Monday, September 29, 2008

Oh yeah! More Marvel Evolutions preview material!

Things are getting pretty exciting here. We've been shown an uncut sheet of proof cards. I.E. no text, just pictures to make sure they're on the right cards. You can see it at the VS Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1448970&id=12722434186

So who can you make out? I see Deadpool, Cyclops, Shatter Star, The Tallus (The Exiles dimension hopping device!), Beast, Morph looking like Marilyn Monroe, Tabitha Smith, another Cyclops I think, Psylocke, Siryn, Orphan and a plot twist with the Astonishing X-Men. The image where they're walking down the hall back in spandex. Love that image.

This is where my eyes start to bleed so I'll stop here. Needless to say... This is awesome. They also have a picture showing a black out sheet that shows where foil goes on the pictures, which is pretty interesting.

The final new picture is a "Sweet Ass" Ultimate playmat that will be in a future hobby league kit. Booyah! There you go doubters. Future plans confirmed. :) That is an awesome mat too.

-Mike
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Friday, September 26, 2008

Marvel Evolution... Just. Got. REAL!

So, THE Ben Seck, master of one of those cool Aussie accents and esteemed member of our beloved R&D Overlords has done the unbelievable... Posted a preview that was up for over an HOUR before someone posted it on VSRealms! Grats to our good friend Bloke of Lost Hemisphere demi-fame for scooping everybody... Hmmm... This doesn't happen to be one of those "foreigner conspiracies" does it? HMMMM? HMMM? Did you just find it, or did you get a TIP OFF!? HUH!? HUH!?

Erm... Anyway...



How sweet is that!?

So, Skrulls have a pretty good 5-drop, Paibok who gives a pump to all your Skrulls with a lot of team affiliations. Is this guy better? Hmmm, maybe. Different. I think that's better than an outright "replacement" drop. Having options is ALWAYS good.

So what does he really do?

Evasion. Evasion is great, for the mere cost of 5-endurance which you probably were taking anyway, and some extra breakthrough you get to keep an extra character going into a turn where you have initiative and can make the attacks that go YOUR way. So, your opponent gets an endurance advantage, but loses their ability to control your board. This can be very powerful. Decks like the Morlocks and Spider-Friends use evasion extraordinarily well. While the Skrulls haven't played with this ability in the past, that doesn't mean it can't work in your favor. Plus, with his other effects, he could be the catalyst for a fun team up.

Invulnerability. Invulnerability is great. If you don't need it, you don't discard, or get a different useful ability, but if you do you can save 5 endurance on an unexpected stun back. Opponent thinks they're going to eat your end because you left Super Skrull out to the side and they took out the guy next to him? Discard a card for invulnerability, play a reinforce effect like Poker Night and take NOTHING instead of "A LOT!" Turns fair trades into a sweet five endurance swing in your favor. Very nice.

Energize. It... Well... You can... I have no idea! Hopefully we find out real soon. If it has the utility of Evasion and Invulnerability, Super Skrull may indeed be a World Champion.

Wait... He does MORE!?

He also has an activate ability with three options. The first is a simple discard. UDE R&D has a good memory. Discards outside of the combat phase are bah-roken. So he can make your opponent drop a card from their hand. Discard is hard to pull off as a main strategy, in fact the only time it's worked, it was banned. So, discard is... Nice. It's nothing special, but options? They're good. Unless they're all bad... Sort of. But that's a whole other discussion!

Target player loses 3 endurance. So you discard for invulnerability, you activate to burn for 3 and a fair trade becomes an EIGHT endurance swing? Yes! Nice! It also gives you protection against exhaustion effects in a manner of speaking. They try to lock up your boy and he burns for three instead. It's not 9 attack, but it's better than twiddling your thumbs!

The final power is the best I think. Target player replaces a face-up resource. Now, obviously you can replace whatever you want. However, you can also play some mentalism on your opponent. Let him pick. Maybe you don't care about what he replaces. Maybe you're playing a lot of reservists and most of your stuff is face down or will potentially draw into your next turn's drop. Maybe you want to protect your face-ups and by letting him choose he'll over think it. Maybe you misdirect them and they think you WANT your resources replaced. Thus instead of replacing your resources they cycle their own stuff, forgoing their own replacement effects? May be. I like it. Plus, you can just replace whatever you want anyway.

