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xphoenix87

Is There a Doctor in the House?

06.14.05  Hey guys. I’m xphoenix87, and hopefully I’ll be doing some feature writing for Pojo from now on. First of all, I want to make it clear that I’m not the best player in the world. I’m not a well known pro, or anything like that, but I’ve played for a while and I know my way around the game pretty well. Hopefully you guys will enjoy my articles, or else I’ll just go cry in a corner. Ok, so now that I got that out of the way, on to the actual article.

Recently, there has been a huge buzz among the VS community about a certain deck that cropped up at the Philadelphia $10k. I’ll start by giving you the decklists for it, then we’ll get into what makes the deck tick.

Stephen Silverman

Characters

4x Rama-Tut
4x Dr. Light, Master of Holograms
3x Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl
4x Boris
4x Valeria Richards
1x Ant Man
3x Sonar
2x Lacuna
2x Kristoff Von Doom
3x Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius
1x Robot Destroyer

Plot Twists

4x Devil’s Due
4x Marvel Team-Up
1x Emerald Dawn
1x The Ring Has Chosen
1x Have a Blast
2x Gone But Not Forgotten
4x Signal Flare
4x Cosmic Radiation

Locations

4x Doomstadt
4x Metropolis

Craig Edwards

Characters

2x Rama-Tut
4x Dr. Light, Master of Holograms
3x Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl
4x Boris
4x Valeria Richards
3x Ant Man
4x Sonar
1x Lacuna
4x Kristoff Von Doom
4x Henry King Jr.<>Brainwave
1x Black Cat, Master Thief
1x Hornet

Plot Twists

4x Devil’s Due
3x Marvel Team-Up
4x The Ring Has Chosen
4x Signal Flare
4x Cosmic Radiation
4x Millenium
2x Common Enemy


There you have it. What looks like an ungainly Emerald Enemies/Fantastic Four/Doom team-up is actually a deadly combo deck if you look deep enough. These two decks took first and second place at the Philadelphia $10k, with Silverman winning it all after the mirror match in the finals. If you’re still wondering what in the world is going on with this deck, just hang on and I’ll reveal to you the genius that is Dr. Light abuse. Now, we’ve seen the six drop version of Dr. Light be abused in decks like Jason Hager’s Evil Medical School, or in the Knight Light deck type. This deck, however, uses the good doctor’s three drop version to win the game. The combo which this deck runs off of is brutally efficient, and it yields jaw-dropping results. To set the combo up, you need Dr. Light on the field, you need Emerald Enemies teamed-up with Fantastic Four, you need Dr. Doom’s presence (whether it’s the good Doctor himself, or merely Kristoff von Doom/Doomstadt), you need Rama Tut in the KO pile, you need Devil’s Due in your resource row, and you need Cosmic Radiation in hand.

Now, you’re probably thinking that what I just said is insane, and could never happen in an actual game. However, I’m telling you that, not only does it happen, but it happens on a consistent basis, and usually on turn 4. Here’s how the combo works. Dr. Light brings Rama Tut back to the field with his effect. Cosmic Radiation readies Dr. Light. Devil’s Due KOs Rama Tut, putting a +1/+1 counter on any Doom character (usually Kristoff). Dr. Light brings Rama Tut back to the field with his effect, and Rama Tut’s effect gets Cosmic Radiation back. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The end result is that you have characters with an infinite amount of +1/+1 counters on them, which is usually more than enough to win the game. However, the deck also includes other tricks, like using Valeria Richards to draw out your whole deck if she is on the field, or teaming up Spider-Friends with Fantastic Four and using Hornet to burn for an infinite amount of damage.

The crowning touch is using Gone But Not Forgotten to gain an infinite amount of life, which places your opponent in an almost unwinnable position. Dr. Light’s ability makes the character search cards in this deck incredibly powerful, because they allow you to discard characters and bring them back out with Dr. Light, saving you resource points and speeding up your combo. Another point to make about these decks is that they feature powerful card draw engines, like Valeria and Millenium, in addition to Boris in order to get the combo pieces out as quickly as possible. With it’s powerful search abilities, the Dr. Light Abuse deck has proven to be consistent and fast, usually winning on turn 4 or 5, and occasionally winning on turn 3!

So, now that we’ve seen the enemy, and found out just how powerful he is, what the heck do we do about it? Well, the simple answer is that there isn’t much your ordinary beatdown deck can do about this combo. There is no easy one card tech to deal with this new threat, which is one of the things that has everyone worrying about it. However, there are some options available to stop this deadly machine, and we’ll see what those are. The basic strategies for stopping the Dr. Light abuse can be separated into two categories: strategies that prevent the combo, and strategies that manage the results of the combo. The latter means using exhaustion, reinforcement, and auto-stun effects to prevent the infinitely large characters from doing damage long enough for you to get something out that can manage them (like a Gamma Bomb). This won’t be very effective most of the time because the Rama-Light player can use Hornet to burn you to death or Gone But Not Forgotten put the game out of reach. Trying to prevent the combo will be much more effective, and there are a few cards that do that very well.

