Energize Breaks Armed Escort

Read the thread here...

So you obviously now know my thoughts on the situation.

Or you can read on and hear them here. Hey, it's my blog, I can damn well repeat myself as much as I want.

Energize with Armed Escort is an infinite combo that readies a character with Energize as much as you want. The Energizer also becomes a defender an infinite number of times.

Under that scenario, this guy over to my right means infinite burn. Or you know, an opponent who never attacks again. Reign of Terror. Meltdown. Play Time. (You go look that last one up.) They all destroy it. So, no, it's probably not consistent in that manner. It's potentially very resilient. Especially if you can put a Fate Set on Red Skull and Pier 4 a Hellboy-Cloak onto the Energizer Bunny.

That alone doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed.

Maybe you forget some important VS history. Things like Frankie Raye were allowed to roam the meta free and loose before they were banned while others like Valeria were banned before they made any impact at all. Maybe Valeria was beatable. Maybe she wasn't even that good. Poor Detective Chimp, he was so fun, yet broken all the same.

Some would argue that because there isn't a major metagame to break that nothing should be done. That because Golden Age and large money tournaments are passe, that fixing things is out of style too. After all, why fix something that will potentially never see play?

Because it's the right thing to do. If there's a combo on turn three that breaks the game, even if it only goes off one game in a thousand, it should be fixed because it's broken and broken things should be fixed.

Quicksilver isn't broken, he sucks. He does what he was intended to do, he readies and he attacks again. UDE R&D said the intention with him was a character to take out weenies. You hit a one and a two and come out safe. Well, the fact is he's a weenie. And weenies typically have to fight upcurve. They made a simple miscalculation and we've paid for it. He works as intended, the intention just turned out to be a bad one.

The original wording for the three drop Secret Six Parademon was...

"Reveal Parademon -> Whenever a Secret Six character you control with cost 4 or greater becomes stunned this turn, you may put Parademon into your front row if you don't control a character named Parademon. Use only if Parademon is in your hand."

This had a broken interaction with the Morlock 6-drop Callisto who bounced a character adjacent to her to put a +1/+1 counter on target character. You could reveal Parademon an infinite number of times, evade a four drop Morlock who was teamed up and then put him down, pick him up, put him down, pick him up, until your entire board was infinitely larger than they started out.

It made it's grand VS entrance at Pro Circuit: San Francisco. It went off five times and didn't even make day 2. But R&D fixed it, because it was broken. They didn't need to fix it, they could have let it go, see if a better version might break the metagame or if with warning it wouldn't even go off once. They didn't. Because it didn't do what it was supposed to do. They don't like cards doing things that are not intended.

So, while Parademon now says, "Remove Parademon From The Game" I can assure you that Armed Escort will soon read, "Use this ability only once per turn."

-Mike