In our last article, we covered the short clips and quick tips for Vs. System success. We covered the various types of advantage, and important aspects of the game that any aspiring professional card player should know. This game can be tough, and rather than spend all your time studying and practicing, you can skip the long, drawn-out version and jump right into the Kingpin’s Cliffs Notes.

Remember last week’s top tips:

1.   Understand tempo. (Who is the beatdown player?)

2.   Hand maintenance helps win games.

3.   Board presence is the single most important part of this game!

4.   Strive for the win condition.

What are the most important things that a player can learn about the game of Vs. System? Can you remember the moment when it all began to click or the advice that changed your game? When I started playing this game, it was difficult to build decks that drew the characters I needed when I wanted them. It was difficult to gauge when to play key cards, and sometimes it was hard to understand when to keep a hand and when to throw it to the bottom of my deck.

I spent a lot of time in the early stages of my playing experience concocting fun lists that would just miss the top tables at my local tournaments. After some practice, I took those same decklists into the Top 8.

Spend Your Cards to Break Their Backs

If you have ever played a great decklist, then the chances are high that you have played a mirror match with that deck. In the days of the dominant Curve Sentinels and feisty Teen Titans builds, you found tournament success through a deep understanding of matchups. No matchup can be as tough to play as the mirror match. Some players are bound to sport similar decklists with mostly identical character lineups and all the same locations and plot twists.

To win mirror matches, it is important to know when to play certain cards and when to make a run for back-breaking advantage. Board advantage can be gained through a subtle rolling tide of attacks that occurs over the course of four to five turns. In this case, one player looks at the board around the mid-point of the match and notices that he or she only has a single character while the opponent is sporting a trio of characters. In other cases, a player will find him or herself staring down a mirrored field of equal drops.

Scenario one is generated by making great attacks and building an inevitable advantage that will be hard for the opponent to surmount in later turns. You may gain this type of advantage by dropping more or better characters than your opponent drops. More characters increase you team attacking ability. You can stun large characters with team attacks and save your big beaters for the opponent’s “small fry.”  If the game is close in the beginning, you can soon turn the tide because of your board advantage. 

However, you may not always be able to drop more or better characters. If your opponent has equivalent drops or even identical characters, advantage can often be found by playing a key card at a specific time in the game. On turn 4, if you are attacking with two characters into two similar characters, the difference in walking away with equivalent stuns and board advantage might be the timely use of a plot twist or a location. On turn 7, the use of the exact same card may turn the tide of the game for your opponent, and leave you with no way to catch up. For example, if you have a card that gives your character +2 ATK / +2 DEF, you might use it on turn 4, allowing your 3-drop to attack up the curve into your opponent’s 4-drop and freeing up your 4-drop to attack into their 3-drop without stunning back. This would allow you to keep your 3- and 4-drops while your opponent will likely retain only the 4-drop. Some players may choose to hold onto the +2 ATK / +2 DEF pump for a later turn when they can avoid a stun with their 7-drop at a crucial moment. Timing is essential, and you must develop a feel for the correct timing according to your deck’s plan and the state of the game. Imagine “blowing” a pump on turn 1 for no reason. It may give you a short term endurance advantage, but if you use the same pump on a later turn, you may gain a board advantage that translates into an even greater endurance advantage.

Pushing the advantage with card use and timing is a skill that few people naturally have, but one that most players can acquire through practice. In our second scenario, the timely use of key cards is not only recommended but also essential. If you have and your opponent have boards with commensurate character curves and similar hand sizes, then you should consider one of two important roads to victory in the mirror match. On road one, you may want to try to keep board parity and wait for your opponent to make a mistake. At the top tables, you may need to travel road two instead, and wait out your opponent until the last possible minute before using a key card. If your opponents are not likely to make errors in formations or attack, you may want to consider keeping powerful plot twists and other effects in your hand until the final turns of a game. Many players use key cards too early, and as a result cannot get out of problem situations in the late game; they use up all their tricks and have nothing left to save the game in the final turns. Cards quickly become chess pieces in this type of match, and the person with more late game options typically walks away with the check in the winner’s box.

Great Players Play Great Decks

If you are preparing for a Pro Circuit event, you often have a wide array of options when it comes to deck choice. There are a plethora of decklists available on the Internet, and depending on the relevant Age (Golden, Silver, or Modern), there may have been tournaments featuring successful decks for the format in which you are going to compete.

If you study the history of competitive trading card games, you might notice that most strong players attempt to play one of two deck types. The best players either try to play the known, most outstanding deck for the tournament, or try to invent a list that beats the known deck.

I took some wrong turns early in my card-playing career. I wanted to be an inventor of decks and see my name in lights as a genius deckbuilder. The problem was that I did not know the best decks in the format, and often competed with inferior lists that lost to those decks. If you want to take a novel list, then you really have to understand how to play the top decks along with your new creation. Most innovative decks counter popular tricks, or have characters that dominate the characters in a given known deck either by stats or by effect.

Imagine a case in which everyone was going to play a 3-drop character whose activated power searched for a location. This strong character has the drawback of losing its controller the game when it is KO’d and goes to the pile. You may choose to build a deck that either KO’s the opponent’s character or negates the search. In both cases, your deck would offer a counterstrategy to the deck most likely to show up in the upcoming tournament.

Playtest Broadly

I was watching a special on cable last night about a family with some extreme beliefs that I found offensive. The family had about ten children, all of whom held the same beliefs. The family was home-schooled and did not really interact with other people. At first, it seemed hard to understand how all the people in this family could demonstrate maladaptive thinking patterns and hold such beliefs.

Over the course of the documentary, it became clear that the children were indoctrinated through limited information, exclusive teaching in the family, and low rates of external contact. The lack of free-flowing information and the exclusivity of the group maintained the faulty belief system.

Playtesting for a tournament can be like making one of these exclusive groups. You limit your contact with other players, limit your information by limiting the group’s membership, and often find yourself establishing a belief system about the best decks and the best cards for those decks.

The pitfalls to avoid in playtesting are being too exclusive and letting your bubble drift too far away from the reality of the current metagame. If you become detached from the actual environment, then you will show up to a tournament with the wrong cards and a poor deck choice, and suffer a poor performance.

Read Your Cards

It is always good to go back and review your cards. When a new set hits the shelves, draft with it, play it, and reread its cards as often as possible. The best Sealed players excel because they know the content of the set and value cards according to a good understanding of it.

How many times have you played in a Sealed tournament or Sneak Preview event and made a game-losing error that might have been avoided by better reading comprehension? Those are tough losses because all you need to do to stave them off is look a little closer.

In the end, you may want to come up with your own set of Cliffs Notes and share them with new players or your friends. I’ve been enjoying the comments and mail you’ve all been sending, and I like interacting with both new players coming into the game and other professionals. Keep the cards flipping and be a student of the game. See you next time in the Kingpin’s School of Hard Knocks.

Class dismissed.

Jeremy Blair is a professional card player from Florida and a member of Team Alternate Win Condition. He sports over ten tattoos, including a full back memorial to his TAWC teammates. Next time you see him, grab a game and ask him about his ink. For questions and comments, please send correspondence to Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.