A Decade Past: Attending my First UVS Event
by Samuel Tate
It is a crisp January morning in the desert. The sun has yet to fully rise, nor have the busy bodies of the Las Vegas strip. The emptiness and sheer cold are a fitting backdrop to the challenge ahead. A year of careful practice, planning and collecting will be put to the test in a single weekend of cardboard action. The Universal Fighting System's World Championship featuring two standard formats. Teams; where you and two friends build three different characters and, dice rolls willing, pick the most favorable matchups possible. The main event is in Singles where you alone battle to be crowned the best player in the world, and immortalized as a character in the game.
That's where the reality sets in. At least, that's where it set in for me at the 2016 UFS World Championship. This would be my first time getting to truly attend a UFS event. I had popped into the year's previous National Championship a round late and a few ultra rares short of a chance to really enjoy myself. With no side events and back to back ten hour graveyard shifts over the weekend I never found time to mingle beyond the handful of Jasco employees I was already familiar with. But now I was in the room with so many figures I had only known from cardboard rectangles and ufsultra images.
This time would be different however. This time, I had been following the tournament results. This time, I had access to any card my heart desired. This time, I had a team! Flanked by Daniel Schussler, a character specialist who usually found himself on the Chaos symbol and Emerson Ryan-Litchfield, Vegas' LGS rep and early adopter of the 'check fives, take lives mantra'. Together we formed: The Hunt Is On.
Vegas had a fledgling playgroup that heavily benefitted from the investment of old heads(Yes UFS had old heads even back in 2016) Brett Hillman and Shane Duckworth. Shane was a Jasco employee at the time and couldn't compete in major tournaments, and Brett Hillman was already on the B-Team who will make an appearance later in this story.
Daniel was on Chaos Snake Man. One of the most frustrating decks I've ever had to play against. It broadcasts exactly what it is going to do to you, and is packed with just enough interaction to protect the combo. The looming threat of the greatest low-zone dispenser ever printed, Ura 121-Shiki Ama-No-Murakumo, gave this deck a sense of inevitability that didn't compromise it's early game power. One of the things I've grown to really appreciate about UVS in general.
Emerson was rocking one of the coolest and simplest characters I've ever seen in UVS, Life Pharaoh Man. I personally believe that control checks are one of the things that makes UVS stand alone in the card game realm where so many ccgs are simply "MTG but any card can be a land." or "MTG but you have a deck specifically for lands." or "MTG but you discard lands instead of tap them." Pharaoh Man was a seven hand size aggro deck with above average 'speed' and damage, bolstered by the truly outrageous value the Life symbol could generate. This deck was dunk after dunk after dunk and cards like Hedonist, KERSPLAT!! and Leona Blade made extended strings surprisingly easy.
I played Demitri 1 for this event as he was the strongest control character in the game. As with most of my decks around this time, it started as a silly idea to gain as much health as possible before being refined into something resembling a real deck through suggestions of the old heads via the now defunct Jasco forums. When I first sleeved up a Demitri I had no idea how powerful the First Form to flip a rival foundation was. I just knew I wanted to gain a whole bunch of health and my seven boxes of Darktalkers: Warriors of the Night granted me three Darkside Masters, Demitri's very necessary UR. Looking back I am thoroughly embarrassed by this decklist, but I remember how each and every one of these silly little one-ofs made the final cut. There is very few cards maxed out at 4 copies, which clashes heavily with my modern sensibilities.
As for the actual event itself there are only a handful of details I truly remember. Round one, Team The Hunt is On got the bye! And I can't tell you how relieved I was at the time. A free win and the opportunity to walk around and scout all the weird and crazy characters I had never seen before felt like such a blessing. I doubt I was able to actually use any of that information in a meaningful way but it was an extra hour(and a half probably knowing the time rules of yesteryear) before I had to truly be nervous.
I don't remember who won dice rolls throughout most of swiss, but I remember getting pairings that we wanted. My particular version of Demitri was still a grindy, throw driven nightmare for the average seven hander but my penchant for spice gave me the edge over the similarly grindy decks I got paired into. While other lists were 100% all in on throws for offense, I had a KERSPLAT!! and a copy of Not Over Yet to give me unexpected extension in the early to mid game as well as Bat Spin which served as a handy tempo shift and unlocked the hidden text on Patriot Stance which came up twice in Swiss. Its strange knowing that I probably wouldn't include those cards in a current day block constructed version of the deck, but these cards provided me the sharp angles needed to take down close games.
