Ranma Solo's VS System Blog

What Have I Been Doing?

2008-10-28T21:12:00.000-07:00

Well, if you didn't figure it out. Here's the official haps... Flashback81 put out the call and I answered it. Technically before that thread went up. But since then, the call has been answered, the names are picked, the teams are decided upon and soon designing will begin. I'll give you one little teaser of what's to come.

-Mike

X-Force Week.

2008-10-27T03:13:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm not quite sure about these guys yet. X-Factor, Exiles, they hit me immediately. These guys... I don't know. It seems cool. I love Domino and X-23. Techno-Organic Virus is sweet as hell. Everything else I just don't think gels together the way Exiles and X-Factor did. Take a look for yourself.

http://www.vsrealms.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62644

So they have a cool theme, I think. I guess I just don't see enough of it here. The idea of lots of plot twists is pretty cool. I really like Lust For Power, and had a strong build of Elektra.dec with 3-drop Dr. Doom and Lust to load up on for the turn pumps.

Domino is very interesting, situational, but very interesting. She can shut down defensive pumps very easily. She kills upswings for the cost of playing plot twists. She can't stop search, out of combat tricks, any of that, but controlling combat is more than enough to warrant consideration.

X-23 is immediately powerful though. Punisher 4-drop is a character that, with work, cleared boards. X-23 is even easier to enable. Instead of multiple equipments, you only need an attack pump. Considering the theme of this team, that will be VERY easy. If X-23 doesn't kill a LOT of 4 drops I will be absolutely shocked. Oh and I know it doesn't have to be an attack pump, just saying that makes the stuns come easier.

Cable and Shift could be an important part of this team, but at this point it seems more like something to play with Exiles. We'll see where this all goes. I hope they're good. I'd like to play with Domino, Cable and Deadpool.

Deadpool's not on X-Force?

Yeah. I know. Just saying that's what I'd want to play. Hehe.

So, I've been a bit busy with a little project (and WoW... I know... Sorry!) and that's kept my VS system thoughts occupied. I don't know what I can say about it yet so... Nothing from me! You'll be able to find out soon for sure. Hey, search for stuff on VSRealms.com and maybe you can figure it out yourself.

-Mike

Exiles Week Comes to An End.

2008-10-18T03:36:00.000-07:00

So I'm sure you've read all the previews now,... What!? No!?

Go read here... It's not long but it has links to all the previews from this week and... Well okay, that's about it.

So, you surely realize by now that Panoptichron is broken. Shadowcat <> Cat: Earth-Unknown is Dr. Light, Proteus: Earth-58163 is Dr. Minerva and Warp Shards is... Well, what ISN'T it?

Yes, I love the Exiles and I love how crazy good they are. The best part is that Weapon X is another Shift team because the Weapon X is NOT the Weapon X I thought it was. Yes, it has Deadpool so there's cross over I assume, but it definitely contains the Weapon X of the Exiles comics. Which means one thing...

HYPERION! Big, nasty, evil, vile, world destroying Hyperion.

/shivers

I hope he's alternative win where you remove 20 Shift counters from him on turn 8 and you win. Maybe 30. Or 40. Gotta be fair after all. ;)

-Mike

Marvel Evolution Preview: Five In One! That's right... FIVE in ONE!

2008-10-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

It sounds like a cheesy infomercial pitch.

"The amazing, stupendous, fabulous, fantastic, Five In One solution for all your problems! Need to draw a card? Five In One. Need to change who you're attacking with? Five In One! Need to remove powers and keywords from a character? Five In One! Need to recover an extra character this turn? Five In One! Need to negate an effect from a non-ongoing Plot Twist during the combat phase? Five! In! One! And if you call now, we'll give you not one... Not two... Not THREE! Not even FOUR copies of this amazing card... But FIVE copies of Five In One!"

So, one thing that really excited me about this set immediately after Deadpool, was the Exiles. I'm a huge fan of that book. Well. I don't know about Claremont's stuff. He kinda scared me off of it. But before then? Absolutely brilliant. And my favorite character was definitely Mimic. The heroic leader figure, part Cyclops, part Wolverine, part Colossus, part Beast and for a while part Angel. He's like Rogue only he can keep his abilities. However, he can only keep five at a time. So Mimic Legend was easily one of my top five picks when Ben Seck asked what I'd be interested in previewing.

This card gives you five chances to swap your Mimic's abilities around, taking whatever utility you have access to. Though, sadly, he only keeps this power for the turn. I really enjoy when cards do something that breaks the rules of the game. Like the Royal Flush Gang before it, this card isn't limited to just four copies. Thematically speaking, that's a very good way to represent Mimic. Traditionally he doesn't have powers of his own, but instead is given abilities that let him take other powers from around the field.

This has allows Mimic to play an important role in versions of the powerful X-Stall. His first version, Calvin Rankin gained flight if there was a flyer around, gained range if someone with range was in play and was granted one character's activated effects at the start of the combat phase each turn. Puppet Master was quite pleased with this. As was The World's Most Powerful Telepath version of Professor X. The ability was quite a bit like an early way of breaking uniqueness. Instead of playing multiples of the same character, you could just make multiple characters do the same thing. This as I said, proved to be a very strong strategy. It's also been the basis of many a jankfully jubilant deck.

After Calvin came another 6-drop. This one a bit of an upgrade in terms of ability. While the stats can often be less than stellar, he has flight and range without relying on any other characters to gain it. And for two endurance he gains any character's payment powers. This is any power with an arrow in it, which includes all activated effects and quite a few others! Plus he can gain this ability at any time, all be it just once per turn.

I haven't seen Mimic, Exile breaking any decks or burning up the tournaments, but his utility is dangerous. If your opponent is trying to burn you with activated effects you can still take those and fight fire with fire, but if he's doing something else like playing Raven, Daughter of Trigon (I'm just saying...) you can gain her "Pay 1 endurance -> Characters and locations target player controls can't ready this turn. Use only during the recovery phase." power and prevent him from readying too.

How about stealing Dark Beast's ability to solve that stat problem, "Discard a card -> Put a +1/+1 counter on Dark Beast. Use only once per turn." Remember any instance of a character's own name in their effect technically means, "[this card]" so when you steal the power the name is changed to Mimic.

Well, you could only do that once per turn. Not anymore. With Five In One, you could do it six times in one turn. Kind of crazy. The thing is since Mimic is a Legend in this set, you know he's getting multiple drops. I've seen a four and a six- Oops. Well, I don't think that's saying too much. Hehe. You'll see them soon enough anyway.

Besides the obvious use of copying your own effects, after all if one use is good, two are better, I think the ability to steal your opponent's thunder can have an unexpected effect. Much like the potential bluff of letting your opponent choose what resource to replace with the new Super Skrull, you can perhaps hinder an opponent from playing characters with powerful payment effects.

Many decks have their main drop and backups in the early game and a suite of Silver Bullets at five and up. Payment powers are one of the most prevalent in the game. While it might not hurt to let your opponent copy Barbara Gorden, Hacker Elite's effect, "Free -> Draw a card. Use only once per turn." It might be another story to give them access to something like... "Pay 2 endurance -> Target player moves his characters until none are adjacent to each other. Use only while Radioactive Man is in combat." or "[Activate] -> Rally for a plot twist card. If you're successful, ready Mr. Fantastic. Use only once per turn." or "[Activate], Remove The Sentry from the game -> Remove target character from the game. At the start of the recovery phase this turn, return The Sentry to play." or "Stun Wolverine -> Stun all opposing attackers and defenders. Use only if Wolverine is in combat and only if you recruited another Wolverine this game." or "Discard a card -> Whenever Luke Cage stuns another character this turn, draw two cards. Use only once per turn and only during the build phase." or... Well... You get the idea.

If you want a better idea what kind of options you have with Five In One go to DocX's search engine and type "->" into the Card Text line and select characters from the card type drop box. There are a LOT of cards there. And if Mimic having their effect may do more harm to your opponent, then your opponent could do to you or even equal harm... Then they might not even play their optimum drop, instead hoping to beat you with their backup plan.

In a Mimic legend deck, I expect the best use will be to double up on your own effects though. Pick a pack of characters with very useful effects and then turn Mimic into the second copy without the hassle of playing Clash of Worlds. Mimic isn't so much his own man, but instead he's every man. Whatever you want him to be, he can. Ahmed the second. Another Quicksilver. Random, Marshall Evan Stone III plays well with Human Torch's various abilities, throw Mimic in and you can copy the enabler OR the payoff.

At first pass Mimic seems like a less exciting legend than others. He doesn't do something new and shocking. He doesn't exhaust everyone or replace himself with smaller copies of himself. He doesn't recover and attack again, he doesn't become invulnerable or unstunnable or anything like that. He just becomes... Whatever you want him too.

-Mike

Survival of the Fittest: The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection Rises From The Dead

2008-10-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

So, before my blog stalled out and went on semi-hiatus I had posted the first version of the Survivors team affiliation. They were not cool. Well, they were but in that bad, "Attack Power 1200! I play Exodia!" kinda way. They were too good in testing. And too convoluted too now that I think about it. Sadly I didn't want to change them that much because I like convoluted sometimes. It's easy to over think things. That's kind of why I did stop posting. I kept wracking my brain on how to fix them and just couldn't figure it out.

Well, now with Marvel Evolution introducing Energize I've been inspired to take up the creative part of my VS fandom again. No, the Survivors aren't going to be an Energize team, after all the problem with the FIRST draft was that they were broken! Not gonna do that again!

I kid, UDE! I kid! Energize isn't broken. Yet. ;)

Instead, the discussion of Armed Escort made me think of attack redirection. So inspired by that I sat down and started first looking at the old list and seeing if anything could be kept as it was. There was one or two that I thought still fit my new vision and they were imported to a new file first. Next I made changes to the cards that could be merely edited. Then I wrote new abilities for all the cards that needed to totally change. In a matter of an hour I had a first draft for a whole new team!

Before I start showing cards here though, I'm going to try play testing them with real people this time. I don't have MWS and it's a little out of my budget so if anyone wants to volunteer putting a MZE set together for me let know. If not I'll make a patch for OCTGN myself. Anyone who would want to play test a few games can reply here as well.

-Mike

I got the email with my preview today.

2008-10-09T17:01:00.001-07:00

Man, is it exciting to be a blogger right now!

I can't say a word about what was IN the email, but I got it and when you see what I have seen, you will be excited. Very, very excited. I have so much to write about and yet I can't. Such torture! Hehe.

-Mike

Played Some VS Tonight! Yay! I missed this game....

2008-10-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

After a little Magic and some Netrunner, Netrunner is very fun by the way, but then I got down to the real stuff. The best game in existence, Versus System.

First we played casual golden age, I brought out the classic Curve Sentinels. Dead Betrayals and all. I should switch them out to Micro Sentinels, knowing my most common opponent plays a lot of swarm decks and rarely, if ever, off team characters. In any case it was fun playing a bunch of pumps on Bastion, Cover Firing and then swinging across with a 16/16. Powergirl tried to take him down, but just couldn't manage.

He had missed a couple early drops, but I flipped Total Anarchy, swung back on his Kate Spencer <> Manhunter for a one sided stun KO'ing her. Finishing Move on Powergirl and then the Hounds munched on Thunderbolt to complete the board wipe. I miss that. So fun!

Then we played some Little Deck. I played my very crappy Kree-Mate deck, that seems to draw well for some reason and he played Teen Titans. Duela Dent, Donna Troy, that was a tough two turns, I had Dr. Minerva on 2 and then Brother I Sattellite for Ahmed. I couldn't touch him until turn 4. I ended up at like 28 or so thanks to T-Jet, Tamaran and Mega-Blast.

Turn four I press out to Commander Dylon Cir with Minerva and Kona Lor. Snagging Ronan off Minerva for next turn. Combat was pretty basic and I caught up a little, by reinforcing mostly and then opting to attack with Ahmed instead of grabbing Penal Colony. Probably shoulda got it, I had to grab it next turn anyway. Penal'd Minerva, Slaughter Swamp on Minerva and had to play Clumsy Foulup to press out Ronan. lol A Knightmare Scenario kept his cosmic in tact and probably won me the game.

Dylon Cir and Kona Lor I would find out had a lot to do with it too. They nuked Tamaran and rowed three characters that could have been the difference makers in closing me out before I was able to force massive damage through on turn 6. I finished at 9 and couldn't believe I had actually won after being so low by turn three.

Ahh, I love this game.

-Mike

Energize Breaks Armed Escort

2008-10-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

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

Marvel Evolution - Previews BEGIN! My Thoughts

2008-10-03T19:40:00.001-07:00

So early this afternoon a card image was released to the VS System facebook page. If you're not a friend of VS System, go become one now! This image features the ever popular Nightcrawler with what I'm told to believe is a member of the Power Pack. Now I know the Power Pack by reputation and ill repute at that, but whatever, the important thing is Nightcrawler. Well... Take a look...

In Ze Munich Circus... Zey Call Me The Nightcrawler!

I love this card. Nightcrawler legend? Yes please! Better yet, we have no idea just yet what it does. Why is this good? Well, personally, I love the rampant and wild speculation.

There's so many things that it could be. Attack protected and hidden characters, reinforcement, character movement, unstunnable attackers. Maybe even defense resetting? Or just remove attackers? He is a sneaky devil and as a legend plot twist it's likely to be powerful. As a rare, it's even more potentially powerful and complex.

Personally, I just am happy to see the fuzzy blue guy getting some legend content.

Mere hours later however, things hit the page that really started the ball rolling. Four cards, two sets of two cards that fit into two of the themes listed the other day. Cyclops and Multiple Man legends. These ones have text and... Yeah, WOW. The first is an 8-drop Cyclops. Cyke at 8! Who needs a 7-drop? Hehe. Okay, yeah, he still should have a 7-drop, but 8 is a sure sign of respectability. That's some rare air for Scott Summers. It also spoils Energize. Which is mind blowing, by the way.

So, Energize characters ready whenever they defend. That means when you attack them, they can use their activated abilities, which TBS has said most of them will have.

"The majority of Energize characters have an activated power, and this allows them to use it twice, or use it and attack (if your opponent chooses to attack it) and a few other tricks that will become apparent once you see the whole set!"

Cyclops, if your opponent is stupid enough to attack him, starts the combat with a 16 point swing in your favor. Their 8 attacks, you exhaust it, you ready, you hit it again Professor X style and ding another 8 burn on there. You thought double stun endurance was nasty? This, this is nasty. 17/17 is a slight downturn in 8-drop stats, so if you don't want to trade you can just exhaust their 8-drop before the attack and still come out 8 points ahead.

TBS also confirms that Scott has a 3, 4 and 6 drop. So... Your three drops locks down two of their characters, your 4 drop Doom (who else? Spider-man? Okay, sure, Spider-Man too!) locks down a third and you could even have Puppet Master for all we know. Yes, yes please! Two cards for two characters, this card is borderline. Not over the edge, but hell yeah, it's close.

Get this, apprently it STUNNED two characters before! Oh my god, how did that get past even FIRST draft? Hopefully TBS meant you stunned your Cyke to stun two characters. If not... Jesus. The Captain, 3-drop Cyclops, lots of way to get this off. This will really shine with an ability to buy it back. Black Manta? Is there another way? I know someone mentioned John Walker <> U.S. Agent on the Realms, but this doesn't target.

If this is any indication of Cyclops's theme and potential, he may be the new leader of the Control game. Cyclops, Spider-Man, Dr. Doom... It's becoming a crowded fight and with tools like this, Scott Summer may just clear the board. Or at least turn it sideways.

Very interesting ability.

Jamie ensures you keep your investment on the field. 5 resource points is a lot in this game. So losing them is brutal. If you have another copy of Jamie Prime, you don't lose anything except 5 stun endurance. That's very nice by itself. What really gets my motor running is the idea of swarming with him after you get him stunned. 5 1-drops? Well, he has more than one. And the name or identity work around solves issues with previous Multiple Man's who put copies of himself into play very smoothly.

What it doesn't stop is throwing 5 weenies down and with the right Multiple Man, you can double those and turn 5 points into upwards of 10! Yes, this requires a LARGE hand size, but hey... Stu? Longshot works if you call Jamie Madrox and Multiple Man now, huh? ;) Oh yes, yes he does. Sure it's golden, but Golden is for fun now!

So, you lost all those weenies too? Well, instead of just throwing them away, suck them up. Gain some life, draw some cards, be ready to flood the field again.

It's hard for me to say much about this card, it's just so self explanitory. I mean, what more is there to say? We all know drawing cards and gaining life is good.

At the cost of losing characters you likely lost all ready? Wonderful! It's like free card draw and life gain. If you do it on turns 3 or 4 before your five drop comes into play you may even be loading your hand with cards to replace those 5 points with 10 like we talked about above. You've got the KO'd pile full of replacements after all.

Well, that's all for tonight, more as we're granted the info. And don't forget to keep checking back for an exclusive world premiere preview here on RSVSB!

Hey, that doesn't sound half bad.

-Mike

Got my Mxy!

2008-10-03T00:27:00.000-07:00

Found Mr. Mxyzptlk: Troublesome Trickster real cheap on Ebay. Been wanting him for so long. 4x for under 6 dollars plus shipping. It got in today (yesterday, but I started typing this post 12 hours ago!)

Ahhh, the wonders of ebay. Sad to see such a mighty money rare go by the wayside, but I will take it where I can get it. Ahh, now to get out Poison Ivy: Deadly Rose, Deadshot: Floyd Lawton and some Fate Artifacts to relive Banana Hammock. Was my favorite modern age deck at the time, perhaps ever, and I never got to play it except proxied up for testing. :Sigh:

But it's never too late for VS. :)

Marvel Evolution - Previews Officially Announced!

2008-10-01T02:14:00.000-07:00

TBS, you remember him, right? Started a thread today on the Realms announcing the beginning of preview season. You can read it here.

Along with the start date and telling us that VS Bloggers would again get to preview cards, he also told us WHICH bloggers would get previews and even spoiled the themes they were be covering!

Now, this is cool enough on it's own. However, infinitely cooler is this... I'm on the list! We get a preview! Snazzy! For those of you who didn't follow the link here's a list of the themes TBS mentioned as preview material.

"X-Factor"
1. Cyclops Legend
2. Multiple Man Legend
3. Energize

"X-Force"
1. Cable Legend
2. Combat Plot Twists

"Marauders"
1. Gambit Legend
2. "Press the Advantage" Opposing Stunned
3. Mr. Sinster Legend
4. Mystique Legend

"Exiles"
1. Blink Legend
2. Mimic Legend
3. Shift

"Weapon X"
1. Deadpool
2. Shift
3. Hunter

"Runaways"
1. Secret Mechanic

"The Horseman of Apocalypse"
1. "The Coming of Apocalypse"

"Starjammers"
1. "Piracy"

"Generics"
1. Including- "M'Kraan Crystal" and "Kid Omega"

Now seriously. It's hard not to be uber-geeked getting a preview. It's impossible not to be full on geeked out of my head after reading that list! We're supposedly going to be doing some sort of blogger draft to see which theme we preview, so I have my fingers crossed to get my hands on Deadpool or Mimic for the Exiles. Blink or Shift is fine by me too, but Mimic has always been my favorite Exile and Deadpool is one of my favorite comic characters period.

To think I have Rob Liefield to thank for that. ::Shudder::

Anyway, beyond that all that we have right now is rampant speculation. Which, I should point out, is hella fun. So let's try some.

Mystique Legend: I'm thinking Bizarro World, Legend stealing effects. Maybe even something like a payment power on an ongoing plot twist to treat your Mystique as if she had a name of your choice. I also imagine she'll do some concealed play as I can't see the Marauders NOT being a concealed heavy team. Mystique is a sneaky little assassin/spy/terrorist and not being able to attack her while she's visible would be a good way to represent her being undercover and make for a very tempting option if you have to pick between always getting attack backs or something juicy while she's hidden. Activate to KO a stunned character? Mystique lock? I like it!

And she can lock me up anytime... Rowr. She seems nice, not at all like a cat with a mouse. Not at all. Eeep.

We know there's a Cable and Deadpool named Plot Twist in the set, I'm hoping it's not JUST an X-Force/Weapon X team up. I'm hoping it's something real complicated. Something that teams up Cable and Deadpool, but also does something funky and off the wall. Like team up all teams that Cable and Deadpool that you control have and when something effects one it effects the other. Bodyslide one, bodyslide the other. Even if it has to be a payment power. Pay 3-5 Endurance -> Copy target effect targeting a Cable or Deadpool you control, choose a new target named Cable or Deadpool.

Considering Deadpool and Cable are both the first theme listed for their teams, I would hope they're considered worthy of such thought out and complex strategy.

The Hunter keyword for Weapon X, I feel probably is something we've seen before. "When this character enters play choose a character in play..." and then some effect that revolves around that character. Dominus, Despero, Hank Henshaw <> Cyborg, all had them. So did Wolverine, Sabretooth and Mavrick. Point being the later three were ON the Weapon X team. I think a team that keeps bouncing back to hand might be fun. Just as long as it's at LEAST as good as the X-Statix. The idea of Deadpool sucking breaks my heart more than a little bit.

I had to look up the M'Kraan Crystal, but it sounds very interesting. I hope we maybe get some of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance storyline here, since apparently it would mean Dr. Doom + Some Power Stolen From Odin, which to me = freaking awesome. I'm a fan of Doom and any chance to see him kicking more ass is to be savored. Also we know UDE doesn't shy away from letting Marvel video games influence their designs. Charging Star and the rest of the Captain America suite, anyone?

I noticed both Exiles and Weapon X will have a focus on the Shift ability or keyword, whatever that is. Considering the Exiles are dimension hoppers and my thoughts on Hunter... I have to think "shift" is a keyworded form of Bodyslide. Maybe you stun the character, remove them from the game and at the start of the next turn they come into play all shiny and new? Allowing you to pick new Hunter targets and representing very well the way the Exiles move from one altered reality to the next.

Kid Omega... Well, I have a very love/hate deal for Grant Morrison's X-Men run. Mostly I hate what follow ups did to the characters and the situations it set up. I'm very curious to see if maybe this will mean a good chunk of unaffiliated characters in Evolution, which would be cool. He is listed as a "Generic" theme, after all.

All will be known very soon though. Previews start this week!

-Mike

Oh yeah! More Marvel Evolutions preview material!

2008-09-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

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

Marvel Evolution... Just. Got. REAL!

2008-09-26T00:25:00.000-07:00

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

Little Deck Creations: Hidden (Little) Evil

2008-09-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

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

Little Deck Creations: Revenge Squad - Ongoing

2008-09-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

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

How I Learned to Love MWS

2008-09-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

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

Wow, it's been a long time...

2008-08-25T03:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I just haven't had too much to say or talk about. Yeesh, you'd think I could at least keep a weekly update. >_< That's the problem with World of Warcraft though I think. Instead of sitting at the computer, doing nothing and deciding to update my blog... I play WoW. Instead of sitting here doing nothing and deciding to cruise Ebay for random junk I'm not gonna buy... I play WoW. So on and etc. Click below to see the rest. This'll probably be a bit rambley.

Well, yesterday I went to try and make a new deck and I had forgotten I barely have any Infinite Crisis so I have like 20 Villains United cards. Argh. It's so frustrating. I basically work for room and board, apprenticing to be a tattoo artist with my Mom and we own a shop together, which is awesome and all, but it means I'm always broke. I'm kinda used to that, I've always been broke most of my adult life, largely due to personal issues.

But anyway, normally I woulda just made a deck using which is my home page I use it so often and then seen what I had, filled it out with proxies and seen how I liked it before trying to buy some singles, but the main person I play with doesn't like proxies so I kinda try and not use them. He doesn't make a big deal, but it's just one of those things where I'm trying to be polite. I seem to go out of my way to not inconvenience other people a lot, which I guess isn't the worst "flaw" a guy could have.

I think I want to do a burn deck with a heavy low curve. Dr. Light and Talia 5-drop letting me spam out extra guys. I haven't looked at the cards in a long time I don't remember really the ideas I used to have except Dr. Light being cool. And Deathstroke-4 is awesome. I've actually wanted to build the deck for a long time, I just always got distracted by other ideas.

