Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

Welcome back to Theoretically Speaking. I apologize for my absence last week—I was very under the weather—but I am back to full strength now and ready to blow your minds with some new strategy. As City Championships for Marvel Team-Up are coming to a close, I have started turning my attention to the next big tournament I plan to attend. That tournament happens to be the World’s Finest team event near the end of June. Before you get all excited, this is not a preview article. Instead, I am going to offer you some insight into how to prepare for this or any other tournament that offers a team structure.

It has been my experience that in order to fully enjoy a team-oriented Sealed tournament, you need to have a goal for what you plan to get out of the event. Generally, for me, that goal is to win as much as possible. Unfortunately, the nature of team events dictates that you can’t completely control that possibility (because you are relying on your teammates to win as well), so I would recommend trying to tackle these types of events from a fun perspective as well as a competitive one. How do you force yourself to have fun with an event when you are a competitive person? There really is no good answer, but I do have a couple of suggestions for you.

First, make sure you are playing with people you like. I know that seems obvious, but consider that there are people out there who only care about winning. If you get stuck on a team with one of these people and lose, you are going to wish you had someone like Rian Fike on your team instead. Now, on the flip side of the coin, if you are winning, he or she will likely be the most enjoyable person on the team to be around. Inevitably though, you will lose.

Second, be okay with losing. I know that is a hard concept for many individuals to grasp, but it is one that I have learned a lot from (and had a lot of practice with lately). Once you have accepted that losing is not the end of the world, the pressure eases slightly. You don’t feel awful if you lose, or make someone else feel awful if you win. This type of attitude can go a long way toward making your experience more enjoyable as well as enhancing your opponent’s experience.

For the June $10K, the format is World’s Finest Sealed, but tournaments can employ the team structure for Constructed events as well. Thus, I would like to briefly touch on those before we hit Sealed.

For the most part, the team Constructed tourneys I have seen have been a bit skewed. This is because they have featured strange restrictions, such as a maximum of four copies of any card in all three team members’ decks combined, or a requirement that the threshold cost of the cards from all three decks add up to a certain number (like the Willoughby Challenge at Pro Circuit Atlanta). Obviously, when a tournament changes a specific format or makes it more restrictive, the metagame will change drastically. The best thing to do when preparing for these events is to make sure that you are ready for anything. I remember playing in the Willoughby Challenge at PC: Atlanta and hitting a Curve Sentinels matchup. I hadn’t even thought of that deck for four months at least. I was able to calm down and play to the strengths of my deck (Doom / Injustice Gang), and I used Unmasked and Joker, Headline Stealer to great effect. In the end, my team went 1-1 and dropped, but I had a lot of fun and met many top-tier players. Overall, if you prepare yourself for anything and focus your decks on winning more than on stopping something that you don’t know will show up, you will be in a good position.

This is the part that most of you are interested in, I’m sure. I would recommend that you push your local venues to run this type of tournament. It’s a ton of fun, and it encourages players to get to know other players, which will in turn create a better environment for the game. That said, there is one very simple concept that you need to have a handle on before the tourney starts: Know the cards!

Never go into a Sealed format with no knowledge of the cards! I remember when I played the first Sealed $10K event at last year’s Pro Circuit Indy and I had to explain to opponents what certain cards did. You are setting yourself up for disaster if you go in thinking that you can just read the cards as you go.

The biggest reason that you need to know the card pool is that you don’t want to make mistakes during game play. This is often why individuals with insane decks lose games (followed closely by “other” game play errors and then dumb luck). I remember in one Sealed event I did for Marvel Team-Up, I had double Secret Defenders up and my opponent flipped up a Planet of the Symbiotes to try to force the stunback. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to read Secret Defenders, and when I informed him that he was still not stunning me, he tried to take the play back. In a fun, casual environment like a Sneak Preview, you can often get away with a mistake like that (depending on your opponent), but in a big-time tournament like a $10K, you will definitely regret not spending time looking over the card pool.

The second reason why you need to know the card pool is that you don’t want to pass over insane cards or select cards that are terrible. This is pretty self-explanatory. Pump is almost always viewed as strong in a Sealed or Draft format, but sometimes there are really good cards that people ignore or even discount because they aren’t “on-team.” When filling out my curve, if I don’t have enough on-team characters, I will look at hidden characters with beneficial abilities who could help me use up my resource points. I specifically like Chen from the Wild Pack. She is hidden and works well if you just splash her in your deck. I have even played her in my deck over on-team 2-drops because I think she is that good. I am by no means a Sealed master, but she has definitely been an MVP in my experience.

This is probably the most difficult aspect of playing a team Sealed Pack event. You have one hour to turn twelve packs into three competitive decks. This may not seem that daunting, but trust me when I say that once the time starts ticking away, you will be panicking like nobody’s business, trying to finish with enough time to take a breath and do some practice draws. So how do you build three competitive decks efficiently?

