The Pro Circuit has now come full circle, returning to where it started in Indianapolis. It was at the Gen Con spectacular where I first emerged, a starry-eyed player in such a grand affair. I have since matured into your friendly neighborhood beat writer, covering my third PC and attending my fourth. And this was a special PC—the first ever pure DC Modern Age event, the first PC where Green Lantern was a legal set, and the first appearance of Avengers at a sanctioned, non–Sneak Peek event.

This was the toughest PC to call yet for a variety of reasons. The PC was all about GLEE and who would be able to wade through GLEE decks to make it to Day 2 without one. It was also all about team performances, as a handful of powerhouse teams faced off against one another to dominate the field.

In the end, it wasn’t about which GLEE deck won the day as much as which GLEE tech won the day. Of 348 players, there were 241 GLEE decks—just under the 70 percent minimum that I had predicted leading up to the PC. But one GLEE deck in particular simply dominated the field, and that deck belonged to a specific team of Vs. stalwarts.

Team FTN came to Indy as a team of Modern Age geniuses. They proved at Amsterdam that when it came to Modern Age, FTN was the team to watch out for. This was followed up by New York, where three of the team members dominated the Sealed Pack $10K, showing the world that Green Lantern Sealed Pack was just another notch in the FTN belt. This was a very dangerous combination, prompting a big “Caution!” sign to light up whenever one of the team members walked by. This is why I picked two FTN members to Top 8 the PC, and I’m not surprised that Jason Dawson succeeded in making me look smart.

When the final whistle was blown, David Leader had won an all-FTN final, and FTN had taken five of the sixteen Top 8 spots over the weekend; Leader, Dawson, and Michael Dalton ruled the Top 8 in the PC, while Chuck Bell and Steve Horowitz made Top 8 in the $10K.

Let’s take a quick peek at the deck that did it:

David Leader’s winning GLEE deck:

Characters

2 Arisia

4 Dr. Light, Master of Holograms

4 G’Nort

1 Guy Gardner, Strong Arm of the Corps

1 Hector Hammond

4 Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern

1 Major Disaster

3 Olapet

1 Remoni-Notra ◊ Star Sapphire2 Rot Lop Fan

1 Roy Harper ◊ Speedy

3 Salakk

2 The Shark

2 Tomar Tu

Plot Twists

4 Helping Hand

3 No Man Escapes the Manhunters

4 Shock Troops

4 The Ring Has Chosen

4 Trial by Sword

Locations

3 Birthing Chamber

4 Willworld

Equipment

1 Chopping Block

2 Light Armor

You have the typical GLEE format here, from your 1-drop madness (Olapet boosted to search for and recruit more 1-drop madness) to the use of The Ring Has Chosen to fetch and discard Kyle in order to bring him back with Dr. Light and search for whatever construct you need. The key to this deck is defensively stealing the initiative. Using the Helping Hands fetched with Kyle, as well as the brilliant decision to play Trial by Sword, you can defend up the curve, stunning your attacker and often keeping your characters alive in the process. Then you can swarm your opponents on your attack with the bonuses given through G’Nort, Arisia, and Shock Troops, not to mention the searchable Light Armor, clearing the opponent’s board while sacrificing nearly no board advantage in the process. No Man Escapes the Manhunters helps deal with hidden enemies, as does Rot Lop Fan. Speedy is for the mirror match, taking out your opponent’s pesky 1-drops.

There were some minor differences within the FTN ranks. Dawson used one less Light Armor and Salakk and one more Major Disaster, No Man Escapes the Manhunters, and Birthing Chamber; Dalton used the extra Birthing Chamber and a Kreon, along with one less copy of The Shark and Rot Lop Fan; Horowitz used the extra Birthing Chamber and an Emerald Dawn, along with one less Rot Lop Fan and Salakk; and Bell dropped the Chopping Block and a Rot Lop Fan in favor of two copies of Men of Steel. Most of those changes weren’t game-breaking (although Jason Dawson’s choice of going with 61 cards was apparently a good one for him . . .) except for Chuck Bell’s last-minute addition of Men of Steel in his $10K deck. Because it’s not searchable, it hadn’t been the card of choice for most GLEE players, but it was a neat surprise tech choice for a handful of players in the PC. When Bell saw how well it fit, he added it in to his deck, and that may have been a key reason for his $10K win.

Various other teams performed with strength at the PC. Team Hans placed two Germans into the Top 8 via Kristian Kockott and Markus Kolb; Your Move Games placed Rob Dougherty into the Top 8 and Craig Edwards into a close in 13th; and hometown favorites Team AttaQC featured 11th place Benoit Chaurette and $10K Top 4 finisher Max Bouchard.

