The Hunt For Peak Universus
by Dani Diaz
I feel like I returned from Louisville a changed player.
I finally conquered those mental demons that told me I was a bad player, that told me I would never amount to anything or have any success in this card game. I had climbed my personal mountain. So, how did I celebrate my victory?
By finding another mountain to climb.
This mountain isn’t measured in competitive success or placings in a tournament. This mountain is a lot scarier to climb because in many ways, the trek up also means taking a deep dive down, down into the depths of one’s soul. If this all sounds dramatic, yeah, it’s a little over the top. But the goal at this summit isn’t a trophy or a champ card…
It’s Peak Universus.
What is Peak Universus?
If you ask anyone in the community, you’ll get a different answer.
To Kevin Broberg, Peak Universus is both him parroting his deck name (Pieck Universus) like a Pokemon, and an unattainable concept that may or may not encompass the meaning of life.
If you ask Sam Tate, he’ll fan out a playset of Templar and intone, “…Peak Universus.”
Many others will joke about how it is everything and nothing, the liminal space between cards, the feeling between being asleep and being awake, where nothing is real, but everything is.
I spent most of a day chatting with Kevin to see if we could quantify or qualify Peak Universus. It was a conversation rife with philosophical waxing, references to Taoist or Buddhist doctrine, and contradictions galore as we ran circles around the true meaning of the thing. And in some ways, we ended up further from the truth of it than we could have anticipated. At the end of the day, I was no closer to understanding what Peak Universus was on an intellectual level… but I feel like I knew what it was in my heart.
You see, I think I’d experienced it before. Something akin to a flow state, where decisions came easily and intention gave way to reality so easily that it could have been a dream. The best games of my life have been played in this state, Universus or otherwise. A great parse in Final Fantasy XIV, a perfect song in Guitar Hero, a match of cards where everything just felt right.
That’s not to say that I won all those matches. In fact, the truth is that I lost many of the matches where I think I experienced Peak Universus.
I am reminded of finding Paul at the end of a round in Louisville, where he was finishing up a game against an Annie player. Afterwards, he shook hands with the player, looked at me and said, “That was the best game of Universus I’ve ever played in my life.” When I asked him why that was, he responded that the game went back and forth constantly, there were ebbs and flows, shifts in power dynamics. Nothing felt too one-sided and both players were able to do “the cool thing” with their decks, follow their gameplans and do their best to survive. In that moment, to Paul, he had experienced Peak Universus.
I thought back to a time when my partner Bri was playing Deku II against a player on Bakugo. The game went back and forth for nearly the entire time, with both players reaching 1 HP for a few turns. It was an exhilarating back-and-forth with exciting surprises like a life-saving Eri use, failed checks at the worst times and a clutch game-winning 6 check. Bri was on cloud nine after that game, full of adrenaline. She still says that was the most fun she’s ever had playing a game, ever.
That, my friends, is Peak Universus.
“Says you,” I hear you say from the crowd. “I don’t really care if the game goes back and forth and all that. I like to win.”
Well, you are valid in that. Winning is part of the game, and to many people, the point of the game. Sometimes winning is Peak Universus.
“Who cares about that,” I hear another voice ring out. “Winning is cool and all, but I just want to do a funny combo that no one has ever done before.”
That, too, can be Peak Universus.
Solving the Conundrum
So, if Peak Universus is all these things, and possibly none of these things… then what the heck is it?
Better understanding can maybe be found by looking to other ways of thought. Take this passage from Taoist literature:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.
A common saying in the Buddhist way of life is “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
What do these passages have to do with Universus? Well, if you’re not into thought experiments, probably not a whole lot. But both allude to the true meaning of things, the way, being indescribable. Any attempt to define or put a box around it ends up in another question, another moved goalpost. “Well, it’s this… but it can also be this. It depends.”
So, what are we players to do? How are we supposed to proceed with our gaming lives? Do we just repeat the same cycle of finding a character, adding “goodstuff.dek” to it and playing in our LCs? Do we brew and deckbuild until we have attained some sort of card gamer nirvana? Do we just put cards on the table?
All of these are valid, and none may be the answer for you. It’s a journey that you yourself have to go on.
When looking for my answer, I found Luke. I figured he would play second fiddle to Ryu in his Challenger deck, so he might be a fun project to return to my dark horse playing ways. But after building and playing him, I realized I was having so much more fun than before. The outcome of the games didn’t matter. I was playing cards, doing things, having a blast. Games were back and forth, tense, and exciting. And for me, that’s enough.
That is my Peak Universus.
Keep coping, my friends.