Even if a deck has just a small edge in each of a metagame’s most expected matchups, a pro player is likely to identify that and go with that deck. You want every advantage you can get, and those subtle differences in percentages will add up over a large number of games. That said, I don’t think the gap between the top decks is as big as you might think, or wouldn’t be if some of those teams were getting as much attention as the most popular teams. One of the obstacles that the new teams have to overcome is simply getting enough people to look at them. Don’t get me wrong—everyone who considers himself or herself to be a deckbuilder probably tries to dissect each new set for the newest contender. It’s just that sometimes archetypes becomes “en vogue” and get played much more than their power levels might warrant.
There are several reasons not to expect decks to immediately jump out onto the scene. The history of the game has shown that few decks have become popular within a short time after all of their cards have become legal for tournament play. The fact of the matter is that besides ever-shifting metagames, many decks appear to have made significant improvements only over the course of time. Yet others have emerged only when top players and teams have brought their “best stuff” to a Pro Circuit or, at times, a $10K.
It often takes a team of players to tune a deck like Rigged Elections (as Team Your Move Games did) or X-Stall (as Team TOGIT did) to the point where it can compete with the decks that have defined a metagame. The defining decks in an environment get so much attention! Every week, these decks are being honed on the PCQ circuit and on the Internet. The most successful of these variants are being copied, re-examined, and tuned by thousands of players around the world. Because of this, it can take a while for a deck centered on a new team to make its presence felt. Often it takes a strong deck builder to focus on the team and a strong player to pilot it to a finish worthy of attention on the web. At that point, with luck, it may be able to take strides towards competing against decks in which every card has already been debated for months.
Building on Momentum
Right now it would appear that the strongest two decks in the metagame are Teen Titans and Curve Sentinels. At least, they are the most popular decks and are putting up the best finishes. If you look at these decks now, the versions assumed to be the prime examples are much different than they’ve been in the past. While some of this is likely a reaction to an ever-changing metagame, there appear to be many changes that have just taken a while to be discovered.
Curve Sentinels
Hans Joachim Hoeh ($10K Bologna)
4 Boliver Trask
1 Sentinel Mark III
8 Sentinel Mark II
9 Sentinel Mark V
4 Nimrod
4 Bastion
4 Magneto, Master of Magnetism
4 Savage Beatdown
4 Cover Fire
4 Nasty Surprise
4 Overload
4 Reconstruction Program
2 Acrobatic Dodge
4 Genosha
Whether or not this is the ideal build remains unclear, but I find his choice of cards very appealing. This version isn’t vulnerable to Ka-Boom!. It plays towards its strongest card Bastion by ignoring Master Mold and having the chance to dig further into the deck for Bastion with Genosha in desperate times. Nasty Surprise can keep Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal honest. The rest of the deck relies on the most efficient generic combat modifiers available. It has an abundance of characters centered on the heart of its curve. Hoeh has won the last two European $10Ks with similar decks that appear to be derived from the “Pimp My ’Bot” version played by John Rich and Charlie Vu in the New Jersey $10K a couple weeks before Hoeh’s first win.
A quick look back at the number of each deck type played at PC: LA shows that the Sentinels were still just arriving on the scene.
Teen Titans: 54
Common Enemy: 43
Brotherhood: 35
Sentinels: 22
Fantastic Four: 19
X-Men: 18
Spider-Man: 16
The Brave and the Bold: 15”
Apparently two of the Sentinel decks were Wild Vomit variants. So why has Sentinels leapt up from amongst the masses? I believe it is mainly because the Sentinel deck has started to realize its potential by improving its decklist, not because the recent introduction of the Man of Steel set has shifted the metagame towards it. In fact, Team Superman decks are relying on Gangbuster and the improvements to the Tower of Babel–bearing League decks don’t seem to be that huge a concern to the Sentinels.
