Choosing Your Destiny: Preparing for an event

Preparing for an event can be a very stressful thing for a deck builder, and this doesn't just mean making your deck perfect. There are many ways that players can prepare for events, be they big or small events, and it isn't right to neglect most of them in favour of just one method. Some people build their decks in the hotel on the morning of a PTC or Nationals event, and they still top it, or even win the event anyway. This isn't something that just anyone can do, and it's going to take some work to be able to know what you're going to be encountering.

A method that I particularly enjoy is to build one deck as a “pet deck” and keep it with you every week when you play in weeklies. You can bring lots of optional cards for your deck and keep them off to the side, and just need to pay attention to those cards in accordance to your matches. I like to keep conditional cards in my deck box for weekly games and do modifications at the game shop once the tournament is done. If I'm lucky enough to get some games in after that, it's all the better to test the deck and find out if the changes were justified.

Further in to the pet method, you could get some assistance from friends, especially if you are in contact with people from other playgroups! Lots of other players are more than willing to help you out with a deck, and I'm sure many would find it a fun experience to try out a deck from someone else and give feedback. Generally when I team up with people for a major event, they are from all over the place. For The Badger Club, one of our teammates is from Atlanta and was able to test with his local friends there, and up in Canada I was able to test with my locals and see how different decks ideas came together. Of course, this isn't a method that everyone, especially newer players, can easily do. I very much encourage heading to Facebook to talk to people, or joining a discord channel (or three) for the game to chat with people and share ideas.

One thing that I do to learn the card pool is a method that newer players usually aren't too interested in. I personally make a point to bring a new deck to every single weekly that I go to, especially if it's a good bit of time before the next major event and I don't know my next major deck yet. Forcing yourself to play a new character every week introduces you to many different play styles, lets you learn how new cards change old strategies, and is an excellent way to find weaknesses in decks and characters. You could even bring multiple characters with you for your deck and side in to them between games, just for the sake of learning the difference in characters. Just because two characters both want to flip their opponent's staging area doesn't mean that they play the same!

The weekly deck method can work pretty well with the pet deck method if you keep your pet deck with you at weeklies, but you can still focus your work on your new weekly decks. You can ask for matches with your pet deck if you've got time, or even have it take over for your main deck if you hate the new deck that much and just want to have fun.

Learning matchups, especially if you want to learn specific character vs character match ups, can be very time consuming, but is one of the most worthwhile things to learn, especially if you are looking forward to a team event. You can look back at recent events that took place in the area, such as PTCs nearby, to look for decks that performed well. As of writing this article, there is a retro event this weekend and I still have not finalized any sort of decklist for it. I had a list that I had spent a considerable amount of time on, but there was a glaring flaw or two in how it ran. The kill condition that I was based around was fairly flimsy if it was canceled, and the attacks that it had to fall back on were not sufficient if the main condition was countered. So I looked at the past couple retro events and I looked at the decks that topped to see if people consistently played cards that countered my deck easily, and I found quite a few instances of cards that would have just ended my day. As cool as my deck idea was, I couldn't in good conscience play it in an event that I wish to do well in, and I had to drop it for another idea.

Universus is a bit different than many other competitive card games due to its character system. You can generally scout around the tournament a bit between rounds to see who is playing what, and you can get a good feel out for the atmosphere of the day. This is great for teams where your team can walk around to different tables and check out characters. Not to say that other card games don't have knowledge just on archetypes, such as finding out that someone is playing an “RDW” deck in MTG, but seeing someone's character usually gives a good indication of what their deck would be doing.

Generally, it's best to do research like this more than a couple days out from the event, but I am the kind of person who gets pretty anxious about their deck and has to change it every other day. I'm a terror to my teammates, I know that for sure, haha. If you can't get a deck figured out perfectly in time for an event, don't fret too much, there will be more events!