There are some very strange things going on at this tournament today. While it’s far too soon to pick out the winners and losers—there are still seven rounds of play left—one can still see the emergence of a few interesting new decks. Since we don’t have a Top 8 quite yet, I opted instead to watch the top eight tables to get a feeling for the undefeated metagame.

Table 1 featured a very standard Sentinel mirror match. I didn’t see any tech while watching these players, but I did see a lot of competent play. These players feel that Sentinels is still a strong choice for an open field, as it has been for most of the past year. Whether its dominance will finally come to an end this weekend is a question as yet unanswered, but the deck is still sporting the sheer numbers it needs to succeed this weekend.

At table 2 sits David Leader, sporting is MK-KO deck. He was up against what appeared to be a mono-Avengers build. Despite his earlier assertions of problems against rogue decks, David easily dispatched his opponent by clearing his board each and every turn.

Table 3 has yet another Sentinels player battling it out with a deck straight out of Marvel Modern Age. Spider-Friends and Marvel Knights battled valiantly, but the robots arrived in an optimal curve and rolled over any opposition.

Sitting at table 4 I found Donald Noland, a PC regular from Tennessee and the only player of the sixteen that I checked who was playing Teen Titans. His opposition was another Avengers deck. For the first time in quite a while, the new set seems to have presented us with a team that can come to play by itself in Golden Age. Many players here are sporting Avengers decks. While it seems to be the deck of choice among casual players, its presence at the 2-0 tables lends credence to the idea that the Avengers are a very powerful team. The players went to turn 9, but in the end, Donald and Teen Titans pulled out the win.

Table 5 featured Floridian Joe Crosby up against yet another Marvel concealed deck. This makes three players at the top eight tables sporting decks which would not have been very out of place in PC Amsterdam. Is concealed making a comeback? It sure looks that way. This match was a bit anticlimactic, though, because Joe was playing The New Brotherhood. His deck did what it has been known to do since Matt Boccio won the very first $10K with it. Two copies of The New Brotherhood and a pile of 1-drops yielded his opponent’s concession on turn 3.

On table 6 I found another old-school deck, Big Brotherhood. It fought against the ubiquitous purple robots in a match straight out of the history books. The game went to time, but Big Brotherhood got out its locations and pulled it out in the end.

Table 7 was another Sentinels mirror match that catapulted another player of the field’s most prolific deck into the undefeated bracket by sheer force of numbers.

At table 8 we find perhaps the most interesting matchup out of all of these. Patrick Yapjoco was playing the Kang/New Brotherhood deck (a partial description of what he played can be found in the Round 1 feature match). His opponent brought . . . Mojo. That’s right, folks—an unaffiliated deck. There’s a large group of players who opened Green Lantern packs and shuffled right past Kyle Rayner and Dr. Light to gape at Mosaic World. This card, combined with a number of solid, unaffiliated guys in the past few sets, may actually have catapulted the teamless strategy into playability. At least, that’s what unaffiliated players like this one hope. The match was a grueling one, with the unaffiliated player taking the early lead with Random Punks. He missed his Mojo on turn 4, though—that is huge—and Patrick began recurring Mikado and Mosha with Avalon Space Station to take control of the game. Patrick eventually emerged victorious, but the unaffiliated dream remains alive at 2-1.