One of the most successful Curve Sentinel decks at PC #2 looked like this:
Sz-Yuan Jonathan Koe (PC: Los Angeles, seventh at end of Day 1, 8-2)
4 Bastion
4 Boliver Trask
2 Master Mold
4 Nimrod
7 Sentinel Mark II
6 Sentinel Mark III
6 Sentinel Mark V
3 Tri-Sentinel
3 A Death in the Family
4 Cover Fire
3 Finishing Move
4 Reconstruction Program
3 Savage Beatdown
4 Tag Team
3 South American Sentinel Base
This deck built on David Spears’s and Shane Wendels’s success with the deck at $10K Texas on November 6. And where were Sentinels in the month before that? Once upon a time, I said, “We also tried to patch up some holes in the other teams. For example, we tried to give the Sentinels a couple more tools to complement powerhouses like Nimrod and Bastion . . .” (http://www.metagame.com/vs.aspx?tabid=46&ArticleId=608), but that comment seemed to meet quite some skepticism at the time.
Teen Titans
I was going to go through a similar run-down on Teen Titans but I’ll try to let the some of the prominent decks speak for themselves.
Gabe Walls ($10K Columbus)
1 Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal, Speedy
3 Dawn Granger ◊ Dove
4 Tim Drake ◊ Robin, Young Detective
3 Hank Hall ◊ Hawk
4 Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal, Sharpshooter
3 Red Star
4 Terra
4 Garth Tempest
1 Connor Kent ◊ Superboy, Tactile Telekinetic
1 Koriand’r ◊ Starfire
2 Foiled
2 Heroic Sacrifice
2 Finishing Move
3 Overload
4 Press the Attack
3 Teen Titans Go!
1 Ka-Boom!
3 Savage Beatdown
3 Optitron
3 Titans Tower
3 Tamaran
3 USS Argus
Make no mistake. This is almost identical to Ryan Jones’s PC: LA winning deck, which in turn looked a lot like Robert Leander’s winning build from $10K Texas. To the best of my recollection, this $10K signalled in the emergence of both modern looking Teen Titans and Curve Sentinel builds. And yet the most successful Teen Titans build at the first PC looked like this:
Jason Green (7-0 in Swiss rounds PC Indy)
4 Dawn Granger ◊ Dove
3 Hank Allen ◊ Hawk
4 Tim Drake ◊ Robin, Young Detective
4 Beast Boy
4 Roy Harper ◊ Arsenal, Sharpshooter
4 Terra
4 Red Star
4 Garth ◊ Tempest
2 Connor Kent ◊ Superboy
1 Koriand’r ◊ Starfire
4 Teen Titans Go!
4 Not So Fast
3 Overload
3 Heroic Sacrifice
4 Titans Tower
4 Tamaran
3 USS Argus
2 Optitron
Notably, it lacked Press the Attack and either Ka-Boom! or Foiled. In all fairness, I believe there were other decks at the PC that approximate later version of Teen Titans that would be seen.
In-House Development
So where am I going with all this, besides giving you an oversimplified history of a couple of decks? Well, I’m trying to emphasize how much work and development has gone into the current tier 1 decks by the outside world. I also want to emphasize how much the metagame and perceptions about deck types are changing. We can only hope to approximate this type of development with our in-house decks. This holds especially true because our only goal isn’t to “break” the environment. We are just as interested in providing you with fun, balanced, and interesting cards. Nevertheless, we are trying to foster the healthiest competitive scene possible—but we meet a lot of challenges.
Where to aim?
Whenever we build a deck with a new team, after we’ve gone through a few iterations of tuning our deck, what percentage of the time do you think it should be able to beat the newest, hottest Teen Titans or Curve Sentinels deck that has been tuned for months by the top pros in the world? It’s tricky to answer. We can’t be too egotistical about our own deckbuilding talent. If we shoot for being able to beat these decks half the time, we can be assured that once the outside world gets their hands on these cards, they will improve any such build we come up with and thrash most of the previous competition. With each set, we get a better impression of how well our decks should fair and how much we can expect to miss that the outside world will find. We certainly can’t expect to build all that thousands of others will.
The fact of the matter is that we have to undershoot the power level of the best decks out there. If we overlook some improvement on a deck or some combo, we may release an unstoppable force onto the scene that could make many old teams and cards obsolete. Maybe we’d really have to badly misjudge the power level of a team for it to really take over the metagame, but then again, it seems better for us to be a tiny bit conservative. As we learn more and more about the game ourselves and we get more confident about our ability to aim at the right level, we can shoot closer to the power level of tier 1 decks. If we undershoot, we can take measures to bring up the power level of the recent teams, who get more cards in future sets than the old teams and as such, are easier to help out.
