I sat down with Michael Jacob, professional Vs. player with four PC Top 8s, for the second and final Sealed Pack construction of the day. He’s 4-0, and one more win will get him into Day 2. Michael verified the cards in his card pool, then went about the business of building his deck. He immediately began by laying out all of his characters by cost. “Team affiliations don’t matter too much to me,” he said. I asked him what he thought of his pool, and he said that he would need to look through his plot twists first. He pulled out Titans of Tomorrow. “Generic search—I love this card.” After going through all of his plot twists, he came to a conclusion: “I pretty much have to play Future Foes with a Chain Lightning and two copies of Five Against One.”

When he actually went through his characters, though, he only had one 2-drop, one 3-drop, and one 4-drop in that team. “I guess I . . . can’t play Future Foes?” Michael seemed perplexed. He worked from the top down—unlike many other pools, Michael seemed to have ample numbers of generally playable characters. He pared his playables down to two 7-drops, four 6-drops, five 5-drops, and so on. After this first pass, the plot twists got another look. “I only have three ATK pumps if I don’t play Foes . . .”

After some additional consideration, Michael noted that he had three Team-Ups. “This looks like a solid three-team deck: Titans, Legionnaires, and Darkseid’s Elite.” The deck’s few Future Foes characters were cut, and Michael sifted through the rest. He cut cards based primarily on their independent qualities, almost completely without regard to team affiliation. After settling into something that looked like a cohesive deck, Michael kept cutting cards, one by one. Some of the last cards to get the axe were Koriand’r ◊ Starfire, Tamaranian Princess (bringing him down to a single 7-drop), the 8-drop Darkseid (realistically only useful as a power-up), and Apparition.

When asked about how many wins he expected, Michael had this to say: “I probably only need one more win to make Day 2, but obviously, I want to go 3-0. This deck is probably only good for two wins, though; there’s nothing special in it.”