ◊ Killer Frost

3 Gorilla Grodd

2 Mark Desmond ◊ Blockbuster, Mindless Brute

1 Psycho-Pirate

1 Fatality, Flawless Victory

Plot Twists

4 Straight to the Grave

3 Funky’s Big Rat Code

Locations

4 Slaughter Swamp

3 Dr. Fate’s Tower

2 Gorilla City

1 Satellite HQ

Equipment

4 Helm of Nabu

2 Cloak of Nabu

2 Amulet of Nabu

1 Quadromobile

This deck was first designed by part of the St. Louis half of the team, with original credit going to Mike Augustine, Josh Hensley, and Kent Kershenski. Players from both cities tested the deck until it shone for PC: Indy. As I said last week, predictable metagames are usually hard to come by for Pro Circuits, but this one was known almost from the outset due to the results of the Silver Age PC in San Francisco two-and-a-half months previous. Both Checkmate / Villains United and Good Guys shone at that tournament, and both were made up almost entirely of cards from their respective sets, which made them easy to convert into Modern decks.

Anthony was initially shocked at the power of the deck when he was first introduced to it by the St. Louis players. “It absolutely demolished everything that we had built. Literally not a single deck that we had thought of was winning more than one out of four games against it,” he said. Those are absolutely huge and confidence-inspiring numbers with which to begin playtesting for the PC, especially when every gauntlet for the PC started with Good Guys and Checkmate / Villains United. They tested the best they could find, and no other deck they came up with could beat it consistently. Eventually, they decided that they couldn’t afford to run anything else. Anthony’s team predicted Good Guys and Checkmate / Villains United to be eighty percent of the metagame, and while they actually weighed in at fifty-five percent, the deck was so generally good that they felt it would easily get all of them into Day 2.

This deck showcases two of the rogue deckbuilding strategies I spoke of previously: attacking the specific decks that make up the metagame, and maximizing your deck’s focus on a specific strength. For this metagame, the two decks were almost polar opposites. Good Guys is a typical aggro deck. For all the one-ofs it ran and the tech cards that could be slotted in, the deck hoped to hit a particular curve every game: Ted Kord ◊ Blue Beetle; Booster Gold; Shayera Thal ◊ Hawkwoman, Thanagarian Enforcer; Katar Hol ◊ Hawkman, Thanagarian Enforcer; and then either John Henry Irons ◊ Steel, Steel-Drivin’ Man or Fire, Beatriz DaCosta, depending on the initiative. The deck was frighteningly efficient at doing just that every game, and then adding power-ups where needed. Checkmate / Villains United, on the other hand, wanted only one character every game: Ahmed Samsarra. After that, the options were open. The Checkmate / Villains United player could fetch whatever character he or she needed from the deck via Brother I Satellite, stretch the game out until turn 7 or so, and then win at his or her leisure.

Despite the difference in themes, the two decks shared one weakness: over-reliance on their 3-drops. Shayera Thal was the main way to search for Katar Hol in Good Guys, and Ahmed was absolutely critical to Checkmate / Villains United’s game plan. If a rogue deck could find a way to attack that weakness, then it could break games open.

Enter Deadshot, Floyd Lawton. And Helm of Nabu. And Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose and Straight to the Grave. And such platinum hits as Manhunter Clone, Funky’s Big Rat Code, and Gorilla City. Any way you could make the deck hit ten cards in the KO’d pile on turn 3 was to be considered, because if you could bring Deadshot online on turn 3, then you would probably win the game. Without Shayera Thal, Good Guys had a much harder time finding Katar Hol, and even if he was in hand, the deck couldn’t put much pressure on without a 3-drop. And Checkmate / Villains United? Well . . . let’s just say that I recall Mike Augustine gloating about how he crowned his opponent’s King three times in ten matches with Deadshot while at the Pro Circuit. That’s three free wins on turn 3 at the PC, ladies and gentlemen. That’s halfway to Day 2.

Notice just how important the builders thought this was: there are four Manhunter Clones in the deck. Let me repeat that—there are four Manhunter Clones in the deck. There are Funky’s Big Rat Codes when there is no real reason to team-up. There is a complete lack of 3-drops because playing some combination of your turn 2 plays in order to get Deadshot active is always better. There are four copies of Helm of Nabu because the Helm almost always drops two or three cards in the KO’d pile when you play it. As a result, the deck almost always had ten cards in the KO’d pile on turn 3, and could keep its opponent from generating any offense or advantage with his or her 3-drop.

After turn 3, though, the deck had to go somewhere, and the builders decided that somewhere was turn 8, where Psycho-Pirate would turn any game into a farce. The best way to get to turn 8 for the Secret Society involves a psychic monkey (which is of course included in the deck), but the second-best way involves characters with huge, oversized back ends. Hector Hammond, Mind over Matter is essentially a blank card in this deck, but he’s 6 ATK / 9 DEF. Crystal Frost ◊ Killer Frost has a bit more utility, but at 8 ATK / 11 DEF, she’d be the right play even if she were a blank. These characters will save you so much endurance that seeing the late turns should be virtually guaranteed, even barring silly tricks like powering-up Killer Frost, locking down your opponent’s character, and then KO’ing Killer Frost to Gorilla Grodd to steal the opponent’s character while not allowing the attackers to ready because of Killer Frost’s ally ability.

This isn’t to say that the deck couldn’t play beatdown if it wanted to. A Hector Hammond with the full set of Fate Artifacts and pumped with a Gorilla City is 13 ATK / 13 DEF. The only commonly played character in the format that could stun back a 13 DEF character naturally is Bizarro, ME AM BIZARRO #1 with his own Fate set. That meant that for either Checkmate / Villains United or Good Guys to stun back the Society’s characters on Society’s initiative, they had to expend several tricks. This allowed Society to keep a board full of giant characters going into turns 6 and 7, when Society could play Mark Desmond ◊ Blockbuster, Mindless Brute and either attack for the win on turn 7 or steal the opponent’s 6-drop with Gorilla Grodd. Psycho-Pirate on turn 8 sealed the deal.

By maximizing the two important elements of the deck—an active Deadshot on turn 3 and characters that are extremely difficult to stun in combat on turns 4 and 5—this deck could get to the late turns while Good Guys ran out of gas and Checkmate / Villains United rolled over to the sheer power of Psycho-Pirate. This is an extension of last week’s theme: a rogue deck has to be either extremely focused or extremely flexible to be successful. Calabrese and his team decided to be focused, and it put all of them into Day 2 and two of them into the Top 8. By focusing on what was important in the format, these guys dominated the tournament. Anthony Calabrese lived the dream and brought home the $40,000 check.

And he did it with Manhunter Clone and Hector Hammond. My hat is off to you, sir.

Until next time,

Mark Slack

ms243@evansville.edu