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Enchante Chang
Good Guys
Enchante Chang
July 26, 2005
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I was very excited when the JLA set came out and had all these powerful cards. The ones that I liked the most were Hero’s Welcome, The Watchtower and UN General Assembly. Everyone knows that whenever a new set comes out, the money rares are the “tutor” cards and when this set came out, it was no exception for the 3 cards I mentioned. So I went about making a deck around these 3 cards. Since those 3 cards are JLA/JLI based that exactly what I did.

What I did was breakdown what the teams did and what cards were the best at what they did. JLI seemed to be all about going down to 4 resources or less and playing off curve, however, DazDaz (Darryn) was playtesting mono JLI 4 resources and was not having good results so I decided that even though I was playing JLI I would not go that route. So that left us with the JLA Ally mechanic to show its power.
The first 12 cards to go in my deck were actually blue cards, as this deck wanted to abuse Ally, I put in 12 cards that powered-up, Magnificent Seven, Reform the League, Nth Metal. Next I thought about which characters I potentially wanted in the deck.

 

JLA JLI
Shayera Thal Sue Dibny
Katar Hol Blue Beetle
Batman Booster Gold
Wonder Woman Crimson
Zauriel Batman
Elongated Man Fire
Conner Hawke Maxwell Lord
Oliver Queen, Hard Traveling Hero Silver Sorceress


JLA/JLI Version 1.0*
Characters Plot Twists

4 Sue Dibny
2 Blue Beetle
1 Booster Gold
1 Conner Hawke
2 Aquaman, Arthur Curry
4 Shayera Thal
4 Katar Hol
4 Fire
3 Batman
2 Wonder Woman

4 Hero’s Welcome
2 (something)
4 Reform the League
4 Magnificent Seven
4 Worlds Greatest Heroes
4 No Man Escapes the Manhunters
4 Savage Beatdown
Locations
3 The Watchtower
Equipment
4 Nth Metal

*Note, this is the deck from memory, may not be card for card of the first draft of the deck.

I felt, this deck played a lot like sentinels except it was must more aggressive. It was defensive at the same time because power-up’s could be played while attacking or defending. Sue and Ted was like Boliver, except you had more of him. 2-drops were there to be fetched by the 1-drops. Aquaman is huge and almost always stays huge in this deck. Hawk Woman seemed better than Aquaman because she got you your 4 drop without using a tutor and the ability to get an equipment was huge too. Katar Hol was a no brainer because he was so big with equipment and made all of your guys ridiculous. Fire was a decent character with Flight and Range, her ability allowed enough burn that the game could end sooner rather than later. Batman and Wonder Woman are quite straight forward and the only reason we played 2 Wonder Woman was because of Hero’s Welcome.

I showed it to my team mates but it was ShaunHay who instantly took to it and played it at Hobby League (HL). I can’t remember why I couldn’t play Hobby League so I let Shaun take my rogue deck to HL. The next time I talked to Shaun was at our Tuesday Night Gaming.

Enchante: So how did the deck go?
Shaun: I smashed them.
Enchante: You won HL?
Shaun: Yeah, in one game I won on turn 5…turn 5!!!!
Enchante: Did any of the games go late?
Shaun: Yeah, I think 1 game went to turn 7 and Wonder Woman/Fire Burnt him out.
Enchante: Awesome!

Hearing that my deck killed on turn 5 was great and we then went about fine tuning the deck.

The first thing that changed was the 1-drops…we went to 8, yes they were that good and that meant the higher end of the curve got chopped (Wonder Woman). It meant that mulliganing was much easier and made the deck much more consistent. Shaun noted that the deck really wanted its team up because you wanted to be able to fetch Fire with Hero’s Welcome, and because Fire’s static ability only triggered off JLI characters; so Maxwell Lord was the first that went into the deck. Aquaman just never got played and you already had tutors to get Hawkwoman, so he got the chop. At this time IG/DOOM was getting some hype and unmasked would wreck our deck very much so, and we had to make a plan for it, that plan was monitor womb station. However, that card did not get added until the night before a PCQ in Wellington. Because Shaun was going to that PCQ he tested at my place for a while and when he went home thought...if we can kill on turn 5…how about not playing 6 drops at all? If you didn’t play 6 or 7 drops…isn’t Kooey Kooey Kooey really good? Wait, if we are going to play that many locations, how about New Era…oh and JLI Embassy is nuts too.

The deck quickly morphed into something like this:

 

JLA/JLI Version 1.1
Characters Plot Twists

4 Sue Dibny
4 Blue Beetle
1 Booster Gold
1 Conner Hawke
1 Maxwell Lord
4 Shayera Thal
4 Katar Hol
1 Olivier Queen, Emerald Archer
4 Fire
1 Oliver Queen, Hard-Traveling Hero
1 John Henry Irons <> Steel

4 Hero’s Welcome
4 Magnificent Seven
4 Worlds Greatest Heroes
4 No Man Escapes the Manhunters
2 Savage Beatdown
3 Bwahahaha
1 New Era
Locations

1 JLI Embassy
2 Monitor Womb Station
4 Kooey Kooey Kooey

Equipment
4 Nth Metal

John Henry (who replaced Dinah) and Bwahahaha were added because of Kooey. The deck could easily get down to 4 resources after playing the 5th, either by playing out reservists or KKK.