Choices, this card is all about choices! And choices allow you to fill in a gap wherever you need it. How many decks have you seen over the years that are brutally dominate because they have options for every threat coming their way. Decks like New School, Crisis Doom, Teen Titans (even if their option for every threat was... Roy Harper!) and Deadshot.dec. I personally liked the name Banana Hammock, but I guess it was too risque for Metagame.com. Hehe. Options are the best thing in VS System. Overwhelming power can win games, stall can win games, but options can win games you were supposed to lose.

Options separate the best of players from the good players from the bad players. Making the right choice at the right time is the hardest skill to learn. Some people never do. So more choices, in my estimation, is always better. I like to think I'm a good player, I know I'm not one of the best, but cards like this are a quick way to find out.

-Mike
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Little Deck Creations: Hidden (Little) Evil

All right, time for another of my ideas. I think I like this one quite a bit. Enough I may try and ebay the cards for it. Luckily with Little Deck even the most expensive card is only a one of so you never break the bank on them. Hehe.

Faces of Evil is a pivotal card in VS history. It rocked the world in Avengers sealed and had a starring role at PC Atlanta, where two of twenty players using the card made the top 8, though they didn't pass the second round. I'm sure somebody won a 10K with it too. I'm not looking that one up though, no matter how fun it is to read the old event coverage sometimes. (I seriously mean that!) I miss reading about big events more than going to big events I think.

Anyway, one variant that had some time in the sun and may have helped lead to the ban on Detective Chimp was Hidden Faces. The idea being that you could play a bunch of little guys in the concealed area and while you sacrificed swing through to the face, you always got to attack back. And because your board was replacable, or even dead at the end of the turn anyway (Hard Sound Construct) you could make great leaps in board position with the right attacks. Better yet, you could make great leaps in the endurance total.

I won't even mention the Kent Farm trick.

Anyway, I built my first copy of Hidden Faces for the Random Punks event way back when. It was long past Bobo T. Champanzee's time, but it still hit hard on a good draw. It was fun and I still play it casually. It still packs no rares and it still kicks a fair share of ass. So, when making that Revenge Squad Little Deck the other day I got the inspiration to put this together too.

After a little testing, I made some changes and it seemed to perk up quite a bit. Here's the list as it stands.

1 Drop
Anti-Green Lantern, Army
Black Bolt, Enemy Within
Dallas Riordan, Mayoral Aide
Green Goblin, Insanity Unleashed
Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
Surveillance Pawn, Army
Terry Sloane <> Mr. Terrific, Golden Age Gold Medalist
Yellowjacket, Rita DeMara
2 Drop
Beetle, Armorsmith
Bullseye, Lester
Captain America, The Patriot - Secret Avenger
Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth
Joystick, Fun and Games
Melissa Gold <> Screaming Mimi, Mimi Schwartz
Warskrull, Infilltrator
3 Drop
Crystal, Elementelle
Shadow Thief, Carl Sands
Wolverine, Skrunucklehead
5 Drop
Paibok, The Power Skrull

Equipment
Image Inducer
Quantum Bands, Unique

Locations
Birthing Chamber
Hunte Castle
Soul World
The Hellfire Club

Plot Twists
Act of Defiance, Team-Up
Cannibal Tech
Faces of Evil, Team-Up
Tech Upgrade
Underground Movement, Team-Up

I started with the auto inclusions. Faces of Evil, Beetle, Yellowjacket, Dallas, Hunte Castle, Hellfire Club, Birthing Chamber. Then I added some personal favorites, Crystal, Surveillance Pawn, Terry Sloane, Shadow Thief, AGL, Captain America.

