Beach Babes

By Tony Hafner
January 15, 1997
2 Avenging Thunder
3 Brain Fire
5 Darkness Priestess
2 Ice Healer
4 Mark of Fire
3 Burn, Baby, Burn!
5 Edge Warriors
2 Entropy Is Your Friend
5 Dark Traveler
3 Discerning Fire
5 Killing Rain
5 Pocket Demon
2 Cave Network
4 Pinball Hall
5 Rust Garden

Notes:

This deck was my main 2-player deck in the post-Netherworld environment. Specifically, it was my main dueling deck in Eugene for a while after Netherworld came out. A couple things to note about this: This deck was very effective in that environment, and at least held its own in Seattle for a while. However, it is fairly easily neutralized by a deck that can generate big hitters quickly as long as the opponent burns for victory. If a site of mine is burned for victory early in the game, I can often point to that and say that I lost the game because I didn't have an Avenging Thunder in my hand at the time.
This deck can be tricky to play. First rule is that if you reduce any site to 0 by combat ALWAYS BURN FOR VICTORY! One thing that gets hard to decide is whether to let your opponent take your sites or not. In the beginning of the game, it can be more useful to have the site in his victory pile. Play those Rains and Marks with care. If you think that you have lost the game by turn 5 then the deck is probably working right. Of all the games I played (and I played alot), there was only 1 where I never thought that I had lost beyond hope. Never give up until the fat lady is screaming in your ear. One thing that I really liked about this deck was the fact that it has not even one rare in it. It has 7 uncommons and 48 commons. Even the uncommons are easy ones to trade for. Of course the Pocket Demons, although common, are harder than heck to trade for.
The playability of the cards is great. There are no characters that require resources. The Monarchs have 7 foundations and there are only 5 cards that require having 2 resources. There are only 5 Jammer resources, but only 2 other Jammer cards. Each of these requires only one resource and is limited and is hard for most decks to destroy. As far as power goes, most cards cost 1 and a few cost 2. The Discerning Fires are variable cost, but cost more than 2 only in rare circumstances, and then only when you are happy to spend that much for such wonderful destruction.
The main idea is to use the Marks of Fire and Killing Rains to soften up a mess of sites and to let them fall to the Burns. Unless a deck could generate a big hitter very quickly, I could usually keep the sizes of both of our structures at 1 or 2 sites. If not, then the Burns would often take out 3 sites in the same turn just after my
opponent failed an early attempt for the win (and he was forced to make that bid because he could see that he was about to lose all his sites).
Against decks that rely on large structures, this deck usually did really well. That is one reason it was less effective in Seattle: everyone here plays with tiny structures anyway. A backup plan was to get the Entropy huge and kick major butt with the hordes of cheap weenies. This often was a waste of effort, but also won a number of games that I had given up as lost.
If I have referred to the deck in the past tense, well, that's because I killed it. It was annoying as hell to play against and not much fun to play with after 2 games or so. Whether I won or lost, I usually stretched games out to an hour or more. It had amazing comeback potential, but no quick-hitting capabilities at all. I also was very disappointed when I discovered that it was greatly improved by the addition of 8 unique feng shuis: 5 Turtle Beaches and 3 City Squares.
This made it much more vulnerable to Whirlpools, but made the Dark Travelers get bigger that much faster. Also, I found that there were a number of sites that caused it major problems: Auspicious Termites, Turtle Island, and Curio Shop. Although I guess I could put it together again from spare parts- I already swap out my Pocket Demons from deck to deck, and I have plenty of the other cards. Maybe I'll even tinker with it again. Flashpoint has added so many cool things
that could improve it...

Last modified: September 20, 1997.