Pro Circuit champion Adam Horvath didn’t have much luck in the PC yesterday, but his weekend is far from over. If Adam succeeds at today’s $10K, it would not be the first time that he’ll have bounced back from a poor start to sit at the final table of a major event. I decided to follow Adam as he constructed his deck for today’s Sealed Pack $10K.

Adam went through his cards and began arranging them in piles by teams. Although he made the Top 8 of the recent $10K Wizard World Texas, Adam is still unfamiliar with a number of the cards in the set. “This card is good; I’ve never seen it before,” he said, holding up a copy of Counterstrike. “My Secret Society is pretty good, but I think you need a lot of them to make these plot twists I have work well.” Adam had both The Plunder Plan and With Prejudice, two of the better common plot twists in the set. “I guess I could team up . . . with . . . Injustice Gang? But they’re just bad.”

Adam’s first realistic attempt at putting together a deck began by piling out all of his JLA characters by cost. His nine playable JLA guys—Batman, Avatar of Justice was pushed aside in favor of multiple copies of Hal Jordan, Hard-Traveling Hero—seemed to form a good base. To these characters he added a handful of JLI characters. The result was a reasonable curve, but Adam still wasn’t convinced that these were the best two teams. “I’ve got to get Secret Society into this deck somehow.”

Once again, Adam shuffled through his Society pile. Ultra-Humanite was immediately added to the deck. “Obviously, this guy is awesome.” The Mist and Captain Cold reinforced the 3-drop spot, but it looked like Adam was going to have problems at the next spot in his curve. A General Fabrikant was added and quickly removed—he was just too awful. With only a pair of 4-drops in his deck, Adam took another look at his plot twists and locations. “I’ll probably play this UN Building,” he said. “I have more than enough teams now.” Adam carefully looked through all of his non-character cards, judging each of their values in the deck he had constructed. He noted that all of his rares, with the possible exception of The Watchtower, were unplayable. After assembling a pile of ten candidate plot twists and locations, not including the Secret Society–stamped cards he left to the side, Adam moved back to his characters. He begrudgingly added The Joker, Headline Stealer to his pile of 4-drops. With an unprintable expletive, he even more begrudgingly added Dr. Light, Light Shaper. He briefly considered replacing it with Despero, but then noted how Dr. Light’s two affiliations might help to facilitate his UN Building.