But it was the fearless Team RIW Hobbies leader who took the PC by storm, pushing his Blue Abuse deck and a fierce draft to the Top 8. He also won $10K Toronto this past weekend, driving his Sealed Pack rating through the roof. What makes Michael’s accomplishments so significant was that he not only played Blue Abuse in a field of Green, but he also told the world he would be playing it days before the PC in an interview in my Pre-Indy Preview. He even posted his deck on VsRealms!

Michael Jacob’s Blue Abuse deck:

Characters

18 Soldiers of New Genesis

4 Lois Lane

4 Superman, Red

3 Superman, Blue

2 Cir-El ◊ Supergirl

Plot Twists

3 Man of Tomorrow

2 Millennium

4 Lanterns in Love

4 Trial by Sword

4 Shock Troops

4 Royal Decree

Locations

2 The Source

2 Birthing Chamber

Equipment

4 Supercycle

Blue Abuse is right! What do you get when you have half a dozen 1-drops in play, each with cosmic, and one equipped with a Supercycle that gives them all +1 ATK/+1 DEF and flight? You get a monster swarm! Now what do you get when you add a character who can stun opposing characters based on cosmic characters you control? Not characters with cosmic counters, mind you, just characters with cosmic. You get a smashfest rarely seen outside of an Incredible Hulk comic.

The crazy thing is that Michael didn’t use Commander, New Genesis, or Mother Box to replenish counters, just Cir-El ◊ Supergirl, who can re-counter everyone on turn 6. Still, with Shock Troops and Trial by Sword to heap more pain on offense or defense and Lanterns in Love to heal the Supercycle beneficiary (or whichever Superman character needs it), not to mention six team-ups, a Superman search card, and a couple of copies of The Source to remove pesky plot twists from your opponent’s deck (like those Helping Hands in the FTN GLEE decks), all of a sudden you have potency to the Nth degree.

There was much cheering on the sidelines for Jacob to make the finals—we all wanted to see a couple of underdog decks make the Top 2. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it past the Jason Dawson wall. But it would have been nice to see a final between Michael and this man:

Team Realmworx had several members in contention. There was Ryan Jones and Vidi Wijaya (as always), and Patrick Yapjoco was destroying everything while trying to avenge his Bizarro World performance in New York. They all moneyed, but the big surprise that was no surprise was the triumph of Dave Spears.

Dave Spears is the man who claims that he can’t play this game, and I’m the man who keeps trying to convince him that he can. I had him pegged to Top 8 two straight PCs, only to have him just miss in both. So this time, I decided to go a different route by making him a darkhorse pick, knowing he likes to be dark and mysterious. It worked, and he made Top 8. Heck, we even had a Spears/Jacob final in Toronto the weekend after the PC!

Spears led the Realms contingent into battle with a deck that the entire Realmworx team combined to design piece by piece (and almost didn’t use!). They called it “The Worst Kept Secret” because a couple of early versions leaked out (you can read all about the deck’s history and leakages in Patrick Yapjoco’s interesting two-part article on VsRealms.com). It was a Qwardian Anti-Matter deck designed to make GLEE’s strategies work against itself. It could take ’em out earlier or stall until the later turns, and it had answers for just about everything. It also used Men of Steel, which may have given Chuck Bell the idea to use the card in his $10K GLEE build.

Here is Dave Spears’s Top 8 deck:

Characters

1 Anti-Monitor

1 Krona

1 Two-Face, Split Personality

1 Sinestro, Green Lantern of Korugar

1 Evil Star

2 Element Man

1 Fiero

1 Malvolio

3 Kiman

1 Kreon

1 Qwardian Watchdog

19 Shadow Creatures

Plot Twists

3 Helping Hand

4 The Ring Has Chosen

4 Men of Steel

3 Emerald Dawn

Locations

4 Qward

4 Sector 2814

4 Birthing Chamber

2 Anti-Matter Cannon

This deck is really, really mean, and with the right draw it can simply devastate. Starting with the Qward/Kiman effects combined with millions of swarming Shadow Creatures, you can often clear your opponent’s board no matter how many combat pumps he or she has. You don’t even need to attack. Element Man makes sure you have characters in your visible area to deal with attacks and helps to replace dead resources. Anti-Matter Cannon kills your opponent’s vital locations and is especially good against the mirror. Emerald Dawn, The Ring Has Chosen, and Malvolio combine for some friendly deck manipulation and searching, and the non-unique Sector 2814 allows for some hyper endurance gain. And if your opponent lasts until the later rounds, it really gets ugly; Evil Star allows you simply to dump a few Shadow Creatures to take out your opponent’s 1-drop swarmers (and most decks in DC Modern Age have some form of swarm), while Sinestro provides some defensive pop, making your Shadow Creatures that much more dangerous. If you have even initiatives, you’ll usually want to go for Sinestro. Then recruit Krona on 7 to hide Sinestro and watch the stun-fest begin. Forcing your opponents to team attack is fun, as they’ll lose multiple attackers. On odds, Two-Face is your man, as most GLEE and Blue Abuse decks thrive on odd characters and you can simply exhaust the opponent’s board and devastate him or her with little hope of reinforcement. And heaven help you if this deck gets to turn 9 and hits Anti-Monitor!