First, declare a leader. Someone who knows the card pool well and has a lot of experience with the cards should be designated as the sorter. This person should have a strong deckbuilding background but also be flexible enough to take feedback from the other two teammates. I have seen things spiral out of control when all three players are screaming, “No, I want that card!” If you have someone who is clearly in control of the deckbuilding, you will be in a better position to efficiently use your time.

Second, don’t try to build two super-strong decks and then throw the leftovers into the third deck. This is what my team tried to do at the first Sealed $10K. We had two very good decks and then one deck that would need a miracle to win. We reasoned that if we put the two very good decks in the hands of the two strongest players, we would be in the best position to win 2 out of 3 in our rounds. Naturally, that logic was severely flawed, as it put all the pressure on Mike Dalton and me to win every match that we played while my other teammate (Peter Sundholm) was getting thoroughly trounced almost every time. It became clear to us after a few rounds that teams who created balanced decks were doing better overall and stood a better chance to win in general. For these teams, the pressure was evenly distributed to all three players, and no one had to play the “garbage” deck. Unfortunately, we realized this fact way too late—we replicated our mistake in the second card pool as well!

The easiest way to create balanced decks is to distribute attack modifiers and Team-Ups evenly throughout the decks. It is hard to evaluate this specifically (not knowing what World’s Finest holds for us), but that is a good starting place. Certain themes and archetypes will inevitably run throughout World’s Finest, and if you can play to those strengths, you will be in a good position. An example of this from Marvel Team-Up would be one player playing a Sinister Syndicate rush deck, another playing a Spider-Friends / Defenders deck, and the third employing an Underworld / Spider-Friends or Underworld / Defenders deck. This way, all three decks employ different strategies so that cards will fit easily into specific decks, alleviating the pressure of deckbuilding and card selection. This is likely the easiest way to develop a card selection strategy, and I urge you to try it.

Third, stay focused. It is very easy to glance over at your teammate and then become completely distracted from your own game if there is some disruption going on or if a dispute has arisen. Thankfully, I wasn’t a victim of this problem, but I remember seeing other teams where teammates would completely stop their matches to watch how a ruling came down for their friends. While having knowledge of the ruling may be beneficial for the player in his or her own game, the downside of taking one’s mind off his or her own cards (and the opponent’s) likely is not worth the distraction.

I wanted to end this article with a little practical team politics and explain how decisions are made in a real team environment. (In this case, I refer to playtesting groups like TDC as opposed to an alliance of three people for a single tournament.) For those of you who don’t know, my team is comprised of fellow Metagame.com contributors Jeremy Blair and Michael Barnes, as well as Tim Batow and John Hall. For a long time, we knew that having a five-person team was not optimal, as there are not enough people to go around when playtesting. Add in the fact that we now live far apart, and there is a lot of strain to keep communication current between members.

With my move down to the Dallas / Fort Worth area, Mike and I can now test together and efficiently help each other in our deficient areas. Tim and John can do the same for each other, as they live within driving distance of one another. Unfortunately, Jeremy has been alone in Florida since PC: San Francisco, and we finally felt that it was time to expand and give him some help in the testing environment. Jeremy periodically would ask if we could add more players, but at the time, we felt the team was strong the way it was and that Jeremy was keeping up with the rest of us. Now that many of our personal situations have changed (a couple of marriages, a move, some new jobs, and some sicknesses), we felt that the extra players would benefit not only Jeremy, but us as well. After a team vote (which had to be unanimous), it was decided that Billy Postlethwait and Ed Colleran would be added to the team. This strengthened not only our numbers, but also our Sealed and Constructed play (and brought several high finishes and trophies to the TAWC locker room).

We were very slow in this decision, and I would urge anyone who is involved in a team to carefully consider the feelings and opinions of all members. A sure sign of team efficiency is when every member feels like his or her opinion has been acknowledged. Hopefully once the June $10K rolls around, you will see all of TAWC there, playing hardball with at least three teams full of players!

Overall, playing team events is one of the best things about this game. Having fun with your friends and meeting new players are some of the most underrated benefits that this game has to offer. (For far too long, the focus was on being competitive and elite.) Now that we have more tournaments that allow us to flex our casual and fun muscles, I expect to see a lot more players out there. If you just keep your eye on the card pool, don’t fight amongst yourselves, and stay focused on the game at hand, you will be in a good position to have a fantastic time—and may find yourself on top of the leader board to boot! Until next time!

Shane Wiggans, one of the nicest guys with a tattoo sleeve, is also a member of Team Alternate Win Condition and would like to ask any Dallas/Fort Worth players to drop him an email so he can try to find a good store at which to game. If you have any questions or constructive comments, feel free to say hey at any event or email him at piercedlawyer@yahoo.com.