Mr. Kohls, a seemingly pleasant young man in his early twenties, with a deceptively calm demeanor, is wanted by local authorities for his part in several violent crimes that have swept the countryside, and parts of Canada. Mr. Kohls at first kicked an unwitting gentleman's teeth in with his Glass Slippers, then repeatedly set fire to the man until he was charred to a cinder (mentioning something about "Iori's Fireball" in the process, a phrase that has expert codebreakers baffled). Mr. Kohls apparently has the ability to regenerate his weapons at will, and of late has been terrorizing parts of Michigan and, most recently, Kentucky in his current campaign of evil. His new powers demonstrate that he can destroy large tracts of foundations at once, and do so often. He is considered armed and extremely dangerous, and will Infiltrate your homes in the dead of night if you aren't careful. Stay alert!

Okay, so maybe none of that is true, strictly speaking. I mean, Matt Kohls IS a pleasant young man in his early twenties, and preternaturally calm at that. But, he's certainly not a criminal - at least not that I know of - and no major investigative organization is conducting a manhunt for him. Of course, I merely wanted to illustrate a point - his character card is outright absurd, and probably would be illegal if STG didn't want to avoid setting a bad precedent by banning a champion card.

I met Matt at Worlds this year, which was a blast, and we spent a good majority of the time just chatting about this and that in the UFS universe, in between competitions. It was a lot of fun, and one of the things I remember asking him about was his character. I couldn't believe that STG let that thing through testing! I was amazed that their playtesters both in-house and outside of the company never caught in to the degeneracy of his card interactions, especially with those cards that remove themselves back to the discard pile for further recursion. He told me something very interesting - the card wasn't even his idea! He had merely told Sabertooth that he wanted his character have defensive abilities, and they came up with the rest. Rather humorous in retrospect, considering he has become one of the sickest and most brutal aggro characters in the game!

I'll admit, at first blush, he does seem to reflect exactly what he was supposed to. The original conception was that he could always end his turn with a block in his hand, and the one-for-one trade for cards seems pretty fair. Along with that, like his favorite female assassin ***Tira***, he has a zone-changing ability that can change any attack to a mid attack and thus make it harder to deal damage to him. This was probably a necessary measure because of his low printed vitality, at the time the lowest yet seen on a character. I'm guessing that someone at STG figured that, as a regular ol' human, his stats would be lower than most of the normal circulation characters and thus, he needed a way to protect himself from dying too quickly. At least, that was the theory.

Then came a little card called Iori's Fireball. A 5 damage attack, off-center zone, that discarded another Fire attack from the card pool, and had a block on it. And everything went straight to hell from there.

I'm pretty sure it was Matt himself who first figured out that this fairly solid little attack, meant to be one of Iori's signature beaters, combo'd ridiculously well with his own card. I do know the original thread is still around, but the modified version of the deck is the up now so I can't quite trace the history of the evolution process as much as I would like. Still, recalling from my own memory, it was always built around the concept of abusing Iori's Fireball, and Glass Slippers eventually became a natural choice because it too had a block, was a throw, and a deadly efficient one at that - 7 damage for a mere 5 diff. Penetrating Lunge had one as well, and was even more of an autoinclude because of it's damage potential for low diff and again, the strong probability of recursion.

I don't when the fine folks at STG figured it out, if they did at all. Certainly they are aware of it now, but our only indication that they were concerned about the abuse of Matt's card early on was in the Sophitia vs. Siegfried Battle Pack, with the printing of Armored Defense, a card which outright ruins Matt Kohls. Again, I can't say whether or not STG had Matt in mind when they creating this foundation, easily one of my favorite cards ever and now watermarked. If I had to hazard a guess, I would imagine that AD was more a response to **Ken** than anything else. Still, it became at least one devastatingly effective answer to a growing problem and was out just shortly before Canadian Nationals in the early part of this year.

