VS System is LEGION

Point Store Cards

2008-06-10T14:30:00.001-07:00

I got a package today that featured four copies of The Infinites, Breeding Pens and Holocaust. It's funny, because I forgot I ordered them, and was lamenting my inability to build a SHIELD/Horsemen Team-Up that counters up Iron Man 4 like nobody's business using Nick Fury to bring out Infinites and KO them to Breeding Pens. That's mainly a hobby league deck, especially since both Breeding Pens and Stark's Armory are probably going to be replaced like nobody's business by Have a Blast/Batman 3/Death of a Dream/Silent War/etc. in a big time constructed tournament.

Still, it's fun to have the opportunity.

Good Week

2008-06-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

You know, some days everything just seems to work out. Some background: My brother and I decided to combine our gift giving efforts for my father’s birthday by chipping in to pay for a year of Verizon DVR. We were going to get him the standard one room DVR, and in standard Dad fashion, he decided to go above and beyond and order the Hi Def Multi Room DVR and buy an HDTV (while still only expecting our original price in payment). We got the box Monday night, and I attempted to set it up Tuesday after he acquired the new TV. Lots of frustration and more than an hour spent on the phone with Verizon led to no working set top box. And this was after seeing my beloved Red Wings fall 34.3 seconds short of winning the Stanley Cup in Hockeytown, only to lose the game 47 minutes of overtime later at around 1 AM. So I was a bit frustrated. And Tuesday’s work sucked. And Rock Band DLC was pretty disappointing (as interested as I am in three tier seven drum songs, I’m not buying a Disturbed pack). Then Wednesday came around. And things took a turn.

Wednesdays of course mean new comics day. And this one was a doosy. Secret Invasion #3, Kick-Ass #3 and Trinity #1, all very good books (look for reviews on read/RANT soon). Got home from work to find a replacement Set Top Box waiting. Set it up and we were still having a few issues, but after 20 minutes on the phone (mostly while holding), we got it working. And I turned on the TV and set it to the NBC HD feed just in time to see Lord Stanley’s Cup in pristine HD staring back at me. Two and a half hours later as Nicklas Lidstrom was skating over to raise the Cup, all was as it should be. My Wings are on top of the hockey world, and the Sox are in the process of smacking down the upstart Rays and cementing their place on top of the AL East. Things were looking up. I’ve got the Random Punks tourney to look forward to this weekend, and while I still have to put together the cards, my Heralds/Inhumans bounce deck is put together and ready for good times.

And this morning was the icing on the cake. Temping for a company is always a dangerous game, and I had been informed last week that my contract would be expiring on the 13^th and my department would be unable to extend my time. Well, turns out that’s not exactly the case. I got extended a month. So I’m still in business through mid-July, which puts me that much closer to the relocation in July. Good times.

Back Issue Order

2008-06-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

Through the listening of the Comic Book Page family of podcasts, I discovered this awesome little back issue website called My Comic Shop. They have weekly specials that you can unlock after joining their mailing list that give 5-10% off their prices for various divisions of comics. This week they've got the entirety of their Marvel stock on sale, so I decided to place an order. Let's take a look, shall we?

Captain Marvel #'s 17 and 32. This is the first volume of the Peter David run, and it'll complete the series for me.

The Death of Captain Marvel OGN. I've only actually read the Death of Captain Marvel reprinted in the Life and Death of Captain Marvel trade, and I've heard it's not the most ideal reprinting, so I decided to get the original.

Inhumans #'s 1-4 (Volume 3 from 2000). Thanks to Billy for pointing this one out to me.

Marvel Team-Up #137. Yup. It's the Aunt May/Franklin Richards one.

Sidekick #'s 1-5. This is the Paul Jenkins/Chris Moreno humor book. I've heard a lot of good about it, and I picked up the two issue Summer Fun Special at Wizard World Philly, so I wanted to grab these as well. Seems like they'll be very much in the style of the backups from World War Hulk: Front Line

Silver Surfer Vol. 2 #'s 70-73 and 75. I already had issue 74, so this will let me read the Herald Ordeal storyline with lots of Morg goodness and the death of Frankie Raye.

Warlock and the Infinity Watch #'s 9 and 19. Galactus appearances.

Should be good stuff. Another 8 Galactus appearances to add to my slowly building shrine to the big purple one.

Wizard World Philly Wrap Up

2008-06-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

Wizard World Philly came and went this past weekend. Let’s talk about it. So I didn’t go to the show on Friday due to not wanting to miss a day of work, and once I got out of work, I took the regional rail down to Market East station, met up with my friend from High School and went back to his apartment for the night. We played some Rock Band, hung out, watched some television, what have you. But that’s not really pertinent information, so let’s move on to the first day of the show.

Saturday:

One of my little foibles is my extreme desire to get to places early. This has always been the case. Thus, I took the walk down from my friend’s apartment about six to eight blocks away from the Convention Center with my bag full of various stuff, and was registered and in my place in line at about 8:30 for the 10 AM opening. I waited around and talked to a guy next to me in line wearing a Green Lantern VS shirt who didn’t play the game anymore. We talked HeroClix for a bit and so on. The doors eventually opened and I made my way to the hall. Pretty overwhelming for someone that’s never been to a big time con before. I walked the floor, checked out the retailers, thumbed through some cheap bins and walked the artist alley circuit. I bumped into Bryan and Pants from Comic Geek Speak next to the vacant table where Katie Cook was supposed to be (shame, I wanted to thank her in person for doing a Lockjaw sketch for me that I’ll be picking up in September), talked to them for a bit and grabbed my CGS convention shirt. I also made my way over to Stuart Sayger’s table and talked to him for quite a while. He’s probably the one artist I really picked up on through VS cards. I only had one of my rare binders with me as far as cards are concerned, so I didn’t have my World’s Finest cards on me, but I still got him to sign a Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster and Judgment Day. He told me a cool story about how he finished off the Judgment Day art. We had a good time chatting and I picked up the three issues of Shiver in the Dark, as well as two prints (one of the art from Certifiable, and the second of a wicked looking Dr. Doom). I should talk to artists more often. Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing. It was around this time that I randomly bumped into Los as he was coming into the hall. We ended up traveling the retailers as he frantically looked for a copy of Ultimate Spider-Man #3 he had seen the day before. During these trips, I picked up a couple of back issues of Starlin’s Captain Marvel and also found the Absolute sized JLA/Avengers slip case hardcover super crazy edition for a very respectable $30. We made our way over to the gaming area and found a nice spot. Los clued me in on a vendor that was facing the gaming area who had boxes of VS for very good prices. I grabbed a box of Legion for $25, cracked it open and pulled a Mobilize, as well as some other goodies (Need for Speed, foil No Match for Darkseid, and so on). Shortly after this, I got a call from Cliff and he made his way over to our neck of the woods. Bryan came by a bit after that, and we got down to business.

I had brought four decks with me that day. My own version of Money.dec that isn’t fully complete (I’d say there are about eight or so proxies of cards like Superman 5, Hal Jordan 3, Mightiest Heroes, Indestructible, etc.) was the only deck I brought with me that had been built and unchanged for a while. The other three decks were either new or tweaked heavily from earlier designs. The first deck I played against Cliff was a Heralds deck that utilized Silver Surfer, Skyrider of the Spaceways, Silver Surfer’s Board and Moondragon, Protector of the Mind Gem to draw a ton of cards. The card draw combined with my deck stacking capabilities, Terrax, Harbinger of Ruin Shape Change, Omnipotence and Negative Zone, Shadow Dimension (It should be noted that Barbara Gordon <> Oracle, Hacker Elite HATES that card) causes a lot of problems and allows for a pretty effective stall against a curve deck. It was a fun game with some pretty glaring errors (Cliff had two Daredevils in play for two turns before either of us noticed), but it was a good time nonetheless. I ended up winning thanks to a big swing on seven with Silver Surfer, Last Zenn-Lavian and Terrax, which was enough to put him below zero.

The second game I played against Cliff used my brand new Gotham Knights/Marvel Knights team up that generally focuses on using Barbara Gordon and The Hook Up to improve my hand while running a mostly hidden attack deck with Punisher, Guns Blazing as my only visible character. Cliff ended up beating me with his Random Punks Birds of Prey by one endurance as we were both in the negatives, and the use of three Tied Downs from the row to stop my Punisher from stunning back and KO’ing his Vixen on four. It’s an interesting way to play the deck, and pretty darned powerful.

The final game we played (to what I can remember at least, without taking any notes and writing this two days later) was my Inhumans aggro deck that utilizes Quicksilver, Inhuman By Marriage pretty much only to draw cards via Ego Gem, Infinity Gem. The extra card draw fuels the super beats that come from Tonaja, The Responsible One, Karnak, The Shatterer, and Maximus the Mad, Mental Manipulator with the ability to draw into my Royal Guards and Savage Beatdowns and Slobberin’ Times. This deck went up against the infamous Arkham Inmates/Injustice Gang team up. I was doing well throughout this game, drawing a ton of cards with Quicksilver and getting a lot of damage from Tonaja, Thing and Karnak due to bypassing their surge effects with Extended Family. We got to turn six, and I realized I was going to have a problem. I was playing against IG and had about 10 cards in hand. I did a lot of damage that turn, but Quicksilver was my only visible character, and he stunned while attacking Abra Kadabra, Magical Rogue thanks to Karnak’s effect. A couple All Too Easys, and he caught up and ONCE AGAIN BEAT ME BY ONE. Damn you, Cliff! I shake the fist! Either way, it was a ton of fun playing with Cliff and Bryan and Los, and a good way to spend a good five hours. I headed back to the apartment for the night, and watched the Red Wings beat the Penguins, which was good times.

Sunday:

I wasn’t planning to go to the con on Sunday. I was tired as all hell and sore from walking and such, so I was planning to relax. But when I woke up the next day, I was energized, and decided to head over anyway. But this time, I took a cab. When I paid my fare outside of the entrance to the con, I fumbled through my pocket for some change. In so doing, I managed to knock my cell phone out of my pocket without realizing it, and didn’t notice this until after he drove away. So I didn’t get the number of the cab or the company. Suddenly, I’m sitting here without a phone, which was a bit of an issue considering I had to call my dad to tell him when to pick me up at the train station, since I didn’t want to leave my car in the parking lot for three days. Thus, I ran around the con like a madman trying to find Los to borrow his cell to call my dad to let him know, and I ended up having to use a pay phone so I could call my dad and get his cell phone so I could call him again later. This definitely threw me out of sorts, but once that was all set up, I got to calm down a bit and attack the cheap bins in earnest. I walked away from a giant section of 50 cent bins with 38 issues of Peter David’s Captain Marvel series (I missed two issues without realizing it) as well as a random one off of She-Hulk and the first issue of Silent War (And we all know my love for the Inhumans). I also ran into CGS trivia geek extraordinaire and generally really cool guy Adam Murdough and talked to him for a bit. He was running through the quarter bins across from my bins. It’s funny, because once I found my haul and moved on, I kept dropping by and he was still there, practically in the same spot for hours. I got some other assorted cheap stuff, including a couple issues of Warlock and The Infinity Watch, Paul Jenkins’ Sidekick and a few other odds and ends. I ran into Pants and Shane (another CGS’er), and saw Jamie (yet another CGS guy) from afar, but didn’t get a chance to get over and talk to him. I also hung around with Los for a bit, but we got separated pretty quick, and since I didn’t have a cell phone, it was pretty hard to get back to meet up with him. I was tired as all hell and carrying around both a shoulder bag, a valise and a con bag, so I decided to cut out at around 2:30. I was back home by 4:35 (I just missed a train heading back home as I got to Market East station), and had time to relax.