I'd also love to have a Rock of Eternity or Blackbriar Thorn/Magic deck. I always thought both were incredibly cool. With Power Girl on 5 I think the Rock deck is absolutely ridiculous. I guess you would still have to play Ahmed because, I mean... Ahmed. Rock. Locations. Duh.

Guess this is rambling a little more than I thought. I'm gonna get some sleep and try and post something more substantive soon.

-Mike

Marvel Zombies - The Survivors = Broken!

2008-07-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

So I've been putting off continuing this because I haven't had a chance to do any work on FIXING the Survivors team, but I figure, who cares? I'd prefer to be a daily blog, I tried really hard to keep up the pace, but if I can only do 1-3 posts a week I might as well go with it. So click below and you'll see the raw text for the Survivors as they stand. They need fixing.

The idea was a strategy of Reverse King, kind of. Force them to attack the hidden area and the Distraction who stands alone weathers the storm. But the fact is, it's easy to go too far with control. I think Sue is the worst of the bunch. She'll be getting a definite overhaul. Especially since she can no Force Field Project to boot.

AU = Alternate Universe. The idea was that this would be a mechanic to allow you to play Ultimate Mr. Fantastic with regular Mr. Fantastic without something like Clash of Worlds to enable it. Basically, you have Alternate Universe: Ultimates and you're only unique to characters from THAT universe. Considering UDE doesn't seem to want to play that way, I'll probably remove the keyword and design something else for the Survivors. I all ready have an idea, actually.

You can see where I made some changes in play testing, it wasn't enough however. They still were way too strong.

Here, you go, enjoy.

Asteroid M: Zombie Earth
2 Cost
Location
Whenever a character comes into play under your control, if they're the only character in the area they come into play in, put a +1 ATK/+1 DEF counter on them.
Activate -> Move target +1 ATK/+1 DEF counter to a character you control.

Interdimensional Teleporter: Zombie Earth
1 Cost
Location
Activate -> Move a character you control with the printed affiliation Survivors to your hidden or visible area.
"What happened? This is _horrible_,"

ORIGINAL
Narrow Sewers
3 Cost
Location
Activate -> Target character with the printed Survivors team affiliation cannot be team attacked this turn unless they have all ready been attacked at least once this turn.
NEW
Narrow Sewers
3 Cost
Location
Activate -> Target character with the printed Survivors team affiliation cannot be team attacked this turn unless they have all ready been a defender this turn.

Railway Tunnel
4 Cost
Location
When you flip up Railway Tunnel, you may discard a character card. If you do search your deck for a Survivors character card.
Replace Railway Tunnel -> Stun target character with cost 3 or less with more than double it's printed attack value. Use this power only if all characters you control share a printed team affiliation.

Distraction
3 Cost
ONGOING: While you control one hidden character, your opponent's characters may attack hidden characters and must attack hidden characters before visible characters.

Can't Eat Us All At Once
3 Cost
Target defender you control gets +2 DEF for each other character you control in the same area and -2 DEF for each other character you control in another area this attack.

Reed To The Rescue
2 Cost
Move a character you control to the hidden area. Move any number of characters you control to the visible area.
"I can't believe we never thought of this. Did you hear what Mindy _said_?"

Mindy Glidewell: Diabetic Genius
0 Drop
Survivors
0/0
Loyalty - Hardfast.
Mindy has reinforcement.
Whenever Mindy defends move her to your Hidden Area.

Human Torch: Ultimate Johnny Storm
1 Drop
Survivors/Fantastic Four
1/2 Flight/Range
Concealed. AU - Ultimate
Activate -> Search your deck for a character card that shares a printed affiliation with Human Torch. Use this power only once per turn and only if Human Torch is visible.
"Yo, Sue. You seen Reed?"

Black Panther: Light Snack
2 Drop
Survivors/Avengers
2/3
Concealed. AU - Zombie Earth. Reservist.
Reveal Black Panther -> Target character you control who is the only character you control in your hidden or your visible area may attack hidden characters this turn. Use this power only while Black Panther is in your hand or resource row.

Mr. Fantastic: Ultimate Reed Richards
2 Drop
Survivors/Fantastic Four
3/3 Range
Concealed - Optional. AU - Ultimate.
Whenever you are attacked directly you may exhaust Mr. Fantastic. If you do gain endurence equal to Mr. Fantastic's defense.

ORIGINAL
Invisible Woman: Ultimate Sue Storm
3 Drop
Survivors/Fantastic Four
4/5
Concealed - Optional. AU - Ultimate.
Activate -> Target character you control gets plus X defense this turn where X is equal to Invisble Woman's defense. Invisible Woman gets minus X defense for the turn.
"I don't know how long I can _hold_ them."
NEW
Invisible Woman: Ultimate Sue Storm
3 Drop
Survivors/Fantastic Four
4/3
Concealed - Optional. AU - Ultimate.
Activate -> Target character you control gets plus X defense this turn during your opponent's attack step where X is equal to Invisble Woman's defense. Invisible Woman gets minus X defense for the turn.
"I don't know how long I can _hold_ them."

Silver Surfer: Zombie Killing Space Surfer
3 Drop
Survivors/Heralds of Galactus
5/5 Flight/Range
Concealed - Optional. AU - Zombie Earth.
Silver Surfer gets -1 ATK/-1 DEF for each character you control in the same area.
Silver Surfer gets +1 ATK/+1 DEF for each character you control in a different area.

Thing: Ultimate Benjamin Grimm
4 Drop
Survivors/Fantastic Four
6/9
Concealed. AU - Ultimate.
At the start of your attack step, you may exhaust Thing. If you do exhaust target character with attack less than or equal to Thing's defense.
"Always _wondered_ if I could take this freak!"

Fabian Cortez: Leader in Exile
5 Drop
Survivors/Acolytes
9/9 Range
Concealed. Reservist. AU - Zombie Earth.
Reveal Fabian Cortez -> KO Fabian Cortez, search your deck for a location, reveal it and put it face down in your resource row. Use this power only if all characters you control share a printed affiliation with Fabian Cortez.

Magneto: Appetizer
5 Drop
Survivors/Acolytes
9/10 Flight/Range
Concealed - Optional. AU - Zombie Earth.
Free -> If you control an attacker, Magneto becomes an attacker. If you control a defender, Magneto becomes a defender and remove all other defenders from this attack. Use this power only while Magneto is the only hidden or only visible character you control and only once per turn.

Silver Surfer: Entree
6 Drop
Survivors/Heralds of Galactus
12/13 Flight/Range
Concealed - Optional. AU - Zombie Earth.
If Silver Surfer is the only character in your hidden area or the only character in your visible area he has Invulnerability.

Galactus: Main Course
7 Drop
Survivors/Heralds of Galactus
16/16 Flight/Range
AU - Zombie Earth.
When Galactus enters your hidden area move all other characters you control to your visible area. When Galactus enters your Visible Area move all other characters you control to your hidden area.
"YOU hunger!?"

"You wanna know how I got these scars...?"

2008-07-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

No Spoilers, short review of the Dark Knight, various thoughts, updates.

AHHAHHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHHHAHAHAHAAHHAAHAHAHHAAHAHAHHAAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHhahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHA
AHhaHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHABWAHAHAHAHAHAHABWAHHHHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
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AAHHHAAAAAHAHAHAHehehehehhHEHEHHEHEHEHEHHEEEHHHEHEHEHEBWWWAAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

/takes a deep breath.

I needed that. The Dark Knight was exactly what I needed, exactly what I wanted, everything I expected and more. Heath Ledger's performance was haunting, transcendent and I'd just like to say that the idea of a posthumous Oscar has true merit. If there is justice he will at least get the nomination. Will it be because he died? Probably. But never once did I stop to think, "Wow, it's creepy watching this knowing that he's dead." or "What a legacy." or anything of the sort in fact. I was so enraptured by The Joker that I forgot about actors and real life for two and half hours. And if Daniel Day-Lewis can get an Oscar for "just acting" regardless of the movie as some people claim (I haven't seen it yet, I want to, but I have a billion movies, comics, books and the like to catch up on) then why not Ledger? Whom Mr. Day-Lewis dedicated his Screen Actor's Guild award too, calling him "unique, perfect."

But it WASN'T "just acting" because the meat of this film is The Joker. They gave him so much to work with. He revels in it. He takes it and runs. It's... It's Oscar worthy, genre picture stigma be damned.

Look at the rest of the cast! Christian Bale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart... Wow, look at that cast folks. That's serious weighty actor folk there. They all deliver intense, amazing performances.

And if they hadn't set up the continuation of the franchise so well I'd wonder how the hell they move on from here. I think this is the 21rst century answer to James Bond. Batman can be forever. Just don't remind us of Batman Forever, okay guys?

Speaking of Bond, I'm really looking forward to the next one. I always like the idea of Bond more than the actual movies, but the new Bond series is exactly what he should be. No nonsense, tough as nails, witty super spy who bangs molten hot tail and then leaves without saying goodbye and never calls again, but cares.

Since there isn't any Bond VS I'll leave that there and move on.

UDE recently updated the points store and I was one of the lucky people to slip in early and grab my playset of Clash of Worlds. I told you all I was getting ready! I wasn't kidding, I popped my codes ASAP from my two MUN boxes and I grabbed 4x Clash as soon as they updated. I'm on Realms everyday and I was checking UDE.com/points every other day. Realms to the rescue as they were put up on my off day. Special thanks to KardKrazy who put the thread up. You can still grab Roshambo, Origin Story, Royal Flush Gang, Agility, 52, I think Superman/Batman Robot and some other nice cards though. I think I wanna play around with a Joker-Clash deck in honor of TDK. We'll see.

ALSO! Big news, Marvel Universe is getting a reprint! UDE listens and apparently enough of you played re-orders with stores. MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THROUGH! It's decidedly important that MUN does not end up festering on shelves, because seriously folks this is a HUGE step. UDE is taking a massive risk to the bottom line and this is sink or swim. We NEED a reprint, but at the same time we need to BUY that reprint, you know? I'm honestly not sure what to do. I have about a hundred bucks left from selling my guitar right now. I may pick up another box of MUN instead of saving it towards Evolutions. I just don't know what to do though.

Any thoughts?

Who's buying more MUN?

Anyway, that's it, sorry for updating so sparsely. I've taken up WoW. Not the card game, the MMO. I'm not sure which is worse. Hehe.

-Mike

DCU Preview! Tattooed Man, Mark Richards

2008-07-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

So, you're here for a DCU Preview eh? I hope you've been keeping up because this stuff is EXCITING! Direct stun? Check. Reign of Terror effect? Check. Just for SINESTRO!? Check! There was some Hal Jordan and Green Lantern goodies last week, but this week is about the Emerald Enemies.

I've been dying to show off this card, it's amazing. Absolutely, positively, amazing and follows in Sinestro: Deposed Dictator's footsteps of recalling previous effects that rocked the game. What effect is on the comeback? Well continue reading to see...

I'm not going to make you wait through a bunch more text, check out the card.

Whaaaaaaaaaat!? Yeah! No kidding! Dr. Light is back and he's bigger than before! Yes, not only does he gain the power affiliation of Secret Society, but he's also got an extra attack! He loses flight and now he's team stamped, but the only additional cost is that he has to pay the 2 willpower he has for the turn.

Oh no! How terrible- Wait. How insane is that!?

Even more insane is that you don't have to put a printed Emerald Enemy into play, you can put any 2 drop or less that you team up with them into play! You can put something like, oh, say...

Deadshot: Floyd Lawton into play! Did you miss him on 2? Did they play another 3 drop and you want to play your 4-drop? Kill it anyway! Wanna burn a LOT with Wylde: Charlie Wylde in your Outsiders team attack deck? Just start spamming characters old school GLEE style. 6 resource points on 4 could translate into 5 extra burn. Crime Doctor: Bradford Thorne turns Tattooed Man into a Puppet Master like character. You get two exhausts every other turn instead of one a turn, but on the off turn you can drop something like... Puppet Master. Thank you Underground Movement/Superhero Registration Act!

Team up with the X-Men and you can keep dropping Bishop: Age of Apocalypse to search for cards, much like Dr. Light's old buddy Kyle Rayner: Last Green Lantern. Want 3 or 4 copies of X-Men Assemble! online? Tattooed Man will help you!

Writing this preview is so easy. It was like a gift. To be fair, most of the hard work previewing this guy was done by all the people who made such innovative and sometimes obvious decks abusing our "favorite" card board rapist. So to feel like I'm putting a little more work into it, here's a little preview deck list! It's not complete, but it gives you the idea.

4x Emerald Enemy 1-drop
4x Domino, Neena Thurman
2x Shadowcat, Phase Shifter
4x Professor X, Idealistic Dreamer
4x Bishop, Age of Apocalypse
4x Captain America, The Patriot - Secret Avenger
4x Tattooed Man, Mark Richards
4x Wolverine, Age of Apocalypse
1x Blink, Age of Apocalypse
1x Holocaust, Age of Apocalypse

4x Birthing Chamber
4x Muir Island

4x Home Surgery
4x Savage Beatdown
4x Something That Grants Willpower
4x The Spectrum
4x X-Men Assemble

As we see more Emerald Enemies and more plot twists from the DC Universe set, this card just gets more and more powerful. Without even seeing a card in the set that can be put into play with Tattooed Man or enables him to team up more easily, he can all ready be a powerful lynch pin to many controlling or rush strategies.

-Mike

I'm Stupid. Yay!

2008-07-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

So, I need to learn to read the f'n card. I mean, I THOUGHT I could read. I thought for sure I could read, but man... I cannot read. Take a look at this card...

And see how totally NOT broken, but still totally cool it is? ::Sigh:: I thought I was so awesome. But man, I shoulda known somebody woulda been playing a super-tuned version of this at Worlds if it DID work. Damn, damn, damn. One of those days.

-Mike

A Modern Age Deck - The Accelerometer

2008-07-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

So I was working on this idea to abuse Satan Claw with The Captain and Death Warrant. I wasn't going to worlds, but I figured I'd try and build various decks to throw at Paul Sung in case something worked. I don't know if I ever played this one against him, because I made it pretty late in the game, but after that I hadn't gone back to look at it. However, with my boxes of MUN arriving and a thread on

VSRealmstalking about abusing Satan Claw I decided to tweak it some more. It was then I realized what I really had sitting under my nose...

8x A.I.M. Agents, Army - A.I.M.
6x Cape-Killer Units, Army - Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
5x MODOC Squad, Army - A.I.M.
4x The Captain, Can't Remember His Real Name
4x Red Skull, Johann Schmidt - HYDRA
4x Baron Strucker, Baron Wolfgang Von Strucks - HYDRA

2x Cosmic Cube
3x Death Warrant
4x Satan Claw

4x Cut Off One Head...
4x Double Agent
2x Finishing Move
3x Underground Laboratory
4x Mobilize
4x Losing The Argument

The idea was simple, Cape-Killer was just there because they helped you pull A.I.M. Agents to hand, grabbed your three or let you throw down two 2-drops on 3. Turn 4 was The Captain and if you had Death Warrant he equipped a Claw and became Baron Strucker. If you had a Cosmic Cube you named him Red Skull to grab whatever you wanted. Red Skull on Five let you burn them when The Captain hit their 4 drop if it was still around, or when Baron Strucker 6 KO'd their 6.

It was fun and all, but I realized something today during a test draw. Do you know what Cut Off One Head... _does_? What it does is gives you 2 resource points. Don't believe me? Read it again! You KO a Crime Lords army character and put two 2-drop or less Army characters into play. When you put Cape-Killers into play they rally for an army character and if they're successful you gain a resource point!

So, when I realized this, I realized that the deck wasn't about breaking the parity of Satan Claw, it was about getting out a 7 drop on turn 5! With that in mind here is the first draft of what I call the Accelerometer.

6x A.I.M. Agents, Army - A.I.M.
8x Cape-Killer Units, Army - Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
5x MODOC Squad, Army - A.I.M.
4x The Captain, Can't Remember His Real Name
3x Red Skull, Johann Schmidt - HYDRA
4x Baron Strucker, Baron Wolfgang Von Strucks - HYDRA
1x Red Skull, Master of Creation
1x Magneto, Master of Magnetism

4x Cosmic Cube
3x Death Warrant
2x Satan Claw

4x Cut Off One Head...
3x Superhuman Registration Act
4x HAIL HYDRA!
4x Mobilize
4x Losing The Argument

Thinking about what 7-drops I'd want to play on turn 7, a few came to mind such as Sabretooth: Genocidal Savage, Hulk: Joe Fixit and Galactus: The Maker. However I realized the best choice was probably the most obvious. Magneto: Master of Magnetism is an old stand by and the fact is that he's always been a strong splash for one simple reason. His power is freaking amazing.

I stun you? You're dead. Bad enough I have a 7-drop on turn 5, but I also have one that doesn't even let you keep your biggest character. Any character at that! If I've been KO'ing your characters before now anyway, you're likely going to have a hard time reinforcing against or stunning Magneto.

The first question of course is, how consistent is it? Well, I got a draw good enough to play Magneto on turn 5 in 5 out of 8 test draws so far. He hit the board on 6 in another test draw. And in one of the 5 where he hit on 5 I all most could have forced him out on 4. I just would have needed another Losing The Argument.

The strategy is pretty simple, you wanna hit HAIL HYDRA!, Cape-Killers Unit, Losing The Arguemnt and Cut Off One Head... while ditching copies of the 2 drop into the pile. Turn 5, search out Magneto, stack the deck with Losing and Cut Off One Head... to put two Cape-Killers into play. Hit your rallies, play Magneto. Win. Odd initiatives, obviously, allow you to use Satan Claw on The Captain against their 4 and if you have a Death Warrant, you stun your 4 to KO their 4-drop.

Don't get the combo? Only hit one rally? You can still play Red Skull or Baron Strucker and pull it out next turn. I'm thinking there may be some more ways to make it more consistent, or maybe I should run one copy of The Sleeper: Doomsday Device * RAID.

Is it possible to go off more? Like can you pull off 2 Cut Off The Head... and gain 4 resource points? When? Turn 5? Can you do that on turn 4? Fin Fang Foom eat your heart out!

-Mike

Final Analysis - Iron Man vs. Captain America Packs!

2008-07-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

So who busts better packs? Captain America or Iron Man?

Pack by pack, Iron Man slightly edged out the All-American hero, but the fact is I think overall pulls count a lot more. So I delved into the cards and while sorting them noted a few particulars that mattered to me. Things like how many 8 drops they pulled or members of Nextwabve. Bad things, good things. Hopefully interesting. And after that I decided to rank the rares from 1 - 10 with 10 being the best and total a score for each of our pack art models. Who wins? Well, read on to find out.

Iron Man Breakdown

# of Foils = 6
# of Uncommons out of 110 = 69
# of Search Cards = 2
# of Uncommon/Rare IM Legend Support = 4
# of Uncommon/Rare CA Legend Support = 3
# of Nextwave Characters = 4 (including The Captain!)
# of Foil Rares = 2
# of Rare 8 Drops = 5
# of Potential Money Rares = 6-8
# of Rares I Didn't Want To Pull = 6 (and not all the 8 drops were in here. LOL)

Rares
1x Vision, Young Avenger
1x Wolverine, Secret Avenger
1x Captain America's Shield
1x Helmut Zemo <> Baron Zemo, Master of the Moonstones
1x Radioactive Man, Containment Suit
1x Thunderbolts Mountain
1x The Sentry, Might Avenger
1x Spider-Man, Unmasked
1x Hulkbuster Armor
1x Stark Armory
2x I'm A Futurist
1x Headcase, Sean Madigan - A.I.M.
1x HYDRA Armageddon Carrier
1x Underground Laboratory
1x Annihilus, The Living Death That Walks
1x Thanos, Mad Titan
1x Negative Zone, Non-Unique - Gateway
1x Alpha Flight Reborn
1x Silent War
1x Loki, Loki Laufeyson
1x Adam Warlock, Savior of the Universe
1x The Beyonder, Inhuman
1x Death, The Second Force of the Universe
1x Fin Fang Foom, He Whose Limbs Shatter Mountains
1x Carrying The Torch

Foils
1x Swordsman, Andrew Von Strucker
1x Iron Man, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
1x I'm A Futurist
1x Headcase, Sean Madigan - A.I.M.
1x Red Skull, Johann Schmidt - HYDRA
1x Sub-Mariner, Protector of the Time Gem

Captain America Breakdown

# of Foils = 6
# of Uncommons out of 110 = 67
# of Search Cards = 2
# of Uncommon/Rare IM Legend Support = 4 (counting Secret Government)
# of Uncommon/Rare CA Legend Support = 4 (countin Punisher: Captain America and James Barnes <> Captain America)
# of Nextwave Characters = 3 (no copies of The Captain)
# of Foil Rares = 2
# of Rare 8 Drops = 4
# of Potential Money Rares = 7-9
# of Rares I Didn't Want To Pull = 5 (and yeah, not all the 8 drops were included here, either)

Rares
1x Cable, Secret Avenger
1x Punisher, Secret Avenger
1x Wolverine, Secret Avenger
1x Captain America's Shield
1x Helmut Zemo <> Baron Zemo, Master of the Moonstones
1x Thunderbolts Mountain
1x Life Model Decoy, More Human Than Human
1x Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
1x The Sentry, Mighty Avenger
1x You're Under Arrest!
1x The Gorgon, Tomi Shishido - HYDRA
1x Underground Laboratory
1x Cut Off One Head...
1x Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas!
1x Hulk Smash!
1x Righteous Anger
1x Annihilus, The Living Death That Walks
1x Negative Zone, Non-Unique - Gateway
1x Gift For Death
1x Beta Ray Bill, Simon Walters - Omega Flight
1x The Infinity Gauntlet
1x Thor, Donald Blake
1x Kang <> Iron Lad, Non-Unique - Young Avenger
1x Punisher, Captain America
1x Carrying The Torch
1x I Got'em All!

Foils
1x Human Torch, Secret Avenger
1x Liberating Number 42
1x Speedball Is Dead
1x Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas!
1x Punisher, Captain America
1x Richard Rider <> Nova Centurion, Keeper of the Worldmind

So based on that information I think Captain America edge out Iron Man. With the pack by packs going to Iron Man it looks like a tie until we factor in the rare ratings which will ultimately decide who provides better packs. Now mind you these are my own opinions on the cards, not necessarily a strict playability rating. 5 means, I don't love or hate it, but it could also be good for trades. Below that is something I don't really care for and probably won't trade well. Above is stuff I want, is playable and would definitely trade well.

I also took out any rares that they both had as it would just wash anyway.

Iron Man Rares
1x Vision, Young Avenger = 3
1x Radioactive Man, Containment Suit = 10
1x Spider-Man, Unmasked = 5
1x Hulkbuster Armor = 5
1x Stark Armory = 8
2x I'm A Futurist = 7
1x Headcase, Sean Madigan - A.I.M. = 5
1x HYDRA Armageddon Carrier = 6
1x Thanos, Mad Titan = 5
1x Alpha Flight Reborn = 5
1x Silent War = 5
1x Loki, Loki Laufeyson = 1
1x Adam Warlock, Savior of the Universe = 5
1x The Beyonder, Inhuman = 7
1x Death, The Second Force of the Universe = 7
1x Fin Fang Foom, He Whose Limbs Shatter Mountains = 6

Iron Man scores 97!

Captain America Rares
1x Cable, Secret Avenger = 5
1x Punisher, Secret Avenger = 7
1x Life Model Decoy, More Human Than Human = 7
1x Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. = 6
1x The Sentry, Mighty Avenger = 5
1x You're Under Arrest! = 5
1x The Gorgon, Tomi Shishido - HYDRA = 5
1x Cut Off One Head... = 7
1x Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas! =7
1x Hulk Smash! = 10
1x Righteous Anger = 10
1x Gift For Death = 3
1x Beta Ray Bill, Simon Walters - Omega Flight = 5
1x The Infinity Gauntlet = 6
1x Thor, Donald Blake = 5
1x Kang <> Iron Lad, Non-Unique - Young Avenger = 1
1x Punisher, Captain America = 7
1x I Got'em All! = 8

Captain America scores 109!

So, despite losing pack for pack, in the end Captain America's draws were just better overall.

