We Book It: Aces and Eights Moving Forward

While the Aces and Eights faction has provided some compelling television, they’ve been wholly mismanaged in the fact that they rely on WWE mid-carders and young guys that get no ring time to show what they are truly capable of. For that angle to truly pick up, TNA cornerstones need to play a prominent part.

Here’s our solution:

AJ Styles and Samoa Joe go heel and join the group. With D’Lo Brown cut loose, Styles gets the VP patch. Through vignettes, the inner workings of the club are revealed more and you see Joe battle DOC for his role as the group’s bruiser. After a while, Styles isn’t happy either and he struggles with Bully Ray for control of the group. At the same time, Styles and Joe capture the tag team titles from Chavo Guerrero and Hernandez. Hinted at before, Austin Aries, Bobby Roode, Frank Kazarian and Christopher Daniels reform Fourtune, but struggle to stay on the same page. Because of their squabbles, they can’t defeat the biker gang. But with a power struggle going on with the Aces and Eights, their situation is just as volatile.

Sting, sick of waiting for help from a TNA army goes rogue and tries to take them out one by one. This works for a short time, as he takes out Wes Brisco, Garret Bischoff and Mike Knox. But when he attempts to take out Devon, he gets a hammer from DOC. On the shelf for a month or so, Sting comes back in his “Joker” persona and begins to torture the club. But he’s not the “team” guy anymore. At the same time, Hogan tries to put a team together to take down the heel faction and chooses Matt Morgan, Kurt Angle, Eric Young and Chris Sabin, who wins the X-Division title a few weeks earlier and is on a major roll. At the next PPV, Sabin screws over TNA and joins the group. Citing the company’s lack of attention to him during his injuries as the main reason for his departure, Sabin reclaims the wise-ass persona he had during the Motor City Machine Guns early days.

Now the club has all the titles. And they have three of the company’s best workers there. With Ken Anderson and Bully Ray on the mic and Styles, Joe and Sabin in the ring, they are impossible to beat.

With Sting still rogue, TNA has no savior, no titles, no control. That’s when Jeff Hardy rejoins the roster and alongside Fourtune, Angle, Morgan and Hernandez, challenge the gang to a massive 16-man elimination tag. Pinfalls and submissions only. Wait, it gets better. When there’s only one member left on one of the teams, the match will turn into a 15-minute Iron Man match. This can open up a bevy of interesting outcomes as one of the TNA stars can battle the odds or The Aces and Eights can destroy them. Whoever ends up with the most pins wins will regain control of the company.

Naturally, it doesn’t have to end there. Even if TNA wins, they’d still have no titles, but they’d have momentum. That would be a great spot for a youngster to be a top face and continue to pummel the group.

That’s easily six months worth of storyline that could help create a proper continuity within the group and get all the ring people involved in this storyline and make it matter.

With Hardy, Daniels, Kaz, Morgan, Angle, Aries, Roode and the wild card in Sting against Bully Ray, Styles, Joe, Sabin, Anderson, DOC and Devon, you have a fairly balanced fight that would be unpredictable in and out of the ring.