So overall thoughts on my first official con: how the hell do these people so multiple cons? It’s completely exhausting, and I didn’t even get to do 30% of the stuff I wanted to. Didn’t get to talk to Maleev or Fred Van Lente or Brian Reed or any of the other creators, nor did I get the chance to talk to any of the CGS forum crew. But I still had a great time, had a blast playing Cliff and got a bunch of awesome stuff. All this makes me do is wait with baited breath for the CGS Super Show in September. Now I have to get ready for Random Punks this weekend.

Wizard World Philly!

2008-05-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

Two days until I descend upon the Philly Convention Center for some Wizard World comic conny goodness. Things I plan to look forward to:

!. Meeting some choice creators. The short list includes Dan Slott (Avengers: The Initiative, Spider-Man Brand New Day), Fred Van Lente (Action Philosophers!, The Incredible Hercules), Greg Pak (Incredible Hulk, Skaar: Son of Hulk), Brian Reed (Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel), and Alex Maleev (Badass covers on Nova and Punisher War Journal, Daredevil with Bendis)

2. Checking in with the Comic Geek Speak folks. CGS Nation will be there in various strengths, and I never turn down an opportunity to chill with the geeks and forumites.

3. VS SYSTEM! Stuart Sayger's going to be there, so I'll be bringing my Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Tricksters to be signed. Plus myself, Bryan and Los will be meeting up with one Clifford Parmiter (you may have heard of him) for a little four man tournament some time on Saturday.

4. Bargain Bins! Dollar bins? Fifty cent bins? Quarter bins? BRING 'EM ON! I'll be taking the shot at filling in my Warlock and the Infinity Watch and Peter David Captain Marvel runs.

5. Wrestlers! Yeah, I'm a sucker for pro wrestling. Mick Foley's going to be in the house, and I'm looking forward to shaking the man's hand.

The Summer of Madness rolls on. Full reports to follow.

Firewater Live at the North Star Bar

2008-05-25T22:35:00.001-07:00

t's been a while since I've been to a concert. Who better then to mark my return to the fold than that mad traveling band, Firewater. Hot off the heels of their excellent new album, Tod A decided to bring along a new bevy of musicians (he was the only member of the band I saw at the Paradise in Boston four years ago that was also there tonight. No Oren Kaplan or Tamir Muskat) to rock the house in North Philly. And rock the house they did. Nearly the entire set comprised of songs from The Golden Hour, and while that is technically a disappointment (no songs from Ponzi Scheme or Man on the Burning Tightrope), the band was on fire all night long. Tod played guitar the whole night and was backed by another guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, an ABSOLUTELY INSANE Trombone player (Seriously. She was out of this world. Solos in nearly every song. Crazy improvisations. Really impressive stuff), and the capper, an auxiliary percussionist that went back and forth from tablas to bongos to a double sided conga all night. This guy was a lunatic. One of the best pure percussionists I've ever seen. He had a spotlight during the instrumental "Bhanga Bros." that is one of those once in a lifetime experiences that I know I'll never forget. He was jumping around and playing the hell out of those drums all night long. And that's what I really love about Firewater. It was true in Boston and it was true tonight. These people genuinely love to play music. And it shows. Huge smiles on all their faces. Dancing around the stage. Tod being the consummate front man making sure everybody in the club is up out of their seats and having fun. I mean, the selist for the first show I saw was definitely better (no matter how good the new album is, it's not quite the same as "Man With the Blurry Face," "Knock 'Em Down" or "Another Perfect Catastrophe"), but the band for this show was incredible. I have no doubt in my mind that Firewater is the best band I've ever seen live. And I'm thrilled I got the opportunity to bask in their awesomeness one more time. Let's hope it's not the last.

Set List:
Hey Clown
Some Strange Reaction
Borneo
Already Gone
Bhanga Bros.
6:45 (This is How it Feels)
Electric City
Some Kind of Kindness
Get Out of My Head
Weird to Be Back

Encore 1
Paradise
Three Legged Dog

Encore 2
This is My Life

Sure, only 13 songs, but just like last time, everything was drawn out with solos and improvisational jams. That was a solid hour and a half of kick ass music. And what more can you ask for?

Modern BYOS Tourney Report

2008-05-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday’s Modern Age Bring Your Own Set was an example of mistakes completely sinking me on multiple occasions. I decided to build a solo Marvel Defenders deck, as I liked their defensive capabilities (through Hellcat, Defenders Defend and Against All Odds), as well as the inclusion of plot twists like Big Leagues. I built another deck for the day which I gave to Bryan, which was your standard IG Hidden aggro deck. We had two others show up, one with his own solo Defenders build, and the other packing Outsiders/Gotham Knights.

Round 1: Solo Defenders mirror (Los)

So this round my deck decided to be very uncooperative. I whiffed on one (no big deal), hit Tania on two and Hawkeye on three (Hawkeye wasn’t exactly what I was looking for), whiffed on four (underdropping into Hellcat), whiffed on five (underdropping into, you know, nothing), whiffed on six (dropping Wong and US Agent), hit Hulk on seven and 5 drop Dr. Strange on eight. Los was using Iceman to keep Tania locked down, as well as the combination of US Agent and Brunhilde to keep his endurance high due to constant reinforcement. He ended up getting the better of me in late game thanks to Quasar giving him better backups than my board.