Months ahead
And then there is the issue of what we are testing against. Since we are testing somewhere around four months in advance of the rest of the players in the world, I think you can all imagine that what we test against isn’t as relevant as it could be. What was the world telling us the best decks were when we designed the last couple sets? Well, it wasn’t Curve Sentinels. Not only do the popular decks change over time, but it becomes tricky if we are using, say, Jason Green’s version of Teen Titans as a basis for whether or not our new team can handle the Titans or not. And what if a team excelled against Big Brotherhood or Common Enemy, and that team slowly vanishes from the metagame?
When there was no metagame
Both Origins sets offered a unique development environment in which we had no decks from the outside world to test against. Thus, we were primarily concerned with balancing the teams amongst one another and trying to give each of them their own feel. As it turned out, some themes worked a little better than others. Clearly we came up short in a few regards, but now all the teams are a force to be considered (with the possible exception of the Arkham Inmates). We will do our best to help them and any other struggling teams out in the future, hopefully in ways that are more novel than giving them a powerful search card.
Helping out weak teams
The first step in helping out weak teams is to determine what the weak teams are. This may not be as simple as it seems. Sometimes we come closer to ideal builds with some teams than others. When we do, those teams wind up being underpowered in comparison to other teams we were developing at the time.
This is, again, partially a problem of being so far ahead from the outside world in our testing. When we’re deciding what cards to give the old teams in the Avengers set, for example, we still haven’t seen an event in the outside world using any Marvel Knights cards. Besides, revisiting these teams with new testing in light of more recent changes in the metagame, we are left to judge these teams solely on our own testing, assessments by writers on the web, and early word of mouth we get from professional players about their testing.
Fostering underplayed themes in successful teams
Many of these issues hold true for teams we’d perceive as strong. If we are under the impression that a team is already “on top of its game” in utilizing one of its themes, we will then look to push that team in other directions with new cards we give it. Sometimes we just don’t have the correct gauge on power level and should have pushed its strongest themes further.
Why isn’t card “X” seeing play?
Sometimes we feel there are certain cards or themes that should be doing better than they are. The potential power of cards like Jean Grey, Phoenix Force and Batman, The Dark Knight has always seemed clear to me. And yet these cards went unplayed for long periods of time and some were even mocked. I know I couldn’t have pointed out the optimal use of these cards. We don’t know if our judgment of these cards is just off. It’s also hard to know when enough tools exist to go along with these cards to make them show their power. Yet cards like these do make a big statement on the scene at times. There are still other cards like Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man that I can’t help but feel aren’t being fully utilized. We had a Spider-Friends deck do well at PC #2 without even using Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man and another did do well with him and I’m sure was subsequently tested by a lot of players. Maybe the Spider-Friends are just lacking the consistency of the other teams. It is hard for us to get an impression of how consistent any deck is, especially when we are changing the text on cards every day. Large tournaments with our finalized cards can eventually help illuminate consistency issues. It is still hard for us to know whether the team really doesn’t have enough tools, whether nobody has hit upon the optimal build, whether the metagame is harsh on the deck, or whether it’s some combination of these factors.
Learning with time
As with most processes, I like to think we’re significantly improving our card pools in each set we release. However, there may be certain hiccups in this process, where all aspects of a new set are not improvements on old ones. I can go over each set and point out directions or major improvements on previous sets, even if certain other directions taken in that set weren’t as wise. This holds especially true in Sealed Pack play, where I believe we are making improvements by leaps and bounds.
As you may have noticed from Danny Mandel’s recent article, we are amassing quite the crew of talented developers with their own impressive accomplishments. In the development of the last few sets we’ve seen the likes of: Brian “I won the first PC” Kibler, THE Ben “Fat Bat” Seck, TOGIT’s Patrick Sullivan, and YMG’s Darwin Kastle roll in. This is in addition to our fairly recent permanent additions of Ben Rubin, Justin Gary, and Andrew Yip to the folks you’ve come to know and love, who like to think they can play. This list includes Mike Hummel, Danny Mandel, and Matt Hyra. In addition to this, we can draw upon the likes of Brian Hacker and Dave Smith when they aren’t too busy with their new games.
Expect good things from our current and upcoming sets!
Comments welcome at DHumpherys@metagame.com.