Marshall James is the American representative in this match and should, to quote Antonino De Rosa, beat “the just weaker” European, Jelger Wiegersma. The Americans have been making bold statements about the play skill of the Europeans compared to theirs, and so far, it seems they weren’t quite right. Marshall James has an opportunity to at least keep up the appearance of American dominance on the feature match front. His odds seemed pretty good as Jelger introduced himself:

“Hi. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Which, as far as Vs. System is concerned, might well be true. He finished in the money in one PC but hasn’t quite made his mark on the Vs. scene. On the other hand, he is a Magic Pro Tour champion as well as one of the most well-respected technical players in that game. Marshall is more of a Vs. player, with a Top 8 in a $10K event and Day 2 appearances in all Pro Circuits so far.

The round got underway with the explanation of a nifty new score pad that looked like a big calculator. It had a feed to the big overhead feature match screens, which allowed watching players to more easily follow the game—not to mention not fall over the rail and hit unfortunate bystanders trying to find out the score. After all that, Jelger and Marshall could finally start playing.

Marshall won the die roll and chose the even initiative. Jelger, playing a Spider-Friends deck, kept a risky hand with a Dusk and a Scarlet Spider but no 3- or 4-drops.
The first turn saw Marshall play a Dagger, Child of Light, hinting at a multi-team strategy from his side of the table.

Dusk made an appearance, but on turn 3, Jelger missed his 3-drop, only for it to show up on turn 4 in Ricochet. Marshall didn’t have any problems hitting his drops as he played Stick and Moon Knight, revealing one of the reasons he wanted the even initiative. Meanwhile, Jelger was doing a little formation dance trying to figure out where to put his two characters to stop the incoming Moon Knight. The dance ended with Ricochet in front of Dusk and a [Spider-Tracer] on the Moon Knight. Moon Knight charged into Ricochet to inform him it’s pretty rude to show up late to a party, but Ricochet used his superior Spider Senses twice to dodge the big bully and save Jelger some endurance. Stick tried to get Ricochet stunned, but Marshall had forgotten about Dusk’s protection abilities, and Stick ended up just bouncing off him.

Turn 5 featured Daredevil staring down his alter ego, as Jelger’s Daredevil, The Man Without Fear faced off against Marshall’s Daredevil, Matt Murdock. Spider-Man showed his presence behind the scenes again by Spider Tracering Marshall’s Daredevil to stop any nasty tricks from Marshall’s completely face-down resource row. Dusk and Ricochet tried to take down Stick, but Stick turned out to have extensive connections. After proving himself a Spider-Friend, he used his newly aquired Spider Senses to live through Dusk’s and Ricochet’s effort. That little surprise got Jelger thinking about a next possible action, causing Marshall to ask him to hurry up.

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Well, passing is always good.”
“Hmm? Ok, if you say so!”

That ended Jelger’s attack, as Daredevil stayed home due to lack of orders. Marshall’s Daredevil didn’t have any qualms about attacking and smashed Ricochet to pieces. Stick then tried to take down Jelger’s Daredevil with a little help from No Fear, but Jelger had his fourth Spider Senses to dodge Stick’s attack. Stick really didn’t have any fear, though, and got another +3 ATK, which caused Daredevil to inform him of the Tragic Loss of Dusk, finally settling their fight with Daredevil as the winner.

Marshall then recruited Iceman, Cool Customer, and Jelger countered with his Scarlet Spider and another Tracer, explaining the no-show of the actual Spider-Man, who was just too busy sensing and tracing things.

This turn essentially finished the game, as Iceman had no trouble freezing Jelger’s Daredevil, and Marshall’s Daredevil teamed up with Stick to take out Scarlet Spider. Jelger was finally out of tricks and could only look on as his Ricochet got run over by Moon Knight, and to add insult to injury, Dagger even came around to poke him for 1 endurance, putting the scores at Marshall 39 – Jelger 15.

Turn 7 saw Jelger show some signs of life when Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man finally showed up, and Marshall couldn’t find any good counterattacks after Iceman and his newly recruited Sunfire got stunned. He did add a Lacuna, though, showing that his deck was really some kind of good stuff deck that tried to use multiple team-ups to make his characters work together.

On turn 8, both players recruited Ezekiel. There was just one little problem for Jelger: Marshall’s Ezekiel had more friends. Marshall drew seven extra cards to Jelger’s three, and that was all she wrote, as Marshall could easily use all his freshly drawn plot twists to take Jelger’s final 15 endurance points for the game.

This one’s for you, America—make it last.

Marshall 1 – Jelger 0