0-1

Round 2: Outsiders/Gotham Knights (Los’ Mom)

Another example of a long game thanks to the Outsiders swarm leading to easy reinforcement. Multiple swings with characters allowed me to stop board presence which generally neutralized Dr. Light. I ended up winning on seven thanks to a triple swinging 23 ATK Hulk. The first two attacks were reinforced, but a full on brunt against Dr. Light was enough to take her down.

1-1

Round 3: IG Hidden (Bryan)

Here’s where the idiocy comes in. So when I built this version of the deck, I realized that losing Beatdown, Flying Kick, Big Leagues and Hunte Castle slowed down the deck way too much. That combined with the loss of Mobilize led to the inclusion of a playset of Criminal Mastermind. So turn five comes around, and he’s got two Masterminds flipped in his row. And I forgot to draw the cards. I didn’t realize this until late in the combat phase that turn. We couldn’t really rewind things due to Secret Files shuffling both of our decks. Now, it’s impossible to know if I would have drawn into Dr. Strange or a way to get him. But if I could have, I had game. I had a Tania in hand to sub over US Agent, as well as Rabbit Fire, Big Leagues and The Order in the row. Had I gotten Dr. Strange, I would have been able to deal 60 endurance direct through double swings by Dr. Strange and Hawkeye. But since I forgot, I lost the game a turn later. Thems the breaks.

1-2

Round 4: Solo Defenders mirror REMATCH (Los)

I hit my curve this time, but the combination of reinforcement and invulnerability from Brunhilde stalled me out. Same story as the first game, really.

So it wasn't a very successful day. But at the same time, oddly enough, it sorta was. A deck I built won the tournament, and without the mistake I made against that selfsame deck, I could have easily finished 3-1 instead of 1-3 and won the damned thing. I did realize that my deck relied a little too much on the turn 5 Dr. Strange combo face crushing for the win, with successive turns as an afterthought (sort of an "Ah, I guess I'll throw in a couple Sub Mariners and Hulks just in case it goes past 5. But I'll be good"). I had the defense down, but I probably should have taken the opportunity to use Ego Gem to draw through the deck a little faster, but these are all things you learn as you go. Not by best tournament, and the first time in a while I was sub .500 in a costructed tournament, but I'll get back in the saddle in time for Punks.

Heralds Bounce Punks deck for the win?

Et tu, Scarlett?

2008-05-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

I remember the confusion when I first heard about it. Wait, Scarlett Johannson is going to put out an album of Tom Waits covers? Seems a little odd. Seems a little random. Then she goes and picks a bunch of very obscure songs, like Falling Down and Green Grass and Town With No Cheer, with the most well known song being I Don't Wanna Grow Up. Seems a little odd. Seems a little random. It came out today. I've now heard it...

It sucks.

I get it. She's trying to be Nico. It's cute. She can't pull it off, but she tries. Here's the thing. Tom Waits is often dismissed by a lot of folks due to his voice, which can at times be an unholy union between Bob Dylan and Louis Armstrong and can at other times be simply unholy (any time he beat boxes on Real Gone legitimately sounds like the devil has taken over your stereo). But there's another side to him. Despite the gruff voice and the often bizarre instrumental choices, Tom Waits can make extremely emotionally affecting songs and albums. From the early work with "Invitation to the Blues" and "Blue Valentines" to "Who Are You?" and "Make it Rain" from more recent years, Tom's been very capable of resonating with his ridiculously rabid fan base. As such, we have a tendency to react pretty fucking negatively when other artists try to mess with his songs. Rod Stewart cannot pull off the emotional complexity of "Tom Traubert's Blues," especially when he decides to be a bastard and cut the verse with the stabbing in it. The only one who came close was Springsteen, and that was mostly because Waits managed to out-Springsteen Springsteen when he wrote "Jersey Girl." So we're pretty protective of our boy Tom.

But Scarlett can't pull it off. Her Nico-esque delivery would work for songs that were, you know, designed to be sung by Nico, but it doesn't work for Tom. She squeezes all the emotion out of everything. It just comes out like a monotone. You can't take the emotion you hear in Waits' voice out of a song like "Who Are You?" It doesn't work. The skeptic in me really believes that the indie cred Scarlett built up on Ghost World is pretty much diminished, so she made a surgical strike by putting out an album of obscure Tom Waits songs. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope she legitimately likes Tom Waits, but at the same time, why would someone who legitimately likes Tom Waits completely butcher his songs over and over again? Doesn't make sense.

There is one good thing here. The musical background supplied by the guitarist from TV on the Radio (there's that indie cred!) is pretty good stuff. It's quite ethereal, and evokes a strong sense of a dream state. But it also overpowers Scarlett on numerous occasions, making it nearly impossible to hear her intonation (which, to be honest, isn't exactly a bad thing often times...). To be frank, the entire album's a mess. If you're even a basic fan of Tom Waits, skip it. If you're like me, and your ring tone is the chorus from "Tom Traubert's Blues," definitely skip it. If you're not a fan, check it out, but listen to the originals to hear what it's supposed to sound like.

I will be getting back to the VS talk soon, mostly based around thoughts about the cosmicky goodness currently going on in previews this week, as well as my terrible, terrible mistakes at the Bring Your Own Set this past Sunday.

The Wonders of Modern Medicine

2008-05-19T19:05:00.001-07:00

Two years ago, Jon Lester was diagnosed with lymphoma. Tonight, he threw a no hitter. Ain't life grand?

