Editor: Staff. Sunday 27th March 2005.
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Editor: Staff. Sunday 27th March 2005.
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 "Verve Sentinels" - By Alex Brown
Authors Note: This article was written around a month ago. Because of a floppy disk error, it wasn't recovered until earlier. Your (hopefully) esteemed author thinks it instructive to leave untouched his earlier ruminations, but also is sure that the evolution of Curve Sentinels be adequately mapped. Thus, any italicized passages are recent additions, whereas the normal text preserves the original document. The announcement declaring the creation of the Modern Age format, and its slated arrival for PC Amsterdam, has redirected my focus on Vs Constructed. Considering a number of Australian players will be attending the tournament I do not wish to give any detailed analysis of the format or the decks within, as the metagame assumptions and incisions we decide upon need to be protected for obvious reasons. Unfortunately for those who were intrigued by the style of matchup analysis I presented in my short work on the Teen Titans, I want to take a different tact today. Such esoteric and totalizing analysis as those articles tried to present requires a significant amount of experience and commitment to detail. As my energy for such work is focused elsewhere at the moment the following article represents a more playful approach to deck construction and on-the-board strategy. While the following paragraphs are the result of a less comprehensive approach to archetype analysis, I hope that the deck idea and innovations can still provide an interesting and successful feature on the Golden Age landscape. Considering the continued success of the Teen Titans, it is fascinating to observe that the tournament scene continues to report the rise and rise of Curve Sentinels. From the breakout performances of Dave Spears and Shane Wendel to the plethora of Top 8's the deck has bestowed upon its pilots, the deck has gone from strength to strength with little sign of slowing any time soon. At a basic level, the deck combines flexible and synergistic characters with ubiquitous flight and range. While the archetype has issues with certain opposing strategies, rarely is the deck at a total loss in a matchup. Even so, many players, myself included, consider the deck fundamentally flawed. As a curve-based strategy, it is among the most consistent, however, the flaws of the curve strategy are difficult to dispel completely. Curve decks aim to be able to use all of their resource points on a single character per turn. Decks that have access to consistent library manipulation such as Common Enemy and GK have an easier time than other regular curve decks here. With only the limited Boliver Trask in this department, consistently being able to play Sentinel heavyweights Nimrod, Bastion and everybody's best friend Magneto, Master of Magnetism is a problematic probability. Sure, dudes are so lucky and some men can pull it off all day long, but in theory and reality the deck was too rip happy for me. It is now widely recognized that the power of the deck rests with drops 5-7. Hitting these is of primary importance, and looking at the design of Hans Joachim Hoeh's double 10K winning list will show you where the emphasis of the more recently successful Sentinel builds lies. This article must be read within a certain context i.e. that I am a committed skeptic of Curve strategies. This is a result of a rather acute observation. That is, Curve decks have a much larger specific character requirement. What I mean is, where a Teen Titans build may typically be able to fulfil the conditions of a winning game state through the deployment of certain characters on turns 2-5, or a TNB-based Brotherhood can achieve inevitability through an arbitrary amount of characters made intolerable through combat modifiers, Curve strategies tend to have to commit an efficiently produced (and often specific-in the case of Doom-4 or Bastion) character on turns 2/3-7/8 . That is a difficult task even with library manipulation, and often resources are stretched too far in achieving this goal. Add to this the relative equality between the matching characters in curve strategies and you find yourself needing a lot of luck to compete in a sophisticated metagame. That said, I have been too often impressed with the flexibility and general potency of the Sentinel affiliation to not look for a better option. In that sense, the genesis of the following propositions have much to thank Andrew Corney for, whose eagerness to think outside the box and ability to effectively play unusual strategies opened my eyes to what was formerly a mere theoretical novelty. In some games between his Melbourne 10K Curve Sentinels and my Melbourne 10K Teen Titans, he continually stressed how much he found Magneto to be a burden. I had heard him complaining in a similar fashion to Ray Isais, a player who joined Andrew and I in making the Melbourne 10K Top 8 (with Curve Sentinels). Andrew, who had been swayed, rightly or wrongly, to the Mark V>Nimrod line of argument (Ray was