One such matchup I can recall is versus James Stephens' Basilio San Juan deck. It topped teams and got ninth place in Singles. A deck that at first glance I viewed as a simply inferior version of the same Life Throws package my Demitri deck was playing. The extra consistency from the character's Form ability allowed him to play much better tech pieces in the mainboard however and I quickly found myself losing game one. The ability to start every turn with Kuuga (Yuri Chou Upper) to commit Demitri, and running additional copies of Athena's Knight and Peaceful Messenger that the Demitri decks couldn't afford to run was a real struggle. Luckily Bat Spin hammered home the five hand size problems in game two, and game three the difference was that I could keep my 8000 Degrees face up whereas he could not.
I also played against a B.B. Hood that was as aggro as you could get in this format. Fire Shield Ram decks were about the only thing that could hope to overcome the constant life gain of a Negative Stolen in the card pool; but with the caveat that anti-draw abilities served as a huge shut down to the strategy. My rival wasn't a consistent player of the game however and spent a lot of time in the round reading every card I played. This led us to a 1-1 draw and my team ended up with the win because Daniel was also in a 1-1 draw when time was called but Emerson had won his match in about 15 minutes total.
Which might've been the only match Emerson won in Swiss? Not to his own faults, but because he was our "throwaway" pairing. His deck's matchups were pretty similar across the board and we were expecting many teams to pair away from Snake Man. A lot of decks tried to get away with a derelict number of low blocks, as evident by Kevin Broberg's Athena deck rocking a grand total of FIVE low blocks in his deck. He would trim this number to FOUR for Singles the next day. This meant that Emerson was typically left with a total toss up at best against another incredibly aggressive deck built to swing over the life walls of the format. And that was the round we needed to him to clutch up the most.
In the penultimate round of swiss we fought against Team RochesterCCG featuring Kevin Broberg, Devon Bernier and Matthew Turner. All players immortalized on cardboard previously and all playing decks that were outside of the meta game at the time. We lost the dice roll and they immediately paired Snake Man into Clark.
Clark was sort of a known quantity before this as a heavy hitting throw deck but what really made the deck pop was the recently released Darkstalkers starter decks featuring Ki Techniques. A card most players would recognize now as Setting the Record Straight. At the time, -2 damage to every single attack was incredibly punishing. My own Demitri deck was propped up essentially by -1 damage to everything with some additional offensive life gain. So Clark's Ability to draw a card every time he took damage and commit the rival out akin to Hood's response made for a pure slog. They needed this pairing pretty badly because his two teammates had LESS THAN TEN LOW BLOCKS BETWEEN THEM. To think that if our Snake Man could've preyed on the seven hand size decks with next to zero low protection it would've changed the course of UVS history forever is something I have to force myself not to think about.
Unfortunately we didn't know much about Saiki and thought we understood Athena as Shane Duckworth had provided us with a blueprint for the Silent Assassin "Railgun" build. We knew about Peaceful Messenger and Power Struggles as fairly common throw hate pieces on Death, so we figured Athena would struggle more with throws, and Saiki burning his low life total to generate assets would only help Pharaoh Man out. What followed is maybe the most stressful hour of UFS I've ever played in my life.
What would soon become known as "Assets Athena" or sometimes "Deforester Athena" was a very real 'welcome to the big leagues' moment for me. Which would make sense, I think its fair to remind readers I had never even competed in a UFS event before this. The struggle to overcome the insane amount of card draw and resource readying that Deforester in its pre-errata'd state provided was so difficult to navigate. Typically my deck was great at nullifying key foundations and card draw effects but the sheer volume was overwhelming. Athena's ability to build in Deforester from hand, recur face down foundations and every attack seemed to either draw more than one card or be followed up by Superior Technique to clear it from the card pool and draw two cards gives me war flashbacks to this day. I vividly remember fiddling with my singular Caught Red Handed in stage wondering aloud if this Superior Technique was truly the thing to cancel since it cleared a card from the card pool as cost. Yes, the cost was to clear the attack from the card pool but cancelling the effect would leave the Supe Tech around, but it could be followed up by a Karame Dama threatening to draw six cards or deal half my remaining life total, and Kevin still had 6 cards in his hand. As is customary for our amazing community Broberg actually helped guide me to the right decision, preserving the game for a couple more turns though my efforts would be fruitless. I would be absolutely crushed just after his first cycle, having managed to sculpt through his entire deck for the right combination of stun attacks and a Maxima Laser to finish me off. Game two went much faster as Broberg had completed the download of my fraudulent offense and leaned heavily into nine damage Segaki Offerings after Perfect Accuracy shut off my Dust in the Wind.