Musical Seasons

2008-05-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love to death about music is the way that just listening to a song can be such a memorable experience that it transports you to where you were when it first really struck you. You can see everything playing out in your mind's eye. This can, of course, be for good or ill. Just as much as that one uproarious song can take you back to an awesome concert experience or a night out with friends, the depressing stuff can just as easily take you back to a failed relationship or a death in the family. It's powerful stuff. When I was studying Philosophy at Boston University as an undergrad, I immediately became enamored with Friedrich Nietzsche, mostly because of what he said about music in The Birth of Tragedy. He talked about how music is the most immediate art form. If you're reading a book or a poem or looking at a painting or sculpture, you can always simply close your eyes and it all goes away. You can't do that with music. You can't close your ears. Sure, things like earplugs exist, but music is persistent, and at the right volume can penetrate even the staunchest of earplugs. And this is why I love music. It's inescapable.

I wanted to throw something out here, which I was reminded of when I put my iPod on shuffle the other day at work. A certain song came on, and it immediately made me think of Winter. Not just the moment that the song first affected me in the winter months, but the actual notion of Winter itself. As an idea. A thing in itself. I started to think about how there are definitely songs or albums I own that immediately evoke the various seasons of the year. And I thought I would share them with everyone.

Fall: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads
Specifically the song "Lovely Creature." There's a detachment to this song. It features a constant, almost galloping series of snare drum rolls backed up by a walking bass line and otherworldly choir. Every now and then, a sharp intrusion by Blixa Bargeld's electric guitar punctures the trancelike rhythm section. This song has always made me think of those chilly fall nights in late October that signal the coming of Halloween. And this isn't even a case of hearing it for the first time in the fall. I bought that album in the summer. A sample lyric: "Oh through the night, through the night/The wind lashed and it whipped me/When I got home, my creature was no longer with me"

Winter: The Knife - Silent Shout
Specifically the title track, "Silent Shout." My brother bought me this album for Christmas two years ago, and I can't help but notice how much of a quintessential winter record this really is. I mean, coming from a duo of Swedish techno artists, you're not surprised that they can make music that chills, but I can't really explain more strongly how much I think of ice when I hear the title track. I just get a picture in my mind of a camera tracking over a large, blank, chilly frozen meadow. It's a song and an album that gets a lot of play for me during the winter months, especially when it snows. Sample lyric: "In a dream I lost my teeth again/Calling me woman and half man/Yes, in a dream all my teeth fell out/A cracked smile and a silent shout"

Spring: The Dresden Dolls - Yes, Virginia
Specifically the song "Backstabber". I always think about those days in March and April where the temperature finally breaks and gets up into that high 50's to mid 60's range. That's my wheelhouse right there. And when it's that temperature and a bright, sunny day, there's nothing nicer than taking a drive with all the windows down. That's made even better if the Dolls are blasting their percussion heavy, bouncy music through the stereo. Their second album is a lot lighter than their first, and it definitely shows. Great spring record for those days where you step outside and just become invigorated. Sample lyric: "You always struck me as the type to take it lightly/But now you're going to have to shut your mouth or fight me"

Summer: Firewater - The Man on the Burning Tightrope
Specifically the song "Dark Days Indeed." I don't think it's possible for me to write a post about music and not bring up Firewater in some fashion. Even still, "Dark Days" is arguably of my college years. The album came out in the summer, and while we didn't adopt it as the anthem of our quad Sophomore year until a different season, it was always a fixture when I would make trips up to Boston over the summers to relax with the crew, have some drinks and dance and sing like idiots to "Dark Days." It's the ultimate drinking song. A chorus that demands sing alongs, great lyrics throughout, a ripping sax solo right in the middle. It's all good. I think for the rest of my life, I'm always going to think about those summer trips whenever "Dark Days" comes up. It's such a defining moment for my social life. And that'll never change. Sample lyric: "We don't know who put this cup/Of life into our hands/But when we go our bones will bake/Upon the burning sands/Cause we walk but once among the living/So no regrets and no forgiving/Hard to dance when you're down upon your knees/And these are Dark Days Indeed"

That felt good. I should write about music more often. But we'll be getting back to VS in the next few days with some new thoughts about my Red Skull preview card from last week in light of Acts of Vengeance, as well as a hopeful tournament report on Bring Your Own Set Modern.

Crazy Month

2008-05-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

I am officially entering a very exciting span of weeks chock full of travel and concerts and card playing and all sorts of things. Not really going to have much weekend time until, oh I don't know, July, but that's probably for the best. Here's what we're looking at.

Sunday, May 18th - Bring Your Own Set Modern event at Great Traditions

Sunday, May 25th - Firewater live at the North Star Bar in Philly

Friday, May 30th to Sunday, June 1st - Wizard World Philly at the Philly Convention Center (complete with plans to meet up with a certain Clifford Parmiter for some VS goodness)

Saturday, June 7th - Ring of Honor at the National Guard Armory in (technically) Philly.

Saturday, June 14th to Sunday, June 15th - Megaweekend New York

Friday, June 20th to Sunday, June 22nd - NEARfest in Bethlehem, PA

Friday, June 27th to Sunday, June 29th - VS World Champs (sure, I'm most likely not going, but it's still a possibility, so I'm keeping it on the schedule)

Gonna be busy. And there's this "Marvel Universe Set Release" thing I keep hearing about.

Crazy go nuts.

The Greatest T-Shirt Ever?

2008-05-14T21:28:00.001-07:00

I found out about this little gem on the Comic Geek Speak forums, and immediately bought one.

R Stevens, you are one magnificent bastard.

Linky

Best DCBS Box ever?

2008-05-14T21:17:00.001-07:00

SERIOUSLY looking forward to Friday's box of comicky goodness. Let's take a peek at the shipping list, shall we? Super Awesome books are in caps and bolded.