Captain America vs. Iron Man; MUN Pulls Challenge Box 2

2008-07-09T00:26:00.000-07:00

This time I'm gonna give Iron Man first open on the top 3 packs and Cap first open on the bottom three. Let's get this party started!

Pack 1

Oooh, another double rare pack for Tony! Foil I'm A Futurist! And we have a Radioactive Man: Containment Suit one of my big wants for this set! But Captain America swings back with his Shield! If it wasn't for the foil, this would probably be a draw, but I'm giving it to the power suited facist.

Pack 2

Iron Man has a Stark's Armory, another high priority for me, looking like Iron Man may jump to an early lead. Spider-Girl, Speedball Is Dead, looking good- Ouch, Annihilus. Again. Yuck.

Pack 3

Tony stumbles a bit, this time only a Spider-Man: Unmasked. I like the card, but it's middle of the road, especially after two awesome packs! Ack, the Sentry strikes again! I guess in a pack for pack analysis I give the win to Cap, though it's hard to not evaluate it knowing I all ready have him.

Captain America 1 - Iron Man 2, time to flip flop. Cap packs first!

Pack 4

Wow, S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents, Elsa Bloodstone, Death of the Dream and Joystick! Great pack for Captain America and Underground Laboratory rounds it out. Mmmm, Thanos: The Mad Titan. I really dig Radically Altered, so... Tough choice. On the strength of the Uncommons I think Cap has this one.

Pack 5

Captain America rocking the S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents once again, plus a Squirrel Girl and Wolverine: Secret Avenger! Iron Man busts a foil Red Skull: Johann Schmidt, first Blizzard: Frosty Friend with the rare being... Alpha Flight Reborn. Hmm, I'd give this to the Canadian X-Man again, sorry guys, but Bizzard and shinyness is enough to put AFR over Wolvie. Probably both will be better trade bait than anything for me though!

Pack 6

We have an Echo for Cap, foil Richard Rider and Thunderbolts Mountain! Iron Man has Blade, Tabitha Smith and... I'm A Futurist. That's a close one, but I'm gonna have to say Captain America wins cause the Mountain can Bomb on 6, I'm A Futurist would just put it in your hand. Hehe.

Captain America 3 - Iron Man 3, we're tied after 6 packs again and back to Iron Man first.

Pack 7

Iron Man's got Power Dampners and The Beyonder, very nice I have my 1x each of the 10 drops. Here's to not seeing any more! Aaron Stack, Extremis Upgrade and another Negative Zone: Gateway. Oh well, I'm giving this to Iron Man.

Pack 8

Pack 8 brings a foil 7-drop Iron Man for Iron Man! And now we have giant dragon in pants! Fin Fang Foom! Gotta love a giant dragon that wears pants. Foil! I think that's the first foil v foil match up so far. Liberating Number 42 for Captain America. His rare is... HULK SMASH! I just wish THAT had been the foil. The alt-art is soooo much cooler. Captain America easily!

Pack 9

I got a Final Justice! And Vision isn't terrible, but not what I want to see as my packs are winding down, that's for sure. Foil Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas! Mr. Rogers walks away a winner no matter what the regular rare is now. Stars and Stripes... Carrying The Torch! BIG winner right before he takes over first packs again!

Captain America 5 - Iron Man 4

Pack 10

Captain America opens with a Cape-Killers Unit and Cable: Secret Avenger. Not bad. Iron Man responds with Fight Or Die and HYDRA Armageddon Carrier! I'll give the slight edge to Iron Man on this one.

Pack 11

Well, Cap brings a Secret Government and sadly a Helmut Zemo 8-drop. Looks like Iron Man closes the gap and takes the lead... Silent War confirms it! Best the good Captain can do now is tie it up!

Pack 12

My first Korg and... I Got'em All! which is sadly not true, but such an awesome card I'm very happy to have it. Iron Man has Adam Warlock: Savior of the Universe, who does not save Iron Man! Captain America wins this one.

Captain America 6 - Iron Man 6. I declare this box officially a draw!

Now the next question is overall quality! But not tonight. Gotta finish entering my points cards for when Clash of Worlds shows up in the points store!

-Mike

I Hate How UPS Doesn't Knock.

2008-07-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

I got the boxes about an hour ago! By chance I was going to get some ice water and figured I'd open the front door... "Just in case." And there were two packages! One was for me! When did UDE stop inserting the box toppers? I always liked those... Anyway, let's get on with the competition!

Pack 1

Captain America wins easily, foil Human Torch: Secret Avenger and Thor: Donald Blake vs. Loki:: Loki Laufeyson. Power Dampners, Nick Fury and Arnim Zola don't hurt. Alias Investigations is a great uncommon, but not a fan of Realm of the Mind or 2-Drop Iron Fist <> Daredevil.

Pack 2

Captain America has Beta Ray Bill while Iron Man brings me my first S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents and Wolverine: Secret Avenger! Sorry Lost Hemisphere, I know this would be a win for Cap in your book, but in mine it's Iron Man's victory.

Pack 3

Cap coming through with another foil! This time it's the awesome Speedball Is Dead! Nick Fury: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. is pretty nice too! Hulkbuster Armor and Sub-Mariner: Avenging Son just don't cut it. And Dr. Doom: Future Perfect just taunts me with his name and his not being awesome.

Captain America 2 - Iron Man 1, switching it up.

Pack 4

Iron Man draws his first foil, but it's a Swordsman. :( Secret War is right next to it, why couldn't THAT be the foil? The Sentry: Mighty Avenger, not bad! Heh, The Patriot - Secret Avenger is the first card in this Cap pack. And a foil! Punisher: Captain America! And with Cut Off One Head, we have another Captain America win.

Pack 5

Echo! Free stuff rocks. Wow! Another foil! Sub-Mariner: Protector of the Time Gem. Direct attack Wolverine and Death, this will be a hard pack for Cap to beat. I'm talking Underground Movement/Superhero Registration Act or something like that. Kang <> Iron Lad is not gonna do it.

Pack 6

Iron Man loves equipment, even if it's Captain America's Shield! S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents, James Barnes <> Captain America: Legacy Reborn and Gift For Death don't quite measure up, though Bucky certainly would like to USE the Shield.

Captain America 3 - Iron Man 3, and flipping back again.

Pack 7

Another 2-drop Cap for Cap, Blade is nice, but You're Under Arrest doesn't do it for me. The Captain alone wins this one for Iron Man! Though I don't care much for Helmut Zemo <> Baron Zemo: Master of the Moonstones either.

Pack 8

Captain America gives me my first Deadpool! Satan Claw and Punisher: Secret Avenger are pretty nice. For Iron Man though we have Echo, Green King and our first double rare pack! Foil Head Case and... Thunderbolts Mountain! Very nice. Iron Man pulling away.

Pack 9

Extremis Upgrade and The Gorgon. I really like Gorgon, I think there's a very good control deck with the Crime Lords, involving him, just not sure what it looks like. Strongest One There Is, Code White, good start. Carrying the Torch! Iron Man by a mile!

Captain America 3 - Iron Man 6, one final switch for this box.

Pack 10

While Iron Man has, Hawkeye <> Ronin and Underground Laboratory... Cap brings me my first The Big Three and a Life Model Decoy. Hmm, that's a hard choice. I think I'm gonna give this... A draw. That's right, neither is better or worse. They're just equally "okay."

Pack 11

Squirrel Girl! Yay! And Righteous Anger! Very nice! Cap may yet make this a respectable showing. Negative Zone: Gateway. While nice, I don't really want the Negative Zone stuff, so Captain America wins this one!

Pack 12

Another Deadpool, another Big Three and Speed Demon! Finally! As for Cap's rare we have The Infinity Gauntlet! Nice trade bait I think. And the final Iron Man pack of Box 1 brings us... Annhilus. Yuck. Now I see why the 8 drops are so annoying. Ah well.

Final score: Captain America 5 - Iron Man 6, not bad! Box 2 coming later. I wanna enter my points cards now!

-Mike

Out For Delivery; Sweetest Words Ever!

2008-07-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

07/08/2008 04:41:00 OUT FOR DELIVERY[I] SUNNYVALE, CA, US

That's my two boxes of Marvel Universe! I can't wait to get them. I think I'll follow in the footsteps of great bloggers before me and see which packs give better pulls. Captain America... Or Iron Man. I'm putting my bet on good old reliable Captain America.

-Mike

Sorry For The Lack Of Updates... Look A Gif!

2008-07-08T03:56:00.001-07:00

Okay, so the gif doesn't work if I just put it in here... Ah-hah, that got it... And of course as punishment for being a lazy blogger, I had to do more work to get that done than I probably would have needed to for a real post!

-Mike

Thursday (Yeah I Know) Thirteen - Week Four

2008-06-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

But it's Monday! But I'm way behind! So let's cut to the chase. Four drops. You love them, I love them. These are my favorites and not necessarily the best, but just the ones I like best. Some are important to the history of the game, some are power brokers and some are just damn cool or even all three. I cut down from 24 this week, proving once again, that it's getting easier as I go along.

Here we go...

#13: You know I love No-Hand Squadron. He is a hell of a good reason why. He's a nice 7/6 and then you get his effect. Burn for 6!? Crazy! How can he do that!? Well, they gain one back for each card in your hand. Oh, okay... Well, wait, so if I just have no cards he burns for 6? Ooooh yeah.

#12: Little Bucky didn't die, he grew up Red. This version of the Winter Soldier is unaffiliated and falls into a very dangerous category of characters. His power allows you to directly KO a character. That's a nasty power. In a game won and lost on missed drops at times, KO'ing someone, effectively for free? Especially a character up the curve? Incredible. Unlike some other characters with this ability though, Bucky makes you work for it. I have this Turbo Bucky combo-ish deck in my head that I'll have to write up if it ever starts firing. I have a feeling Sniper Shot ala Eugenio is a much easier and more consistent choice, not to mention all ready developed, but options are good.

#11: Ahh, Poison Ivy, quite a regular on my lists so far. She's a bit further down on the list here, but she's just not quite as good at four as she is earlier in the game. Stealing a 2 drop or KO'ing a character is very nice, but her activate cost is a bit prohibitive. While Bucky kills things without having to do anything and other characters kill things by doing what comes naturally, she has to have a character stunned before she can use her ability. So KO'ing a four drop on 4 require a 3 drop to go up the curve. Why is she a favorite then? Well, it's Poison Ivy! Also, I had quite a few sealed decks that decimated people with Ivy Lock.

#10: Wow, I may be under rating this guy, but I'm still trying figuring him out. With the Iron Man support in Marvel Universe, just having the name is pretty good. Extremis Upgrade is ridiculous. Nimrod every turn? Check! Stark Armory growing him every turn? Check! I'm A Futurist doubles as a character search? Yes, yes it does! Better yet though, his effect is amazing. It lets you keep your board and they get bigger to boot! Your three drop is good as a 5/4, he'll be better as a 6/5. Your five drop is only a 9/9? Next turn he's a 10/10. That's using average characters! Imagine him teamed up with Thing: Heavy Hitter or Wolverine: Logan! Or my favorite pairing so far, Radioactive Man: Containment Suit.

#9: So John isn't obviously a powerful card. But he's on here because I have a really fun Willpower deck that uses him to power a few combos. His ally effect works great with Oa, Ultra-Humanite: Evolutionary Antecendent, Katma Tui, Wall of Will, Guy Gardner and Satellite HQ. Even The Ring Has Chosen sometimes is ably assisted by John. I've turned games around when I missed on 5, but powered up and searched out Sinestro-6.

#8: So drawing cards, nice defense and he grants team ups. You'd think they're be powerful in that order: most to least. But the ability to give adjacent characters the X-Men affiliation is what really put Professor X on the map. Drawing cards is always nice, but you have to make it to the recovery phase. Good defense helps with that, but even better is letting Xavier's School ready Puppet Master (or you know, Dr. Light: Master of Holograms before he was banned, who... got another Puppet Master usually anyway) to exhaust an additional character who is one more character who can't attack into the big chair end of Chuck. Oh, and then draw a card when they can't stun him. Hehe.

#7: My only cheat this week. Bullets or arrows, guns or bows, these guys will kill you dead. In that power group of 4-drops with KO powers, these are probably the best. Punisher KO's anyone he stuns at the low cost of playing equipment while making equipment better anyway! Merlyn requires locations and is a little more fragile, but his power has been proven in the past, having won a PC. He activates, sure, but he doesn't need a stunned character! Both are 7/7 with range and both play into a theme of their team. Marvel Knights are good with KO's and equipment, while the League of Assassins was the original Location hog. Both have great search, they're both uncommons, it's no wonder that with the addition of a KO ability they've rocked the house. And luckily both are very cool characters. Merlyn's appearances in Green Arrow's solo series which I recently caught up on are absolutely brutal in the best possible way.

#6: Rogue is the kind of card that makes combos you didn't think possible, possible. She allows you to copy an ability, like, maybe KO'ing characters based on your number of locations or exhaust a character like Puppet Master or any number of other things. My favorite Rogue trick was in a Heroes United deck. Rogue, Mr. Fantastic: Stretch, and Professor X: World's Most Powerful Telepath. Normal F4 burn got 9-12 off each Cosmic. With Rogue and Professor X you could get 18 with just the two of them! And on the occasion you faced off against Thing: Heavy Hitter...? 22 damage on their initiative turn 7 is usually insurmountable.

#5: "I bet you a fucking dollar The Captain makes Top 8 at Worlds." Well, I wish Guglio or anyone else had taken me up on that offer. And thank you to Brian Eugenio, local deck builder extraordinaire, who not only proved my prediction on The Captain right, but also went all the way to the finals and won the WHOLE event with the Nextwaver, becoming the very first VS Worlds champion. Which I also predicted after seeing the Top 8 after day 2. Congratulations Brian! You deserve it, big time. I could tell you a million things to do with The Captain, but I'd rather just build decks and show you later!

#4: This card just doesn't seem like it should work the way it does. I read it and thought for sure I was reading it wrong. Go ahead, take a look... Read it yourself. Yeah, see? She's direct burn that you can add attack pumps onto! How crazy is that!? Savage Beatdown? +5, direct to the face! But of course, like any deck that attack so efficiently, think Quickfate, you play Samantha Parrington on 5 and Elektra can attack twice letting you play for the turn effects like Flying Kick, Combat Reflexes and Tania Belinskya. I like to team her up with my favorite 3-drop Dr. Doom with Lust for Power to load up a huge hand of pumps before you smack the crap out your opponent!

#3: I think Sentinel Mark V is one of the most important cards to ever be printed. For good or evil, Curve Sentinels was the dominant deck in VS for longer than anything before or since. Strategies like Puppet Master and Rigged Elections have always been at the edge of the meta waiting to jump in and steal the event, but Curve Sentinels ruled supreme. They had the tools since Origins with Bastion, Nimrod, Micro-Sentinels, Search and Destroy and one set later the addition of Total Anarchy, but they needed a bridge to the future, and this four drop/five drop turned the dial to 11. I enjoyed my time with Curve Sentinels, but will admit I was very happy to see Avengers dethrone them. I think the reason many people felt smothered by the Purple Curve King was not because the Robots weren't a good deck, but because they were the Kings of Savage/Nasty/Overload too. Combined with an open ended deck list they could tech against and beat all most anything.

#2: I love assassin characters. Deathstroke is one of the coolest. He's so cool even Deadpool, who originally was just Rob Liefield's excuse to draw Deathstroke, is that much cooler by association. And Deadpool is cool on his own! This version is one of my favorites. He's powerful and will usually see play if he's your main four drop. The effect of burning your opponent whenever he stuns is simple, but very effective. He's practically got invulnerability, but instead of taking 0, you just even the playing field. This gave him a prominent place in the High Voltage burn deck that aimed to drop your opponent to zero very fast by Enemy'ing out the nastiest burn options it could get it's hands on. Besides effects though, the guy has his own team! And a sword too! (if you get that joke, congratulations, you have a good memory!)

#1: You knew this was coming right? How could you not? Dr. Doom won the first PC, he won the last PC. He was my first major VS love and to this day nothing thrills me more than dropping him, turning up a search card and turning it back down before clearing a board full of weenies with Reign of Terror. 7/9, 10/6, whatever flavor your Doomstadt it turns him into a monster and if you don't like attacking he can just remove people from the fight to begin with via Mystical. Best of all though, your opponent can't do anything about it. Locking the plot twists in your opponent's hands from being played can devastate their game plan. I've had people scoop on turn 4 in response to a second Reign of Terror that they're powerless to stop. Diabolic Genius, is probably the most successful card in VS history. I'd be very surprised if any character card has been in more PC Top 8 decks than him. And I bet he gives Beatdown and Enemy of My Enemy a run for their money.

-Mike

Crossblog Challenge Prizes!

2008-06-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

Remember the Crossblog Challenge?

No? Well, it was a week of coordinated posts by some of my fellow bloggers that lead to a puzzle, helped you solve the puzzle and told you how to turn in the answer for a prize of 12 packs of VS system product! I was very excited about it and dedicated a few days of time to figuring it out.

And I won!

So I got my packs today. It was 4 packs of Man Of Steel, 2 Infinite Crisis, 3 JLA and 3 Avengers. Now, that's certainly not the most desirable package I've ever received, but for free I'd take a any cards! Hehe. I got some decent rares even. 3... 2... 1... and Removed From Continuity from the Crisis packs; Secret Origins, Psycho Pirate and Mogo from JLA; Foil War of Attrition, Avenger's Mansion and Avenger's Assemble from MAV and Astro Force and Anti-Life Equation from Superman.
The only two bad rares were Hank Henshaw <> Cyborg: Evil Imposter and Ride of the Black Racer, which at least is a very cool looking foil.

Thanks guys! The challenge alone was fun enough that I didn't care about prizes as much as solving it.

Speaking of the fun of it, I'm gonna try and get back in the swing of things here soon. Tonight or tomorrow I'll do late Thursday Thirteen on my favorite 4-drops and then I'll post up the text of the first draft of the Survivors team to start the second part of the Marvel Zombies Fan EC. I also have a contest of my own brewing in my head. It'll involve deckbuilding and alternative strategies. More on that later though!

Remember to read the Crossblog Challenge hosts by clicking them in my blog roll, and if you don't remember, they were Lost Hemisphere, Lost Planet and The Kamiza!

-Mike

Much Late Tournamnet Report and Modern Age Musings

2008-06-25T00:33:00.000-07:00

Pre-Face: I've been working on this since Friday now and I just can't remember the details of the matches well enough to match them up with the endurance totals. So, I'd just like to say upfront I switch from detailed report to kinda fuzzy recollections half way through.

Okay, so better late than never! I apologize for the delay, stuff came up. But last Monday I went to a tournament in Hayward, for the Marvel Release Celebration run by Curtis "T'Challa" Brown who most of you probably know on Realms. Playing Superman/Batman Robot in Modern required me to borrow some cards, but luckily Curtis is very cool and all was well. Even though he didn't have exactly what I wanted he had stuff and I was happy just to play.

The switch from Sealed to Modern was originally due to product lacking, but as of the day of the tournament there WAS enough MUN to do sealed but, rightfully, Curtis said unless everybody wanted to do Sealed we'd stick with Modern cause the price difference was 25 vs. 10. I was kinda looking forward to sealed, but we didn't get a totally unanimous vote so Modern prep for World's it was.

With me was my friend Muffin who's learning the game and literally decided to play a deck built from 3 packs of DC Legends, 3 packs of Marvel Legends and whatever reprints he had from older packs. That's a trooper folks! Well, in my line of thinking anyway. He just "likes" playing his own cards and he just likes playing period. I never was really certain about the idea of archtypical players, but I think he fits. I don't know which one, but who cares as long as we enjoy ourselves.

Here's the list I played.

4x Superman/Batman Robot
4x Maggie Sawyer
4x White Lotus
2x Huntress, Vicious Vigilante
2x Krypto
4x Barbara Gordon <> Oracle, Elite Hacker
1x Batman, Twilight Vigilante
4x Superman, Man of Tomorrow
2x Dinah Laurel Lance <> Black Canary, Cry In The Dark

27 Characters

2x Coast City

4x Bat-Signal
3x Blinding Rage
4x Combat Reflexes
4x Crackshot
3x Heroic Effort
4x Home Surgery
1x Mental Blast
4x Teen Supreme
4x The Hook-Up

34 Others

Ideally I would have played 3x Metropolis Marvel instead of Man of Tomorrow, though he's very nice with Coast City, which I had never thought about until I was looking through Curtis' cards for some filler. I think in Modern Coast City will definitely stick around and maybe even in Silver if there's room. Blinding Rage/Mental Blast woulda been Soaring To New Heights, but I really think Blinding Rage works well. Especially if you have 4 Krypto's like you mean too. Also Heroic Effort should be Clash of Worlds.

I think I'll write a bit more about a fixed deck list below, at the event I wasn't exactly stressing. I just wanted to play. I went a long time without getting many games in and as I said when starting this blog, I really missed it because I love VS. I'll play this game long after it's gone, which hopefully won't be anytime soon.

(Pre-order, pre-order, pre-order...)

Game one I was paired with Chris and we sat down and shuffled up. I mulliganed a hand with The Hook-Up two Teen Supremes and a Home Surgery. I wish I had kept cause the first card off the top was Maggie and I drew into a Robot on Turn 1.

In anycase I had evens and so he played Mastermind Excello first, discarding a Hulk to draw two. I laid down Maggie Sawyer and swung for one. Turn two I had Huntress concealed and passed. He must have missed based on the endurance totals, but I originally was thinking he had played Rick Jones. I'm sure he dug for cards though. I swung direct for 5 and passed. Next turn he had Hiroim and I played Barbie. He swung on Maggie, I took 4 and Bat-Signaled for Twilight Vigilante. I think I had Hook-Up and started the usual big card draw here.

And, I just can't make sense of the game from the life totals from here. He hit Korg, he hit Green King. I know I had a huge hand full of pump and just needed the Teen Supremes a couple turns to win, but never drew any after the mulligan. He went from 44 to 39 to 28 to 24 to 19 to 15 to 9 to 3 to -3, but I was at -9 by that time. He hit me for 23 with Green King and then 6 more. I also taught him that Righteous Anger is a once per turn kinda thing. Hehe. I remember we made it turn 8, but my Black Canary didn't do much against the 17/17 King.

Next round I was inevitably paired against the new player I brought with me. lol Seems to be the way tournaments work out for me. There was only 8 of us anyway. Probably a good chance we'd have faced off anyway.

I'm pretty sure I had Maggie Sawyer to start and then Huntress, Vicious Vigilante. His first play was Bart Allen <> Kid Flash, Heir to the Mantle. He followed with Firehawk, Flaming Justice and I played Barbara and used The Hook-Up a couple times.

On turn four I had Batman and he played Rose Wilson <> The Ravager, Redemption Earned who for some reason I didn't think was on the Titans later and would cost me the game. Batman and a pump hit Ravager for 10 and did 10.Gotta love that double stun endurance loss. On turn five I got stupid and greedy. He played Freddy Freeman <> Captain Marvel Jr., Third in Line and I thought, "Oh man, I need to be able to stun back at least one of his guys... I better play my Robot here."

So I boost the Robot for five and pass to him. He team attacks with Rose and Freddy and I plotz. I've got 2 Home Surgery that will do nothing and a hand full of Crackshot and Combat Reflexes just waiing for a juicy Teen Supreme. So yeah, I trade 5 for none, but lose my Robot. Next turn I have like Krypto and a Teen Supreme. Barbie and Hook-Up into another. And he under drops a big board of characters who aren't teamed up! I could about cry. I've never seen a prettier opening just waiting for smashies.

Le sigh.

Long story, short, too late... I lose on 8 and made a mistake in my attacks, where I coulda gotten it to him -14 while I was at -15, but the actual end was -15 to -7 or something. I played Canary concealed to guarantee swing backs, but I'm pretty sure he team attacked my visible character so... Maybe I could have won. I don't know. I wasn't in the right frame of mind. I got very tilted by the Robot mis-recruit on 5. I was out of the game there. Either way it was a fun, tense match up for me.