I thought I had a solid base here, but I was trying to think of more ways to turn up global pumps. This led me to think of Act of Defiance. Thinking about it, made me think of the typical Skrull deck with poor little kidnapped Franklin Richards doing all the dirty work. Hiding the evil Skrulls in the hidden area. Where Hunte Castle and The Hellfire Club could pump them even more!

Along with Act and Franklin I added Warskrull for his search effect and Wolverine: Skrunucklehead for his potential to swing for 12-13 or more. Paibok was added because with so little deck space, I imagine I wouldn't have more than my Global +1 pumps and so having a five drop that could provide another "global" pump would be a smart move.

To make sure I could share that pump with everyone though I had to think. What could I do? What granted everybody the same affiliation on my side. Well, Super Human Registration Act does. And it lets you recruit off your deck, which would be nice for off curve, but wait... Isn't there another team-up like that? Something that has something to do with the hidden area? Hehe. Oh yeah. Underground Movement, how I love thee! While SHRA hogs the spotlight, I think Underground is honestly an out and out better card.

In this deck it allows those great characters like Beetle and Melissa Gold and Joystick to jump into the hidden area and hang out in the castles and clubs the rest of the deck chills in. They're the kind of characters you'd play even if you couldn't hide them, which says a lot. Normally, in a full size deck, I'd play the one drop Joystick, but I added the two drop instead after another idea struck me.

When looking for small Skrulls I was reminded of Black Bolt: Enemy Within. What's better than a board full of hidden characters with global pumps? The same thing but with a fat, juicy 1 drop soaking damage in the visible area! With just the cards in the deck all ready, Black Bolt plus Quantum Bands had potential to be very large. Like a four drop on turn three or even just four.

With the addition of some of the dual affiliated Thunderbolts in Marvel Universe, the potential is even better. Joystick and Green Goblin add Sinister Syndicate while Bullseye provides his S.H.I.E.L.D. credentials. There's still other affiliations on the character list, I believe meaning with just my board he could (potentially!) be an 14/14. Wanting to ensure that if I hit Black Bolt I'd get him all affiliated up, I added an Image Inducer to the list giving me two equipments to bloat him up. Also added two search cards for the equipment. With Yellowjacket to search for Beetle, Beetle to search for Black Bolt and the two equipment searchers, it seems like he'll hit the board pretty consistently with a good bit of pumped up brawn.

Now, if I had all my affiliations out it might be a pretty bad situation for me, cause that'd take a long time and late turns aren't exactly where you wanna be with any Face variant. But Quantum Bands gives you every affiliation around. So most of the time your opponent will give him 2-3 points himself. Hopefully that's enough to end the game before their big hitters come out and snuff the (little) evil hanging out in the concealed area.

-Mike
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Saturday, September 20, 2008

Little Deck Creations: Revenge Squad - Ongoing

All right, untested deck reports rule. :)

I saw some mention of Revenge Squad in the VSR MWS Little Deck tournament and I figured before I saw any sort of decklist from the two people playing it I should try my own version and see what differences there were later. I figure it'll make for a fun comparison.

Jumping straight in, here's my list.

1 Drop
Hope, Amazon Bodyguard
2 Drop
Atomic Skull, Joe Martin
Brainiac 13, Mental Giant
Mole Man, Leader of the Moloids
Mr. Mxyzptlk, Fifth Dimension Imp
Terra-Man, Toby Manning
3 Drop
Lex Luthor, Champion of the Common Man
Lex Luthor, Megalomaniac
Lex Luthor, President Luthor
Professor Emil Hamilton <> Ruin
4 Drop
Atomic Skull, Cursed
Kiman, Chief Weaponer
Maxima, Empress of Almerac
Metallo, Kryptonite Heart
5 Drop
Preus, Citizen's Patrol
Mongul, Tyrant of Warworld
6 Drop
Brainiac 12, Upgrade Complete
Brainiac 2.5, Future Intelligence
7 Drop
Braniac 13, B-13

Battle for Metropolis
Bizarro Ray
Concrete Jungle
Death of Superman
Executive Privilege
Hostile Takeover
Null Time Zone
Omnipotence
Revenge Pact
Standoff
Toy Soldiers

Standoff may be one to jettison as I don't know how often it's really going to burn anybody for a significant amount, but without play testing it I like the card. If it had a lower threshold I'd like it more. It's probably best kept to a full size format where you can flip multiple of it on turn 4.