NOVA #13 (The Galactus Arc begins!!!!)
Punisher War Journal #19
X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead (This should be interesting. Haven't read any Quicksilver since Son of M)
Angel: After the Fall #7
Avengers/Invaders #1 (Should be tons of fun)
Franklin Richards: Not So Secret Invasion (Time to find out if these books are as good as I've heard)
Invincible Iron Man #1 (Hoping for the best)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer #14 (Goddard's arc has been awesome so far)
Secret Invasion #2 (Yep, already have it)
Mighty Avengers #13 (Nick Fury!)
CASANOVA #14 (Absolute top of the stack. If the internet is to be believed, this is one of the best comic books to come out in a very, very long time. I LOVE CASANOVA)
Captain Britain and MI:13 #1 (British Skrulls!)
Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four #1 (Fantastic Skrulls!)
THE TWELVE #5 (It's still great. JSA, eat you heart out. Yeah! I said it!)
Green Lantern Corps #24 (MongulThanos continues his quest)
Sky Doll #1 (Super interested to see how this turns out. Loved the preview in the Soleil sampler)
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #1 (YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!)
Serenity: Better Days #3
Booster Gold #9

19 books? Two completely awesome (or so I assume) cosmic books? One of which has FUCKING GALACTUS in it? And the finale of the current Casanova arc, which has been absolutely mindblowing and amazing and deep and funny and all of the great things that make Casanova Casanova? Good, good, good times.

Plus, we've got the Modern Bring Your Own Set on Sunday. Dr. Strange will be my strength as I pilot my solo Defenders build into the fields of battle. Tournament Report will follow (if anyone else bothers to show up, of course).

Random Preview Review: SHIELD Helicarrier

2008-04-23T19:09:00.001-07:00

Hold on a second there. That Helicarrier isn't on its side! What was David Finch thinking? Was he holding the Bristol Board sideways that day without realizing it? That was for Billy. Moving on to the card itself in some random bursts.

Woo! Terraform! And it makes perfect sense here, as a flying ship should pretty much be able to land wherever the hell it wants. Terraform is a fantastic mechanic, and it's nice to see it come back.

From my perspective, the card is good because there are no restrictions as to when you have to flip it. Sure, it's a pain that the characters you return have to be non-stunned, but SHIELD is very obviously a team that rolls with the off curve army love. Thus it's nice that you can flip in response to an attack and perhaps force them into attacking your giant Iron Man with all his delicious +1/+1 counters because you bounced back all his friends. I'm a little iffy on resource row cards that have hefty flip costs thanks to reusable non Team-Up resource row hate like Batman/Reality Gem/Unravel Reality/Planet Weapon, but it seems like the juice is worth the squeeze in this case provided you can protect it (*COUGH*Pathetic Attempt*COUGH*).

Look, we all know how good a blanket +2 ATK to your whole field is. Look at The New/Next Brotherhood. Look at Doomed Earth. Look at MTU Carnage. All of these cards have been part of decks that have either been at or close to tier 1 at various points in the grand VS metagame. Of course, there's a big difference here in that we're dealing with a unique location, which means no multiples, so you probably can't build a super potent rush deck based around this thing, but it does give flight, and we are heading towards a modern age devoid of Flying Kick. Global flight has never been a bad thing.

I think it's a good card overall, but a bit underwhelming compared to the other things we've seen (Kinda like The Great Arena in that respect). It will no doubt be powerful in the right deck, and Stu and Squire have probably been working overtime trying to figure out the perfect army deck for it and how to somehow fit it into Super Troopers (respectively), so it'll definitely find its place. Personally, I want to see more Iron Man love, because dammit, he's one of the most fascinating characters in the current Marvel U (I'm really tired of him being simply written off as a dick. It's a hell of a lot more complex than that).

I do like the feel that you've got this potentially gigantic Iron Man surrounded by hoards of little dudes that can come and go as he sees fit. It'll be interesting to see how far reaching the R&D fellas really take the SHIELD umbrella. Seems like with Squirrel Girl joining the party, SHIELD encompasses the entire 50 States Initiative, which means we're dealing with approximately two thirds of the Marvel Universe as active SHIELD agents. Allows for a lot of potential shenanigans in card choices. The only downside is the inclusion of Squirrel Girl (who sadly does not have the text I wanted for her, which was something along the lines of "Activate -> KO target character with cost 9 or greater" and the art from when she took down Doom. Imagine: Ditko on a VS card...), I now really want to see the rest of the GL(Insert flavor of the month initial here) crew, including silly things like a Mr. Immortal that auto recovers the second you stun him or something along those lines. A man can dream.

Oh, and for those of you that haven't read the manic and crazy awesome Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Spectacular one-shot from last year, try and find it on the cheap at a con. It's Fabian Nicieza and Dan Slott being as silly as possible with some of the silliest characters in the Marvel U. It's also the place where Stu got all the panel scans for his Squirrel Girl preview. Awesome, awesome stuff.

TBS Interviewed on Comic Geek Speak

2008-04-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

I'm at work listening to Comic Geek Speak's wrap up of Day 3 at New York Comic Con. It's the standard con show, mostly consisting of co-host Peter Rios taking his iRiver around and interviewing various creators and fans at the cons. Imagine my surprise when I hear none other than The Ben Seck himself being interviewed by Peter and Kevin Moyer. It's a fun interview, with some nice little tidbits about Marvel Universe, including a Fin Fang Foom card featuring new art from Mike Mignola. It's awesome stuff. You can find the interview in episode 422 (linky), and it's the last major interview done on the con floor, starting at around the hour and fifteen minute mark. It's good stuff.

It should be noted that when Peter was talking about the listener he talked to that got into comics because of VS, he was talking about me.

Ok, self serving grandstanding is now over.

2008-04-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Various upheavals in my professional life have caused me to neglect both this blog and my contributions to read/RANT. I finally got off my ass and wrote up a review of Captain Marvel #5 at the sister blog, so I wanted to throw something up here to prove that I'm not dead yet. Sure, I probably lost whatever readers I had in the hiatus, but what's the fun in not toiling in obscurity? Calvin's dad would claim that it builds character. So why stop now? I'm going to start a bit fresh here. Missed a bunch of previews (I hear that this Hulk fella might be pretty good...) and left some strings hanging, but there's not much I can do about that now.