In the final round I played Kevin and had evens. I played out Maggie and he responded with the same play, commenting, "Uh oh, you're playing the same thing!" and I replied, "Maybe, I guess we'll see."

Well, I had Barbara on three and flipped the Hook-Up named GK/Team Superman. He played Batman, Problem Solver also using The Hook-Up. On turn 4 I played Batman, Twilight Vigilante in the visible area and he dropped Superman: (EDIT) Last Son of Krypton and No Stun Endurance Loss even when you double it. We attacked around and I lost Maggie. Next turn was Superman for both of us. I had Superman: Man of Tomorrow in front of Batman and he played Superman, Metropolis Marvel after At Their Finest and searching him out. I flipped Coast City and activated on Man of Tomorrow, se he went at him with Marvel and I reinforced. I love taking 0.

On six I played Superman/Batman Robot and he dropped... I forget but he missed Batman and I know that was his main plan cause it was much lamented. It probably wouldn't have made a ton of difference, but then again Coast City was pretty useful more than once. Oh! Two Face. Who tapped down my Superman/Batman Robot. I had one Teen Supreme but the pumps in hand were probably better used waiting I thought. I mean, both Two-Face and Superman: Metropolis Marvel were 12/12 to my 12/12 so it didn't gain me board advantage and if I drew a Home Surgery, Babs could recover the Robots for Teen Supremes to go off.

On seven I played Canary and he replaced Superman with the 7 drop who's just a real dick. Deterrent Force, that is. He activated on Canary and Two Face exhaust Superman/Batman Robot I believe. No, he attacked, that's right. He hit Batman and I swung back with the Robot to trade. Superman after a Blinding Rage. On 8 I had... Krypto I believe. He played 8-drop Kara Zor-El. Who is just awesome, by the way.

Robot/Krypto team attack Superman and I took 2. Black Canary swung into Kara and I played a Crackshot. I played a Combat Reflexes and Batman negated it. Blinding Rage for the sealed deal and the final totals are -1 to 1. I'm the negative one.

So close. One pump. At some point he negated my Teen Supremes too, I'm sure.

So, what would I play in Modern for the Robots after this experience, ideally?

4x Superman/Batman Robot
4x Maggie Sawyer
2x White Lotus
3x Alfred Pennyworth
4x Krypto
4x Barbara Gordon <> Oracle, Elite Hacker
1x Batman, Twilight Vigilante
3x Superman, Metropolis Marvel
2x Dinah Laurel Lance <> Black Canary, Cry In The Dark
1x Lady Shiva, Jade Canary

27 Characters

3x Coast City

4x Bat-Signal
3x Blinding Rage
3x Clash of Worlds
4x Combat Reflexes
2x Omnipotence
4x Home Surgery
3x Soaring To New Heights
4x Teen Supreme
4x The Hook-Up

34 Others

The draw power is fantastic. The ability to just drop pump after pump after pump is incredible. Even better is that with Clash of Worlds you can play a HUGE four drop and a HUGE five drop that take no stun endurance loss and with Coast City and Home Surgery you can often force very bad attacks. Without the digging power of Helm of Nabu, I think you need a longer curve, but can still go off on 4 or 5 and just win outright at least once every few games.

I would probably even play this at World's just because it'd be fun. Not the best choice, but I expect a lot of Marvel Knights and while a deck like MKKO seems like a really bad match, I think you smash them. Just don't recruit the Robot without an active Omni on Black Widow. Blade might hurt a bit, but I think you can recover from losing Barbara and stabilize.

Against Hulk Omnipotence has got it's obvious uses. One of which is NOT stopping Green Scar, but if they can't play Righteous Anger things are pretty good for you. Bat Got Your Tongue is a nice target against JLA/World's Finest builds. Illuminati is chock full of targets to Omnipotence and is probably the one match up you need to take odds on, in case they're going to Glove you.

I don't know what all else is out there, but I'm sure Reservists will see play. Crime Lords have to have some kind of juicy build. Quicksilver/Clash/Teen Supremes seems a pretty likely combo deck waiting to happen. S.H.I.E.L.D. potentially has a couple builds that could make it. And I'll say it here, I bet The Captain is in the Top 8 either Day 1 or Day 3.

-Mike

Tournament Report Delayed

2008-06-19T05:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry guys, inspiration struck and I've been working on my novel instead. Can't pass up a gift like that, I've written 3,482 words and that's more than I've gotten done in one sitting for more than a year. Looks like I'm actually going to finish it sometime this week.

Exciting times! Guess it's time to get myself ready to deal with trying to get an editor and publisher.

Anybody have any connections they wanna hook me up with? I'm totally not above nepotism.

-Mike

Checking In With Some Art

2008-06-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Played at the Hayward Release Celebration put on by Angel's Anime Outpost and run by the Realms' Curtis "T'Challa" Brown. Had a good time, played me some Robots again. Was hampered a bit by being unable to draw what I needed, but... More on that later. Click below to see some art I found that I just thought was awesome. Kind of goofy and light hearted. Certainly made me feel better about my record. :)

Happy Father's Day!

2008-06-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

To all the Dads out there, this is your day. Hope you enjoy it and remember... It could be worse. You could have more of'em!

-Mike

.

Ranma's Comic Review: KICK-ASS 1-3

2008-06-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just finished reading these and I have to write about them. Immediately. Warning, spoilers and strong, perhaps even graphical praise ahead. If you are offended easily, I'll tell you right now, you wouldn't like this book anyway. Wuss.

I first heard about this book on G4's attack of the show. Their resident comic book geekess Blair Butler did a review of issue 3 for their Fresh Ink segment. Like many books she's recommended I wanted to check it out and this time I actually got around to doing so.

I'm very glad I did.

The concept is simple and summarized well in this issue when our protagonist asks a friend, "Why do you think nobody ever tried being a super-hero before?" This is set in the real world. Which is why I say protagonist instead of hero, because even if it does turn out he's a "hero" and saves people and makes things better, maybe it's sending a pretty bad message.

I'm not one of those psychopaths who thinks reading about violence or playing violent video games programs you to do insane things, but hey, why DO you think nobody ever tried to be a super-hero before? I mean, you'd think someone would've put on a cape, bought a police scanner and tried to save the day. I don't think dudes in Spider-Man costumes climbing up the side of a building counts.

See? That right there is one good reason why no one has ever tried it before. Me? I don't like being stabbed. I don't think I do anyway. And that's not the worst of it for our protagonist Dave Lizewski. Before the flash back began, Dave had a car battery clamped to his testicles and shortly after this stabbing he's run over by a pair of ditzy teen girls who didn't see him until he was flipping over their windsield and just kept going.

KICK-ASS is brutal. I saw a couple images and I expected the blood shed, but I had no idea the main character was going to be the main whipping boy. To be honest, I all most didn't like it, but reading all three books in one sitting I was able to see that there's a pay off to this. That comes later though. In this first issue what we get is a kid who introduces himself by saying he's not the class jock, not the class geek, not the class anything. He's just one of those kids who exists.

His mother died, but not in any sort of comic booky way he says, "Yes, my mother died when I was fourteen years old, but she was killed by an aneurysm as opposed to a hitman. You might have hoped for a little... I WILL AVENGE YOU MOTHER! ...But the reality was more like feeling numb and playing video games while my father cried in the next room." And despite an awkward 'youth culture' including fandom of the Goo Goo Dolls (WTF?) I think the book does a good job of voicing a real teen aged kid.

Usually the bad teenager dialogue of comics doesn't bother me too much. I mean, my favorite kind of writing is the hyper-intellectual overwrought dialogue that so many people complain about not happening in real life, but still it's nice to see someone handle it well. Better yet, John Romita Jr's art enhances that real feel even more. The kids looks like KIDS. There's no bare midriff, c+ cup prosti-teens. The only cleavage is on the biology teacher he says he uh... thinks about during private times at home. And she's no bombshell.

So when he gets the crap stomped out of him by the three graffiti vandals he tries to stop I think it's that much worse. Because they do such a good job of grounding the character and making you think about him like a really normal person. It's like, "Oh my God, they're killing him!" and instead of going, "COOL!" I winced and wanted to scream, "Leave him alone!" Like I said, I all most didn't enjoy the book at first for this very reason.

In the second issue he wakes up in the hospital, wondering how he got here, lamenting the fact that he's going to have to explain to his father why he was dressed up like a "pervert" and left beaten half to death in the middle of the street. When he finds out that he was found naked, he thinks to himself, "Oh, thank God. Thank God."

One important detail I think is that he thinks with a broken back and two broken legs that he got rid of the wet suit and mask himself. I'm really hoping that Millar doesn't leave it at that. My assumption is that somebody we'll meet later did it. And hopefully an ally, not an enemy. Someone who saw him trying to fight the thugs and wanted to protect his identity.

I digress, speculation aside, the issue spends about half the time with Dave recovering from the horrible injuries he sustained. Six months all together. Six months of a young man's life wasted in bed for the most part. He talks about how stupid it was. How he can't stand to read his comic books anymore because it makes him angry. Blames them for inspiring him.

"...but who was I kidding? The beast was friggin' in me, man."

You knew it wasn't over. He's out prowling the roof tops the very next night. A good spot to work some humor in, some little girls mistake him for a rapist, pervert, flasher or all of the above and begin harassing him. He tells them to bug off, but they keep following him saying they're gonna kick his ass and stuff, which seriously made me laugh my ass off. I might have been pissed if Millar has actually had them kick his ass of course, but instead he stumbles into the middle of a gang beating. He pulls his two lead pipes off his back and shouts, "GET THE HELL AWAY FROM HIM!" clubbing these guys like they were baby seals!

The next five pages are so graphically brutal that I just... I had to stop for a minute to really take it all in. Some guys takes off from the gathering crowd to tell some friends to come check it out, "There's a guy dressed like a superhero fighting Puerto Ricans outside! It's fucking awesome!" And of course in our day and age, what crowd doesn't have a cell phone camera trained on everything that happens ever. Eventually the thugs don't care enough to take the beating anymore and run off. Dave has saved the day and the guy thanks him and dude with his camera phone goes, "...this is so going on YouTube."

Where the first issue made me leery of where Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. were taking the story, this issue had me bounding for the third. I had this pit in my stomach thinking that this would be some sort of sick cautionary tale of a young man who just takes and takes and takes until finally he's dead in a warehouse with jumper cables clipped to his balls. But here he gets a victory. He doesn't get off light, that's for damn sure, but he's obviously the hero he wanted to be now.

I was also very glad to see them realistically portray the injuries he suffered in the first issue. He's not out of the hospital in a month, no he's down and out for a very long time. Long enough to stew in his own misery and realize how retarded what he did was. Even if his oath to never do it again was bull shit, he made it and I wouldn't buy it for a second if he didn't.

The third issue starts off with a little World building as we see the media coverage of the YouTube clip blowing up all across the spectrum. He even gets a name, "Kick-Ass." They get back to Dave's personal life where he's found a new sense of confidence. The thrill of wearing his costume under his clothes. He's even making progress with the girl who shut him down cold in issue one.

Of course his best friend decides to clue him in. Her mother runs a shelter for batter women, and the rumor going around is that the reason Dave gets "mugged" so much is that he's turning tricks and the Johns are being rough with him.

I can't help it... I laughed like a mad man. She's his fag-hag apparently. In the modern sense. I never knew there was a traditional sense, the things you learn, right? Thanks Captain Comet! (...check out Paul Sung's interview with him over on VS Blog! AND an interview with Michael "BigSpooky" Barnes too! Links over in my blog roll.) The funniest part, is he decides he doesn't care. He'll just enjoy hanging out with her anyway it comes.

When we return to his hero career, he decides it's time to learn the age old hero tradition of leaping from roof to roof, until he sees how wide the gaps are and decides to walk street side. I'm laughing at this more than I ever would have expected too after the way the first issue went. Anyway, having set up a MySpace account for Kick-Ass Dave is going to look up some girl's ex-boyfriend and tell him to stop calling her, because it's starting to scare her.

Entering the dude's house he doesn't realize what fucking trouble he's in until it's too late. For one, unlike the girl who flashed her tits at him not five minutes ago...

These guys haven't heard about him, so the swagger his notoriety grants him is sort of neutralized. With the pepper spray his dad gave him, he gets a bit of a surprise advantage... Until the floozy breaks a champagne bottle over his back. It looks like he's in for another horrifying beat down leaving him crippled for like this time when...

OH MY GOD!

This little girl in a mask comes in behind Kick-Ass and shoves a freaking sword through the ex-boyfriend guy! She then proceeded to slice and dice the loser friends like so much wet, bloody tissues.

"Okay, you cunts. Lets see what you can do."

THIS is the moment where I think the book will either have you hooked like some sort of super-crack-heroin hybrid or if you somehow made it past the first few beatings without running away screaming... You'll run away screaming.

I think you know which category I fall into. If you are not reading KICK-ASS and you have a strong stomach, you are doing a disservice to yourself to not be reading it. If they can keep up this pace, stay true to the concept and deliver on even half the potential it offers, I can see this book surviving deep into the double digits without a hitch. With two heroes in the cast now, a third can't be far behind and when or if they introduce a super villain, I expect something VERY special.

I'm happy to report that not only has is sold very well, but the movie rights have all ready been snatched up. So even if you aren't a comic reader (STU!) then you'll be able to get yourself a dose of KICK-ASS sooner or later. I'm dying for issue four and as a self promoted book only (Epic is an imprint of Marvel that doesn't get access to their PR department) I'm asking you to do your part to help get it out there. Tell people about this book. As soon as my guitar auction closes I'll even be buying copies of my own, to make sure my support shows up where it counts. In the numbers.

-Mike

Burning Down The House!

2008-06-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

Wow, the sky outside is really creeping me out. There was a big fire in central Fremont and at about 8:40, when it's still usually just starting to get dark, this is what the sky looked like. This is literally me just turning and facing different directions and shooting up into the sky. I wish I had gotten a picture of the sun earlier. It was blood red. I don't know how to connect this to VS, but had to post these. Put together a Secret Society/Manhunter Little Deck. I'll probably write about that soon. For now I'm just gonna put together a play list fitting of the mood and try and relax with some tea.

Thursday Thirteen - Week Three

2008-06-13T01:22:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my third Thursday Thirteen. I nearly forgot, but thankfully I was browsing the VS Blogasphere and stopped by the Lost Hemisphere and saw their newest, which reminded me to do mine! Thanks guys!

I somehow started with just _29_ choices this week to whittle down. I don't know if I was just in a rush to get it done or if I actually am getting more concise at making choices in the first place. Or three drops might just be easier to pick out because there's such a wide gap between playable and unplayable, cool and uncool at that point. There's lots of marginal two drops that still see play, have cool effects and are workable, because after all you're only paying two resource points. But on turn three it's time to get serious.

#13: Then again, you didn't always pay two resource points. I've avoided listing banned characters in my actual 13 so far, but hey, Dr. Light is iconic in VS Lore. Talking about three drops and not including him is like... irresponsible. Sure, I wasn't against him going. It was long over due, but do I get wistful for him sometimes? Definitely. Do I think of him when I see cards like Captain America, Secret Avenger and think... Wow, am I glad Dr. Light is banned? Definitely. But he left an indelible impact on the game. I think for the better. Errata worked for a while, but he continued to make things go fantastically, cosmically awry. Puppet Master, Kyle Rayner, Mr. Fantastic, Rama-Tut whoever the target of his effect, Dr. Light was the star of The Show.

#12: I always loathed Cable. I thought he was such a terrible character for so long, but in Cable and Deadpool I was won over. He went from gun toting mutant bad ass to this strange messianic schemer who just wanted every to love each other. The main reason he's on the list is because of his legend support. Being the cheapest version of Nathan, with a sweet ability as a bonus, he enables Bodyslide. Bodyslide is like a plot twist version of Dr. Light. Much more limited, but anybody with a "comes into play" ability can take advantage. Two drops or not. It's a plot twist, not an activate ability so it's much more balanced, but I still find myself coming up with a hundred Bodyslide combos I want to try out all the time.

#11: Back before the Morlocks made Evasion Random Punk royalty, this guy made it playable. 3/5 wasn't that bad for a 3 drop and his ability was amazing. Overload? Not so scary when your whole curve can't be targeted by your opponent! His flavor text is very cool too. I love when VS puts the funky in the flavor. From this guy to Thor's Olde English and Bullseye's hitlist.

#10: So, I'm sure a lot of people disagree with me on this one. In fact I know quite a few absolutely hate this guy. To be honest, I didn't even play him in a tournament, but once. And he was a one of in my Brave & The Bold Equipment deck. I did plenty of off initiative sniping in casual play, because I always felt the best way to beat a deck was to play it and learn it.

Roy makes my list of favorite three drops, because he pushed me. He made me improve at the game. He made me learn things like, once you put a put a recruit effect on the chain, you have recruited that character. So before Doom comes in and gets sniped, you can play Reign of Terror on Arsenal and laugh maniacally. Or that when you play a plot twist it's on the chain until it resolves, so Garth can't target that Teen Titans Go! that was just played to ready again in response to you playing Overload a second time. Roy Harper made me a good VS player.

#9: If you want a big 3 drop you can find plenty of them. I think Black Panther is one of the quintessential 3 drops though. T'Challa over here was all most always a sick turn three play. On turn 4 and 5 he was just as fine, though Reign of Terror sucked. King of Wakanda found himself in High Voltage and search out Flamethrowers, but I like putting a Mindtap Mechanism on him and laughing at opponents who can't attack into the hidden area. There's a lot of great 1 cost equipments he can snag for you though.

#8: Two cheats in a row? No, see, I like Ruin but he's not a favorite three drop. And I know it's vogue to hate Ahmed, but I can't help it. King Kills, 6/6's that you all most always exhaust... He's the kinda of thing I LOVE about this game. That balance of opposing ideas and counter intuitive strategies. Ruin is here to show you just how awesome Ahmed is. Ruin? He's the "fixed" Ahmed. 'Nuff said.

#7: Never has a version been so keenly correct. Sage, the secret weapon that gave Ivy League fits. When your win condition has a threshold of 4 and you have to play it out of combat for it to work, delaying it until turn 6 is a deal breaker. Enemy of My Enemy enabled decks to deal with Ivy and her pals. She also did a good job slowing down AGL's when combined with Bad Press. I really like the art here too. The color scheme stands out as very different from most other cards. Plus she's Mental, the one Mutant trait that UDE really nailed in development.

#6: If you're playing Random Punks in Silver Age without Barbara Gordon <> Oracle... That's one hell of a three drop you have. She's so amazing, you can even sub her over Ahmed if you're afraid he's gonna lose your game. The two faces of Barbara both draw cards. Sure Batgirl isn't as good at it, but I love her too. As linked above, my B&tB equip deck used her to the best of her ability and like Oracle, that often meant a giant hand.

#5: As good as drawing cards usually is, this guy made it a scary prospect. Coming down on turn three, his ability doesn't activate until turn 4 and that lead to many games where an opponent facing Luthor (including myself) would desperately throw everything in their arsenal at the Nefarious bastard to try and stun and/or KO him at any cost. Especially since even if you KO'd him on 4 after his ability triggered, it still locked you out for the rest of the turn. With IQ on the table the turn before, he could pour on the burn in Injustice Gang and anything that somehow makes Dr. Doom: Diabolical Genius better is damn powerful.

#4: While She-Hulk was usually the main drop in most Common Enemy decks, I played 3 of her and 3 of Purple Man. His ability put pressure on decks to waste tricks and against the mirror he even let you call your shot on turn 4 when they flipped something. Wanna reuse that Beatdown? Nah. I'll take that. In one PCQ he won me multiple games. First he stole the only two Heroic Sacrifices a B&TB player had in his deck, on back to back turns. (...and now I didn't KO one to steal the other. No, Garthing them either!) And better yet in another match against a Fantastic Four deck (piloted by a young Carlos The Dwarf if I remember correctly) I stole a Signal Flare just in time to search for Thing: Every Loving Blue Eyed Thing after replacing Diabolic Genius with Victor Von Doom.

#3: Look at that face. See that? She's enjoying this way too much. Bad girls always have more fun, don't you know. She breaks the rules brazenly. Riddler: Riddle Me This is good once, how much better is he in triplicate? Yeah. That's much better! She lets you reuse Chemo: Toxic Waste every turn. She makes Dr. Polaris: Polar Opposite pretty dandy too. Without even teaming up, that all ready earns her a spot. Now just think about team ups. Tattooed Man lets you bring in 2 characters for free every turn, Terry Sloane quickly turns your 1/1's into 3/3's and 4/4's attacking up the curve, gain 12 a turn after you hide your new Valeria: Children of Light and Darkness, Technocrat team attacking to draw cards? And that's just a few ideas.

#2: I've kept an Arkham deck together since DOR because of this guy. Sonic Guns and Sucker Punches just made it better with MSM. I haven't really updated it much since then, I probably should, but it's come to hold such a special place in my heart. I don't know if I could change it. It actually works quite well when it goes off. Maybe Mobilize should worm it's way in. But with cards like Fear and Confusion, Crushing Blow and Kidnapping, it's hard to make cuts. They're the kind of cards that just blow out games when they hit. Plus... "You're food now, fleshbag!" is easily one of my favorite phrases to shout out as a I attack into a 6 drop with Fear and Confusion and a 5 drop.

#1: This shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me. I could play Dr. Doom in any deck if you give me half a reason. "Man, I hate getting King Killed... Oh man, replace Ahmed with Dr. Doom!" Okay, no, I wouldn't do that, but I have found him in my X-Statix Little Deck, my Squadron Supreme No Hand, of course my Doom Crisis Little Deck and I have plans for a couple A Child Named Valeria decks with him. Search for a plot twist, KO a useless lackey and put it into your row. You can exhaust him to bring a Moloid in play without shame. You can KO HIMSELF to get out of a bad attack when you know you'll lose him anyway. 5/4, range, he's amazing. And with the support he has across the ages he just gets better. Attack or Defense boosts from Doomstadt, Latveria makes turn 3 Reigns of Terror possible even if they aren't as powerful as you'd think, Mystical Paralysis lets him neutralize all the way up the curve no matter how late your game goes. There's no downside to him. With Crisis on Infinite Earths you don't even lose him when you play the 4-drop Doom. How can you not love this guy? God, I could rant on for hours and hours about Richard's Rival. But I'll just leave it at this, if they make a nice 4-drop Cable, I'll be dreaming of Bodysliding this little bad boy.

-Mike

Ebay: Because Supporting VS Is Cool

2008-06-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm finally selling my guitar.

I've thought about it for a long time and I never could bring myself to do it, but now I really want Marvel Universe and it's getting scarce all ready. So... Up on ebay it goes. If anyone is interested it's an Ibanez 7-string, RG 7620 from 1999 made in Japan in Vampire Kiss red.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170228413360

Local pick up is an option.

-Mike

Hobby League: Random Punks - Or Paul Sung Let Me Play

2008-06-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

First things first. Thank you, Daddy Bear! Dude, you're the man. Guy doesn't even play in the tournament, but shows up to lend me some cards so I and a new player I'm trying to get into the game can play. Though he did forget a few. Still, I'd rather play something suboptimal than not play at all.

Click below to see how I did.

What I Played:

4x Superman/Batman Robot
1x Harvey Bullock, Gotham Central
3x Jaime Reyes ♦ Blue Beetle, High-Tech Hero
4x Maggie Sawyer, Gotham Central
4x White Lotus, Supermen of America
4x Huntress, Vicious Vigilante
2x Krypto, Guard Dog of El
4x Tania Belinskya ♦ Red Guardian, Cold Warrior
4x Barbara Gordon ♦ Oracle, Hacker Elite

1x Amulet of Nabu - Fate Artifact
1x Cloak of Nabu - Fate Artifact
1x Ego Gem - Unique ♦ Infinity Gem
4x Helm of Nabu - Fate Artifact

4x Dr. Fate's Tower

4x Bat-Signal
4x Combat Reflexes
4x Flying Kick
4x Teen Supremes
4x The Hook-Up: Team-Up

This should look familiar to you. Because you should be listening to A Proud Zinco Podcast over at VS Realms. Or reading Bearsday over at Miguel Rodrigquez's VS-Blog. Well, Paul hit me up with the idea a few weeks ago. I suggested Krypto, so I feel like I contributed at least a little bit to the deck. So all you netdeckers out there can thank me after you're down kissing Paul's ass! Ha ha ha. But seriously, if you like the deck Paul and Ludin Romero, Paul's co-hostm both shared versions with the online community that I think are strong.

