The Kamiza.com

Well the first thing I have to mention today is that I have a name for my articles now! Congratulations to Lupercl for coming up with this, and thanks to all that entered. Unfortunately I can’t remember who did enter, and in the switch over the original article with its comments isn’t around any more, so please comment on this one. I have lots of prizes and given there weren’t that many entrants I reckon I can spare something for everybody.

But enough about that. Much more important is talking about the Battle of the Venues sponsored by the House of Heroes in Loughborough (Thanks to Tyler for organising the whole Battle of the Venues and Dave Pyrrah for judging the event). This will be in a little more detail than I talked about Manchester, firstly because my memory is fresher, and secondly because I did better, and it is always easier to talk about things you do well in.

Drafting Marvel Universe:

Well my last draft was a spectacular misfire, so I definitely wanted to do better this time. My main recollection of this draft is that the packs were generally pretty good. There were lots of choices to be made. I even remember a few of them. In my first pack the rare was a Swarm of Annihilus and the other plot twists weren’t that much more exciting. I brought my choice down to either Joystick or Black Widow. Now I think that Black Widow is the better cards, being able to punch far above her weight, but I also knew that the guy to my right would likely be on the lookout for Avengers. (He was playing them in the constructed part of the tournament and had already decided that if he saw cards for his deck he would likely pick them regardless). This meant if I gave him a good Avengers card I could avoid them and give us both better decks. I also have a real soft spot for the Thunderbolts so I was pretty happy. I picked up a 4 cost Winter Soldier in the next pack, giving me an excellent weapon in the curve based games I expected, and then started spotting several excellent Crime Lords cards appearing so I started grabbing those. I ended up with a primarily Thunderbolts/Crime Lords deck, though turn 4 was based around whatever ringers I happened to pick up. I had a Red Skull 7 cost as well as Cold Storage for a powerful burn attack, as well as a Sleeper. I ended up running with plot twists that could be used as defensively as possible, the idea being to go for the even initiatives and try to win on either turn 7 with a recovered Skull, or 8 with the Sleeper. This would also work to maximise the Winter Soldier somewhat. So did this work?

Playing the Draft Games:

Round 1 vs. Mark (Hooton). Mark is one of my old opponents from back when I started playing. He loves Crime Lords so it was no surprise to see some Hydra recruits on his side. This game really came down to turn 4. I had Karla Sofen in play and hit the Winter Soldier. Mark didn’t have a character to play and decided to just skip the turn rather than start building up sniper counters. In then end the pressure of the extra guys I had on the table were enough to finish the job, the game ending when Bucky forced his hand on turn 7 leaving an Elektra and Red Skull to face down my 4 guys.

Round 2 vs. Scott. Scott is one of the Loughborough players. His draft strategy had been extremely simple. He’d just taken whatever good characters came his way, and as many combat tricks as he could. I didn’t see any team-ups beyond Phylla-Vell, but there may well have been a couple of those as well. He started very aggressively with Green Goblin and Beetle. I unfortunately missed any early characters, meaning that Beetle was likely to be a real pain in the neck later on. Really though, this game was lost for me on turn 5 when I had to recruit Magneto (I had Bucky lurking though). I’d taken a lot of damage this game. I think I’d have been able to keep a 5 cost guy from being stunned by His She-Hulk, but Magneto was just too small. In the end the only way to get another turn was to put Magneto into Cold Storage and then straight out again, losing a resource in the process. A Wolverine (Weapon X) triggered The Winter Soldier, but then promptly did his thing leaving Magneto looking a little fragile (I guess the quick freeze had made him a touch brittle).

Round 3 vs. Mark (Driver). Mark is another Nottingham player. I didn’t quite work out his deck, but he’d said before the tournament that he’d be looking to draft Shield/Thunderbolts so that was what I expected. In pretty much every tournament report there is one game that you just don’t remember that well, and for me this was it. In fact all I remember was that I hit turn 2 for the only time, and that I played Centurions on turn 4, and that they helped my eke out a pretty impressive advantage in characters.