I also dabble in the 0 Defense Stun theme, as you can see. Kiman, Bizarro Ray and the Brainiac's all combine to provide some good potential for out of combat stuns. If nothing else stun backs or extra damage can't be scoffed at. Not when a game can be decided by getting that last 1-2 points on your initiative or losing next turn. I went this direction because the Revenge Squad 4 drops didn't excite me enough to include any but the ones I have.

That being said Metallo, Atomic Skull and Maxima are awesome. Burn, stun and big attacks are all very nice. In a perfect world I would hit Atomic Skull every game though. The reason why is he forces your opponent's attack order and controlling your opponent off-initiative wins games. Even optimal attacks can turn bad. But if they have to save Atomic Skull for last, chances are you can reinforce every swing that comes your way.

In my last post I mentioned the one major problem in the Little Deck format, Deck Out decks, but there's another thing that can cause problems for you. I don't see it as a problem with the format that needs to be fixed, but it's certainly something that will challenge you as you build with this format in mind.

Consistency.

While one-of's are often found in the most consistent of control decks, that's because they're able to manipulate the deck as much as possible by stacking a ton of search, mill and sifting effects. Four Enemy, four Mobilize, four Straight To The Grave, four Wild Ride is excessive, but there are tons of winning decks that run some 8-10 card combination of those to vast success. Yet, nearly all winning decks have something in common. The early game is full of 4x cards on the decklist. Four of the optimal two drop, four of the power one drop (often a search effect themselves), four of the best three drop.

In Little Deck you just can't do that. You can't even play Enemy of My Enemy or Mobilize ONCE, let alone four to eight times. So, the point of all this?

Look at Mole Man and look at Terra-Man on turn two. They serve vastly the same purpose. In fact the only difference in playing one of each as opposed to two of Terra-Man is flight/range, some Plot Twist interaction with team affiliation (pretty important if you need to fill 2 points on 5 and miss because Mole Man can't be picked up by Revenge Pact) is that you can have BOTH of them out on the field if you're lucky enough.

In fact, I'd be pretty pleased to set Terra-Man on turn two and Mole Man with Hope on turn three. Ruin is the obvious better choice, but if you have a row full of Ongoings without him, these growth minded 2 drops can swell into your second and third four drop on turn 5.

In what I've played of little deck, finding similar cards like this is one of the best strategies. Consistency is the best way to victory in our little game. If you can stack a ton of similar effects into your Little Deck you may find it playing very much like it's older brother varients.

The suite of Lex Luthors on three seemed the best option to me as backup for Ruin. They each do something effective and provide me with a way to power up in a format not very conducive to such a thing, which could lead to many surprise bricks on Defense or stuns on offense. It does lock me out of playing Lex at any other drop though, because I think his best options are at four and five and if you lose your three on those turns you're in bad shape.

This may be another change that has to be made to the deck once I start play testing, because while I'm very happy with the turn four options, the turn five options without Lex seriously SUCK. Preus is incredible. Mongul is a nostalgia choice. I had many great turns thanks to Mongul back in Man of Steel sealed pack. I don't think there's any better options for the Revenge Squad at five, but I all most considered playing Preus or Die as my turn five option. After all, with Revenge Pact and Executive Privilege I have a fair chance of cycling through a lot of my deck.

With them both active on turn three I can see more than half my deck. By turn 5 I will have cycled through it's entirety and begun drawing into cards stacked as I chose. Which can be used to your advantage by simply taking quick notes during play.

Which reminds me... I need to make a Longshot Little Deck. Hehe.

If I do have to replace Standoff, a strong choice might be Thinking Outside the Box which forces you to draw from the bottom of your deck instead of the top. Which means instead of waiting for your good cards to cycle back through the deck, you just pick them up next turn.

