Thursday Thirteen - Week Two

Only forty-one this week before the need to make cuts. Eventually I'll be picking my final Thirteen right off the bat. For this weeks edition I'm sharing my favorite two cost characters in the game. There weren't as many that jumped out at me before I started as there were with the one drop slot which to me is chock full of characters that really take hold of a space in your memory and defend it with raised swords and threats of carving a chunk from your motor skills. I think it's because two drops do work, one drops do magic.

For the longest time, most decks didn't want a one drop. So a one drop had to be incredible to see play. Boris, Alfred were just so good you couldn't NOT play them. Longshot filled your hand like nothing since. The Invisible Girl let you play A Child Named Valeria. Now one drops are much more common, but as key and powerful as many two drops are, I just don't get that same sense of crazy wonder from them. One drops had to have something special. A two drop just needed three attack. Still, here are my favorites.


#13: Beast seems so unassuming. Such little text and yet such far reaching implications. Gamma Doom ran Beast and Latveria to power out Gamma Bomb turns earlier than it was supposed to be played, but I never dug Puppet Master decks to be honest. I liked exhausting characters, but not with a little old bald man. So what I really like about Beast is the Dream. Xavier's Dream was a highly derided joke. Until Michael "Big Spooky" Barnes made it reality with an 11-1 record day one of PC New York. Beast made it all possible. Beast and a bit of Total Anarchy. Besides, look at him, he just looks awesome. Some people will always prefer the classic look or the CLASSIC look, but I like the Leonine version of Beast. Very regal.









#12: So, I still cheated this week. But... Tim Drake is where it's at whether it's the past or the present and probably the future. When else did you ever spend 4 resource points for a 2/3 and win a game? When else do you draw three and four cards for ATTACKING!? Tim Drake <> Batman, whenever that happens, is gonna be broken. Hehe.











#11: Nightcrawler is like the ultimate version of that "Two Drop" syndrome I described above. He's got three attack and he doesn't do anything to play into a grand strategy. All he does is not stun. BAMF! It's shocking how strong that is. And as all of us on VS Realms know thanks to CHDB, non-stunning attackers are broken.















#10: Hounds Lock. Dreaded words. Words that made you cringe in sympathy for fallen friends and sometimes even for falling foes. I only played one copy of Hounds in my Curve Sentinels, but you know what? I usually had them on turn two. Gotta love Boliver Trask. Hounds of Boliver? Not quite the same ring to it. Their ability to lock down a board once your Savage/Nasty Overloaded was ridiculous. Even without Overload they sometimes turn what should be a close match into a routing.












#9: First of all... Hot! The art is great, I love the scarf and the shadow and the leather and the improbable body pose. Not quite Rob Liefield, but hey, I can't see her feet either, now can I? Hehe. Her effect is so good it got Dr. Light issued errata. She was Light Show 1.9! After all, only once per turn doesn't matter if you KO her to Devil's Due, bring her back into play, ready Xavier's School, ready Dr. Light and KO her again. I've got a Hidden Faces deck that at one point I tried to fit her and Ahmed into. I kept forgetting that pesky Loyalty--Reveal when testing. lol Her latest exploits include readying Four Freedoms Plaza and New Baxter Building. Very sexy indeed.










#8: Ahh, my beloved Merc with a Mouth. Deadpool is easily one of my favorite characters ever. Cable and Deadpool is one of my favorite series of comic books ever. While I haven't played this card very much, the flavor it captures is amazing. You see, Deadpool can't die. Kinda like Wolverine. And others. But he's also very annoying. So... He's a 4/2, two drop who NEVER goes away. That's annoying enough for your opponent. But better yet, he's annoying to you too eventually! After all that's a breakthrough avenue a mile wide. So just like the comics he annoys EVERYone! Friend, enemy, random passer by.












#7: THIS is how I like my 2-drop exhausters. Forget one at a time, I wanna sap the energy out of your WHOLE board! Call it Shimmer Pigs, KnightLight or, my favorite, Evil Medical School, but any way you slice it Shimmer, GCPD Officers and a team up are absolutely brilliant. Harvey Bullock: GCPD Detective and Alfred certainly didn't hurt. And it enabled one of my favorite characters in the early days of VS. Dr. Light: Arthur Light. But he's for the six drops!