Dr. Doom, Diabolical Genius: This card definitely spells DOOM for a Rama-Light player. The fiendish genius is the bane of all combo decks, and this one is no different. No plot twists from hand means no recurring Cosmic Radiation, and therefore no infinite loop. It’s for this reason that most Rama-Light decks run Robot Destroyer. If you can stun Dr. Doom with Robot Destroyer, than the path is clear for your combo to go off. If your opponent isn’t playing the big robot though, Dr. Doom will probably mean a handshake and a “W” on the scorecard for you. However, Dr. Doom being on the prowl is the reason that the Rama-Light deck wants to have even initiative. If the deck can get it’s combo off before you have a chance to recruit Dr. Doom, then you might have to resort to our next card...

Reign of Terror: As good a field-clearing card as there is in the game, Reign of Terror can save you the game if your opponent only managed to get 1 or 2 characters to the point of infinity. It won’t help you if the go for the infinite burn, or if they gain infinite life, but it can save you if all those pieces weren’t assembled.

Black Cat, Master Thief: It’s hard to have a combo go off on turn 3 when one of it’s crucial plot twists has a threshold cost of 5. Black Cat makes it impossible for the Rama-Light player to win by turn 3 or 4, and making the search and team-up cards cost more also significantly disrupts the deck’s flow.

Phantom Zone: This location could be the cause of a great boost in Superman and Revenge Squad popularity in the near future. Phantom Zone allows you to remove Rama-Tut or Cosmic Radiation from the game, effectively stopping the loop until your opponent can get another copy of that card. The only problem with this method of prevention is that you have to draw into the Phantom Zone, whereas your opponent can search out his Rama-Tut or Cosmic Radiation. However, it’s still an effective way to deal with the combo.

Have A Blast: This is the card that most decks will probably be trying to tech against Dr. Light Abuse with, but it isn’t highly effective. It’s threshold cost of 3 means that if the Rama-Light player has odd initiative, you might not even be able to use Have A Blast. Also, you have to use it against the opponent’s team-ups, because by the time they flip Devil’s Due, they have the combo ready and can chain to your Have a Blast. So, at first glance this looks like a great solution, but in reality it’s a rather limited option.

The Source: This option is limited to New Gods builds, and suffers from many of the same drawbacks that Have a Blast does. The advantage, of course, is that you can take out a bunch of team-ups in one fell swoop, and significantly lower your opponent’s chances of completing the combo.

Utility Belt: You need multiples on the field on order for it to really make a difference in most cases, but this is a very effective counter that Gotham Knights decks can use. GK decks seem particularly suited to counter this Dr. Light Abuse, because they also boast this next card...

Fizzle: Cosmic Radiation? I don’t think so. Stopping Cosmic Radiation delays the combo until they can get another one, and you get to beat their face in while they’re doing that. Not as effective on it’s own, but in conjunction with Utility Belt it makes Batman’s squad highly effective against the Rama-Light combo.

Spider Tracer: If you can’t target him, you can’t pump him. Sadly, this doesn’t prevent Dr. Light from being readied by Cosmic Radiation, since that card doesn’t target, but it can prevent the other characters on the field from being targeted by Devil’s Due. However, this will only be a temporary solution, because you’re going to run out of Spider Tracer’s to play before your opponent runs out of characters to play.

Sonic Gun: This little used equip does a great job of countering the combo in the short term, but, again, won’t be very effective in the long run. You can only bring out so many Sonic Guns, and your opponent can just keep brining out characters to pump up. Eventually, you aren’t going to have enough Guns to take down all his counters. It’s a nice way to stall though.

Stilt-Man: However big you are, I can be bigger. He doesn’t help against infinite burn (of course, most of these strategies don’t) or infinite life, but he can just grow and grow along with your opponent’s characters. Plus, he’s Stilt-Man, possibly the coolest incompetent villain ever.

Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff: If the game goes to turn 5 and they haven’t gotten the combo off, Wanda is going to shut it down for good. Unless they’ve got 3 copies of Gone But Not Forgotten in the row, they’ll just kill themselves on the burn. However, this requires you to get to turn 5, which isn’t going to be a common occurrence against the Rama-Light combo.

Well, there are some ways to combat this deadly combo. There are probably many more, but these are just the main ones that I wanted to list. Hopefully, this article has educated you in just how bad a thing it is when doctors turn evil.

Hope you enjoyed this

(Right now I don’t have a good e-mail address for you to send comments to because my current inbox is too small to handle much. I’m working on that, and hopefully I’ll have an address for you by my next article. Until then, you can Personal Message me on the Pojo message board, where I am xphoenix87.)