With such strong effects that simply require you to lay down your blues every turn, this concept seems like a powerhouse. You have to be wary though, because without Ruin you can end up rowing characters and losing your biggest advantage. Little Deck, like sealed, seems best suited for a 20/10 spread of characters vs. others. Meaning it's not that hard to face a hand full of characters on an early or mid-game turn.

With that in mind, in goldfishing the deck I've mulliganed for a hand full of blue or Ruin each time. So far it hasn't led me wrong.

To give you an idea of how different I expect this deck and the ones in the tournament to be, I heard mention of Reign of Terra and Total Anarchy. Yeah, Reign of Terra. The worst card in VS System history. lol And it was praised! So, I can't wait to see how that works. To further illustrate my point, here's a list of Ongoings I considered.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Absolute Dominance
Anti-Life
Assault and Battery
Bad Press
Banished To The Anti-Matter Universe
Blood In The Dark
Carrying The Torch
Dimensional Deal, Team-Up
Foiled
Global Domination
Help Wanted
Hostage Situation
Knowledge Is Power
Magical Lobotomy, Magic
Mob Mentality
New and Improved
New Mutations (before I realized I had a fair amount of flight and plenty of range, if I needed it)
No Hope
Research and Development
State of the Union
Thinking Outside The Box
Total Anarchy
Trapped In The Sciencells

That's a BIG list. Many of them would change the deck quite a bit. Well, I would be forced to change the deck quite a bit that is. I could just slot them in and it'd suck and they'd be useless. Hehe. But from teaming up to focusing on certain characters there's a lot of ways to build this, it'll be fun finding out which ones are most effective and how many of them are effective.

-Mike


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Thursday, September 18, 2008

How I Learned to Love MWS

Instead of rambling about how I'm "back" or going to try and post daily again, instead I'm just going to post and if you're out there, I appreciate it. I know somebody has been visiting every week, I've had hits and all. Sorry I didn't have anything for you before now.

Before this last two weeks the only thing I could tell you about MWS is that it's terrible and doesn't work and ugly and annoying and gives me conniptions. I couldn't remember specifics, but the first time I tried it, I could not for the life of me to get it installed properly. It wouldn't let me switch from library mode to deck editor mode and I couldn't get the cards out of the Magic template. You know, all squashed up inside the little art box? Ugh, I hated that so much.

I don't like Magic, I play it, because it's there. I know players and we have fun. It's very casual. I enjoy myself, but it's just... Not the same. It's so frustrating. To see my beloved VS squeezed into a Magic card hit some psychological nerve with me. After a couple days I just jettisoned it all, chucked it, deleted it, round filed it and didn't look back.

After all, OCTGN worked very well, it was easy to find the sets and I don't play online nearly enough to justify trying to force it. The online tournaments I had played at the time had all been on OCTGN or the precursor for online VS play Apprentice. I was resistant to switching from Apprentice to OCTGN at the time, but I actually LIKED OCTGN. I _still_ like OCTGN.

Really, I do.

But you know what else I like? I like Little Deck. I love Little Deck. It's such a brilliant format. It's like constructed sealed. Sealed is one of my favorite formats. Not draft, which is fun, but sealed. The only problem in sealed is bad packs = bad packs. Hard to beat the guy who opened two Faces, Yellowjacket, Beetle AND Joystick.

So, when Flashback81, now the newly appointed VSRealms Online Tournament Organizer (in caps because it's an official title!), told me about putting together an online Little Deck tournament for his big 2000th post I was very excited. OCTGN he said!

Suuuch a dirty, dirty liar. Hehe. After a public vote willed things the way of MWS I was in a terrible dilemma. To play Little Deck I had to soil my PC with MWS again. This was a new PC, a PC that hadn't been there to see the horrors of MWS before. I could scar it's young soul! What to do, what to do!

Being something of an unintentional masochist I asked Flashback to help me get MWS installed so I could play. I really, really wanted to play. This time things went better. I had a bit of a snag trying to install the sets, but Flashback got it all straightened out real quick and thank the heavens it actually WORKED! Holy crap, I was not prepared for that! I had no idea what to play so I grabbed my box of Little Decks (I have 10 put together) and started looking through them. Most are pretty horrible, because I just threw them together with whatever I had lying around.

