Editor: Staff. Wednesday 20th March 2005.
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Editor: Staff. Wednesday 20th March 2005.
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 " Metagame develpments" - By Alex Brown
The Curve Sentinels are everywhere. At 10K after 10K , the Curve Sentinels are filling Top Eights, and although many commentators didn't think the deck had what it took to post a big finish, the archetype recently took down consecutive 10k's in Bologna , and then Orlando . Being relatively cheap to build, and relatively easy to play successfully, its popularity can only continue to grow.
The most surprising development in this phenomenon has been the ease at which the Curve Sentinels have leapfrogged the Teen Titans, a deck that was only recently being discussed as being broken in many circles, as the deck to beat. After Rob Leander won his second 10K in New Jersey , an event still only concluded recently, the Titans were seemingly infallible. Mere weeks later, and it is the Curve Sentinels who are posting the most significant results. It is important to understand why this has happened. The Teen Titans are a notoriously difficult deck to play, but significantly, their mode of play is also unpopular. An often overlooked variable in the metagame equation is the appeal of the style of a deck to its proponents. Many players like to think of the game as combat-oriented, and decks such as Teen Titans and Fat Bat are offensive to such tastes. As such decks seem to have lower level of player interaction, hysteria tends to find emission from their every success. While I would argue that the very idea of player interaction is much more complex than widely thought, it is nearly entirely irrelevant to the competitive player why a player chose to play the deck they did. All that is important is the knowledge of what deck they will choose to play. As such, the simple, combat phase tendencies of the Curve Sentinels are very appealing to the semi-competitive player. The efficient characters and vanilla plot twists offer bare, but direct, routes to victory. The tactics are simple, the strategies are obvious. For players who want to compete, but are not always interested in the subtleties of the metagame, Curve Sentinels provides a flexible and robust fulfillment to their needs. I have offered some reasons as to why players would want to play Curve Sentinels in a broad sense. However, this has done little to explain how their recent success has come at the expense of the Teen Titans. In a format that has a number of competitors, Curve Sentinels and the Teen Titans have emerged as the top decks. Yet after a continued run of consistent success, the Teen Titans are now playing second fiddle to the might and ubiquity of Curve Sentinels. The first thing to note about this is that both decks have been around for a while, and that the Curve Sentinels have only recently taken the upper hand. At the time of PCLA, it was widely believed that behind the power of Tim Drake and Teen Titans Go, the matchup between the two decks was quite favourable for the Titans. However, as the target upon the head of Garth & Co. became more vivid, and the bounty larger, the Sentinels were programmed for Total Anarchy and Nasty Surprise. Total Anarchy, even if often unwieldy, is nonetheless very effective at reducing the numbers needed by the Teen Titans to generate an irrepressible sequence of attacks, and additionally removes any prospect of Roy causing too much trouble. Nasty Surprise, in combination with Overload, goes a long way toward nullifying the effects of Heroic Sacrifice, and is useful against any deck without Acrobatic Dodge or Fizzle for taking out extra characters. These additions have significantly improved the matchup for Curve Sentinels. Much of their success can be put to the fact that they are very proactive solutions that attack the Titans plan early in the game, as the Teen Titans are a famously self-contained unit that are normally able to establish a win if their opponent lets them get any semblance of their complex into place. In a lot of respects, it would seem that the Titans could regain the upper hand by moving to a reliance on Foiled to counter Total Anarchy, and Not So Fast to counter Overload/Nasty Surprise. In the struggle between Ka-Boom and Foiled for the most relevancy, Foiled is finally getting some time in the sun. With the advent of Marvel Knights and the coming of Midnight Suns, Foiled looks set to shine. Apart from Going Rogue (which admittedly is seeing a minor resurgence) and League variants, Ka-Boom is on the outer. I have advocated Not So Fast for use in the mirror, but this card takes on a much more attractive hue considering the developments I have outlined above. It is a card that is nearly always useful and unexpected, and sometimes game-breaking. In Titans, there is sometimes the problem of finding an appropriately useless card to pitch, but the metagame demands an answer to that question much more than in the past. That said, I do not support playing Teen Titans at all at the moment. If you are currently playing in an undeveloped metagame, where on-the-table skills are significantly more important than matchup understanding, you cannot find a better deck than the Teen Titans. However, as metagames become more sophisticated, the natural advantages of the Teen Titans are fading from prominence. I have always believed that the Teen Titans were able to dominate tournaments for such a long time because players had yet to actively create plans to beat them. The Teen Titans have a much more resilient winning complex than other decks. Their synergy allows for a multifaceted plan that can fall back on an effective B-team when the going gets tough. While a card like Power Compressor could generate an auto-loss for a deck like Going Rogue, or Fizzle for Common Enemy, the Teen Titans could easily swat away peripheral attempts at diluting their power. Even Tower of Babel , a card held up as the Titan Kryptonite, could be ineffective in the face of a defensive Roy/Press or Savage Beatdown. Once players deliberately sought to disrupt the Titans plan, with disregard for severe disadvantage in other matchups, the tide would turn. Even a deck as flexible and naturally powerful as the Teen Titans would fall. I think that moment is upon us. In a similar vein to those who like to think of Vs as primarily a combat-orientated game, there is a small but vocal subculture of players who find the Titans route to victory, particularly the abilities of Roy Harper, distasteful. I don't think it is going too far to say that it is typical of such players to consider a tournament successful if they can get their deck up to beat Titans, regardless of their results over the rest of the rounds. As someone who likes to take a professional approach to this game, particularly for high-level tournaments, I think to be consistent that I don't judge such behaviour. As outlined above, I am interested in what comprises the metagame, not the factors that led to its constitution. On analysis, if we are to follow the shifts in the American and European metagames, the Teen Titans are up against it at the moment, and the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. At the moment I would advocate a much more direct focus on the most populous deck in the metagame right now, Curve Sentinels. As with Titans before it, Curve Sentinels are seen to be a deck without weakness. They all have flight and range, they are all at least of average size on the curve. They have the best six-drop in the game. Often they have the best seven-drop in the game as well. That said I think they have a number of exploitable weaknesses to. Respected players such as Leander have moved to Betrayal in an attempt to counter the inclusion of Magneto but I think this solution is rather narrow. I would look first to the strategic themes of Curve Sentinels and work to actively disengage them from that plan. Something that is not obvious straight away, is that the Sentinels, beyond Bastion and Savage Beatdown, have little offensive game. Their reliance on defensive invulnerability, and unfair counterattacking, leaves them very light on the offence. If you can find an affiliation, like SpiderFriends or Team Superman, that can quite easily significantly elevate their defense values, you are off to a good start. Something else that is often overlooked, is that Curve Sentinels relies significantly on the MK II to negate several gamebreaking abilities. As the deck is often impregnable on defence, at least without serious backup, using KO effects to remove it at the cost of a possibly unsuccessful attack is advised. Most importantly, and perhaps obviously, you really have to concentrate your firepower to beat Sentinels. They are the everyman deck, and can afford flexibility at the cost of focus, because their natural flexibility is just stronger on the Curve than every other like-minded strategy. If you want to beat them, you cannot take the same luxuries. Forget Have A Blast!, move to 4 Paralysis and possibly Flying Kick. If Lost City is your plan, mulligan more often for it, or team up with League. Anyway, I am at present working on my own solutions to the Purple problem, and hopefully I can relay some results shortly.
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