I think a hybrid is stronger. What I really wanted to play looked like this...

4x Superman/Batman Robot
3x Jaime Reyes ♦ Blue Beetle, High-Tech Hero
4x Maggie Sawyer, Gotham Central
2x White Lotus, Supermen of America
2x Huntress, Vicious Vigilante
4x Krypto, Guard Dog of El
2x Tania Belinskya ♦ Red Guardian, Cold Warrior
4x Barbara Gordon ♦ Oracle, Hacker Elite
1x Batman, Twilight Vigilante
2x Superman, Man of Tomorrow
1x Dinah Laurel Lance ♦ Black Canary, Cry In The Dark

1x Amulet of Nabu, Fate Artifact
1x Cloak of Nabu, Fate Artifact
1x Ego Gem, Unique ♦ Infinity Gem
4x Helm of Nabu, Fate Artifact

4x Dr. Fate's Tower

4x Bat-Signal
4x Combat Reflexes
4x Flying Kick
4x Teen Supremes
4x The Hook-Up: Team-Up

And if I was perfectly honest with you I'd cut 1x Dr. Fate's Tower and 2x Helm of Nabu for 3x Clash of Worlds. But I thought it would be tacky to borrow a card, if Paul even had it, that was the prize for the tournament. Especially since I had assumed he would play.

Anyway, I headed for BART with a friend at about 4:30 and go to Berkeley just after 6, hurried over to Games of Berkeley and went to the back to sign up. After doing so I headed to the front to snag a few packs of Universe since everybody was opening boxes and I had a little bit of money. Pulled a James Barnes ♦ Winter Soldier, Communist Puppet - Raid and License To Kill. Not bad. Not Hulk Smash! but I like both.

First round I was paired up with everybody's favorite 27 character sealed deck playin' Wakandan King Curtis "T'Challa" Brown. As I sat down I had this sudden flash of like... ESP. Gotham Knights! And turn two he plays Tim Drake: Titan In Command then Barbara Gordon <> Oracle: Elite Hacker. How'd I know? Hehe.

Turn 1 I was in with Maggie Sawyer after mulliganning a hand I wish I had kept when I drew Maggie. But oh well. Turn turn I had Huntress in the concealed. She traded with Tim and I poked with Maggie again. Turn three he plays Card Draw Barbie, Aerie One and draws a card. I Bat-Signal with Maggie for Barbie myself. The Hook-Up teams Superman/GK and I discard to draw. Tim smacks around the cop. Huntress smacks around Tim. My Barbie to the face. He death traps Huntress with his Aeried Oracle.

Now, I draw into a Robot and the Helm of Nabu, exhaust Barbara for Jaime Reyes and flip Fate's Tower to complete the suit. He plays the Huntress 4 drop, Harsh Mistress. She's a sweetie. I attack Tim and he moves her for free to reinforce and I don't dare Teen Supreme even though I pumped. I was hoping to bait him into negating a Kick, but he's a sneaky Panther.

On turn five he had Cassandra Cain: Death's Daughter. I played Tania Belinskya, used her backup on herself and formed with Maggie adjacent to both. He declared a team attack into the Batman/Superman Robots with Cassie and Huntress. I have nothing so I take 0 and he takes 5. Hey. I like that trade! Tim hit the cop lady again and he passed. I passed and he went ahead and exhausted Barbara to Finishing Move the Robot. Le Sigh. Good-bye Fate Suit! Luckily I drew Robots next turn and played them for a full 6 points, backup with Tania on Robots and form the same way as last turn.

He under drops with Commissioner Gordon: Gotham Central and Batman: Twilight Vigilante. Tim and Huntress still the only visible characters. I declare Robot into Huntress and he reinforces, then discards a copy of herself to Gordon for plus four and used Break You for +6, just in case. Making her 17 attack and stuns back even if I'm still on the Dr. Fate curve! Daaamn. Well, I didn't have any other attacks to make so he sent Batman into Maggie, I took 7 with the double stun damage. Then 8 with Cassie into Tania. Barbara Gordon exhausts to Death Trap the Robot... Okay. :D I assume he was playing around a potential Clash of Worlds.

Next turn would be the last with him playing the Jade Canary, Lady Shiva and me boosting a Superman/Batman Robot for 7 plus replaying Fate's Tower to search for a Helm so I could at least stun back. He made good swings and I stunned by Shiva and that was game.

Round 2 I faced the new player I brought with me, Matt. Sadly we both knew how this was going to go and with a little grumbling we shuffled up and played it out. I hit my curve, what little I had, I had Teen Supremes on 4, but not very much pump so I finished it with a triple swing on turn 6. Basically took the time to tutor him a little more on smart attacks and reminds him not to accidentally shuffle his mulligan into the deck against anyone but me! Hehe.

Round 3 I played a player I haven't met before, named John. As I sat down he said he thought we were playing the same deck and we might have been playing something similar, but not quite the same. He opened with no drop. I missed as well and as we drew he commented, "Want to go back to last turn? I pulled my one." I replied, "I got a one drop, but not one I wanna play." He asked if it was Maggie Sawyer and I said I'd love to play her on turn one. lol I laid down my resource and recruited Krypto. He had Kelex: Caretaker of the Fortress. I couldn't attack and he didn't dare. So I exhausted the super-dog to remove Jaime from the game and get an Amulet. Turn three he recruited Barbara: Elite Hacker, played The Hook-Up and drew. I drew Barbara Gordon and a Fate's Tower. We both free draw off Barbara and then I flip The Hook-Up and draw a Helm. Sweeeet. So I flip the Tower, grab a cloak and let Batgirl fly again.

He didn't have any attacks and so I hit Kelex with Oracle and went to the next turn. Superman/Batman Robot came out, took the mantle of Dr. Fate and I subbed Barbara out for Barbara to draw a card. Replayed Helm a couple times and did some math in my head discarding Flying Kick, White Lotus and Jaime. Subbed in Tania Belinskya and used her backup on the Robot. He had Batman: Twilight Vigilante and passed. Krypto attacks Kelex, Robot goes into Batman with some pumps. We take a minute trying to figure out the math. Robot is 25 and Batman is 7 defense and... We both just kinda go slack faced. lol "Uhhhh." He says, "Do you have Teen Supremes so we don't have to figure this out?" I show two and it's scoops.

Don't you hate those moments when you can't remember shit like, "Batman's defense is 7, 7 minus his cost is 3. 25 - 3 = 22 endurance loss?"

Final round I'm playing Michael Gilmore who's been around and we've played multiple times. We think the last time was at the last PCQ in the area. Could be. I'm not sure though. In anycase we play and I mulligan into an awesome draw. Seemingly. He plays Rem Ram and grabs Harry Delgado. I drop Maggie Sawyer and he passes attack. I attack.

"Uhhhh." Oh yeah. They're both 1/2's. Next turn I play Huntress: Vicious Vigilante to his Chrome. Huntress and Chrome trade, I attack Maggie into Rem Ram again, but I have the power up! Sadly he decides to play Lying In Wait and that's the story of this match. I lose Huntress, naturally and we move on to three. Barbara comes out for me with Amulet and Cloak, I don't play the Helm because I'm low on hand size and don't wanna have to discard any pumps or Supremes, Senyaka for him. He hit Maggie and I think she Bat-Signaled. Oracle hit Senyaka and he had Lying In Wait again. I played The Hook-Up to team up and recovered Barbara. Turn 4 I had the Supa-Mecha-Bat and switched the suit over, Helmed out. He had Anne Marie Cortez and I had a feeling that if I played my Combat Reflexes and Flying Kick then he'd just reveal a two cost, so after asking him to hold on before the Combat phase I decided to pass. When he didn't reveal a two anyway, I kinda had a feeling he wasn't familiar with Teen Supremes, so I swung and saved my Flying Kick for a kill turn.

Cortez went down with reinforcement or something... I'm kinda hazy on the middle here. Turn 5 wasn't too eventful except I expected to replay the Robot so I sent the Fate Set to Barbara and let him stun my 8/8 robot with Polaris for 1. With Huntress and Harvey Bullock in the hidden area I didn't have much to attack back with so I tried to Hook-Up with a power-up, since I had a Bat-Signal in hand, but no luck. I looked at the Acolyte Body Armor in his hand.

So, next turn I exhausted the old Superman/Batman to look for a new one. Boosted, moved the Fate Suit over and re-buyed the Helm a couple times. I had like... 15 cards left in my deck at this point with 4 full Helm draws, Barbara'd out and 2 face up Hook-Ups. I subbed Tania in for Huntress. He had Harry Delgado. He used Harry's effect on Tania. He didn't reveal for Anne Marie. Then in combat he replaced for Polaris. This plus a third Lying In Wait won him the game. I attacked Anne Marie first and she got reinforced. I played Teen Supremes and he seemed not surprised so I assume he just didn't have a two drop. :( I had one more Supremes, but...

I thought about it and at 3 endurance, I had to hit Harry Delgado to win. So I hit him. And he had that third Lying in Wait to end it. He was able to attack back and that's all he needed. So I offered him the shake and I finished 9th of... 17 I think.

Matt had fun. He wasn't in last, went 2-2 with a bye. I think I might be able to convince him to buy some old boxes considering how cheap they are. He was very impressed with the idea of 20 bucks getting more than a box with some sets. Especially since he couldn't afford the Magic Pre-Con he wanted and still pay for BART home. See? Pre-cons don't work!

One final thanks to Paul Sung for the deck idea and the cards and big "Fuck, I coulda won if I'd just had a Black Canary to Bat-Signal for on turn 6 and that Harvey Bullock had been a Superman: Man Of Tomorrow like I planned to replace him with!" ;)

Anyway, it's always fun to get out and play. Can't wait for next time. Hopefully Saturday for the Release Celebration. Oh...

Pokemon Milkshake. Blame Curtis.

-Mike

Tournament Report Tomorrow. Art Tonight.

2008-06-10T02:28:00.000-07:00

I'm dead tired, been typing for about an hour and I'm still just on the first match. lol I probably should take notes more often considering I always write up a report. Sometimes I have to give the gist not the full treatment, but that's only cause I'm lazy which isn't a good excuse. Oh well. I got a PM out to Curtis to remind me about how our match went after turn 4, cause it's all hazy on me right now.

Anyway, on Thursday Thirteen: Week One I mentioned how Mary Marvel: World's Mightiest Girl had some suggestive flavor text. I've been meaning to post a picture more in line with my thoughts when I read, "Say my name, Mary."

There it is. Certainly more than just a girl. You can say what you will about mini-skirts and bared midriffs on super heroines being demeaning and inappropriate to the reality of the situation... And I won't even disagree.

But ask me if I care. Hehe.

-Mike

Continuing First Impressions.

2008-06-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

So we've now seen the entire set and I can't get over how amazing some of the cards are. I've got at least 3-4 different decks brewing in the back of my head. Things that just... Well, they're pretty cool in theory. We'll see if they pan out. If nothing else it's a lot of fun decks in mind.

Good: He draws a card every turn, including the first turn he's in play. He's also the new Bizarro. He adds a Legend to his bag of tricks every turn. Wolverine. Hulk. Captain America. Red Skull. Batman. Superman. The Captain is whoever you want him to be. A 7/6 reservist with flight, range and that amazing an ability?

Bad: Nextwave. I love the team, I love the comic, but he's gonna be off team in most builds. There's no Reservist search in modern. Thank God it's so each to team up. Avengers let you deputize anyone and everyone, War Bound says your on the team whether you like it or not and the Reg/Anti-Reg team-ups put everyone in your deck on the list. Otherwise it'd be strictly Straight To The Grave.

Good: First of all it's Spider-Girl. One of my favorite characters and one of the biggest stacks of books in my collection. I have about 70 Daredevil books, 74 Spider-Girl issues and Spider-Man may beat both if I count Ultimate Spider-Man, but I'm not sure.

The ability is great. At the cost of 3 endurance you can turn off everything that makes an opponent's character good. Even if she had to attack to use it, this would be good. But she has evasion!

Bad: Spider-Friends only. With Worlds looming and MTU out of modern, she probably won't be a major factor at the event. At the cost of 3, she also has to fight off notoriously strong characters like Poison Ivy: Intoxicating and Ahmed Samsarra for power slots.

Good: Everybody should know how much I miss Slaughter Swamp. Asgard looks to fill a bit of the gap between Slaughter Swamp and Soul World. For Marvel Universe I think it does nicely, depending on your team. For example the Avengers Rally so much that I think it's better than Slaughter Swamp because you're likely just increasing your hand size at will as opposed to discarding a card. There's even a location Alias Investigations that just lets you Rally for a card type of your choice for an activation. The two of them together are better than Slaughter Swamp.

Bad: The two of them together are better than Slaughter Swamp. Sure, Ahmed will search them both out in Silver. But that's a lot of row space to take up. Is the effect worth it? Probably. But what about now? Right now, it seems like a lot of effort for a non-rally based deck with not that much payback. You can still just draw it next turn, but if you need a card NOW, then it's troubling.

Good: Huge pump for Army decks. It also works very well in the swarm Secret Avengers build I wanna play. I don't know if it's Worlds worthy, but it seems quite good. So much card draw, so many good cards. If you swing with two characters, the bare minimum, this nets you +2 attack. That's okay. But then with 3 team attackers? It jumps to +6 attack. That's all most Wrecking Crew! Three one drops with +6 attack can hit most fives.

Bad: They have to share a version to pump. Though you don't have to have nothing but Secret Avengers in the team attack, you only your attack boosted if you have at least two characters that share a version. It's very nice, but it's definitely a niche card. Army decks love it.

Good: Built in Bodyslide. For a swarm deck, hiding a couple characters on a key turn until YOUR attack step could be key. 5/4 stats, range, reservist, lets you use the actual card Bodyslide and all that for just 3 resources. Also gives you the X-Men team. Very nice.

Bad: The built in Bodyslide costs 2. That's a bit steep for a swarm deck wanting to spam out characters and downright inexcusable for a deck that wants to curve. Why boost when you can just run Bodyslide anyway? Okay, you technically get two Bodyslides, but if you run 4x Bodyslide none of them cost you resource points.

Good: First of all, I'm VERY glad the 4-drop Bullseye isn't the only Bullseye card in the set. I was very disappointed by the 4-drop, who I think is rather unexciting. This guy however is damn nice. Starting turn 3 you get to stun their two drop just by exhausting. He's got Substitute so if you hit a different two drop earlier, Bullseye can always take their place. Or if you have a better 2-drop for the job at the time you play them and when the opponent's two drop becomes pesky, call up Bullseye to take care of it.

Bad: 2/2? If they don't have a two drop out he's kinda sitting in the hidden area hoping you have something to exhaust him for. And if they have hidden hate, he's gonna be a rail for the freight train to your face.

Good: Then again, maybe Bullseye is a 4/4. Exhaust to stun a two, play this, recover and he's a hidden Kyrpto with an ability instead of a draw back. Speedball is Dead plays very well with some of the Thunderbolt characters like Speed Demon who will gain reinforcement, Joystick who will gain Invulnerability and of course my favorite Radioactive Man who will lock up Plot Twists with a cost of 2. Plus it makes him as big as Hulk! You can also kills pumps with it if you're going to take breakthrough anyway, you stun your character, take the damage and recover them anyway, better than before.

Bad: It can start to get really costly if you try and use it on a 4 drop. Especially if you double dip like evasion with old Electric Eve. It's really just all in how you play it.

All right, that's it for now again, I'll be continuing this whenever the mood strikes me. Maybe even more tonight.

-Mike

More MUN First Thoughts.

2008-06-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

These are all just the quick, first impressions I'm having as I browse through the scans provided by im_all_noobish over on VS Realms in this thread. There's so many amazing cards, but I'm only picking out the ones that really strike me as stuff I have to take about. I might do some sort of set review later, but I'd want to play with the cards a bit before then.

Good: I was worried that the Illuminati would have trouble with cards like Have a Blast and resource row disruption, but Sub-Mariner here offers you a way to mitigate the effectiveness of row replaces.

Bad: Yet another cost of "exhaust two different members of the Illuminati" and still no The Order, Cosmic Radiation or even To Me My X-Men. Despite the fact that they CAN use Cosmic and To Me My X-Men, one is Golden Age and the other just isn't enough juice. I was thinking and hoping they'd be a strong control deck, but I'm not so sure anymore. Great effects do not a great deck make. There needs to be synergy. And exhausting all your guys for all your effects is not so hot.

Good: It does something that was too powerful even at a cost of 5 plus the cost of the stolen character without a recovery, but for only an exhaust. If your four isn't stunned while attacking, then exhausting a 3 would be a pretty sweet play. Avengers have some pretty nice cards and I can see that happening with frequency.

Bad: You have to exhaust a character to steal stunned character. You might often be better served just attacking or playing a Finishing Move effect. It might tempt you into trying to do something like teaming up SHRA w/X-Men and Avengers so you can recover the stolen character which could be good, but it's one of those things where you might be trying to hard to make something good, great and instead coming up with something marginal.

Good: There's a free character to exhaust for Switching Sides, right there. The Avengers have a lot of Rallying for characters and they also have a fairly decent ability to put things on top of your deck, so the likelyhood of Echo <> Ronin being free is rather high. Reservist, 2/3 _and_ a Crime Lord? Well, you have me sold. Amelia Voght 2.0.

Oh the art is awesome? Yeah, it is. There's enough Ninjas in this set all ready to make me giddy. Let's not forget there's even a plot twist Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas!

Bad: Um,... I can't see her boobs in that costume? Yeah, that's probably it. Oh, um, concealed instead of concealed--optional I guess. It's always nice to have a choice. Especially since she's free, it would be nice to soak up some attacks with her.

Good: He's a 9/8 four drop off initiative with only one draw back. He's a freakin Nazi.

Bad: He's not an amusing Nazi like the schmucks on Damn Nazis. He doesn't look goofy. He's very serious looking. And while I hate the revisionist alternative of editing the giant swastika out of his picture, I have to admit I might feel uncomfortable playing him in some situations. "You shall call us The Master Race." Yeeeouch. This might be the first card I ever deface with a sharpie.

Gameplay wise, he kinda sucks when you have the initiative because his ability means nothing as an attacker. I'd think he's more of a backup character unless Crime Lords dig the odds. And Kingpin-4 may be a better off-turn drop anyway!

Good: Mutant of the Year was a key card in Adam Prosak's Devil's Due deck that won the last PC LA. This provides the same effect, none of the Loner drawback, plus a global D-pump. If you can get Suzie Secret Avenger visible she's got a huge rear end to soak up endurance.

Bad: On the other hand, it's better to just leave her cute butt in the hidden area because unlike Mutant of the Year, when you stun Invisible Woman your inaccessibility goes away and you're once again open to the nasty world out there waiting to burn you, exhaust your characters and discard your hand.

Good: They can usually only stun one of your team attackers anyway, right? Two cards from the hand to recover and ready an Avenger you control. That seems okay. But this is what probably makes Switching Sides so crazy. Team attack up the curve to their big drop. Recover and ready the guy they stun and exhaust him to steal their drop.

Bad: The fact that you have the option really makes these little downside to this card. If you HAD to discard two cards I really wouldn't like it. Three is just the right turn to start wanting to play the effect and options really leave it to do whatever you need it to, without excessive cost.

Good: I will call him Bob.

Bad: I might want to sharpie on him too... :(

Good: So, yeah, this guy hits turn 2. Goes away and turn three you fate up the Hulk cannon, blindside the crap out of someone with him, turn four Brood dies Hulk-KO, Turn five you play someone who can take the fate set... Turn six you play THIS guy...

Who takes the Fate suit, eats his dopple ganger and is an insane 20/20, no reinforcement, KO machine.

Oh... Bad? There's bad in the Hulk cards? Um, I guess that you have to choose between a couple of the Hulk drops and the INSANE effects Hulk gets for the entire game when his buddies die. Like I don't think you wanna really play the four drop Hulk when you can play Brood, have a bigger drop than their turn four anyway and then kill it... With your three drop.

That's it for now, I'll pick up more tomorrow.

-Mike

MUN Hits,... And Knocks Out Teeth Everywhere!

2008-06-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

I can't even begin to tell you how amazing some of these cards are. I'm gonna post a couple here and talk about them, with MASSIVE thanks to im_all_noobish on the Realms and his thread of scans from Marvel Universe.

GOOD: Savage Beatdown... Every turn. Defensive pumps every turn. This guy is great. Like Garth or Black Manta without paying 3 endurance. Plus he really helps you in your quest

BAD: You have to target John Walker with it and it's only once per turn. So sadly you couldn't bounce your search card and be oncurve every turn after 4. Okay, maybe that's not a BAD thing so much as a, "Wow, I misread the card for a second" thing. lol

Good: Brood Creature 2 of 6. LOL That just cracks me up for some reason. Hulk made friends of the Brood, eh? Didn't know that. That's pretty interesting. It's ability? WOW. So I see it like this... Hulk is fated on 3. Turns 1-2 were getting Villains United on the board. Join Us Or Die on the Brood. Hulk Loner KO's their four, KO's their three and probably has a +8 attack on one of those swings, making it for 19.

Bad: There's bad? Um, you might wanna play 4 drop Hulk? Eh. Why bother. lol

Good: Oh wait, did I say you needed Villains United characters on the board!? Hahaha, silly me. If you miss them you just play THIS instead. Midnight Sons for the Hulk. Hulk a uniter! Hulk mash enemies together until they one giant friend-blob!

Bad: There is no downside. Hulk plays with any toys he wants, because he's the Hulk and if you don't let him... He'll just get angry. And "you wouldn't like him when he's angry."

Good: You can hide anyone you want, Mobilize for anyone you want, Big Leagues anyone you want. This is very cool. I imagine this will be involved in some cool combos. It fits in my Radioactive Waste deck very nicely. Offense, defense, it doesn't matter.

Bad: There's very many cards I am afraid of in this set all ready. There's a 2 drop Spider-Woman with Evasion and Invulnerability that I guarantee will be combo-tastic in SOMETHING eventually. I think we're ripe for a banning.

Hmm, having some trouble with Blogger, so I'll stop here for now. Check back later for more MUN filled posts as more cards are spoiled and I keep telling you what I think. Cause, that's kind of the point of a blog!

-Mike

Thursday Thirteen - Week Two

2008-06-06T02:31:00.000-07:00

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

One Last Gasp. The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.

2008-06-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

Here we come to a close on the Marvel Zombies half of the Marvel Zombie Essential Collection. Before I show you the new cards, I'd like to officially state that Zombie Wolverine no longer has his cost reduction power and instead is just a three cost beat stick. I felt his 5/5 stats were still reasonable because many of your best effects require you to KO many of the stunned characters you keep around around that would boost him to ridiculous levels. After this is posted I'll go and add the new version to the end of the article in which he originally appeared.

So now, let's start with one of my favorite Zombies. Zombie Spider-Man. Through the book Spider-Man brings humor into the fantastically dreadful circumstances of the Marvel Zombie universe. While Hank Pym muses that he's grown to love flesh and would eat other humans even if he cured the zombie disease... Spider-Man capitulates wildly from ravenous beast to whiny, emo Peter Parker who in turn goes right back as soon as food presents itself.

He's like a binge drinker swearing he'll never drink again and how it's ruined his life... But hey, let's have a toast and a shot and just one drink and one more, okay, while we're here we might as well finish the bottle!

His best use is to cost less once you have some dead Zombies to shuffle around. But his flight can also be key to breaking up formations and picking off the weak. I gave him this ability due to his common mode of travel on Giant-Man's shoulder.

I let Peter play with his other Spider Friends pals and whoever they invite to the party because he seems to be pretty normal as long as he's not hungry. So give him a snack pack and your other characters shouldn't worry. Too much.

Zombie Wasp avoids Loyalty - Hardfast because she's both easy to feed and works with the Survivors later, so thematically she doesn't need it and not so powerful that she NEEDS it. A lot of the zombies don't play outside their teams at all, but I wanted some that could infiltrate other decks.