#6: Now if my favorite one drops were Joystick and Ape X, it shouldn't be surprising to see this guy in my list of favorite two drops. I don't love this guy quite like I love Joystick, but he still cheats the curve like a mutha. On two, sure, he usually has a couple -1 attack modifiers from your hand, but on turn five? He's usually a 6/6. Even on turn two his defense is three, which is damn good, but it just gets better! Turn three with an Airskimmer after you Tridented Joystick on two? It's all most not fair! Shape like friends? We like you too buddy.













#5: Much like Black Thorn before her, Sage is the real deal total package. Drawing cards, perfect body (3/2, though I love the pale look too), hidden and extra copies are useful as more than just power ups! Hell yeah. Plus the story behind the character is pretty awesome. Spying on the Hellfire Club for Professor X, she was his "secret student" and spent a very long time under cover. Sure, it was a retcon, but it's one I like.










#4: To me, Faces of Evil is all about these two. Yellowjacket and Beetle are probably more of a "pair," but this is about two drops. He's the engine that made things run smoothly and she was the backup that made sure games ended. Burning for 8 or so a couple times was often a deal closer. And Beetle made sure you got her when you wanted her. I could probably add Kyle Rayner to make this a trinity, but I'm cheating enough as is.







#3: I couldn't begin to tell you how much I've burned for with this guy. Some people preferred Captain Boomerang, but I loved IQ so much that even seeing Captain as a my backup made me grimace. I took DIG to a PCQ way back when DJL was pretty new and though my record wasn't Top 8 quality, I had a match against Glock that gathered quite the crowd. On turn 7 I boosted a new Scarecrow out onto the field and burned for over 20 before I ran out of endurance. At the end of the turn... We were both tied at negative seventeen! We played the final turn and he got himself a Mogo. This sucked, but still I somehow only lost by a couple points. After all, my attacks were All Too Easy. I sure coulda used Circe: Evil Enchantress.








#2: Talk about sexy. Poison Ivy has always been my favorite femme fatale from Batman's gallery of rogues. Probably from comic books in general. I'm probably an environmentalist partially because of this characters influence on me early on. Watching the Batman: Animated Series as a kid I would always feel conflicted about episodes she was in. I knew she was on the wrong side of things, but I was sympathetic. I wanted her to get some kind of moral victory. Let's not forget she was best friends with Harley Quinn too, another favorite of mine. All that, plus great stats and an ability that is ridiculous. She's been the dominate diva at multiple PC's, including the deck that got Justice League of Arkham banned. Whether Fated up on turn two for Banana Hammock (such a great deck name) or just doing her thing in Ivy League she was killer. Also, one of the VERY few cards I've spent more than a couple bucks on. But I just HAD to have a play set, especially when I saw the EA.







#1: Also a distinguished player in the Banana Hammock deck that won PC Indy '06, Deadshot is a card I totally got excited about the second I saw it. KO a three drop? Nice! Three drops are often vital to a deck's strategy. Not to mention that when the next DC set came to town and introduced us all to Ahmed Samsarra, KO'ing a three drop didn't just hurt a deck... It won a game. I have a definite place in my heart for assassin characters, so that doesn't hurt either. Whether you call him Deadshot, Deadpool or Deathstroke, if his job is killing I'm probably willing to give him a shot. And his flavor text says it all on that subject. "Isn't it obvious? I kill people. For money." $40,000 is a nice chunk of change. The first deck I played when I returned from VS sabbatical was Punisher/Deadshot. I didn't get any King Kills like I always dreamed of, but I sure did enjoy myself.

So, there's my list for this week. It's funny, but i have to admit one of the single hardest cuts from forty-one to thirteen that I had to make was Quicksilver: Inhuman By Marriage. He's so soundly hated by most people, but... I WANTED to put him on this list. I just couldn't justify it. I don't love him. I fear him, I like him, but this is my list of FAVORITES, you know? Oh well, I'm sure he'll be on my list of best or most powerful two drops ever. Next time, I'm gonna head to three drops. I'll probably continue this up to Eights and then branch out into other topics.

Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing it.

-Mike