Here are my top five, in no particular order.

Roy Harper ◊ Speedy

While most formats in the past have featured 1-drops that were nothing but icing on a strategic cake, DC Modern Age puts a huge emphasis on the turn 1 play. 1-drops are a lot more than just providers of useful effects. Hitting a turn 1 character gives a player a huge advantage, and virtually all of the top decks are running one or more of importance.

GLEE loves hitting Arisia or G’Nort on turn 1, and both of these characters can create major problems for opponents as the game goes on. Like many 1-drops in the environment, these characters dodge diminishing utility by basically becoming more and more powerful as turns wear on.

In EE Rush matchups, it’s all about robbing the opponent of The Shark. Sure, there are other characters to be concerned with—such as Henry King Jr. ◊ Brainwave and the less popular Sonar—but they lack the power to truly wreak havoc possessed by T. S. Smith. 

Against Blue Abuse, there’s always a plentiful supply of Soldiers of New Genesis to eat. The deck usually accepts that it will lose a few cosmic counters to stuns, but it likes keeping as many as possible around to repeatedly redistribute them for multiple stuns via Superman, Blue and Super Speed. Speedy combined with random stuns can rob the Blue deck of virtually all of its counters, and once that happens, the deck is basically offline.

Shadow Creatures decks hate it because, well, they need Shadow Creatures to fuel their tricks. Speedy cuts them all short by removing fodder for Evil Star, making it more difficult to use the deck’s search cards, and just generally slowing it down and depriving it of options.

While Speedy is the most obvious inclusion for this list and would no doubt be argued as a staple by many more experienced players, it really deserves mention here.  With synergistic tricks like reuse of the same Speedy within a single turn via Book of Oa and Dr. Light, Master of Holograms, a single copy of Speedy can really ruin a well-planned strategy. Often, it can just disrupt formations to the point that breakthrough becomes far easier to deal, another definite advantage to having a Speedy on board at all times. 

Rot Lop Fan

Dedicated Shadow Creatures decks running Mono-Anti-Matter character spreads and Shadow Creatures-dependent GLEE hybrids have made a massive impact here today. Rot Lop Fan lets a character have direct access to either deck’s pintsized power cells.  While the beginning of the day first seemed to suggest that Rot Lop Fan was seeing very little play, it quickly became clear that many topnotch GLEE players were running it as insurance for the Anti-Matter matchup.

While formation and aggression can allow an Anti-Matter player to work around Rot Lop Fan, these alone are not a perfect solution. By playing in such a manner, a competitor foregoes his primary intents. The ability to dictate an opponent’s turn priorities is really quite powerful from both mental and realistic standpoints.

Phantom Zone

It lets Blue Abuse eat Dr. Light’s lunch every time he tries to go to the fridge and get it. End analogy, and end explanation of very obvious yet very under-played card.

Dimming of the Starheart

Seeing people actually run Dimming of the Starheart was almost surreal, but they actually used it for a variety of reasons. While the most compelling impetus for its use is clearly Olapet and her magical 5 willpower, it also makes an entertaining response to effects like Oa and Uppercut. Olapet made for prime mid-game off-curve aggression in the minds of many players, and on a turn when an opponent is banking on the ferntastic fighter to lead the charge against the opponent’s biggest beater, a sudden -5 to her inflated ATK is usually the first in a long row of collapsing dominoes.

The ban on flight is also quite helpful, especially in an environment where flight is so common. While Tomar Tu was the star of many a formation, Dimming of the Starheart’s wing-clipping effect was not to be underestimated either. Formation and attack decisions become quite difficult in an environment where both players often control half a dozen characters each—the simple loss of flight in one potential attacker can change or ruin an entire turn for your opponent. While Dimming is definitely a conditional card, it was most certainly one that won games.

Anti-Matter Cannon

A great card for the Anti-Matter mirror match (which was more common than most originally suspected it would be), the Cannon seems to be included in decks chiefly for that purpose. Capable of disrupting Sector 2814, Qward, and Birthing Chamber in that matchup, it’s a true boon once it hits the field, blowing up locations as fast as they can hit the table.

Even in the non-mirror, the card is surprisingly useful.  If an opponent is ambitious enough to flip an Oa in the early game, you can blow it away. Even if he has another, he’s going to eat a second discard if he opts to use it, and that hurts. In the EE Rush matchup, you can eat Willworld and—more importantly—Prison Planet.

Even against the Superman Robots/Soldiers of New Genesis decks, Anti-Matter Cannon is great. It peels apart The Kent Farm, launching horses and monkeys every which way.  That’s right—it even techs the deck only nine people are playing.

All in all, there have been more than just five pieces of tech that have been used over the course of today. There are even some plays that are just so techy and cool that I wish I could list them too (think Book of Oa for nothing, just to discard Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern in order to Dr. Light him). Overall, though, the above five are my personal faves, and they serve to demonstrate that despite the popularity of GLEE, there’s a lot of room for personal style in the DC Modern Age format!