The inspiration for her power was the scene where she takes a bite out of Magento's neck directly leading to his death. At which point she says that the bite she has will last her for days if she shrinks down. So... She disappears with her food and if you want to find her again you'll have to work for it.

Obviously she's going to do a lot of team attacking.

Which works very well with our next Zombie. Zombie Colonel America is a sweet play to get back your hand after you empty it on a big turn of dropping pumps and weenies onto the board.

If you can find a way to recover him he can really start to rack up the cards for you. As in regular continuity, where he's only a Captain, Colonel America is a born leader and takes charge in most of the Zombie battles. Until, that is, his longer than life nemesis Red Skull pulls the remainder of his brains out of his head. Which finally puts an end to the Colonel.

Zombie Daredevil is one of the unlucky main characters who failed to get him a piece of Cosmic Power when the Surfer is taken down by the Hulk. Then he just kind of disappeared from the book. I remember Thor getting taken out, but not specifically Daredevil.

Zombie Daredevil is a hell of a deal as long as you have some stunned characters hanging about. A 3/3 for one is very good. Better yet, like many other Daredevil cards he's available to avoid stunning while attacking up the curve. I did this based on the fact that Magneto hit him with a steel girder and kept coming.

To avoid letting too many people play him with evaders he's got Loyalty - Hardfast. I think the mechanic is a good balancing tool. Though it forces you to play on team, it allows for some cool stuff.

This final guy is probably a design space limiter, but that's not always a bad thing. He doesn't have Hardfast loyalty, but despite a very powerful effect, it's quite limited.

I actually don't see his ability firing off too often on turn 5. He can get a four drop into play by getting one of the o-cost zombies along with Mr. F, but Mr. F is his only four drop target. And you likely played him on four and if you didn't you likely have a character with cost two or less around. I see his ability less as a way to close out a game and more as a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat across from a live Total Anarchy or some sort of Flame Trap like mechanism. Otherwise 10 attack for 5 points isn't bad, but you'll probably prefer a three and two you don't have in play. And Hulk on 6 is a definite closer, so... To be honest as strong as he seems, I don't think he's actually a staple of the deck.

But I do hope you think he's as cool as I think he is. That leaves us with only one card for the Marvel Zombies team. The Interdimensional Teleporter: Ultimate Universe.

Remember Zombie Spider-Man's cost reducer? Remember Hulk's power? Power Cosmic Devoured does it too. Well, this lets your turn those costs into a positive.

So, lemme explain why it says Ultimate Universe on the version line instead of Zombie Earth. The idea is that since your teleporter is bringing back removed characters, it's obviously the Ultimate Universe teleporter sending them back. After all, the Zombie Earth teleporter couldn't just grab people on it's own.

Otherwise the zombies would have had a much easier time getting food. And Zombie Reed wouldn't have had to trick Ultimate Reed into coming through. Speaking of that little trick Zombie Reed played. The flavor text is what he told his young, living counter part when he came through to Zombie Earth and it's easily my favorite flavor text in the set.

So do the Survivors have a Teleporter? Oh yeah. Their's does something a bit different and it may do something very different by the time I'm done redesigning them. You'll see all about that next time though, when I reveal the current, very busted, Survivors deck. As promised here's the deck list for the Zombies.

4x Zombie Colonel America, Who Needs Brains
2x Zombie Daredevil, The Hunger
1x Zombie Hank Pym <> Giant Man, The Galactus
1x Zombie Hawkeye, The Hunger
1x Zombie Hulk, The Galactus
2x Zombie Human Torch, Frightastic Four
4x Zombie Invisible Woman, Frightastic Four
2x Zombie Iron Man, The Galactus
2x Zombie Luke Cage, The Galactus
3x Zombie Mr. Fantastic, Frightastic Four
2x Zombie Spider-Man, Emotional Eater
1x Zombie Thing, Frightastic Four
1x Zombie Thor, The Hunger
2x Zombie Wasp, The Hunger
3x Zombie Wolverine, The Galactus

31 Characters

2x Cosmic Power Amplifier
4x The Dead Shall Walk Again
2x The Galactus Come
4x Head Is Mostly Skull
4x Interdimensional Teleporter, Ultimate Universe
4x It Arrives
4x Power Cosmic Devoured
3x Such A Waste
2x World Devourer?

29 Others

-Mike

Thursday Thirteen - Week One

2008-05-30T03:18:00.000-07:00

So, my first Thursday Thirteen starts with 45 cards. I guess 32 won't be making the cut. Unless I cheat, which I think I'm going to do. Today I'm sharing my very favorite 1 drops in the game. Some of them just go together or are so similar though that I have to give them a single entry. Now there aren't the BEST one-drops or the most used one-drops or anything like that. These are just straight up my favorites.

I have three cheats, I'll admit. That is, three pairs of characters that just go together in my mind so much that It's impossible to separate them. First though, an honorable mention. This was a tough list for me. Like I said I picked out 45 cards before I started cutting it down. This card would have made the final list most likely except for one problem...

The chimp was banned. I never got to really play with the fun stuff he did, but he was so cool. Far too powerful, without a doubt. Kent Farm Faces decks were insane. Chimp Rigged was far too easy. I don't think there was much he couldn't make better. I had ideas like... Play 4x Bat Signal with Chimps to search for any character in my deck... In every deck. Imagine getting two of the little bugger in play with Changling, Poison Ivy or Clash of Worlds?

#13: Tommy is screaming to be broke. Constantly on the edge of being so, really. Free characters are cool. I've always liked Evasion and Evasion 1-Drops can always find an interesting use. Plus you'll probably notice that a lot of my favorite one-drops have 2/1 stats.

#12: Hope comes from the Man of Steel set. Yet she made it into a Top 8 of a PC that _wasn't_ modern age. I always thought she'd break something one day. Justice League of Arkham became a game ender with her in the Ivy League deck that terrorized PC San Francisco and the next few 10k's.

#11: What can you say about a 4/4 one-drop? Uh, "Awesome!" That's what. Sure, AGLs die at the end of your turn, but only if they aren't stunned. And between Blinding Rage and Chomin that became a standard procedure on turn 2 going into the similar gigantic Xallarap. And then when Felix Faust spammed 3 of them out? You got a swarm of nastiness very befitting of the art.

#10: Before there was Rat's Laugh. Before there was even Evasion. There was Stone Age. My friend Paul build a deck with Longshot, Ratcatcher, Last Laugh, Thuggee and Random Punks that aimed to build a big board, Flame Trap itself and Last Laugh you to death. Sadly the one thing that made it semi-playable was Gone But Not Forgotten and we quickly realized it didn't trigger before you lost the game. Killing the Cindarella come backs that it was becoming infamous for.

#9: Speaking of Rebel Freedom Fighters, this guy's name couldn't be less fitting. He was one of the first rares I ever pulled and Wild Vomit was always a favorite to play, though I never had my own build. The best part, to me, was always that point in the game where you start calling Wild Sentinel/Cover Fire and revealing 2 of each because you've cycled through the deck. Also the magic behind the Michael Jacob Force deck that I've always wanted to have a build of, but never quite have had the cards to put together. Plus, if it wasn't for Longshot, would the Realms have fallen so completely for StuBarnes?

#8: "Play hard, but play fair." I love that flavor text. Mr. Terrific helps your little guys stand up to the big bullies across the field. With his Legacy Michael Holt each of your upcurve attackers/downcurve defenders gets a full on Lost City power up. That turns most characters up a full resource point in general. The deck that really made me love Terry was Hidden Faces. One thing I will say though... While nobody has to get hurt... They usually do.

#7: I've always been kinda fascinated by Shadowpact. I think Mary is best utilized for her ability to let you get her (BIG) Brother into play on 8 without having played a single Shadowpact character before hand. Something that was very useful towards the end of Glock's life cycle. And the art is absolutely cool. The flavor text makes me think of a bit more... "mature" version of Mary, but that doesn't take any of the power away from the image captured on the card.

#6: For a while the nastiest thing in the world was a turn 2 Poison Ivy: Deadly Rose fully Fated up and I'll be honest. I absolutely loved doing it. Ivy has always a favorite character of mine and so seeing her rock house was great. Ted also found his way into many of my equipment decks and of course World's Greatest Heroes or "Good Guys." I never loved that name, but I never knew why it was so reviled by some people. lol

#5: If his team hadn't sucked so bad, he woulda been one of the most powerful one drops in the game. He basically doubles the value of every attack pump to the face. Put a Goblin Glider on him turn 2 and it gets absolutely disgusting.

#4: My first cheat. These two servants fulfill such a similar purpose it's hard to choose one over the other. I guess I would go with Boris if forced because Doom was so much more playable than Bats for so long. But I have some great memories of turns 1-3 filled with old man fist fights.

#3: Here's a character that has a great effect and enabled an even better plot twist. With her hubby Reed around and A Child Named Valeria, your board became either an untouchable horde of attackers or a reinforcement effect away from an impenetrable fortress locking your Endurance total completely away from your opponent. Plus Alex Garner art is always awesome to look at.

#2: The Riddler is like Prankster only made uber-playable. And I tried to play Prankster anyway. With Poison Ivy: Intoxicating you can get out a few of the little guy in green and really hurt your opponent. I'd love to get Edward and Oswald together though.

#1: My favorite play ever is rowing Golden Archer, dropping Ape X, searching up some Dual Sidearms and equipping them. Surprise Attack. Row Albert Gaines, drop Joystick, equip her with an Atlantean Trident and smash for a counter. It's even better if you can play out those last two cards in hand. I'll take my chances missing a three drop when my Joystick is going to be a 9/6.

So, there's my first foray into Thursday Thirteen. Next week I think I'll do my favorite two drops! See you then.

-Mike

Yay! New Cards In The Mail

2008-05-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

I love getting new cards in the mail. Yes, I had no Checkmate Safe Houses. lol That brings my Moloid count up to 10. Also nice to have Flame Trap around. Especially 4x Foils, for like 60 cents each I think it was! That's freakin' awesome. Still waiting on another order... But this might be a clue about what I'm waiting for...

I'm excited for Silver Age Random Punks. I was bitterly disappointed to not make it out to BYOS Golden, so I've got my fingers crossed big time to make it for SARP.

I had a list of BoP/Darkseid all ready and I'll probably still try and buy the cards for the deck just cause it's fun, but I'm gonna be playing something a bit more juicy. You probably have seen the list if not, go searching across the VS Blog Network and you can find it. Consider it like a treasure hunt!

Here's my Dark Birds list if you're interested though.

4x Gypsy, Illusionary Operative
1x Huntress, Vicious Vigilante
4x Barbara Gordon <> Oracle, Hacker Elite
2x Dark Firestorm
4x Darkseid, Apokoliptian Opressor
1x Cassandra Cain, Death's Daughter
4x Darkseid, 8th Century
1x Darkseid, Evil Reborn
1x Dinah Laurel Lance <> Black Canary, Cry In The Dark
1x Lady Shiva, Jade Canary

1x Ego Gem

3x Ancient Throne

4x All Hail Darkseid
2x Ancient Evils, Team-Up
4x Bat Signal
3x Battle Training
3x Crushing Blow
4x Dark Fury
4x Joining The Darkseid, Team-Up
4x Lord of Apokolips
2x Titans of Tomorrow
3x Unravel Reality

One thing I will say is that Battle Training should probably switch out for SKREEEEEEE! and switch the numbers on your 2's, or even run 4x Speed Queen/1x Huntress instead. I like Battle Training and I can usually team Darkseid up with JLA via Ancient Evils or have Gypsy still around for the kill turn, so it doesn't go wasted, but hitting into your opponent's hidden area will probably be too important to pass up in Silver Age Punks. Either way you have a lot of pump.

-Mike

No Tournament, But There Was VS.

2008-05-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

I got to play some Little Deck today. Started out with my pretty bad Stand Alone X-Statix and a bunch of not teamed up people vs. Mostly JSA with some JLA/Titans. It was a fun match with Orphan 3-drop in play until turn 5 when he got finishing moved after a big team attack. Lots of turns with a big team attack and Mr. Terrific bonuses being able to overcome my huge character and Vivisector bouncing from my hand to play to hand to burn for 5. Unfortunately I got up to Anarchist: Man of the People and had nowhere left to go, while he kept swarming medium guys at me until turn 9 or 10 when he dropped Power Girl: Earth 2 and the bewbage did old Tike in with very little help and allowed the rest of his field to hit my face.

Next up the Origins X-Men took on Glee with emphasis on EE. I think I'll do my LDC on the Glee deck soon. Anyway, on turn 4 I had Goldface, then I got Major Force on 5, which gave me enough characters to flip In Darkest Night. I might have been able to attack his Blackbird wearing Cyclops this turn but I wanted to play Darkest Night, so I did. Next turn I played Black Hand, Ring Has Chosen'd for Olapet and boosted him for G'nort. Flipped Empire of Tears, KO'd a couple resources and after using Goldface's ability was down to 3. IDN, EoT and a Millennium. I was able to kill him a on 7, because he couldn't recover his characters and wasn't hitting anyone big enough to match up with mine.

The next game, however, took the cake for sure.

Since my friend had forgotten to bring his regular decks he decided to throw together another little deck with his stuff he had brought. Going through the stuff he had just bought from the X-Men set he got out some Hellfire Clubbers with the addition of some other X-Men villains like Lady Deathstrike and Black Tom he shuffled up and I played my Little Press Chess. He hit HFC Initiate, Viper, Tarot, Beef... And I hit Dr. Minerva (whiffs), Ahmed Samssara (searches up Penal Colony), return Minerva to hand at end of turn, play her (whiff), return her, play her (whiff), play the 3-drop OMAC, Neutralization Protocol... And you know what he does?

Declares attack with Beef to Ahmed. Legal. I search up Brother I Satellite. He stuns. Attacks Minerva with Tarot. Attacks the Robot with Viper and a pump... HFC Initiate exhaust for Finishing Move on Ahmed.

Me, "Well, good game."

Him, "What?"

Me, "Oh, wait, you don't know?"

Him, "No, what?"

Me, ::Hands him Ahmed.::

Him, "Well, I'm glad he's bigger than the Robot, that's the only reason I used it on him!"

Me, "::laughs:: That's gotta go in the blog."

And so it is. Hehe. Great game. Love VS. Best game ever. Ever.

-Mike

The Galactus Come! The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.

2008-05-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

Card draw as I've covered before is a major part of any swarm deck. Card draw and over sized weenies. Today I have four characters for you. Each of them get a bonus from World Devourer? which I debuted last time. Most of them fit into one of those two categories. One on the other hand gives you a reason to have all those dead bodies lying around.

Along with Hank Pym they all have the version The Galactus. Now, you may notice all ready that four plus one is five and there were six Marvel Zombies who became The Galactus. Well, I'll tell you right now that there isn't a Galactus version of Spider-Man. I didn't want to repeat characters in this set since it's so easy to fill out the curve with unique characters and didn't want to leave anyone out that I didn't absolutely have too. I can always make a Zombie Spider-Man: The Galactus later anyway!

First up is Spider-Man's buddy and living taxi in the Marvel Zombie series, Luke Cage. Luke is usually associated with card draw and good stats, so I thought why mess with a good theme?

At 3/3 he's a strong two drop, even better with flight and range. With World Devourer? face up he's a 5/5. With Power Cosmic Devoured, he's a 7/5! What's even better is if you don't have those cards and you team attack with him, you can maybe draw into them.

True, it's not pure card draw, but with the KO'd pile as an extension of your hand the way it is in VS, card filtering is all most better. You can discard flak from your hand and potentially still use it later on.

How can you use it later on? Well, let's take a look at our next card!

Zombie Iron Man allows you to trade an old, dead Zombie for a fresh body from the KO'd pile. They'll be stunned next turn, but you can do a lot with them before then. Besides the obvious ability to trade a stunned one or zero cost character for a two drop attacker at the cost of an exhaust and having said two drop in the KO'd pile, Iron Man works very well with the Zombie version of Sue Storm.

Since Iron Man stuns the character at the start of the next build phase, if you bring back Invisible Woman, you can stun her this turn during an attack, search for an ongoing plot twist, recover her, stun her at the start of the build phase and get another ongoing plot twist.

Or you can KO the character to the cost of, Iron Man, Power Cosmic Devoured or... Well, you'll see shortly.

Another thing you can do is leave them in play, because stunned characters sticking around help make this next character bulk up. Wolverine often has powers triggering on him stunning other characters or becoming stunned himself. This version plays off stunned characters, but he doesn't have to do the dirty work himself to come and scavenge the corpse for a few pounds of flesh.

So, I expect in most games Wolverine will be at least a 6/6 when he comes into play for you, putting him on par with his MOR three drop version. If you can stun multiple characters on turn one, you could even play him on turn two as a 7/7! Now, that should be a very rare occurrence if it ever happens at all. More likely he'll make for a 7/7 or 8/8 on turn four, that costs two.

This might be a little too powerful, as the first similar character I think of is the five drop Sinestro who costs three on turn six and gets +1 ATK/+1 Willpower for each face up resource an opponent controls. Starting at 8/9 I would guess on average he's an 11 or 12/9 for three. Thoughts? Should he just not get cheaper? Is his other power strong enough for three resource points in a deck like this?

Finally we come to what I consider the close of the normal curve for the Marvel Zombies. He's a big, mean, hungry six drop. In fact, he's the hungriest one there is! Just ask him.

Zombie Hulk is massive. How massive is he? Just look at him. At his size, most characters force horrible drawbacks on you. Like Bizarro: Dark Mirror who makes you discard two cards every time you draw one! He better finish the game for you or you're not gonna be playing resources or characters very much longer. Legion: He Who Is Many straight up says you cannot play plot twists! Bizarro(hmmm, I see a theme): Bizarro World's Finest lets your opponent pick the order of your attackers. For other examples go look for yourself on Doc X's VS Search Engine.

What is Hulk's drawback? Whenever he attacks or defends, you have to prod him with a bit of food or he'll go diving into the KO'd pile looking for some himself! That is to say, you have to KO a character anytime he enters combat. Yes, you want to keep stunned characters sitting around and yes this is part of the reason why.

However, those zombies you KO'd to pay for other costs won't go to waste with this bad boy around. Instead of sitting there in the KO'd pile, Hulk can scarf down on a few and make his incredible attack even bigger! Though it'll hurt him on the back end. Worst of all, for your opponent, he has flight, range and like all four of these cards he gets a power boost from World Devourer?, that last part makes him on par with a seven drop! Nobody wants to mess with the Hulk, people. Nobody.

Despite Hank Pym being your seven drop, this guy is the most powerful character at your disposal as a player of the Marvel Zombies deck. And who can argue with that? Hulk was, after all, the only Zombie powerful enough to take down the Silver Surfer, which let the other Zombies gain their cosmic powers and take down Galactus.

Next time I'll be showcasing the last few Marvel Zombie characters and their one location. I'll also give you a breakdown on the deck list!

-Mike

UPDATE:
Based on feedback, I've edited out Wolverine's cost reduction power, this is the most current version.

Curse You VS Network!

2008-05-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

So, now Google has VS Network as the top link when you search for VS System Blog. God damn you! I will reclaim my spot! I hope! lol

-Mike

Who's Number One? It All Depends How You Define It!

2008-05-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

So I just found out something hella awesome.

Go to Google. While you're there type "VS System Blog" into the search field and hit, "I'm Feeling Lucky." We'll wait here.

Okay... Did you do it? Muahaha, yeah, that's right! Takes you right back here where you started! We're number one! We're number one!

I have to say that's one hell of a nice surprise. A bad surprise though is that I can no longer make the Golden Age BYOS tournament at Grapevine Comics and Cards. Buses stop running from BART towards my house at 6:30 and no one will be home to pick me up from the station. And a 10 mile walk is one thing I _won't_ do for VS. To be fair, there's very little in this world I would walk 10 miles for. Like money or my life or something.

I was really looking forward to it. Was gonna play Common Enemy! COMMON ENEMY! C'mon, man! How often do you really get to bust out EA Reign of Terror?! I love that deck so much. One of the few decks that isn't "budget" that I was able to put together. Well, all most. I still only have 3x Signal Flare, 3x Boris: PSODD and, this is actually pretty funny, 3x Common Enemy. Also I lent my 1x Flame Trap to somebody and never got it back, but it was okay cause they did a lot for me. Anyway, here's what I woulda played.

OGMoney.dec

4x Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom
3x Robot Sentry, Army
3x She-Thing, Sharon Ventura
4x Medusa, Inhuman
2x She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters
4x Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius
1x Ghost Rider, New Fantastic Four
1x Robot Destroyer, Army
1x Thing, Heavy Hitter
1x Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom
1x Hulk, New Fantastic Four
1x Sub-Mariner, Ally of Doom
1x Thing, The Ever Lovin' Blue Eyed Thing
1x Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria

3x Doomstadt

4x Common Enemy
2x Faces of Doom
4x It's Clobberin' Time
4x Signal Flare
1x Flame Trap
4x Mystical Paralysis
1x Press The Attack
4x Reign of Terror
4x Savage Beatdown

I hadn't made a final decision on the 2-3 tech slots I had left but I was thinking maybe 1x Apocalypse, En Sabah Nur and 2x Political Pressure. Or 2x Press The Attack, since you have such big characters and Doom with Mystical. I'm really sad I won't get to play it, cause I have some great memories of this deck. I know JVirtue does too. ;) I nearly won the very first PCQ I ever went too with a very similar list. I had 1x Wolverine: NFF, Acrobatic Dodges instead of Beatdowns, an even count of Purple Man/She-Hulk and Silver Surfer: Norrin Radd. Oh well, sometimes things just don't go your way.

Maybe next time.

-Mike

Incident Trouble, AKA Little Crisis Doom - Little Deck Creations

2008-05-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

This is easily my favorite Little Deck so far. Doom was my very first love in VS. The very first pack I opened had the 6-drop and as I commented to a friend, "Man, I got the 6 cost Dr. Doom. I think he's really good!" Talk about an understatement. Of course, the 4-drop we all know, love, fear and loathe was the break out star because of things like Mystical Paralysis, Reign of Terror and Boris: Personal Servant of Doom, but still the 6-drop was good enough that even in an age of Curve Deck domination it wasn't uncommon to replace your turn four play a mere two turns later. As long as that turn six play was a certain dictator in a little known European country named Latveria.

Even Big Brotherhood usually tried not to replace characters that close together. Unless we were talking about a certain dictator of a small nation of mutants named Genosha. We all know how good HE was too, but since he doesn't show up in this deck lets keep moving on.

Doom's controlling nature and the power cards making up a Skeleton Deck led to multiple strategies being playable in the months after his debut. You could play Gamma Doom trying to stall out with Puppet Masters, Mysticals, Reigns and Robot Sentrys to win after setting up a recurring Gamma Bomb starting turn 7, thanks to Beast: Dr. Henry McCoy and Latveria.

You could team up the Common Enemy route and control with Doom, while the Fantastic Four played out the super beats of a lifetime with It's Clobberin' Time, Thing: Heavy Hitter and Savage Beatdowns. Not to mention Signal Flare was old school for "Consistent," back before "Consistent" meant rarely missing a drop.

And of course you'd be remiss not to mention Evil Medical School. Shimmer, Dr. Light: Arthur Light, Alfred, Boris, GCPD Officers and another deck that went to the late game to win. With what I think is probably the best win condition ever. Boosting Dr. Light on 9 is beyond cool! I mean, you snag all your guys in the KO pile and dump them on the board, stun anybody you please and attack for lots? Hell yeah.

But that's a lot of exposition. As I said, Doom is what I love! So, it's easy for me to go on and on about him and his team. Lets get down to brass tacks.

For Little Deck I decided to emulate a more recently version of Dr. Doom debauchery, the Crisis Doom deck. The deck plays Crisis on Infinite Earths to make your characters non-unique and hopes to spam out Latverian Overlords, with help from somebody else's friends to fill the gaps.

The first thing to do was to pick out Dr. Dooms to go in the deck. Victor Von Doom and Diabolical Genius are the first two, followed very closely by Richards's Rival. Next I put Lord of Latveria in, Sorcerous Savant fills up your six drop slots nicely. Scientific Sorcerer is okay, I'd rather play Fearsome Monarch, but I don't have him. I'd also be playing Latverian Monarch and Power Hungry if I had them for the record.

