Pro Circuit Indianapolis 2005 is now on the books, and we are all, I’m sure, getting used to the fact that Team FTN won more or less everything. I say more or less because, while they seem to have DC Modern Age all wrapped up in Constructed, not a single one of them was even qualified for the only DC Modern Age Draft of the weekend¾The Willoughby Invitational.

If you check back on my article from two weeks ago, you should be able to get a fair idea of what it took to get a much-coveted slot in this, the last event of Gen Con Indianapolis. I had a fun couple of weeks receiving entries from far and wide, many of which were simply intended to give me a chuckle rather than to earn places in the competition. Well, chuckle I did, but at the same time, I managed to find myself some winners.

When the dust settled, the following lucky four had managed to grind their way in to the inaugural Willoughby Invitational.

Challenge 1 winner – Ben Kalman (writer at Metagame.com and all around nice guy.)

Ben was one of many who used the word “curses” in his limerick, but he seemed to be the only one not intent on having it mean idle threats or profanities. I must confess that while brainstorming this one, even mine had multiple rude words (and as such will never be published). While the rest of us were getting virtual slapped wrists for suggesting the use of naughty words, or simply having the wrong number of syllables in their verses (a word that didn’t show up in many limericks, but which would have been a pretty clever inclusion), Ben stole the slot with this entry.

There once was a player of Vs.,

Who believed in the power of curses,

Sacrificing a rooster,

While opening each booster,

He ensured his luck never reverses.

Challenge 2 winner – Jeremy Gray (Indianapolis native, part time creative genius, full time nice guy . . . sensing a pattern yet?)

Jeremy has a nasty habit of being creative in a way that stands out. His decks may not necessarily be optimal for a format, but they will always be surprising. As such, his choice of how to make himself as a card struck a chord.

1 Cost

Jeremy Gray – Team Misunderstood

Concealed

Cannot be targeted by plot twists or payment powers.

If an opponent reads one of your cards or asks, “What does this do?” put a confusion counter on Jeremy Gray.

Remove 2 counters >>> Search your deck for a card and put it into your hand. Shuffle your deck.   

0/1

If you were Jeremy playing this card, it would probably be amazing. If you were anyone else, I’m not so sure. Unfortunately, Jeremy found at the last minute that he couldn’t make the invitational and needed to relinquish his slot, which was really not tough to fill. He still has his invite ready for the next event at So Cal, though, and I for one cannot wait to see what he does with the format for the next event.

Challenge 3 winner – Ben Stoll (the first guy I ever played in the feature match area (during $10K Indy 2004) and a thoroughly nice guy.)

When reading people’s stories about Vs. System, there were many about being lucky or unlucky, and it felt a little tough for me to start deeming people’s being especially blessed or cursed alone to be good enough to warrant a slot for the invitational. As such, it was the weaving of a great tale that won it for me here. Possibly a few more exclamation marks than I would have used, but a good yarn nonetheless.

Pro Circuit New York '05. Young hopeful Ben Stoll had not given in to the dark side (Curve Sentinels), or even the Doom side. He was not smart enough to invent X-Dream or NewSchool; he was just a kid with an obsolete Mutant Nation deck and a heart of steel. His eventual Day 1 performance would be less than satisfactory, as Rogue's plan to KO Bastion on 6 would fail him time and time again. But in round 1, something glorious happened.

It was turn 9 or so, and there had been nary a team-up all game . . . until now. A few X-Men were recruited in one final attempt to stop the mighty Imperiex, but all of them had been paralyzed at the start of the battle except for one: a brave little German boy who feared not the Imperiex, especially since he had never been stunned while attacking anything before. Yes, Nightcrawler fearlessly hurtled toward the laughing Imperiex, seemingly outmatched! But in the blink of a team-up, everything got crazy. Suddenly, Nightcrawler was travelling to exotic new locations he hadn't seen before! Lost Cities and Avalon Space Stations! He even visited two Savage Lands on the way to battle Imperiex! He was humongous all of a sudden! He was David, and Imperiex was Goliath! And he couldn't be stunned! Imperiex trembled, and Nigthcrawler was ready to finish it! But wait. "What is that?" Nightcrawler pondered. "It can't be Overload, and I'm too swift to be stunned by a Flame Trap . . ." Just then he heard the hideous cackle of Doctor Doom, who had come out to play this turn alongside Imperiex. Nightcrawler couldn't believe it! "No! It can't be!” he cried. “It rained so hard on turn 4! It rained twice!" And then he was gone, plucked back up into a hand filled with useless plot twists.

(This is the story of how I pumped my 2-drop Nightcrawler large enough to take down Imperiex for the win, which would have been the greatest thing ever, except for the fact that my opponent had a third Reign of Terror when I thought he had only recruited Doctor D. to paralyze my other drop.)

Nick’s all-rare deck featured both a solid curve and a potentially scary late game, both of which put it out on top against a surprisingly small number of other submissions.