Choosing a Constructed Deck

With a 2-1 record in the draft (and my loss coming to the only guy on 3-0) I was pretty happy and looking forwards to the constructed part. After some actual testing I was going to be playing with a Negative Zone Deck, so I’ll just mention now why I thought that would actually be a good idea. The deck is exactly the same as the one I mentioned last week, but I will put the list at the end of this article for anybody that is interested.

The Negative Zone deck has an interesting mix of problems and strengths. The Problems are the most obvious. Firstly it isn’t especially consistent. You are quite often reduced to gambling on the top couple of cards being useful. Now to be honest most decks have that problem, but the Negative Zone have it pretty bad as you spend quite a lot of your game discarding cards. This is connected to the second problem: You really need to be running quite a lot of Negative Zones. To my mind other than the Gateway, the rest are really just enablers to make the rest of the deck work. This means that in some games I might have as many as 12 cards in my deck that don’t really do anything. That isn’t a good thing.

The strengths more incremental. There isn’t any one amazing thing that it does, but it all just tends to hang together somehow. Swarm of Annihilus proved to be far more effective than I would have given it credit for (largely because my own early game is so inoffensive that there is usually some target around for it). The Endurance gain works quite well to overcome that same early game disadvantage. Direct stuns are a nice way to maintain a board advantage. Finally the Gateway can completely swing a game around. Having one character being able to KO all my opponents characters is really rather powerful. So how did it do?

Round 4: vs. Arthur with Warbound. This was one game I wasn’t looking forwards to. My expectation was that the Warbound would be a very difficult opponent. Anti-targeting effects were pretty scary for me, and the Warbound plays a different sort of game in respect to the board than most decks that I felt would be pretty bad for me. In fact the card that did most the damage was quite a surprise - Sakaar. With that in play I could never quite keep the extra character I needed to trigger some of my effects. I do think I made a couple of technical mistakes throughout the game (as did my opponent), but he certainly played well enough to beat me, with a massive Hulk doing the job on turn 7.

Round 5: vs. Amit with Teen Titans. I haven’t played against Amit for a while so I was quite looking forwards to this. It turned out to be a rather close game. I was getting thumped early on, with my only chance for revenge being Skreet picking on Dove from the safety of the Hidden area. It didn’t help that Cyborg kept getting rid of anybody else that tried to help (though at least I had plenty of cards to discard to flip Negative Zones). I won this game because of two things. Firstly on turn 5 I was able to recruit Annihilus and use the Prison Alpha to get a free stun on Amit’s Starfire while having Skreet man the gateway. This meant I could start to accrue some board control. (I’d also been able to Omnipotence Birthing Chamber and Teen Titans Go! at this point). Annihilus did subsequently find that he had been forged in a Crisis and some other universe was calling in yet another exhibition of Titans board clearing, but I had a Harvester of Sorrows and Syphon working overtime. On turn 7 I’d needed to re-recruit Syphon (Tim Drake seemed to have a problem with him) and Thanos. The endurance gain from beating up Amit’s little guys was just enough to keep my head above water (as well as stuff all those Titans through the gateway) and allowed my Void on turn 8 took complete control. I finished turn 7 on 4 Endurance, after gaining about 8.

Round 6: vs. Tim with Spider Friends. I ended up playing Tim again this tournament (some foreshadowing there…) so I’m not going to talk about this game here, largely because the games were all close but followed a very similar pattern. You’ll here about that then…

The Cut:

I managed to sneak into the top 4 in 4th place, which made me very happy. The tournament was actually very tight. Special congratulations should go out to Scott who managed ace the Swiss in both draft and constructed. He would be my next opponent. (It was also nice that our Nottingham team did pretty well overall in the Swiss, as they performed well in the constructed. Mark Hooton came in 3rd with No Legend Brotherhood Curve (with no Mobilise), and Mark Driver was 5th with Shield Curve, again almost no search and making good use of the 5 cost Radioactive Man instead of the usual containment suited guy. I think I just wanted to support the players that made the trip and point out that you can make some pretty effective decks with a couple of boxes and bit of trading without breaking the bank on cards like Mobilise.

Semi-Finals:

Time to try and avenge my earlier defeat to Scott, only now with Constructed Decks. Scott was running a Shield burn deck, making heavier than usual use of Wolverine with a few ways to ready him and lots and lots of ATK boosting tricks going on. But would that be a match for a mopey bug alien dictator and friends? The best of 3 match would commence.