Dr. Doom, Richards's Rival
Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius
Dr. Doom, Sorcerous Savant
Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom
Dr. Doom, Scientific Sorcerer
Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria

Next I decided to bring in the "Skeleton Deck" that every Doom deck really should play if it can. Doomstadt is a ridiculous pump that gives most of your characters +3 something. In this case Defense. I don't have Castle Doom or I'd play both. lol Reign of Terror, Mystical Paralysis, Faces of Doom and Boris: Personal Servant of Doom.

Boris, Personal Servant of Doom

Doomstadt

Faces of Doom
Mystical Paralysis
Reign of Terror

That leaves us with gaps to fill. Let's start with characters. You need two drops, you need five drops. Five is one of the more important drops in any game so let's start there. Kristoff is unplayable in this format as everything is one-of anyway. I considered Post: Kevin Tremain in the tradition of Thing: Heavy Hitter since if all your characters are Crisis affiliated you don't stun anyone, but I'm not going to have Crisis every game. I know that. However, if I miss it, I'd rather underdrop than get my 5-drop auto stunned. So the only Loyalty character I'm going to play is Garth <> Tempest: Atlantean Sorcerer. For a mere 3 end you get to fish back all those insane one-of's you're going to play. Like Reign of Terror!

On team I decided to play Robot Destroyer and Ultron <> Ultron II: Army. They both offer good options. Out of combat stuns are always strong, even if you trade a five for their four. With a Mystical Paralysis, Robot Destroyer can often turn that into a dead initiative for your opponent. Worse for them still if you exhaust a three drop to Mystical. Or worse, have a Puppet Master too boot. Ultron can be KO'd to either your 6-drop, your 3-Drop or just at the end of the turn and boomerang back to the board keeping your presence up. He also lets you play Mask of Doom for a much less costly price.

Garth <> Tempest, Atlantean Sorcerer
Robot Destroyer, Army
Ultron <> Ultron II, Army

At two, I went with San to search up locations because Doomstadt is so important and Doom also has some other very nice locations. Puppet Master and Robot Sentry help you to control the flow of the game and finally Kristoff Von Doom allows you a way to control Doom. Better yet he gives a +1/+1 pump to most of your five drops. With that in mind I figured filling in a little of the Doom army theme would be a good way to close out my drops.

Kristoff Von Doom, The Boy Who Would Be Doom
Pupper Master, Phillip Masters
Robot Sentry, Army
San, The Alienated One

On three I added Doom-Bot and Doom-Bot Corps. Being able to ready a Dr. Doom I control is crazy in this deck. Ready my six drop and attack for the win? Yes, please! For 3 endurance your Doom-Bot Corps can become Dr. Doom for a turn and take advantage of your Doomstadt* or Mystical or activate Faces. On four I picked up Mr. Fantastic: Doom's Adversary. Free characters rock and you have two three drops that fit the bill of his ability. However if you have Robot Sentry in the KO pile you might as well try and take advantage of the whole effect so I also added Tibetan Monks. With all these Army characters, and a focus on your characters being Dr. Doom, Decoy Program became an easy addition as well as Dr. Hauptmann.

Dr. Hauptmann, Diabolic Inventor
Tibetan Monks, Army
Doom-Bot, Army
Doom-Bot Corps, Army
Mr. Fantastic, Doom's Adversary

Decoy Program

That brings us to 24 cards. We have 6 slots left. One has to go to Crisis on Infinite Earths, obviously. Next I decided to run Mask of Doom since we can return characters and run a freebie, and two search cards is much better than one. With location search I looked at Doom's locations. Latveria, Latverian Embassy and Doom's Throne Room are all great cards. In Little Deck the Embassy, like it's character counterpart 5-Drop Kristoff, is sadly useless. Latveria though, that's VERY useful. Nearly global reinforcement can really kill a rush deck, worse yet if they're trying to get past an extra 6-9 defense too boot. Not to mention the occasional chance to Reign or Mystical on turn 3. Sadly I don't think we'll be playing enough plot twists to run the Throne Room, because I really like that card.

Seeing as Doomstadt is so nice as a global pump for Doom, I looked for other Doom Legend cards. Power Cosmic is nice, but without a huge closer like Sub-Mariner: Ally of Doom I don't want to risk losing all my resources. Micro-Size and Supersize aren't big enough pump, but I did like Expendable Ally. You can't rely on it as a Savage Beatdown, but as a Fizzle/Nasty Surprise it works just fine. Bitter Rivals is a way to bring the attack bonus of Castle Doom online, though very limited. I've found it very useful in combination with Sorcerous Savant and Lord of Latveria though. You play it on 4, keep it a couple turns before that drop dies off and then switch the target by replaying it. Finally I decided to add Diplomatic Immunity, however I'm thinking it may need to be cut. It just hasn't done much, but at the same time I haven't played it more than a couple times.

Here's the list...

Little Crisis Doom
Boris, Personal Servant of Doom
Dr. Hauptmann, Diabolic Inventor
Tibetan Monks, Army
Kristoff Von Doom, The Boy Who Would Be Doom
Pupper Master, Phillip Masters
Robot Sentry, Army
San, The Alienated One
Doom-Bot, Army
Doom-Bot Corps, Army
Dr. Doom, Richards's Rival
Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius
Mr. Fantastic, Doom's Adversary
Garth <> Tempest, Atlantean Sorcerer
Robot Destroyer, Army
Ultron <> Ultron II, Army
Dr. Doom, Sorcerous Savant
Dr. Doom, Victor Von Doom
Dr. Doom, Scientific Sorcerer
Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria

Decoy Program

Doomstadt

Bitter Rivals
Crisis On Infinite Earths, Team Up
Diplomatic Immunity
Expendable Ally
Faces of Doom
Mask of Doom
Mystical Paralysis
Reign of Terror

In place of Diplomatic Immunity I think I'm gonna try Have A Blast! because with the one-of rule in Little Deck, you can blast some very powerful twists and then safely expect to never see that crap again! Hehe.

-Mike

*You don't have to use it and then flip Doomstadt do you? It says you are considered to control Dr. Doom, but that doesn't mean the same thing as a character named Dr. Doom does it?

Take Two. The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.

2008-05-18T01:37:00.000-07:00

With the feedback I received from Pi, I was inspired to edit the Cosmic Power Amplifier, change the art on Power Cosmic Devoured and add a new card to the set! First lets take a look at the two cards you've seen before.

First I decided that the new card should use the art from Power Cosmic Devoured and got a new image for Power Cosmic Devoured. I think this fits better anyway, especially with the flavor text. Making the Amplifier cost one, but still stun any attackers seems to be much more balanced. You can use it earlier in the game and get your plus 3 attack and hope to stun the equipped character or sit back and watch your opponent do everything they can to stun the equipped character before stunning any body else. You also get a very strong incentive to play it... Because if you don't have a Cosmic Power Amplifier, you can't take down Galactus and if you can't take Galactus down, you can't have The Galactus zombies!

I'm really not sure about the name, but hopefully this makes the versioned Galactus zombies much more flavorful. This gives the zombies quite a bit of global pump, so I made sure you could never have more than one face up. It also gives me a better reason to keep Power Cosmic Devoured as costly as it is. However, if you play this, Power Cosmic Devoured and equip another Cosmic Power Amplifier you should be able to finish off just about any opponent! Making the steep drawbacks more than worth it.

If you go back to the book, that was a theme they explored with Hank Pym, who at one point says that even if he somehow cured the zombies of The Hunger, he thought he'd still want to eat flesh. He'd started to like it. So essentially he's saying being an undead, rotting corpse was worth it. Hopefully, having a board full of rotting, undead characters will be worth it!

-Mike

Selling A Magic Card, To Buy More VS!

2008-05-16T22:58:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me some Magic Pre-Con decks his store was throwing out. One of them came with a copy of Umezawa's Jitte, which I remember was worth a bit of scratch. So I checked ebay to see it goes for about 11 bucks usually and I decided to auction mine off. It'll just about pay for the Darkseid/Birds of Prey Random Punks deck I want to build for the Silver Age Random Punks event coming up.

Dark Fury, All Hail Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips and if it works out with Titans of Tomorrow to team up JLA... Battle Training! Yeah, that's a lot of sauce! Plus all the card draw with Babsy, Furnace of Apokolips and The Hook-Up... I think it'll be fun.

So anyway, here's the link.

Umezawa's Jitte!

-Mike

When All Else Fails! The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.

2008-05-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

When designing a swarm deck, you don't usually think of giving them a seven drop. In fact you probably don't think of giving them a six drop and maybe not even a five drop! However with an essential collection, despite the end product being a deck, you're still making a team and I think every team should be fully developed enough to at least play one through seven.

Plus, the team opposite the Marvel Zombies is a stall team. After all, what's the best way to survive zombies? Hole up in a defensible position and ride out the hunger. So I didn't want to give them an easy win if they just made it past turns four or five. Instead the zombies can continue being a threat even in later turns of the game, in this case thanks to Zombie Hank Pym <> Giant Man.

Even as Pym was consumed by his need to feast on flesh, he was working on things. In fact he kept Black Panther down in a basement hidden from the other zombies so he could grab a snack here and there when he needed to do some heavy thinking. It's hard to think when you're hungry for us normal people, let alone a creature dominated by hunger like a zombie. He didn't even tell his wife the Wasp.

This allowed him to come up with a way to amplify the boost given to the zombies from eating the Silver Surfer when the Herald's master arrived and made it clear he'd wipe the Earth of all life, living or undead. So what does the Cosmic Power Amplifier do exactly?

Well, if the Power Cosmic Devoured gives zombies +2 attack, amplifying that Cosmic Power must be worth an even larger boost. However, +3 ATK is a bit too much to put on an equipment without making it expensive. With one resource point you can usually get +3 ATK to one single character or +1 ATK/+1 DEF across the board. You can even get upwards of +5 ATK for one resource point. At the cost of KO'ing the character if it's stunned. With two characters Cosmic Power Amplifier is all ready better than that. So I felt even two resource points wasn't enough.

So making it cost three seemed the fairest way to go, but as you've all ready seen, the zombies can cheat it out on turn 7 by playing the man/zombie who invented it. However it's still got it's drawbacks. The reason is because the only time the zombies used it, they were fighting such a huge threat that even with the neat little toy a few of them went down in the process.

This is meant to close the gap when the chips are down and if it doesn't work the fight was probably over anyway.

Join us next time when I show you the other zombies with the version The Galactus.

-Mike

I Love VS! New Player Update!

2008-05-15T03:40:00.000-07:00

So, I just spent the last few hours putting together a deck for the Golden Age BYOS event at Grapevine Comics and Cards in Stockton gonna start goldfishing to see it to see if I like it. If I'm not feeling it I can always play the DCL Injustice Gang deck, since I ordered the character cards on Monday and got them TODAY! Cards In Hand has awesome prices AND speedy shipping! I'll definitely be going back. I really like the deck.

BUT, that's not the important part of today's VS Experience.

My friend Muffin has started playing and after buying a box of DSM and making a Superman deck he bought a lot 34 Marvel Knights packs and made a Marvel Knights deck and now, today, he got 2 boxes of Marvel Origins delivered from ebay and made a quick X-Men deck. When I called to talk to him about game night (Cyberpunk 2020!) he was buying a couple Infinite Crisis boosters to replace the New Gods in his Superman deck. He was playing 5-drop Scott Free and didn't realized Loyalty made it impossible for him to play the character, so he filled out his curve with some JSA'ers like Katar Hol and Power Girl.

I'm calling it, we have a new player! Now to get him to a tournament. I don't know if he'll be willing to hit Stockton, but I'll try and keep a better eye out for Berkley stuff now I guess.

Man, one taste and it's all over. VS really is like crack!

-Mike

Crime Lord / Hydra Previews Begin!

2008-05-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

Read the preview article at VS System . com!

I'm kind of disappointed they aren't doing Hydra as their own team. From what the Wiki says on Winter Soldier, I don't know if he'd have the Hydra affiliation anyway, so there may still be hope of the Hydra name being put on some characters ala The Rogues in DCL. I just wanna see the symbol, you KNOW it's gonna be cool looking on a card!

With that said, I'm very excited about the Crime Lords. Death Warrant is so damn cool. Everything in this set seems to get me excited. Except the lame Thunderbolts Bullseye, anyway. I'm dying to see a deck drop 2-3 Death Warrants onto an opponent's field on turn 4 and see the look of dread come over my opponent. "Wanna pass on your attacks?" Nasty Surprise has never looked this good since Overload was banned! Since it's not unique and it IS concealed-optional, it's pretty safe once you get it on your opponent's side of the table. There are certainly tricks to kill it. Level 12, Zinco, Bodyslide.

Another worry is it being moved though. Wonder Woman can change where it lands and if they have enough characters it doesn't matter how many Warrants you sign this turn, none of them will end up on Wondy.

Of course that leads us to my favorite bit of text on the card! "Return death warrent to its owners hand" means that after the contract is cashed in, you get to sign it out on someone else! Bucky is okay, I like him, but in a bubble he's not exciting. Not to me. Very good, obviously, because any out of combat stun (especially since it doesn't have a cost of character restriction!) is an effect you cannot over look as it is likely very powerful. I mean, look at Roy Harper <> Arsenal from DOR, you'd think blowing up a resource and exhausting your own board would be the end of your game, but he was easily one of the most abusable cards to ever hit a VS board! So, Bucky, most definitely a power player.

But Death Warrant? That makes him exciting. Very exciting. Imagine if you will a wall of 1's and 2's that plays this version of the Winter Soldier on 3, 4 and 5. Now give them a mass reinforcement effect and a full compliment of Death Warrants. He becomes the World's most deadly contract killer. Who do you want to cap? Worried they'll attack him first with some unimportant drop? Hide him. He doesn't even have to activate so you can even exhaust HIM to play the Death Warrant to begin with!

THAT is cool. Very, very cool. Here's to getting us some 1 and 2 drop Bullseye, Deadpool, Taskmaster and Crossbones to play with Winter Soldier, because I'm dying to turn this into a serious deck and it can't get any better than actually being full of contract killers. Hmmm, Crime Lords could also see a version of Katrina Luisa Van Horn when she was known as Man-Killer too. If it has to be a team up deck the Thunderbolts might also have Killer Shrike and obviously Bullseye is on the team, even if I dislike the version we've all ready seen. The Cat (Shen Kuei) could have a spot on the Crime Lords. Which I would like to see after the issues of Cable and Deadpool I've been reading. He seems to be a very cool character.

I can't wait to see what the rest of the week brings, hopefully that blanket of reinforcement I'm hoping for. Maybe the "even bigger flying carrier" that will be previewed Thursday on VS Realms?

-Mike

Happy Birthday To Me!

2008-05-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

I turn 24 today. Whoo hoo! Gonna get a good... 7 and a half hours of sleep, go to the flea market, hopefully pick up some old random ass comic books, come home read those and the back pile I'm starting to build and hopefully play Halo 3 online with some friends all night.

Been reading quite a few comics lately that I acquired. About halfway through Cable & Deadpool. Deadpool is easily one of the greatest characters ever, in spite of his rather... unsavory creation. Stupid Rob Liefield.

If you don't have Rob, here's a very good 40 Reasons you should! And to wash that taste out of your brain I've got perhaps the single best page out of Cable and Deadpool so far! From issue 20, where Deadpool is clashing with Black Mamba, Asp and Diamondback (the B.A.D. Girls!) over a thievery commission. Mamba did her magic and made Deadpool lapse into his darkest fantasy... Which was apparently giving old Nate AKA Cable a rub down on a tropical beach. lol This follows as he wakes up and they all realize somebody has pre-burgled the item they both were hired to get.

Oooh, looks like the Deadpool solo series is all finished downl- I mean, is here...

...

Deadpool made me do it. Support comics, buy them if you can! I do, I swear!

-Mike

Something Just Seems To Be Missing Here.

2008-05-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

The Illuminati previews have been this week and I really like the new Dr. Strange. I had an idea when I first saw him for a weenie deck with lots of equipment and Cable/Bodyslide to get a few extra cards whenever I can with Dr. Strange. I've been trying to figure it out and I have, oddly, 55 cards again. Only this time I think maybe it's missing some key card to draw it all together and make it work, unlike the Radioactive Man deck, which I think just needed some spice to make it really kick. This is more like missing a side dish or maybe even a portion of the meat.

I was trying to make it Silver at first, but I guess that didn't work out all the way cause by the time MUN is legal the MXM cards will be out of Silver Age. I think I'll come back to this idea once MUN is completely spoiled and either make it work in Silver or just go Golden Age, throw in Stretch and A Child Named Valeria because I mostly just want to play a version of Fantastic Fun anyway! Hehe.

It could partly be because I really wanted to also make The Elektra Situation playable, because... Well, look at it. That's a COOL card. This may just be two real decks that I'm trying to cram into one. I don't know... What do you think?

2x Invisible Woman, Walking on Air
2x Black Cat, Thrillseeker
2x Nick Fury, Col. Nicholas Fury
2x Shadowcat, Phase Shifter
3x Jaime Reyes <> Blue Beetle, High-Tech Hero

2x Dr. Strange, Secret Avenger
2x Mr. Fantastic, Stringbean
2x Ant-Man, King of the Hill
2x Captain America, Secret Avenger
2x Professor X, Idealistic Dreamer

4x Cable, Nathan Summers

2x Punisher, Guns Blazing

1x Ghost Rider, Rider on the Storm

3x Dual Sidearms
1x Eye of Agamotto
2x Image Inducer
2x Katana
1x Ultimate Nullifier, One-Way Trip

3x New Baxter Building

4x Body Slide
4x Super Human Registration Act
4x Savage Beatdown
4x Mobilize
2x The Electra Situation

55 cards

Man, I Want This As A Playmat!

2008-05-08T21:02:00.001-07:00

Ahh, Felicia Hardy, the only reason I ever liked the idea of MJ splitting with Peter. That kinda turned out to be a "be careful what you wish for" situation though. :(

-Mike

The Ongoing Hunger of Zombies! The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.

2008-05-08T02:36:00.000-07:00

Within the evil Zombie versions of the Fantastic Four I mentioned that the Marvel Zombies had some really cool Ongoing Plot Twists for the rotting Invisible Girl to grab at the cost of a stun. I'm going to show them to you in chronological order of how the events they represent in the comics happened. How did this nightmare start you ask? Well it started with an arrival.

In this universe, a version of the Sentry came from an another dimension infected with the zombie causing virus. As he began killing and eating people he spread it to others. Quickly super heroes were rising from the dead left, right and center! Quicksilver's zombification didn't help their chances of survival.

Like most decks that play a lot of characters the Marvel Zombies need to refill their hand somehow. I figured giving them their very own Birthing Chamber would be flavorful with the idea being spreading the virus leads to new recruits which is represented by refilling the hand and KO'd pile as Birthing Chamber does. Limiting it to one copy is very obviously a necessary evil. Besides you can always add Birthing Chamber if you want more copies face up!

In the first issue of the official Marvel Zombies series, the Silver Surfer makes an appearance. We all know what this means. The Herald of Galactus is there to see if the world is suitable for his master to devour.

Unfortunately for him, the zombie Hulk figures out a way around the fact that none of his undead compatriots can seem to bite through his silver skin. Once Hulk bites off his head the other zombies renewed their effort and peel back the "candy coating" and dig into the soft juicy bits. This had the unexpected side effect of granting each of them a bit of the Power Cosmic residing in the Surfer's body.

(More on that next time!)

The effect allows you to get another use out of characters like Zombie Invisible Woman or Zombie Colonel America. And if you replace the now used up plot twist you can attack with a character who's been lying around such as Zombie Wasp or get another use out Zombie Iron Man's effect. You'll get to see THOSE cards in a couple weeks. :)

Using the power granted by the Silver Surfer and nifty little gizmo that Hank Pym whipped up, the zombies take down Galactus. And then they eat him!

Yeah. That Galactus! You thought they got a power boost from Silver Surfer? You ain't seen nothing yet! Taking the power of Galactus wasn't without losses. The zombies even had to kill some of their own in the fight for dibs on dinner.

As a team that tries to swarm, I felt a global pump was pretty much standard fare. I made it nice and costly to play and keep around because it's easy for a zombie swarm to build up and overwhelm, but they always lose a few in the process. That's just how they work and these zombies are no different.

Hopefully the cost will be offset by your ability to play more zombies than your resources normally allow. Which in turn is why you'll want the effect so bad in the first place, hehe.

The final Ongoing Plot Twist I have to show you represents the end of the first Marvel Zombies series. When, after devouring Galactus and absorbing his vast cosmic powers, a group of the zombies begin to travel space and like the single entity Galactus before them... They munch their way across the galaxy, eating one planet at a time! For they hunger! They are The Galactus! Hey, who knew, Galactus pluralized is still just... Galactus!

This Plot Twist lets you eat your opponent's locations for a nice mid-game snack. The Survivors team has some rather key locations, seeing as Hidey Holes are the best method for avoiding death in your standard zombie apocalypse. Considering the Galactus eat the planets I thought a little End gain was appropriate. It was a Heralds subtheme and it was was Galactus did. The fact that it's reusable is all the better.

So, there you have it. Next time join me as I show off the one piece of Equipment I gave the Zombies.

-Mike

Would You Look at That?

2008-05-08T01:22:00.001-07:00

We made it to the Mothership!

A big thank you and thumbs up to Mr. Fike AKA StuBarnes for the shout out. It's great to know somebody appreciates what I do and I'm sure many more fine people will head this way and appreciate what I do thanks to the link. Hehe.

I'll have another update along sometime tonight, just figured this was a bloggy kind of thing to and as a blog I should be doing more of that!

-Mike

Thunder Tactics - Little Deck Creations

2008-04-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

Team Tactics is easily one of the most powerful cards in the game. I don't think it's ever gotten it's due, because (luckily, I think) it's a combo piece that needs a lot of work to pull off and isn't too hard to disrupt. Early versions of Tactics Abuse used Fantastic Four because they had very large stats to begin with, access to a great pump in It's Clobberin' Time and of course they had the best readying tech for a very long time, if not still, Cosmic Radiation.

Cosmic allows you to ready your entire team! You can't attack, but if you're all ready attacking, who cares! They also had a 1-drop Ant-Man who killed reinforcement, which is very important if the plan is to smash through somebody for lethal damage with Team Tactics. Basically they gave you eight cards to ready and eight cards to break reinforcement with while any other team would only have Press the Attack and Blindsided. The version I played also used A Child Named Valeria, the idea being to weenie up, draw a lot of cards with Antartic Research Base and play Thing, Heavy Hitter or Wolverine, New Fantastic Four on the kill turn. You attack with your unstunnable small drops, attack with the big guy, pump them to all hell and Press/Cosmic them into Tactics.

It was very fun. There was also versions with Doom as early as Marvel Origins. My friend Joe O'Brien built a deck with Doom-Bot, Doom's Throne Room and Tactics that played used a Doom-Bot or two to ready the Latverian overlord into a pump fueled Tactics kill. Boris was great at searching out the key plot twist, Doom-Bot being army made him easy to hit on three and Robot Destroyer on 5 was a good way of negating reinforcers.

The next major change to Tactics as a deck idea, that I remember was in the Avengers expansion. In that set the Thunderbolts debuted. A team of villains looking to get over as do-gooders that eventually decided they preferred the life of a hero had a sub-theme of being "ready" and thus had multiple ways to set an attacker straight ways.

So, this LDC is probably obvious by now, if it wasn't from the very subject line. I decided to build a Team Tactics deck that focused on the ability of the Thunderbolts to ready themselves. The first thing I did was pull out the super obvious choices. To me that consisted of 5 cards.

Speed Demon, Second Chance Speedster
Melissa Gold <> Songbird, Heroine Unbound

Blind Sided
Deadly Conspiracy
Team Tactics

Next I thought about what I need to make this work with the Highlander rule of Little Deck. Obviously you needs attack pumps and to make sure you get your Team Tactics the best solution outside of search is card draw. I also wanted ways of preventing reinforcement. With that in mind I set about building a curve.