Little Deck isn't supposed to be good, it's supposed to be fun. :)

After paring it down to three choices that seemed to play pretty well in the games I've had I was left with Crisis Doom, SecSoc/Manhunters Deckout and Suicide Sinister Syndicate. My choice was easy. Not because I'm a power monger (I am) or because I thought it would do well (I did), but simply because Little Deck offers a unique chance that no other format does.

In Little Deck you can very well decimate an opponent by depleting their deck and leaving them with NO resources but a vastly dwindling hand. The Deck Out, which is deadly in Magic is non-existent in VS. Deck out is one strategy I really enjoy in Magic. So to try it out in VS was attractive. Here's the problem, it's not that it's just "deadly" in Little Deck, it's that it's EASY and that it's a painful, brutal process.

BANNED IN THE V S R (Online Little Deck Tournament)

Characters
1 Drop

Lana Lang, Manhunter Sleeper
Manhunter Clone, Clone of Paul Kirk
Riddler, Riddle Me This
2 Drop
Dr. Sivana, Mad Scientist
James Jesse <> Trickster, Giovanni Giuseppe
3 Drop
Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
Kate Spencer <> Manhunter, Vigilante Justice
Manhunter Soldier, Army
Quakemaster, Robert Coleman
4 Drop
Black Cat, Felicia Hardy
Felix Faust, Dark Bargain
Gorilla Grodd, Grodd Awful
Pan, Manhunter Duplicate
5 Drop
Black Manta, Underwater Marauder
Hank Henshaw <> Cyborg, Manhunter Grandmaster
Manhunter Giant, Army
6 Drop
Manhunter Conqueror, Grandmaster
7 Drop
Solomon Grundy, Buried On A Sunday

Locations
Gorilla City
Slaughter Swamp

Plot Twists
Attend or Die!
Funky's Big Rat Code
Gravesite
Overpowered
Sorcerer's Treasure
The Fall of Oa
Unnatural Selection
With Prejudice

Turns out, I'm not the only person who was going for the Deck Out. When Flashback WISELY banned the purposeful attempt to mill your opponent's deck into the KO'd pile an outpouring of people posted about their need for a new deck now. How sick is it?

Turn 3 in one game, Manhunter Clone double evaded on turns one and two, Riddler and Lana Lang came out on two with Funky's Big Rat Code, Kate Spencer stunned their two on three, I played Overpowered, I replayed it with Sorcerer's Treasure. I then drew my deck with Fall of Oa. I didn't even need Overpowered twice, I just did it because I could. lol He only had one card left on the Sorcerer's Treasure replay. It took me three more turns to kill him even though he missed 5 and 6 because he had one card in hand and played it as a resource on turn 5.

Yes, it's that sick. Worse yet? I did it in much the same way with a few differences in a game I played after the ban came down. That was 2 out of 3 games with a turn 3 deck out. So, there's ONE problem with Little Deck. While the format is genius, it's not perfect. Enemy and Mobilize are banned, can't have anything but one of's in your deck... But the Red Robots from Space break the format in half. I think the only way to work around the problem is to ban the deckout concept. Which is kind of hard. Maybe cards milled by an opponent should be put into a secondary KO'd pile and when your deck is empty, that's shuffled into your deck? Fall of Oa still lets them pick up their deck, but it doesn't let them pick up their deck and smack you in the face with it.

In any case, this isn't about the (one) problems with Little Deck, this is about loving MWS!

Needing a new deck I didn't really think about it until the pairings went up, in fact I didn't install MWS until the day before that. I was paired up with the Lost Hemisphere's own Captain Spud. When he contacted me about playing the next day is when it suddenly hit me that I should build a deck.

I opened MWS and figured I'd try the deck editor out to start with. I needed to get used to it and the best way to test a deck editor, in my opinion, is to see if you can build a deck from scratch with just their filters.

