Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Marvel Zombies: The Dead Shall Walk Again

In thematically representing zombies, what is most important? I think there's obviously the dread of flesh eating monsters, but it's hard to scare your opponent while you're playing. Then again if you ever sat across from Roy Harper and his Teen Titan pals, you may just have felt dread. Or, maybe you were abused by a wall of Gotham police officers escorting Sue and Reed Richards from the hospital.

What they have in common is what I think is the best way to represent zombies. Swarm. A crowd of zombies surrounding you, no escape, impossible to fight your way through the mass of teeth and out reached arms... That's the quintessential scene of any zombie movie if you ask me.


Building a swarm team is hard because you have to supplement the ability of the deck to play out characters. The norm of a curve deck playing out one character and one resource per turn is supported by the draw step without any help. Trying to play two or three characters a turn quickly empties the hand and leaves you devoid of resources. So, draw effects and recursion are essential to a strong swarm deck.

This card, practically, gives the Marvel Zombies both. Originally it allowed you to thin any number of Zombies from your deck as long as their cost was three or less. This stacked the KO'd pile far too quickly and I felt that this would break with something from outside the set if left alone. I designed the card just around the time Attend or Die was being broken and so I always had it limited to recruiting three unique characters, but didn't want it to be too weak.

The idea of zombies coming back from the grave I think is the best part of the card. As the zombies kill more and more heroes they continue to join the ranks of undead.

Next Monday I share with you the members of the Zombie Fantastic Four!

2 comments:

Pi_3.14159... said...

I think it is cool, but I am not fully sure about it. I mean, the concept is pretty cool and I like the flavor, but then again, I don't know what the concept for the team is really supposed to be, so while it is an incredibly powerful card, it may also not work with other Zombie stuff. I'd have to see what their theme was before judging more.

RanmaSolo said...

Next week I'm upping the cards I show, so hopefully it'll give you a good idea of what they do. The ZF4 cover a nice range on the curve.

-Mike