Oddly enough, I want to talk to you folks out there about Magic. Not Joey Q's Spider-Man marriage altering unexplainable Magic, but the original cardboard crack, Magic: The Gathering. I haven't played Magic in years. I bought some packs of Tenth Edition a little while ago on a nostalgia trip, but I haven't played the physical game in an extremely long time. I was surprised when my WoW playing buddies at the local store were planning to bring Magic decks this past Sunday. So, of course, I decided to bring my own, slapping together two mono color decks. I went with mono Black discard, because it's what I used to play 12 years ago (the concept that that was 12 years ago frightens me), as well as Mono Blue. I didn't exactly have playsets of the cards anymore, so most of my stuff was relegated to one-ofs and two-ofs. And considering when I played the game, my decks were pretty much only legal in Vintage. We played a bunch of games yesterday, and it was one of those odd situations where a good chunk of the cards in my decks were out of print and thus unrecognizable to my friends that started playing long after the days of Ice Age and The Dark. This of course means that I didn't recognize their cards either, which made the games a bit longer than expected. Still, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

The glory of Magic that makes it such a great casual game to just dust off and play is the ridiculous amount of stuff you can have happen out of nowhere. Here's some examples.

The first game I played with my Black deck involved using a swamp and Dark Ritual to drop Underworld Dreams (IQ in enchantment form) on turn one, which absolutely wrecked Bryan.
At the end of his turn on four, Mage Dan (so stated due to the multiple Dans in our play group and his affinity for the Mage class in WoW) had seven cards in hand. A Cursed Rack and Mind Twist later, he had no hand on turn five without playing a single card.
The Rack is a ludicrously powerful card.

I also had fun with the Mono Blue deck, but in a different fashion. I had two different games that went to turns 25 and beyond, one against a crazy Green enchantment deck, and the other against an equally crazy Blue/White ping deck that had so much defensive tactics it was crazy.

So what was the point of this little excursion? Well, I've realized that Magic is one of those games that will always be there. VS is my game. I think it's a better overall game than Magic. That'll never change. However, the casual pick up and play aspect of Magic is really enjoyable in its own right. I'll never go out of my way to buy cards or play in tournaments, but every once in a while when WoW or VS gets tedious for a week, it's nice to bring out the old guard.

I also wanted to mention that every card previewed so far for Marvel Universe has been pretty much crazy. When you look at previews and have to think of what isn't a money rare (which for me is basically just 8 drop Hulk and The Great Arena so far), you're looking at some good times. Good times indeed.

Avengers Previews!

2008-04-10T06:53:00.001-07:00

At the end of every week, I'm going to be going over our preview cards from that week and sharing some of my thoughts concerning playability, flavor, mechanics, balance and such. So let's get going with the Avengers Centric previews.

We've got the new mechanic of Rally with Captain America, The Patriot*Secret Avenger. Rallying is a very powerful effect in theory, with the chance of both drawing a card and getting an effect at the same time, or cycling a card off the top (which can of course be good or bad). This guy was made for off curve decks, especially those that swarm the board with characters. Depending on what else we get in the set, I wouldn't be surprised to see this guy at the end of a couple press chains in a Kree Avengers team-up in Silver. Sure, Kree may not be the best team for this considering their penchant for bouncing their own characters back to their hands, but if you drop Cap at the end of your press chain on the kill turn and throw out a Lunatic Legion, your opponent's probably going to be pretty upset with your entire board getting +3/+1 this turn. His secondary power isn't going to be as useful in a curve deck, but if the rally goes off it doesn't really matter. With no one drop, you'd still be getting a 4/3 two drop that cantrips and keeps your hand healthy. Plus, we've got the version "Secret Avengers," which is a definite portent about the importance of version in the Avengers team, so look for cards like Ravaged and Furious Assault to make a comeback in these decks.

It's basically Mightiest Heroes for the Avengers. Similar effect in that it stacks any Avenger on top of your deck, and has the alternate discard effect to get the card to a place you can use it. Mightiest Heroes put a power-up (or discard for Truth, Justice, and Peace) in your hand, and Avengers Reassembled puts a Reservist into your row. It is a nice effect to be able to flip this from your row and have it replace itself into a reservist so you can still search and not mess up your theme. Very strong. Hell, even if you're playing this in a non reservist Avengers curve or swarm deck, it's still as functional as Mightiest Heroes, 2 drop Surfer, Attilan, Kindred Spirits or any other cards that stack your deck. Very strong, and the mechanic of adding alternate cost boosts to Plot Twists is a good move that opens up R&D even more.

We've technically seen this guy before, in that he's the Captain America card we voted on during the voting sessions to prepare for Marvel Universe. That doesn't change how strong he is. You can wreak havoc on an attack step with this guy, especially if he's got his Shield equipped to him. I like that it's an attack redirection that does not cost an exhaust like most of the other ones, with the added bonus of the second part of the text that allows for some invulnerability to be passed around. Plus, he's an 8/7. That's always nice. I do think that some sort of Avengers/Team Superman deck that basically makes it impossible for your opponent to actually choose who he is attacking could be pretty strong. Just having Captain America adjacent to Wonder Woman is going to cause all kinds of trouble, and he's a lot better than Vartox. Good stuff.

It only took a couple minutes for Tchalla to come up with a way to stack the 11 drop unaffiliated Surfer from the Coming of Galactus set to burn your opponent for 11 on turn four (It involves We Had a Team-Up and 2 Drop Surfer, for those that don't know). Plus, you've got tons of synergy with 2 drop Captain America's rally mechanic, which you know will be on other characters in other forms. It's reusable burn. And it can burn for quite a lot under the right circumstances. And he's another Secret Avenger. Good stuff.