Game 1: Scott began in fine fashion with Shield Agents burning away, while I dinked them with some Alpha Primitives. Where the game really started to shift was turn 3. Wolverine pounded me for rather a lot of damage, but my Primitives along with Thanos (I think - it may have been seekers), let me make good use of my resource row as I flipped 3 Seat of Annihilus! Drawing 5 cards a turn seems rather nice. Syphon on turn 4 was even nicer. Scott wasn’t really able to clear enough guys out of my way to stop my endurance climbing up. Turn 5 lead to the real damage though. I had an Annihilus to recruit and was able to flip 2 copies of Omnipotence for Death of a Dream and Pathetic Attempt. One Swarm later and Wolverine was looking a little less dangerous. Sharon Carter was able to beat up my Alpha Primitives, but with Syphon keeping my Endurance in the positive and a Ravenous next turn to get rid of Scott’s Helicarrier that was enough to seal the game.

Game 2: Well this was actually pretty similar. Granted I didn’t have the crazy triple Negative Zone draw. Instead I had a Gateway and a Shadow Dimension which meant that I got to drag Wolverine out into the open and then have Syphon punt him straight back through the gateway. Scott’s second Wolverine next turn was caught with a Swarm (again with Omnipotence backup on Pathetic Attempt). With that Shield were out of steam. It just goes to show, that sending all your dangerous prisoners into somebody else’s dimension is going to have a few repercussions.

Finals:

But now I had made it all the way, and had to face down Tim’s Spider friends, who had sneaked through the semi-final. They had been tied at game apiece when time was called, and had to use a tie-breaker to see who would get through.

The Final Games:

All the games I played with Tim were pretty similar, all ending on turn 8. If you look at the decks that is not so surprising as they both have a lot of similarities. We were both running Omnipotence and some cards to attack the resource row. We both had some off-initiative tricks to maintain a board position. We both had a late game plan, and neither deck was especially aggressive. So who won?

Tim, so congratulations on winning the Battle of the Venues tournament.

But why did Tim win all the games we played? Here are the reasons as I see them.

1. Tim’s deck was more consistent than mine. He was able to run more tutors, but also had more deck filtering available much faster than I did.

2. The Spider friends have a more powerful late game. Other than The Void, mine is all based around having the initiative, whereas Spiderman can single-handedly negate much of that.

3. Tim was able to run more cards that actually impacted the game than I did. I think he was running a full 4 copies of Omnipotence for one, but where I needed to include the various Negative Zones, Tim was instead able to include Big Leagues and Berserker Rage (for Wolverine Canucklehead) as well as Pathetic Attempt. This gave him the advantage in combat situations as well as the resource row wars we were having.

The only card I actually had that would have made a big difference I think was the Gateway, but the only game I actually drew one, Tim was able to replace it. Still, it was Spiderman, and the hero generally gets to defeat the villain so I can’t feel too bad.

In fact it was a really good day. Getting to play some VS for a whole weekend is always nice, and coming in second with the Negative Zone was pretty cool as well (if only there were more weenie decks - I like playing those).

Next Week:

Firstly it should see the release of Marvel Evolution. I have been looking around the web, to work out what I will be looking for. Right now my list is mostly characters (Iceman is number 1, with Monet, Domino and Ironman all about equal. Back from the Dead wins for Plot-twists). Hopefully I will get my hands on some before the weekend (I’ll be away then playing multiplayer vs., amongst other things). I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.

Bonus Decklist: The Negative Zone (Modern Age changes in parenthesis - but it won’t be quite as good)

4 Alpha Primitives (4 Currs)

4 Skreet

4 Thanos

3 Seekers

3 Syphon (3 Centurions)

3 Centurions

4 Annihilus

3 Ravenous

1 Blastaar

1 The Void (1 Annihilus - Living Death who Walks)

4 Negative Zone - Gateway

4 Negative Zone - Prison Alpha

4 Negative Zone - Seat of Annihilus

2 Negative Zone - Harvester of Sorrows

2 Negative Zone - Shadow Dimension (2 Harvester of Sorrows)

4 Swarm of Annihilus

3 Wave of Destruction

3 Omnipotence

4 Mobilise