Sunday, April 6, 2008

Windy City Throw-Down, Sunday

My final post from the site of Pastimes itself, I have to say, I've learned a few things.

1) Tourney-play isn't for me. Sealed is one thing, and I love it. Same for draft. But when it comes to constructed, I build great, fun Hobby League decks. They can't do very much against the Grodd/Deadshot deck, or a Random/Human Torch/Punisher deck. I don't build the hyper-consistent monstrosities that takes down those and other giants.

2) Don't check the drop box just 'cuz you're dropping the slip off.

3) DCL draft is a blast.

4) Vs has some of the greatest players. Even when I was getting hosed by Fantastic Four or IG Hidden, I was having fun just goofing around with my opponent. They put up with me being really bizarre, and most of them seemed to get something of a kick out of my deck, so with a few exceptions, I had fun every round.

5) Omnipotence is the best card in Modern Age, hands down. I beat Fantastic Four and IG Hidden because of it, and I got completely thrashed by another deck because they had it.

So, ultimately, I played 18 rounds of Vs. this weekend. I won 6 of them, which means...well, I had a God-atrocious record. 3 - 6 in Super Crossover, 3 - 6 in Constructed Modern. I got about 8 hours of sleep total all damn weekend, which is going to hurt tomorrow, as I have an early class followed by work all day. I bought a bunch of cards, opened a few packs, pulled nothing really interesting. Play errors cost me multiple games - enormous play errors for which there is no excuse. Still, I met cool people and played the game. I also had a couple pieces of a Chicago-style inside-out-upside-down-what-the-bloody-hell pizza - a pizza that cost, by the by, 35 dollars, when all's said and done.

I suppose I'll post my constructed deck for you all, so you can see the materials that lost me 6 games out of 9. It wasn't a bad deck, honestly - I had a decent game against Family of Four, a decent game against IG Hidden, and those were the two most populous decks by quite a bit. Ultimately, however, it fell short - consistency issues combined with power issues killed me as surely as anything else.

Mean Green Machine (60 cards)
Characters
2
1x John Walker <> U.S. Agent, Loose Cannon
2x Beast, New Defender
4x Tania Belinskya <> Red Guardian, Cold Warrior
4x The Chief, Niles Caulder

3
1x Kyle Richmond <> Nighthawk, Heart of the Team
2x Hellcat, Patsy Walker
2x Mento, Steve Dayton
3x Hawkeye, Loud Mouth

4
3x Negative Man, Larry Trainor
2x Samantha Parrington <> Valkyrie, Chooser of the Slain

5
2x Robotman, Cliff Steele

6
2x Beast Boy, Freak of Nature

7
2x Hulk, Strongest One There Is

Locations
3x Dayton Manor

Plot Twists
4x Secret Defenders, Team-Up
4x Misfits
4x Defenders Defend!
3x Call of the Wild
3x SKREEEEEE!
2x Savage Beatdown
2x Omnipotence
2x One Man Rampage
2x Mobilize
1x The "B" Team

Things I would change

Take out SKREEEEEE!. It's not a big help against Hidden IG. I pretty much only used it to try and take out Invisible Woman, and I got Force Field Projection-ed every damn time.

Replace Hellcat with 2 more Nighthawk. Not hitting team-ups was a problem, and Hellcat was never particularly helpful.

Take out the two Savage Beatdown and replace them with 1 more Call of the Wild and 1 more Omnipotence.

Replace The "B" Team with an additional One Man Rampage.

Those are the changes that spring to mind from this experience. The deck uses Beast Boy for multiple swings - if it's against IG Hidden, I get as many counters on him as I can and then double-swing using Parrington to ready. Generally, I would hit for 30-40 on turn 6 against them. The lowest I hit for was 20, with no pumps or counters, and Prometheus on the board. If it was against any other decks, I would proceed to feed their drops into Beast Boy using One Man Rampage to ready him. Beast Boy generally gets between 20/20 and 24/24 on a decent hand, and Secret Defenders makes it tough to get the stunback on him.

So, that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed yourselves this weekend; I did.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're fine with constructed play just not huge 9 round tournies. Side Events and such are perfect for goofing around. Also if we actually slept it would be less draining.

That pizza was awesome stop complaining.

Calvin Cleary said...

Hey, you got a no-cost Superman for one of your pieces of pizza - all I got was less hungry on average, overpriced, inside-out pizza. It wasn't bad, but if pizza costs that much, it'd better...well, I was going to say something inexplicably vulgar here, but opted against it. Suffice to say, it'd best make me feel REALLY good.

And I know that a big part of it was the 9-round tourny, but the fact was, I just vastly prefer hobby-level constructed play, because I don't like having to throw in tech cards x, y, and z. Omnipotence was a kind of fun tech, but I have to run four to have any realistic hope at all that it is worthwhile, and I hate cutting other, more fun cards from my deck for cards like it and Pathetic Attempt. I'm not saying it isn't a worthwhile experience...just that it isn't one that I would care to do often. I know how to build more techy decks, they just aren't as fun for me to play. Oh, well.