Well, you cannot build a deck from scratch with JUST MWS' deck editor. Well, you can but it's a pain in the ass. I had to use the fantastic little website DocX give's us over at, my home page. I do not like MWS' deck editor at all, but it does it's job well enough to pass. Throwing together a Thunderbolts deck mostly focused on their "Growth" theme emboldened me to try another.

After thinking back to my previous choices I thought, "Let's play with the Syndicate a bit." Because, after all, I've always loved Spidey's rogue's gallery. Even back in Web of Spiderman, as bad as they sucked, I thought that Sinister Syndicate had some AMAZING drops. Stuff like Tombstone: Lonnie Lincoln, Hammerhead: Gangster (he's a GANGSTER yo!) Vulture: Adrian Toomes, Green Goblin: Norman Osborn and Goblin Glider scream out for blood.

Suicide Syndicate (more fitting than you know!)

Characters
1 Drop

Basilisk, Basil Elks
Fusion, Markley
Doppleganger, Killer Clone
Razorfist, Sociopathic Mercenary
Slyde, Jalome Beacher
Tinkerer, Phineas Mason
Tombstone: Lonnie Lincoln
Vulture: Adrian Toomes
2 Drop
Electro, Shock Jock
Swarm, Fritz Von Meyer
Hammerhead, Gangster
Shriek, Frances Barrison
Silvermane, Silvio Manfredi
Trapster, Peter Putski
3 Drop
Bullseye, Assassin For Hire
Venom, Mac Gargan
Spider-Man Robot, Timespinner
4 Drop
Carnage, Psychopath
5 Drop
Green Goblin, Norman Osborn

Equipment
Goblin Glider

Locations
Doc Ock's Lab

Plot Twists
Blinding Rage
Crushing Blow
Flying Kick
Legacy of Evil
Sadistic Choice
Sand Trap
Savage Beatdown
Sinister Salvo
Spider Hunt
Spider Slayers

Well, this is what I decided to play. Oh noes! My secret tech! lol To put it mildly I don't think I have to worry. Even without warning I have been severely trounced in both rounds one and two. The first match against Spud was a nicely thematic beating with Spider-Man and a motley crew providing the beat down.

(You can read a report by Spud at the Realms in the following post.)

Ironically, the second round was against Pi_3.14159 who you should all know from his awesome blog in my links over to the left. The irony is he played a Counter Growth deck based mostly around the Thunderbolts. I wasn't too surprised as I know he plays a full size deck around the theme after all.

In anycase, while having to mulligan Carnage, Bullseye and Green Goblin in my opening hand against Spud could have cost me the match in round one, in round two I had a pretty dang good draw and still got absolutely trounced.

But I had fun. I always have fun when playing VS System.

The thing is I had fun and it was very easy. Which is not always the case with online play. MWS wasn't just easy, it was COOL! With Spud talking me through it I learned the ropes and some of the features are just awesome. I wish there was a graphical reference for your KO'd pile so you could see the cards, but that's a minor complaint. Also would be nice to roll over your face down resources and be able to see them, like OCTGN, but again... Minor complaint.

The thing that makes MWS super awesome and, now in my opinion, better than OCTGN?

The arrows. You can right click your card and drag to another, drop it on and you get a big red arrow from your card to the other card. Why is that so helpful? Well, instead of typing, "Declare an attack on Spider-Man with Venom" you just right click Venom and drop him on Spidey. Have an effect that targets? You can shift click, drag a card and drop it on the target and you get a big YELLOW arrow to the card.

Man does that sound like a silly reason to love something now that I type it out.

I don't care. I love MWS for the arrows. The arrows are awesome! The arrows are WIN! And besides making the game play easier, they've got another thing going for them. As I sat staring at a board with 4-5 arrows going all over the place as effects and attacks piled up... It reminded me of one of the reasons I love VS System itself.

The tangle of arrows was a perfect representation of the complex computations that go into a game of VS. It was like looking at my thought process during a game graphed out. That is cool. Very cool. I love MWS.

-Mike
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