Snake Man vs Clark would never see the completion of their game three as Emerson had met a similar fate, seeing a deck that brought just as much aggro to the table backed up by insane resource denial to prevent the hope of a back swing attempt. A fantastic turn 1 build would turn out to be his demise as attacking turn 1 was allowed back then, and Saikai's ability to generate momentum with Hornbrook Bach made a three attack kill possible on his first turn via Shell Kick and Hien Shippuu Ryuujen Kyaku.
One loss however did not deny us the opportunity to intentionally draw our final round of swiss, and we'd end up playing against that team immediately in top eight the next day anyways. I wish I could remember what deck I played against. All I remember is getting absolutely trashed by early game Chasm Busters, and potentially losing if not for a judge call back in an era where repairing the game state was not a priority and game losses were the norm.
Our next matchup was against our only loss in Swiss, Rochester CCG. Brandon Jones of Fiddlestix fame was talking to our team about switching up the matchups but he convinced me that flipping Deforester was still a much better matchup than dealing with the resource denial of Saiki. And knowing that Saiki could be aggressive regardless if he even had foundations much less face up ones it made logical sense to avoid that pairing. At the time of writing I believe we still had to roll for pairings in top cuts, or it could've been that the higher seed got to choose but either way we did not get the first pairing. Snake Man would meet Clark once again, and we decided to try the same pairings after all.
Emerson would not find a way to extend his costly attack lineup or dodge the many bad checks in his deck against Saiki once again. But I was doing a much better job at identifying the threats in the Assets Athena deck and despite losing game one, I had found an early groove in game two with an explosive double Darkside Master turn three kill. One thing to note about the Assets Athena deck was many many players tried to pick this deck up in the aftermath of 2016 World's and the general consensus was that it was incredibly clunky. Many top tier players could not navigate the mulligans and early turns of the deck and my one of Not Over Yet allowed me to take advantage of a rough start for Athena to steal a game going first.
Game three had me feeling like a genius. Through the help of both friends and rivals I was now identifying the correct abilities to cancel, I was now flipping Deforesters instead of the usual threats I had been flipping the day before and an early Surveyor was giving me the optimal offense of "Play Spinning Necro Driver, kill an asset, repeat next turn." My Templars were going toe to toe with Karame Dama draws and I was no longer offering up juicy +3 block mods to the Segaki gods. I was finally able to make Athena play with a regular resource count, and with only a couple of cards left in both of our decks I saw my path to victory.
I wish I could remember the exact board state, but I remember this much: I had to play multiple five diffs and didn't check well to start things off. Broberg was at 3 health after my initial attacks and I had a Darkside Master in the card pool so any partial block would end him. I scoured his discard pile for any throw hate. Knowing he had a singular Leaf Shield in his deck, and none to be found in discard it was almost certainly in his hand. Quick math determined I only had to make two more control checks and only one of them needed to be a five. I would play my KERSPLAT!! and got to use its enhance to ignore progressive difficulty on my next attack, then play Spinning Necro Driver. Knowing that the Spinning Necro Driver would get blocked by Leaf Shield didn't matter at this point though, because it had Multiple 1. The Multiple keyword's greatest strength is that you don't have to make a check for the multipe copy, meaning even if I committed out for Spinning Necro Driver, I would still win. A three damage multiple copy isn't very impressive, but with the +2 damage from Darkside Master it would require Broberg to not only have a third high block in hand, but he would have to pass a third block for the turn with no resources left after blocking KERSPLAT!! and Spinning Necro Driver. This combination of cards had been the ace up my sleeve all weekend. The number of times a Demitri player attacked five times in a turn during this entire tournament could probably be counted on one hand, and I'm certain I took the lion's share of that accolade.