arguably the driving force behind this philosophy) successfully demonstrated the power of Underground Sentinel Base in those games. USB, a card that had lost favour amongst those who were playing the deck at the highest levels, capitalized on the increase in Mark V's in Andrew's deck, and enabled an additional flexibility in strategy for the deck. This possibility was recognised in the Realmworx notes on the original deck design, but had become a relic in the aftermath of PCLA. It needs clarifying that Nimrod is by far the more powerful card, but is a much less flexible card. The issue is whether the flexibility is more important than the power. I think the power is more important right now, but if you want to go for the flexibility, I think you really need to take the plunge and use cards that maximize that flexibility, i.e the two Sentinel Bases. This idea appealed to me initially because of my dislike of traditional Curve strategy. When I delved deeper, I found that even if the idea was to prove ineffectual, there was so much natural synergy and redundancy available to such a design that it was definitely worth pursuing. In a nutshell, I wanted to change the focus of the deck from hitting the curve and needing to peel its characters to a deck that could provide a similar, even if slightly less powerful, punch on a more consistent basis. USB, a card that had represented the real power behind the once-mighty Wild Vomit archetype, gave this desire hope. However, what really nailed it for me, was the possibility of Master Mold now being a substantially more relevant card. Not only would this take a lot of the pressure from Bastion, but provide the consistency I needed from the deck. Such a plan would necessitate a much larger number of Sentinel Mark V's, and the omission of Nimrod. Only extensive testing can validate this move, and at the moment, I have too limited a pool of information to make an assertive claim. It also opened up the possibility of a return for South American Sentinel Base, and made Ka-Boom a much more insignificant threat. Another serious question this posed was an inquiry into the value of Boliver Trask. The more Mark V's this deck could play the better, even if it still wanted a realistic chance of hitting early curve. If Boliver was to go, Finishing Move would also appear a little worse, and many more experienced Curve Sentinel players have warned me against taking them out. So my initial drafts of the character base looked something like: 4 Boliver Trask or
Sentinel Mark III At this stage I wasn't too sure about the character to non-character ratio, or the importance of the various characters on the curve. I liked Boliver but I thought that he would no longer be as an important factor in mulligan decisions, as USB was crucial to the deck's best draws, and may demand a lot more consideration. While I set about learning the ins and outs of the deck I resolved to keep him in, as I thought I could only learn more about his effectiveness with him on the table than without. As for the correct number of Master Molds I think 2 is probably the best quotient to start with as the decision I needed to make would be built strongly on how much it hurt to miss 6 altogether.
Anyway I settled on the following list for a Hobby League Tourament on Friday: 4 Boliver Trask 6 Sentinel Mk III 7 Sentinel Mk II 12 Sentinel Mk V 4 Bastion 2 Master Mold 4 Underground Sentinel Base 4 Savage Beatdown
I don't really like Finishing Move anymore, even though I still recognize that it is an extremely powerful card. Perhaps bizarrely, I just don't like the way it makes me play. I explained this in a little more detail in my articles on Teen Titans. Another candidate for selection I rejected was Search and Destroy, even though I am a very big fan of the card. Because I had very little experience with the deck, I thought it best to leave the more matchup specific cards (like Total Anarchy) out of the deck. I wanted to try the Nasty Surprise/Savage Beatdown/Overload combination out as well, but thought that the inclusion of SA Base was more imperative for the moment. I was surprised at the limited amount of plot twists I had available to me but at the same time I realized I couldn't reduce the character count much further. I didn't consider Ka-Boom or Foiled at all to begin with, but I would definitely recommend some sort of resource-stunting maneuver as a complement to the natural plan of the deck. I played the above list to a perfect record in Hobby League, and was suitably impressed, even while considerably bored with the affiliation, to think that the deck can be a successfully offbeat variant on what has become the most popular deck in the metagame. While I don't really enjoy playing with Sentinels, and realize the metagame has narrowed since I played this deck, at the Hobby League tournament I played in I took on and won three mirror matches, which may be heartening for those of you who want to play something only a little different from the mainstream. If anyone plays USB Sentinels in an tournament, post in the Forums and let me know how you went.
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