Shaun played in that Wellington PCQ’s and split the constructed Top 4 so he could play in the Limited and then in the Top 4 of the limited said they should play it out with a 200/100/100/100 payout, so there was some incentive to play. He won that PCQ.

So Shaun came back to Auckland and we tested more after smashing the Wellingtonians with our new deck. We felt that Titans was probably the worst matchup but not un-winnable. To deal with Titans is to reduce their board so Arsenal has no ammunition; to do that effectively we felt that Total Anarchy was the key and 3 went into the deck, removing the beatdowns and 1x no mans, and the deck remained that way for Shaun. How did Shaun go? Well from going 6-0 in the first 6 Rnds, Bruce** told him to lose and he listened to Bruce for the next 4 rounds. James White who also played Good Guys was at 2-2 at one stage and had to play Darryn in the 5th round! James proceeded to win the next 6 games to advance to the Top 8 but lost in the semi-finals to Randall who was playing Titans.

Now I bet you guys are wondering why James’ version is so different to ours. The thing is, James was no longer testing with our group because we had formed The Four Horsemen and we decided to give James some tech and told him to play GG at $10K because we felt it was the best deck, add in surprise factor and that is a recipe for $$$ (just ask Ks-ap). Nik tested with James a little bit and gave him some pointers on where our deck was headed and came to his own conclusions. The best thing in James version was Null Time Zone, however, I did not agree how he played no Bwahahaha and that he played so many NTZ***.

This was my version just before the $10K Auckland and would have been the version Shaun would have ran if we did not have High Voltage

JLA/JLI Version 1.2
Characters Plot Twists

4 Sue Dibny
4 Blue Beetle
1 Booster Gold
1 Conner Hawke
1 Maxwell Lord
4 Shayera Thal
4 Katar Hol
1 Olivier Queen, Emerald Archer
3 Fire
1 Oliver Queen, Hard-Traveling Hero
1 John Henry Irons <> Steel

4 Enemy
2 Heroes Welcome
4 Magnificent Seven
4 Worlds Greatest Heroes
4 Total Anarchy
2 Null Time Zone
3 Bwahahaha
1 New Era
Locations
4 Kooey Kooey Kooey
2 Monitor Womb Station
1 JLI Embassy
Equipment
4 Nth Metal

At $10K Auckland, a bunch of the Wellingtonians took our Good Guys deck and refined it to suit their needs and it paid them dividends with 2 of them getting into the top 8 with Good Guys. Personally I did not like a lot of the changes in their decks but the one that did catch my eye was Light Armour. It could make John Henry huge or be a tutorable ATK pump via Blue Beetle.

** This term comes from starcitygames magic articles. To summarize the article: Bruce is your ability to lose.

*** I changed my version to have 2 Null Time Zone and 3 Bwahahahaha which the Wellingtonians also had, I was very impressed.


Infinite Crisis released!

I felt that the set did not contribute a whole lot but the one that stood out was Absolute Dominance. The problem with Total Anarchy was it had potential to KO Hawk Woman who was such a powerhouse in this deck that you wanted her around as much as possible.

If I were to play Good Guys in a tournament tomorrow it would be something a long these lines

JLA/JLI Version 1.3
Characters Plot Twists

4 Sue Dibny
4 Ted Kord
1 Mikado and Mosha
2 Booster Gold
1 Maxwell Lord, Financer
4 Shayera Thal <> Hawkwoman
2 Katar Hol <> Hawkman
2 Katar Hol <> Hawkman (DCR one)
1 Jester
3 Fire
2 John Henry Irons <> Steel

4 Magnificent 7
4 Worlds Greatest Heroes
3 Bwahahahaha!
4 Enemy of my Enemy
2 Hero’s Welcome
4 Absolute Dominance
2 New Era



Locations
4 Kooey Kooey Kooey
2 Monitor Womb Station
2 JLI Embassy
1 Slaughter Swamp
Equipment
4 Nth Metal
1 Light Armor/High Tech Flare Gun

The notable change is the removal of NTZ. At the moment I feel the card has no place in the current metagame. The metagame has warped to become either kill on turn 4-5 or live until turn 8-9. Bwahahahaha already serves to stop the early and late game, but perhaps NTZ should not be excluded too quickly. Absolute Dominance is just better than Total Anarchy because you don’t want to lose Hawkwoman and is still a big threat against titans because they lose Dove/Hawk/Tim Drake.

I’d like to thank TFH for working on this deck with me, but mostly to Shaun Hayward who put in the most effort in building Good Guys. Shaun was also the person who named Good Guys; even though a lot of people do not like the deck name, it is the one that has stuck around.

As always, Same VS Time, Same VS Channel.



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