Nice article, TDB. Keep it up.

Also, let me ask you a question.

That sentence in your sig, the servant one. Who said that? For some reason, I know who it is, it just won't click with me.

Paul, wow. That's all I can say. This is a great article. This is the kind of stuff that is worth reading, IMO. I love reading analysis (and I mean DEEP analysis) and theory and whatnot. Good job.

I'm still a firm believer in practice over theory, though. Like you wrote, you can theorize what can happen and "see" what will happen, but when you actually play, things can go the other way really fast.

The perfect example is the Bizarro vs. Darkseid/resource row disruption. On paper, it seems like Darkseid will just wreck the Bizarro deck. But you also have to take into account the person you are playing against as well as the decisions you have to make in response to the decisions your opponents make, etc.

I wanted to post my response without reading the rest of the thread, so sorry if I sound redudntant to what has already been said. I would think in the quicksyn vs checkmate match. Quicksyn would have the edge. They put so much pressure early on that sometimes Checkmate wants to put Ahmed in the visible to soak up damage. Or maybe swing in to take out a potential attacker. Also I think a lot of Checkmates defense tricks are more harsh on curve decks that might just have one or two pumps. Rush decks usually have a a ridiculous amount of pumps and can hopefully out pump checkmates potential brickwalls

I really like this thread, Paul. Very insightful.

I find that the mental VS aspect is a very useful tool while deckbuilding. I am not one for copying others decks, but not above snagging an interesting theme or card interaction and doing something of my own with it.

How I approach it is, what do I want to do on each turn to reach my win condition. I work backwards. I say: My win condition is on turn X. What does that look like. Where do I need to be on the previous turn. What stands in my way....etc...back to square one. Invariably there are certain cards or combos you expect to see. If you have ways to overcome these obstacles enroute to your win condition, you have a viable deck. At some point, a deck has to sacrifice protection for erection. In other words, you can't have an answer for everything. So focus on what will cripple you rather than what will cause you to stumble a bit. There's not enough room in your deck for it all. I find that the decks that I have built that have an answer for the most situations usually still lack something, and the something is usually a win condition. The deck I built around Doom, Gotham and Revenge Squad basically just denied my opponents as much as it could, but winning was a stumbled into it kind of thing. When a deck is focused and determined, it will inevitably have some vulnerabilities. The idea is to reduce them to a handful of scenarios and not try to stop or protect against everything.

As to who would win I don't know. I think that depending on the build, both deck they could both win.
But more importantly I think that this article is the kind of read that new players need. I have played the game for a little more than a year and I have never had somebody explain this as well as you did in your article. I have learn much of this the hard way through having my butt beat time and again. It is to bad that the collective wisdom of all VS Gurus can not be pooled together so the new players can benefit. Excellent article and thank you for your insights.

Sadly, our match was played on paper. :disappoin

Practice is, of course, king. But I think we all run through and try to visualize a matchup whenever we're planning to test a deck against another archetype. Without planning, we'd just be practicing random jank against one another, and that would just be silly.

I agree with Ekin and Mike, like, I think postulating how to play a match-up is much better then not touching it at all. Especially, if you have had no experience with any variant of your deck versus theirs. I think the key is to not automatically make any assumptions, I mean some strategy has to be better then no strategy.

I really think if you reduce it to a small simpler variables, you can actually forecast these things pretty well. It's when you try to be to inclusive that your predictions become less accurate and useful - the more things you try to predict the harder it is going to be obviously.

Also, if this article helped check out vs-blog for my Thursday Bearsday piece.

My homo crush : P

I've not tested the Sydicate/Checkmate matchup, so I'll keep my fat trap shut. What I will say, is that your Mental VS assessment may be one of the most important articles in VS in a long time. If there were a VS SYSTEM 101 class, this would be the first exam. Well done TDB. I'm going to make all of my Hobby League guys read this article immediately.

I'll second everything everyone before me has said about how much you mean to the community Paul.

It's posts like this that make me very glad you did not in fact take a break from the game after megaweekend SoCal.

alsa...You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to TheDerangedBear again.