At one, I chose two characters,

Count Vertigo, Werner Vertigo
Ogre, Weaponsmith

I'd play Dallas Riorden over Vertigo, but the only copies I have are in my Faces deck and I didn't want to replace her in there. lol He'll help out with reinforcement issues.

Captain Boomerang, George Harkness
Erik Josten <> Atlas, Kosmos Convict
Speed Queen, Female Fury
Tania Belinskya <> Red Guardian, Cold Warrior

Boomerang gets rids of two drops, Josten gets bigger and bigger and is just a nice attacker on turns 4 and 5. Speed Queen's readying effect is useful not so much for Team Tactics, but for card draw with Ego Gem. If Tania sticks around or you have to under drop, +4 attack for the turn is incredible.

Besides Speed Demon on three I have...

Dr. Doom, Richard's Rival
Hellcat, Patsy Walker
The Creeper, Jack Ryder

Doom will search out Tactics for you, Patsy is a pump that's likely to stick around even to turn 6 for Melissa Gold. The Creeper's card draw is very useful. He should net you at least 2 cards thanks to Evasion and he's only made better by being on everyone's team. And if I had any copies of Babs I'd totally play a copy of her over him though.

For four drops I picked 3 really strong card draw four drops.

Darkseid, Apokoliptian Opressor
Moondragon, Protector of the Mind Gem
Professor X, Headmaster

With luck, all of them will net you 2-3 cards per game. If you have an Ego Gem, Moondragon will guarantee at least one the turn she comes into play. And since you want the even initiative you can probably protect her until the next turn by making safe attacks.

As well as those three, I picked a card I've never really seen get used much, but I think is pretty good.

Dallas Riordan <> Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

She pumps her self at the cost of giving your opponents a card. But if you do you get a 10/7, which is pretty nice. It's too bad it only lasts for one attack.

Charcoal, Charles Burlingame
Paul Ebersol <> Techno, Man of Metal
Scarecrow, Psycho Psychologist

Since 5 is likely off initiative Charcoal makes for a scary defender. He'll stun just about anybody attacking into him. Especially if he's Hellcat's +2/+2 bonus on him. Paul Ebersol lets you get back a pump you might have used to stock up for turn 6, or if you somehow lost Team Tactics, he's a second copy. Scarecrow is a nice five drop or six drop and if you keep letting your opponent fill their hand with things like Vantage, Win-Lose Deal or bouncing 2 drops, he can deal a nice little stack of burn damage.

Finally, I'm packing one seven drop.

Beetle <> Mach 4, New Team Leader

He's got okay stats. Nothing bad, nothing phenomenal, but his ability can be very nice. Did you have to under drop last turn? Well, put that character adjacent to Beetle and give them +3/+3. Flight and range make him a good option as a Tactics finisher too.

That's a total of 22 cards, 19 characters, 3 plot twists. I all ready mentioned, Ego Gem and Win-Lose Deal which rock for card draw so let's make that 19 characters, 1 equipment, 4 plot twists.

Ego Gem, Infinity Gem

Win-Lose Deal

And that's 6 cards left. Pumps!

Barbaric Brawl
Combat Reflexes
Flying Kick
Justice, Like Lightning
Mega-Blast
Savage Beatdown

The only one that isn't at least 3 attack worth is Justice, Like Lightning which also allows you to exhaust target character if you play it on a Thunderbolt. No need to talk about these, they're just chocolate syrup. Once you get the ice cream in the bowl... Pour it on!

-Mike

Radioactive Waste! - A Preview Inspired Deck Idea

2008-04-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

Thunderbolts Week begins for Marvel Universe previews and the first card I saw was a new version of Radioactive Man. Instantly I had an idea in mind... Because I've always loved counters and this adds another thing I love with counters, Control.

What's the plan? I wanna lock my opponents out of plot twists on turn three and hide this bad boy in the hidden area. Doom Patrol is the obvious answer for counters and I think to hide him the best option is Charles McNider <> Dr. Mid-Nite. I think I'll call it...

RADIOACTIVE WASTE!

4x Elasti-Girl, Rita Farr
3x Atom Smasher, Al Rothstein
4x The Chief, Niles Caulder
2x Erik Josten <> Atlas, Kosmos Convict
4x Radioactive Man, Containment Suit
4x Charles McNider <> Dr. Mid-Nite, Golden Age Academic.
2x Holocaust, Age of Apocalypse
1x Robotman, Cliff Steele
1x Beast Boy, Freak of Nature

3x Dayton Manor

4x Enemy of my Enemy
4x Freak Out
4x Misfits
4x Heroic Effect
4x Forbidden Loyalties
3x Counter Terrorism
3x New Identity

55 Cards

I figure that leaves 5 cards for MUN to fill in, with Counter Terrorism and New Identity being easy to cut for better alternatives. The theory is simple. Put counters on Radioactive Man, immediately on turn 3. Lock out your opponent's twists so they can't get enough attack to stun him, hide him on 4 and keep adding counters to your board until you can just win out with Holocaust burn.

Heroic Effect, Counter Terrorism and Forbidden Loyalties all work on Radioactive Man whether you hit Doom Patrol or not, but obviously the idea is to team up Doom Patrol and Thunderbolts so you can Freak Out onto old Chen boy. Misfits lets you smooth the curve and Enemy is Enemy, no need to explain that one. Dayton Manor is perfect if you team up on three and is reusable every turn. On 6, and I can easily see even turn 5, you can flip another one without caring that it's going to KO a resource if you plan to win that turn.

Anyway, that's the idea. Can't wait to see how much better it gets during the week!

-Mike

Dazzler by Jim Lee

2008-04-27T04:22:00.001-07:00

Now THAT is an awesome version of Dazzler. I'm not sure what all it really says in the corner there, but seeing as MY name is Mike, I'm just assuming this is "For Mike." This is just the universe rewarding me yet again for being up past 4AM. :)

-Mike

Marvel... Apes? Huh... Okay. I'm sold!

2008-04-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/04/simian-super-he.html

It was cool when DC did it, right? :)

I always (never) wondered what kind of simian Dr. Doom would be!

-Mike

Fantastical Zombies! The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.

2008-04-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Little late, um, oh yeah, I meant to do this Monday... LOL Yeah. Reason being the DC announcement kinda depressed and scared me to be honest. BUT! Soldier on, is my motto.

So, the theme of the Marvel Zombies is weenie rush with lots of dead bodies sticking around. You've seen Hawkeye, I flirt with broken-ness a bit more, but not a LOT more, I promise. Hehe.

So Loyalty - Hardfast prevents you from playing Zombie Thing with anyone but the FF and MZ, otherwise you KO him. Zombie keeps you in play if you're recovering somebody else in the recovery phase.

His other restriction prevents him from having greater than 3 attack. This builds in a limit to how much damage he can do. The reason is because, obviously, he's free. What is his real purpose if you can't even play a flying kick on him?

He's there to be a body. There are multiple effects for the Marvel Zombies that care about bodies. KO'ing bodies most specifically. There are also costs that require you to control stunned characters or give you bonuses based on the number you control. So Thing and his 0 defense are very friendly to the deck.

Zombie Invisible Woman is the best bet to keep the deck on track. She searches for your key plot twists she grabs characters and she fulfills the stunned character requirements that fuel some strong effects.

A nice 2/3 for a 2-drop with concealed-optional. I've always loved Concealed - Optional. You can either protect her and use the ability every turn or you can put her out on the lines and attack with her... And if the attack goes bad, use her effect to go set up next turn. Or, if your opponent's attack goes a little too well, then you can use her effect and negate the effects your opponent has played on an attacker.

I'll make sure to show one of the awesome Ongoing plot twists she can snag next week!

Continuing up the curve is Zombie Human Torch. Human Torch usually is a burn character and he usually has good attack and bad Dee, so he was rather easy to design. 6/3 is good, but his real power is in the ability!

"Activate -> KO a character you control, target opponent loses endurance (uh oh, typo!) equal to that character's attack. Use this power only once per turn."

Is your attack about to go south? Did somebody negate a lot of your attack long pumps by killing a defender? Are they going to remove an attacker? Force Field Projection, Science Spire? Kill that attacker and do all that damage straight to the face! Characters still have attack while stunned too, so remember that zombie sitting around, doing nothing for you? Kill it, hit the face, make use of them! Hell yeah!

Flight and range make him a good attacker, but I think you'll often find yourself activating instead of attacking. And obviously make Human Torch a very strong defender. Again he's Concealed - Optional, so that you really have the choice of what you want to do with him. I think it adds a very interesting and fun level of strategy to your rush decks having a lot of Concealed - Optional.

Thematically Concealed works well for zombies, but I thought at the time it worked especially well for these four because they end up coming across the divide and into the Ultimate Universe. They do this when Zombie Reed tricks Ultimate Reed into building an interdimensional teleporter that then brings Ultimate Reed to Zombie Earth and allows Zombie Reed to take his Frightastic Family to the Ultimate Universe where they do battle with the rest of the Ultimate Fantastic Four.

What is the cost of 3 resource points? You can get 1 for free many ways. Including the new, awesome, previews of MUN that StuBarnes revealed on his blog (see link to your left!) where Squirrel Girl pops out a one drop friend when she comes into play. Shadowpact lets you pay 15 for 1 resource point up the curve and it's restricted to only Shadowpact character cards, period with it's "printed" restriction. But down the curve is much less expensive, your 3-drop Nick Fury can bring in 2 characters each turn for the cost of an exhaust! With a team-up for Anti-Matter that's a pair of 4/4 Anti-Green Lanterns! 8 damage a turn!

By limiting Zombie Mr. Fantastic's effect to Zombies, as well as forcing you to bring out 3 characters, it makes it much harder to just power out a sick 3-drop. Ahmed? No need to apply here, buddy. This is another reason for the 0-drops. It rewards you with the ability to bring out the undead Torch (...or Wolverine! More on that later.) with his buddies Thing and Mr. Fantastic. Still, there's plenty of good 1-cost targets for this ability.

And there you have the Zombie Fantastic Four! Please feel free to comment here or if you want to start a thread on VSRealms and link it in the comment section!

See you next time, when I show you some Zombie plot twists!

-Mike

Something Sinister This Way Comes (Little Deck Creations)

2008-04-19T03:28:00.000-07:00

So, instead of the idea of a Week or Month dedicated to Little Decks, this will be a continuing series of articles.

I've always loved the Goblin Glider, so when I was pawing through cards looking for idea starters for little decks, I realized I HAD to do Sinister Syndicate. I don't have much Marvel Team-Up, but I had enough to add some real power to this deck. Looking through my old SS cards, it's easy to see why they never went far. Most of them outright suck. However, there's some serious gems.

Goblin Glider is ridiculous in a weenie deck. Flight, range, +4 attack and it usually costs "free." Thank you very much! I'll take one! Vulture, Adrian Toomes? He's a 2/1 with flight for one. You have to reveal as an additional cost, but you gain END for every bit of breakthrough he does. On turn one that's a 4 endurance swing a good lot of the time! And if you put the glider on him? Ridiculous!

Hammerhead, Gangster is a 2 drop, 3/2 that gives +2 attack to your characters while they attack directly. That's insane. Imagine 1 drop, Hammerhead, 2 drop + Toomes + Glider. Attack up into their 2 and 3 with the 1/2... Now swing direct with Hammerhead and Toomes and rock the endurance difference by 19! On turn three! I did just that with my Sinister Little Deck tonight.

Green Goblin, Norman Osborn can straight up KO a character in the support row. It can be played around by protecting that character, but the ability is so strong that even if it doesn't go off it should be because you can just fly over and kill the weenie not worth KO'ing for breakthrough. Then attack up into the character "protected" from Norman with some pumps. Like Spider Slayers. Then KO them with Sadistic Choice anyway. Hehe.

19 Characters

Chameleon, Dmitri Smerdyakov
Basilisk, Basil Elks
Doppleganger, Killer Clone
Razorfist, Sociopathic Mercenary
Tombstone, Lonnie Lincoln
Tinkerer, Phineas Mason
Vulture, Adrian Toomes
Vulture, Aerial Stalker
Electro, Shock Jock
Hammerhead, Gangster
Shriek, Frances Barrison
Silvermane, Silvio Manfredi
Swarm, Fritz Von Meyer
Trapster, Peter Petruski
Albert Malik <> Red Skull, Axis of Evil
Spider-Man Robot, Timespinner
Venom, Mac Gargan
Carnage, Psychopath
Green Goblin, Norman Osborn

1 Equipment

Goblin Glider

1 Location

Doc Ock's Lab

10 Plot Twists

The Contract
Crushing Blow
Flying Kick
Legacy of Evil
No Fear
Sadistic Choice
Sand Trap
Savage Beatdown
Sinister Salvo
Spider Slayers

Chameleon, Doppleganger and Red Skull are the only ways to facilitate The Contract, so I might cut that after I play more games, but so far whenever I've had it, I've had one of them. Carnage is a great game ending option on 5 with a one drop. For the most part my mulligan has just been characters, but hitting Hammerhead on two is usually at least 4 extra damage by turn 4. You lose a lot of endurance off Razorfist, Venom, Carnage, Electro and Doc Ock's Lab, but the way the curve looks I think the deck is supposed to lose if the games goes to six anyway. Hehe. Enjoy your endurance while you have it. Use it. I should probably play more pumps to make up for this, but I kinda like the deck so far.

Are there any stars of the MTU Sinister Syndicate that I'm missing? Leave a comment and let me know!

-Mike

Look'it Me! I'm Spider-Man!

2008-04-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/double-wires/

I've been playing this game for like two hours. You have a little stick figure and you click on the platforms to "swing" from lines you shoot out from your hands. Very Spider-Man-esque. My record right now is 134.72 yards. Gotta go try and beat it.

-Mike

Going A Little Crazy

2008-04-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

I've become engrossed with making decks for the Little Deck Format. Read it about it here on VSRealms.com and I'll be waiting when you get back.

Okay...

So how crazy did I go? Yesterday I put together 8 decks! It's great! I have so many great cards in one ofs not the normal four-ofs you need for so many full size decks. But in a Highlander environment that's all I need! I have no Mobilize or Enemy of my Enemy, but those are banned! I think I'm in love! The first thing I built was actually an Avenger's Reservist deck. I always loved the deck, but never got to play it except in proxy.

In building it I was reminded of one big problem. You really only played Carol Danvers because you couldn't play 7-8x Hawkeye, Clinton Barton. So, now you still need 4-5 four drops, but you only have three on team! And I don't have Dr. Druid! Ack! What to do? Well, I looked through my Avengers cards and noticed Squadron Supreme had a lot of reservists. Lots of good reservists!

So in went Golden Archer and... Amphimbian. I could go with Brotherhood reservists, but those are in my TNNB deck and I didn't want to break it up. It's all ready got 4 random 2 drops because I don't have Amelia's. Hehe. Anyway, I looked around and I like some other Squadron reservists like Albert Gaines <> Nuke, Moonglow, Lady Lark (Linda Lewis) and Arcanna. Finally I grabbed Paladin and my curve was decided.

21 characters.

Beast, Furry Blue Scientist
Rick Jones, A Hero's Best Friend
Thermite, Sam Yurimoto
Dane Whitman <> Black Knight, Heroic Paladin
Natasha Romanoff <> Black Widow, Super Spy
Paladin, Intruders
Black Panther, T'Challa
Lady Lark, Linda Lewis
Moonglow, Melissa Hanover
Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger
Amphibian, Kingsley Rice
Carol Danvers <> Warbird, Galactic Adventurer
Golden Archer, Wyatt McDonald
Hawkeye, Clinton Barton
Albert Gaines <> Nuke, Atomic Powerhouse
Hawkeye, Leader By Example
She-Hulk, Gamma Bombshell
Harry Delgado, Acolyte
Wonder Man, Simon Williams
Hercules, Son of Zeus
Arcanna, Arcanna Jones (...She's not related to Rick is she?)

This was always an attack deck, so I grabbed a few obvious pumps first of all.

3 Plot twists

Call Down The Lightning
Heroes In Reserve
Savage Beatdown

Next I decided if I should play a team up and figured with the ease of searching it, I might as well. The Squad and Avengers have their own team up anyway. It also made my non-Reservists, reservists... However, I didn't think I needed to play any non-Reservists. Plus depending on the team up would suck. But having it would occasionally make Answer the Call and Pancea Potion game winners! Even without the team up Answer is great on every turn I'm likely to play it except 6. To try and make my curve better, I also added Hibernaculum. At the discard of a Squadron Supreme character I can dig for my characters or bring back a character I lost earlier. It doesn't have to be Squadron either.

4 Plot Twists

Answer The Call
Hibernaculum
Pancea Potion
Supreme Sanction

I wanted more attack pumps so I grabbed Avengers Mansion, hard to argue with a reusable pump! Air Strike can be used as attack and a card draw. Might Makes Right is a nice 3 attack all the time and if I play into Answer, Pancea and Nuke it's Beatdown #2. That was 30 cards, but I kept coming back to a card that was in vogue with Reservist for a while, War of Attrition. It's like Have a Blast without the discard and most of the time and no drawback in this deck. I decided to keep it because I all most always play 61 cards and often play a little over 30 in sealed. I know the extras in sealed are bad, but mathematically the difference between 60 and 61 doesn't effect your mulligan condition.

1 Location

Avengers Mansion

3 Plot Twists

Air Strike
Might Makes Right
War of Attrition

Total = 31

Final List

21 characters.

Beast, Furry Blue Scientist
Rick Jones, A Hero's Best Friend
Thermite, Sam Yurimoto
Dane Whitman <> Black Knight, Heroic Paladin
Natasha Romanoff <> Black Widow, Super Spy
Paladin, Intruders
Black Panther, T'Challa
Lady Lark, Linda Lewis
Moonglow, Melissa Hanover
Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger
Amphibian, Kingsley Rice
Carol Danvers <> Warbird, Galactic Adventurer
Golden Archer, Wyatt McDonald
Hawkeye, Clinton Barton
Albert Gaines <> Nuke, Atomic Powerhouse
Hawkeye, Leader By Example
She-Hulk, Gamma Bombshell
Harry Delgado, Acolyte
Wonder Man, Simon Williams
Hercules, Son of Zeus
Arcanna, Arcanna Jones

1 Location

Avengers Mansion

10 Plot Twists

Air Strike
Answer The Call
Call Down The Lightning
Heroes In Reserve
Hibernaculum
Might Makes Right
Pancea Potion
Savage Beatdown
Supreme Sanction
War of Attrition

So, once I get a few games in I'll update you with how it does. If you have any suggestions on how to make it better, I'd love to hear them, though this is me making decks out of what I have for now. Doesn't mean I can't be on the look out for new cards, hehe.

And seeing as I made 8 of these... Maybe I'll do Little Deck Week! Or maybe not... lol I'll definitely be posting a lot of these either way. If I feel up to it tomorrow you'll know.

-Mike

Marvel Zombies: The Dead Shall Walk Again

2008-04-15T00:35:00.000-07:00

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!

Spent The Night Playing Vs... With A New Player

2008-04-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

That picture, is a picture of VS doing it's magic.

Once again I got somebody new to play VS and I'm hoping I can get them to stick to it, because if I turn this play group over to VS... Well, it'll be a bunch of new VS System players, that's what!

While teaching Matt with a couple test games, another gamer who went with me to a few VS tournaments, Charles, called "next" and played 3-4 games against Matt while I got my hands on Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the first time.

VS is so fun though I kept finding myself forgetting Brawl to look over and correct little mistakes like the amount of defense given by a Cover Fire or reminding Charles that Oa only works on attackers.

I think there's hope for converting Matt, after all, how can you resist the lure of Hounds Lock? Or realizing that Total Anarchy is about to hose an Arkham deck! Or Savage Beatdown on a Mark II into 4-drop Poison Ivy followed by Hounds Lock!

You know, I'd forgotten how cool Sentinels were since I last played too. Hehe. Hounds Lock, despite the later sour feelings, is a thing of terror and beauty.

-Mike

P.S. that's his 6th resource in his hand.

Stop Uwe Boll Before He Gets A Comic Book Movie!

2008-04-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html

Infamous German "movie" director Dr. Uwe Boll, yes, that bastard is a doctor, has said that if one million people sign a petition asking him to retire from creating films, he will do so. Do I believe him? Not really. Will he find a loop hole? That seems to be his thing. But isn't it worth the slight chance he'll quit? Isn't it worth it to never see some indy book like Fables or The Walking Dead slaughtered and strewn about the silver screen like so much feces?

Is it worth it to thumb our noses at the director of such "gems" as Bloodrayne, Dungeonsiege, Alone In The Dark and House of the Dead? YES!

Eventually he'll run out of video games. Eventually he'll have to expand his horizons and license out properties from other mediums. What's the easiest target? Comic books. The comic book movie craze is still in full swing, they're still making big bucks and you have to imagine that some independent publishers are more than willing to do anything to sell a few more books or cash out on something that isn't gonna sell any more.

Please, Dr. Boll, be a man of your word... Cause I'm signature 170,004. I don't doubt we'll hit a million.

-Mike

Converting The Non-Believers Part 2

2008-04-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

All right, so I'm attempting to play VS with the "Magic Player" again today, hopefully he can show up early enough to get a game or two in, instead of just a quick run through the rules.

Update later tonight!

-Mike

EDIT: I think we have us a gamer! Quote Muffin (yeah, he goes by the name Muffin), "I hate you, I really didn't need to ever actually play this." Me, "You've seen how cheap older boxes are, right?" Muffin, "Dammit, yes!"

Marvel Universe Previews! Captain America = Counters FTW!

2008-04-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

Marvel Universe Preview: The Avengers

If you haven't seen the new previews from VSSystem.com, go check them out! They also drop one hell of a cool tidbit about how there's going to be six character cards dedicated to Captain America! NICE! Now, I'm sure one of those is going to be Bucky <> Captain America and I bet we get a Punisher with the version Captain America too! We all ready have the really cool art for that.

What I'd really like to talk about though is the Captain America 2-drop. Over on the realms in the preview thread (Read It Here!) there's been a fair amount of discussion about this character all ready. Like how he goes well with Avengers Reassembled, but I think that was obvious in the preview. The idea I really like is Captain America, Cable-3 and Bodyslide! Imagine if you will a deck... Sort of like this...

4x Rick Jones, A Hero's Best Friend
4x Archangel, Angel
6x Multiple Man <> Jamie Madrox, Army
4x Captain America, The Patriot - Secret Avenger
2x Spider-Man, New New Avenger
2x Longshot, Hero of Mojoworld (Or better yet, Amelia Voght, Acolyte! As suggested by Flashback81)
4x Cable, Nathan Summers
1x Sage, Xavier's Secret Weapon
4x Black Panther, T'Challa
2x Wonder Man, Simon Williams

1x Blackbird Blue

2x X-Corp: Amsterdam, X-Corp

4x Enemy Of My Enemy
3x Time Breach
4x Bodyslide
4x Heroes In Reserve
4x Forbidden Loyalties
3x Counter Strike
3x Fastball Special
61 Total

Only imagine you've seen all of Marvel Universe, you gave it more than 5 minutes of thought and you tested it. As vs_savant2 pointed out in the VS Realms thread above if you pull out a full pump on T'Challa on turn 5 he's a 9/8 all ready. Drop Captain America successfully and he's a 10/9, plus Cap at 4/3. 14 attack for 5 points? Sweeet. Bodyslide Captain and that's 16 attack on turn 5. I'd imagine Counter Strike and maybe Time Breach would be easily replaced with better cards, but this is all off the top of my head.

If you play Angel, Captain America, Cable and then 2x Multiple Man, Bodyslide Captain America and play a second Captain America... Let's say you kept Angel.

Captain America on 2 = 2 +1/+1 counters. Captain America on 4 = 5 +1/+1 counters. Captain America on your attack step on 4 = 6 +1/+1 counters. 13/13 is a damn nice chunk of stats even divided six ways. Imagine if you Bodyslide the new Captain? Imagine if you Bodyslide the new Captain and play a THIRD Captain America instead of 2 Multiple Man.

(Throwing in a free Amelia adds 2-3 counters the first way, 5 with the double Bodyslide.)

Very cool.

-Mike