There were three main decks and many strong performers playing them. Unlike after New York, the rankings shifted in an odd way—certain players made the obvious leap into the top standings, but mostly the rankings just shifted a few places here and there. I think we’ve reached a form of status quo in the Top 10 rankings, and even in the Top 100, where we finally have a level of Pro Player that will remain somewhat steady in terms of placement, even though such players will be joined by a handful of other strong competitors jumping back and forth throughout the rankings.

Here’s a look at what the Top 10 looked like before and after the PC:

TOP 10 CONSTRUCTED

There were also shifts within FTN, as Michael Dalton moved up to 14th, David Leader moved to 18th, and Chuck Bell moved to 40th.

There were no dramatic shifts in the Top 10 such as there were after New York. The furthest drops were Jason Hager to 22nd and Stephen Silverman and David Bauer both moving to the Top 15. It was no big surprise that Jason Dawson, who keeps ending up X-1 in the Constructed portions of the PC, supplanted Adam Prosak in a first place tie with Ryan Jones. Michael Jacob is now in third in Constructed and sixth in Sealed Pack with an extraordinarily high combined ranking of 4—by far the highest combined rating in the game right now.

TOP 10 SEALED

In a reverse of New York, there were more dramatic shifts in the Sealed Pack rankings than in the Constructed ones. A Day 2 meltdown by Ryan Jones and Alex Shvartsman meant a plummet from Top 10 to the 35th–40th range, leaving room for Michael Jacob and Michael Dalton to come flying in. Niles Rowland also entered the Top 10, supplanting one of the many Asian Draft specialists, Bertram Huimin Chuang. With Jones gone, only Vidi is a Realmworx Top 10, Though Dave Spears’s success in Toronto means that he’s creeping ever closer toward a high-level Sealed Pack position.

We’ve now entered a new era in the Vs. System world where teams make the difference and the Pro Circuit is being dominated by a series of metagame-breaking team performers. FTN, with an all-star roster, has now supplanted Realmworx as the team to beat. Realmworx is still an awesome threat, though, with a lineup that can easily regroup and rekindle their previous success. After all, almost all of them finished in the money at Indy, and they have the game’s all-time money leader and a couple of others who are close behind. FTN also has to watch their overseas flank, as Team Hans has now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re all capable of winning on both sides of the Atlantic. Of the three teams, however, we can’t discount that So Cal will be the home turf of the Realmworx players, which is never a disadvantage. Well, almost never . . . we didn’t see a big Indy presence on Day 3.

RIW Hobbies is another team to look out for, with Jacob leading the way and Di Shi close behind after a solid Top 8 performance in Toronto. We also can’t count out the Hong Kong Cavaliers; their performance was under the level we’ve come to expect from them, but Golden Age is their specialty and So Cal will be their battleground.

Team AttaQC is the team of the future, with Max Bouchard and Benoit Chaurette building on multiple top-level $10K and PC performances. Their team is built on the backs of a champion team from other games, much like FTN, and we’ll see their name pop up in the future.

Finally, look for Team Random Punks to build on Donald Noland’s 2nd place performance at Indy. Rising from the ashes of Team 3BG, Joey Carey, Doug Tice, David DeMichele, and the rest of the Random Punks gang are all capable of taking any tournament they enter.

The curse of the PC Champion still holds true, with Adam Bernstein nowhere to be seen when it came down to the nitty-gritty. For that matter, none of the Indy boys made it to the Top 8 in either of the tournaments at Indy. And where oh where did TOGIT disappear to?

So Cal looms in the distance with a Golden Age field that is wide open after the emergence of Avengers. This set will make the difference if the playing field overcomes the throes of laziness and tests beyond one or two games. These five new teams each have the power to slam Sentinels and Titans; they just need to be worked on and molded. The question is: will people be lazy and not bother with the effort of building a killer deck? Will they just revert to the classics that always seem to do well? What will Jason Hager & Co., Michael Barnes & Co., and Michael Jacob & Co. turn out? What will Realmworx and FTN turn out? Stay tuned, because So Cal will be the most exciting PC yet!

Next Week: Back to the past for a Supremely Satisfying Soiree.

Questions? Queries? Comments? Send ’em along and I’ll try to get them answered in the column! Email me at Kergillian (at) hotmail (dot) com

Also known by his screen name Kergillian, Ben Kalman has been involved in the Vs. community since day one. He started the first major online community, the Vs. Listserv, through Yahoo! Groups, and it now boasts well over 1,750 members! For more on the Yahoo! group, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Marvel_DC_TCG.