Characters:

4 Scarlet Spider ◊ Spider-Man

4 Spider-Man, New Fantastic Four

4 Wolverine, New Fantastic Four

3 Human Torch, Hotshot

4 Thing, Heavy Hitter

2 Ghost Rider, New Fantastic Four

4 Hulk, New Fantastic Four

3 Mr. Fantastic, Scientific Genius

2 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd

Plot Twists

4 Signal Flare

4 Savage Beatdown

4 It’s Clobberin’ Time

4 Cosmic Radiation

Equipment

4 Flamethrower

3 Fantasticar

3 Mystic Chain

Locations

4 Antarctic Research Base

While a lot of decks chose to run a heavy Fantastic Four build (as they have the most natural all-rare character curve) it was the use of equipment and Antarctic Research Base to give a “big fun” feel to the deck on later turns that swung it for me. I personally would like to have seen a Time Platform in there for Mr. F to find, but I guess that’s just me.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, despite meeting up with Nick during the course of the Pro Circuit, I managed to lose him completely prior to the event’s kicking off after the Top 8 on Sunday. This leads me neatly on to my first piece of advice for anyone looking to run a tournament¾the time and place at which you run it must be clearly worked out and communicated. Suffice it to say, I’m not the greatest tournament organizer of all time, and if I happen to run the greatest tournaments ever, that is more a function of crazy formats than anything else. Nick has got an open invite to a future Willoughby Invitational from now until he uses it, and my apologies. If UDE is looking for a head of Disorganized Play, I would happily jump to the front of the queue.

By the time the finals had finished on Sunday, there was quite a buzz around the venue (or at least around the people talking to me) about the Invitational, not least because the special German draft product I had procured was (and is) the only way to get foil cards from the Batman vs. Ra’s Al Ghul starter deck.

I rounded up my winners, my pros, and some substitutes for those who couldn’t make it and found myself with the following motley crew ready to try their luck at foreign DC Modern Age Draft.

• Jason Hager (PC NY Finalist)
• Olav Rokne ($10K Seattle semifinalist and possessor of a mighty beard)
• The Ben Seck (Member of UDE R&D and winner of $10K Sydney)
• Josh Wiitanen (A regular on the PC with a penchant for mischief and an aversion to sleep)
• Dean Sohnle (Wandering $10K winner who is the living embodiment of Fantastic Fun)
• Cory Eisenhard (Another Fantastic Fun player who is also good times . . . is there a pattern here?)
• Ben Stoll (Winner of Challenge 3)
• Ben Kalman (Winner of Challenge 1)

Everyone sat down, eager to crack open packs which would be equal parts familiar and unfamiliar to them, while I laid down the rules as described in my previous article. I did have one slight problem, though. There was the issue of rulings. For a fun event like the Invitational, I didn’t really want to hand out warnings and game losses for slow play, but at the same time, I definitely didn’t want to start letting people get away with flaunting the rules. The answer came in the form of a permanent marker. Any warnings or penalties of any kind would be enforced by the medium of immediate errata. Should a player start causing trouble or playing in an unsportsmanlike manner, they would simply find some of the numbers on their cards changed.

With that in mind, the draft began in earnest. There was confusion and laughter as players tried to work out how many teams they wanted in their decks (the consensus being “a lot”) and the relative value of cards in this mixed-up format. Maxie Zeus was a high pick for Dean Sohnle, as he represented a nice little splash in a hard to find team (and five extra endurance, as well). Cory first picked a foil Ra’s Al Ghul, Eternal Nemesis with the cheeky smile of someone who had just drafted a foil that is more or less impossible to get in the USA. Various cards either skyrocketed in value (Battle of Wills) or plummeted to being pretty low picks (poor old Goldface). A crowd unlike any other I have ever seen for a draft formed, looking equal parts confused and amused. They had something pretty special to look at in pack three as Jason Hager opened one of the more unusual cards to exist in Vs. System¾a non-foil extended art Batman from the starter deck. Given that there was a total of around 92 different rares that could have been opened between the three sets mixed up in the box, this was truly something a little bit special.

In deck construction, there was the complicated matter of how many cards to play in one’s deck. While normally this is something of a no-brainer, the lure of a larger starting hand was enough to push many toward playing decks up to 45 cards in size! Would such a gamble pay off? Was a seven card starting hand enough to mitigate a massively weaker and less consistent deck? There was only one way to find out, and many of the players took it. Towers of power abounded, and those with only 35 cards in their decks were the ones getting funny looks. Truly, it was a day unlike any other.

The play itself was no less crazy than the draft had been. It wasn’t long before I was busy applying rolling errata to cards, including a Bizarro World for which it was necessary to check with me (rather than its official website) to find out what it did whenever activated, and an Anti-Life Equation that got significantly easier to understand when it said, “At the start of the turn, Olav loses 2 endurance.” (Little did Olav know that if he had flipped the card a second time during the tournament, I would have added the line, “and draws 2 cards.”)

Winners and losers there were, but everyone seemed to be having a ball. Indeed, while I don’t like to toot my own horn (at least not in public), I did hear various people describing it as the “funnest event in Vs. history.” I am deaf in one ear, though, so they might just have been saying it was the dumbest event ever. Or that it was the funnest event in history, period. I really would not like to make the distinction in a court of law.

I am rather loathe to admit that the worst part of the event may well have been my own megalomania with applying “positive warnings” and erratas to people’s cards if they made particularly entertaining plays or observations. In retrospect, even though Jason Hager’s Virmann Vunderbar was clearly the most German thing in an all-German draft, it probably wasn’t appropriate for it to become a Nein/Nein character that still cost 4. If it weren’t for the fact that this was more a tournament about having a good time than winning or losing, I would feel a lot worse about making the game that much more random, but it still seems a little off that my mods could be that powerful. Jason Hager walked away with the (invisible) trophy for the first Willoughby Invitational, and I hope that everyone else involved enjoyed themselves too, whether as a spectator or a player.

One way or another, I just cannot wait for PC LA, where once again Vs. will take a little detour from regular tournament play for something a little bit different by yours truly.

Have fun and be lucky,

Tim “Scary with a Sharpie” Willoughby

timwilloughby@hotmail.com