The Enhance step wasn't very interesting. Neither stage was healthy. Speed and damage modifiers were already exhausted. I fully expected this and my next three speed move to get blocked for no damage, and yet I knew I had the win anyways. All of my two checks were accounted for in discard or card pool. Even a Revoke would mean that Broberg didn't have enough blocks to handle the attacks before the multiple copy, and he would have revoked the KERSPLAT!! enhance to ignore progressive difficulty anyways. I remember looking over to see Daniel still locked in battle with Matthew and Emerson mirroring Devon in that arms folded, expressionless look from afar that was so typical of team's tournaments in the past. UFS Team's tournaments didn't allow you to conspire with your allies while you're in-game.
I've never once considered until the time of this writing that advice from a teammate would've changed my path. As is befitting our beloved card game, any mistake I made would have had to come turns earlier. A card reviewed, an ill-fitting block passed, even the priority of a failed spam foundation from your turn one build. I think I prefer it this way, since the fire of blame would burn in my soul if I ever suggested my teammate make a play that ended up backfiring. Or worse, dealing with that level of pseudo-betrayal determining my own game of chance.
Where was I?
Oh right, my coming of age moment where through the power of friendship I overcome the greatest player of all time. Though at the time maybe second or third best? Its always weird whether we're counting occasional Jasco employees like Tim Keefe or Jeremy Ray who aren't necessarily in the player pool all the time. Either way, I'll take the accolade even if it requires an additional ten years of hindsight to say I beat the best to ever do it in my first tournament ever.
So here we are, KERSPLAT!!, a 3H6, fully expected to be blocked followed by trusty Spinning Necro Driver, which had whittled my rival's health and assets away all game How fitting for it to deal the final blow with it's keyword ability. Then the unthinkable happens. Something I don't think I ever considered a single time. Princess Diaries fans would understand this was inconceivable.
Broberg blocks the KERSPLAT!! with the Leaf Shield. The thought that he didn't even have a high block, and would be forced to block with the Leaf Shield didn't cross my mind a single time. This was THE Kevin Broberg. Surely he always had the right block zone, and surely he knew to save his throw hate for a throw! Its in the very name "Throw Hate"!
But more important than the static ability of Leaf Shield to prevent lethal damage, was the played ability of breaker 1. All of a sudden my perfect plan was in jeopardy. All of a sudden the uncertainty of control checks, the very backbone of the Universal Fighting System, was looming over my shoulder alongside my defeated teammate. The weight of an entire weekend of gameplay re-appeared in an instant. All guarantees evaporated in front of me. Now I had a 2 in 7 chance of failing to grasp victory.
I checked a Moon Tracer.
And just like that, it was all over. Twice now Daniel and Matthew didn't get to finish their match. Twice now Emerson and I failed to overcome our rivals. Team Rochester CCG would go on to face another Vegas team in the Finals. The B Team, who all had B first names, and defeat them as well. Soon Pulled My Trigger would be printed into standard, giving three symbols an incredibly potent win condition on a 3/4 asset. For Kevin Broberg it would be just another Sunday.
If you asked me in 2016 if The Hunt is On would continue to team together my answer would've been an obvious yes. If you asked me in 2016 if I would still be playing UVS 10 years later my answer would've probably been an obvious no. I don't think there is any hobby I've stuck to for that long before, and to even believe the game would still be around a decade later wasn't certain. Life has a funny way of sending people down different paths. I never got to play with those two on my team again, and rapidly changing design philosophies of UVS along with the transition from college kids to grown ass men means our paths may never cross.
Admittedly thinking about stuff like that used to bother me a lot. Will I continue to enjoy a game if I never get good at it? Whats the point of taking this job if I know I'll be burned out by it in a year? What if I invest into this friendship that probably won't last? I'm glad to say that looking back none of that fear or anxiety exists anymore. Instead I think about the fond memories, the opportunities to travel across the country and meet so many wonderful people with our shared experiences of UVS. In the end it leaves me feeling Too Damn Good.