I did a lot of coverage on that event for this site, including a full metagame primer and analysis of the event along with interviewers of the top finishers afterwards, and in my post-CanNats article, I was struck by the high number of Order control decks present in the Top 8, especially from those members of Team Pacific. I didn't know much about Order control at the time, or have any inkling towards it's viability, but when I spoke to Simon Tang about it later - he being the leader of Team Pacific and the 2nd place finisher at that event - he told me that one of the primary reasons he chose that resource along with his team members was because it offered access to Armored Defense, along with any number of other brilliant card interactions that they exploited beautifully. Ironically, it didn't appear to matter, as Jacky Tang was crowned 2007 CanNats Champion by using Fireball Kohls and burning everything in his path. He wasn't even planning to play in the event that day, yet decided to at the last minute and borrowed the deck from a friend! To me, that fact alone spoke volumes about the consistency and relative ease at which achieving first and second turn kills were possible with that deck.

After it's win at CanNats, you might have expected Fireball Kohls to dominate the meta. You would have been wrong. In an interesting turn of events, STG's diversity rule created a situation in which nearly everyone assumed that someone else was running Matt Kohls, and therefore no one actually seemed to use him themselves! I have termed this phenomenon "The Phantom Effect", and it has been become something of a curious quirk to plan for in metagaming for large events, unique to this game only. US Nationals was the next major event and due to the phantom effect, it seems everyone else thought that they would be victims of diversity if they choose to use Matt Kohls - with the end result being, almost nobody actually ran Matt Kohls. The same was true at the East Coast and West Coast Championships. I believe not a single player ran Matt Kohls in either event, which I wouldn't have dreamed to be possible given it's speed and exceptionally consistent nature. It resurfaced again in New Zealand for that National, yet it was overshadowed by Joshua Lowen's winning *Ibuki* hybrid deck and the ***Rock*** deck that took second.

When it was announced by STG that Matt would defend his title at Worlds this year with his own character card, many of us (including me) assumed that he was going to run the Fire version. He did do exactly that, in the end, and piloted it to another of his Top 8 finishes, but what most don't know is that it was not his original intention to do so. He had an interesting deck built off Evil utilizing Kunai and the two big Ryu vs. Akuma Battle Pack attacks from Akuma's side, Messatsu-Gorasen and Kongoko-Kuretsuzan. It was still able to loop these two attacks, and now it had the control power of Evil to back up the loop, as well as recursion of key cards such as Lost Memories and, most notably, Infiltrating. He showed it to me and some other top players like James Hata examined it thoroughly as well, and tested against it but it wasn't able to work properly in Matt's eyes so he abandoned it for the Fireball loop version, even though he told me that it was (in his own words) "cheesy" and "boring". Hey, can you blame him? You can't argue with the results, really. It should also be noted that Matt's 2nd place team for the Team event, Team Suck and Die, and the winners Team NICE HEAD! both had a Matt Kohls deck as their aggro representative in the team. Omar Chavez was victorious in the dramatic third match of the final, 2-0 over Jonathan Herr...and he was piloting, what else? Matt Kohls. Oh, the irony.

I bring all of this up because, in 2 of the 5 AoP events so far this season, Matt Kohls himself has run his character to multiple Top 8 finishes and just took the last AoP in Kentucky with the Evil version of his deck. And I don't just mean the resource; this thing is legitimately EVIL!!! He recently told me that he visited STG headquarters at their invitation, and played a few games with his new deck against the employees. Though they remain concerned about his character card, and rightfully so, they still appear unwilling to ban him for the reasons I mentioned earlier. The new deck is perhaps even more disgusting and degenerate than the original, with very few answers, and though I am not at liberty to discuss it per Matt's wishes, I can say that most of the cards in the deck should be obvious to anyone who has been following the meta or even just reading my own stuff in this column over the last few weeks. The idea of blowing up all foundations in play EVERY turn is a little sickening, no? While there are more and more answers to his ability, like Martial Arts Champion for example, this new idea may finally earn him a long overdue reprieve. Even Matt says his character is ludicrous, though if you ask him now he may not confirm that, hehehe ;-)

Still, as Matt Kohls continues to attack across the country, I can only give you fair warning. Lock and bolt all your doors AND windows and don't go outside if you can avoid it. You may be viciously assaulted by a hammer or two, if you catch my drift. I would advise prayer, fasting, and sincere repentance as we all seek to survive this new, wicked menace.

Calling all cars, calling all cars!

(As always, feel free to contact me via PM, email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or on AIM, screenname: VikTheSlick. Till next time... -Vik)