I love this card. It's a very strong Defense pump with no visible drawbacks. Plus it's got the added bonus of negating everything else on the chain that's targeting him. Which sounds great, but that's really what makes this card balanced. There are very few cards that are going to be played by your opponent during an attack that target your character. Most of them (your SKREEEE!'s, your Going Apes, your Atomizes, etc.) can be played at any time, and are likely to be done before combat is legal, especially with a card like this out now. Sure, it might negate a What Are Friends For?, but that's not exactly the most popular card on earth. So basically, the secondary power of this card is more likely to negate your own stuff. This card cannot be played in multiples, as first one to resolve will cancel out any others still on the chain. You can't play it with any other ATK or DEF pumps unless you have a strong understanding of the chain. This means that you can play out this card first and chain a Savage Beatdown to it for a pretty crazy +5/+4 on the attack, but that allows your opponent to play any effects that target you without worry, as another Charging Star would negate the first one and the Beatdown if you want to stop your opponent. This card is really good.

And now we get to the reason why I couldn't wait until tomorrow to write this up. This card is ABSOLUTELY CRAZY. It's a global team-up that hits every card you own and artificially increases your hand size by one. That's all well and good right there. You have to play with the top card of your deck revealed, which is technically a drawback (The Secret Society loves to know what they can get their hands on to mill off the top of your deck). But to be honest, the rest of the text could be blank after that first sentence for all I care. This card gives unaffiliated characters team affiliations. While they're in your deck. And automatically lets you Mobilize for them. Mr. Sinister is an extremely powerful card. Holocaust is a ludicrously powerful card. Now, you can not only play them and search for them, but you can also play Big Leagues and Against All Odds without losing your other team affiliations by playing Crisis on Infinite Earths, so you can still run all your team stamped stuff from other teams. Plus, all those character searches that stack characters on top of your deck (Kindred Spirits, Mightiest Heroes, Avengers Reassembled, 2 drop Surfer, Attilan, Lady Blackhawk, Sintaris) can now be played on the turn you want to use them, and you can still recruit from the top of your deck. This card is insanely powerful and should be a big time money rare.

I'll pop in with a quick post tomorrow about tomorrow's card. This set already looks insane. And I can't wait to see next week's Hulk/Warbound previews.

New Blood Part 1: Fantastic Four

2008-03-31T20:19:00.001-07:00

I met my friend Will when I picked up WoW and started playing at the local hobby league around January-February of 2007. The guy is quite the card player and one of the best metagame callers I've personally seen. When I was playing a few casual VS games with Bryan on Sunday (wherein I managed to win two games with Skrulls despite not playing Franklin Richards either game and not playing Captain America the first game), Will showed some interest in learning how to play VS. He's watched us play a lot, and always found the game intriguing, but monetary concerns have kept him from jumping in full tilt. So we sat down and went over the basics of combat and the phases of the game and such. Next week we're going to sit down and play some games.

Now, out of the decks that I usually have on my person, only one of them (Injustice Gang hidden beats) is probably easily grasped by a new player. The others (JSA/FF Alan Scott abuse, Skrulls, JLA stall, Substibuse, and World's Finest) would probably be a bit too esoteric for someone who's just starting out. I've got the starters, and I've got the Hellboy Essential (which is what was used to teach me the game), but I've always found them a little lacking in terms of either easing someone into game mechanics (Hellboy) or being legitimately fun to play (the starters). But we have a trick up our sleeve. And that trick is Marvel Legends. As we all know, Marvel Legends is not the most complicated set, and it's the perfect jumping on point for new players. Very few cards are super complicated, keywords are pretty much nonexistent, and even though the cards are simplistic in nature, they're still very powerful. And what team is the best example of this? Why, the Fantastic Four, of course. So I decided to make my own damned starter deck. 60 cards, mono team Fantastic Four. It's got a very good cross section of the basic points of the game. Concealed characters, activated abilities, equipment, locations, search, combat pumps, and so on. Plus, for being (mostly) short on rares, it's a pretty strong little deck in its own right. It's not exactly as abusive as Miguel's deck, but it's still a lot of fun to just shuffle up and play. And without further ado, here we go.

Characters:
4x Invisible Woman, Walking on Air
1x Uatu the Watcher, He Who Watches
3x Human Torch, Matchstick
3x Mr. Fantastic, Stringbean
4x Invisible Woman, First Lady of the Fantastic Four
2x Thing, Idol O' Millions
4x Mr. Fantastic, Critical Thinker
2x Luke Cage, Paid in Full
2x Franklin Richards, Child of the Cosmos
2x Ghost Rider, Rider on the Storm
2x She-Hulk, Single Green Lawyer
1x Human Torch, Flame On!
1x Hulk, The Fantastic Hulk
1x Thing, The Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing
Plot Twists:
4x Mobilize/Signal Flare (take your pick, really)
4x Finishing Move
4x Devastating Blow
4x Torch and Thing
3x It's Clobberin' Time!
2x Stretch Out
Equipment:
4x Unstable Molecular Suit
Locations:
3x Research Facility

I'm probably going to whip one of these up for each team from Marvel Legends (except, you know, the Shi'ar) and post them on the blog this week if I get a chance.

And as for the Ultimate Cosmic Deck, I'm still working on it. The Wild Pig sale and the short box full of comics I got out of it have put a bit of a dent into my free time.

Wild Pig Comics Madness

2008-03-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

Twice a year, Wild Pig Comics (www.wildpigcomics.com) in Kenilworth, New Jersey runs a 50% off everything in the store sale. The March sale, which celebrates their anniversary of opening the store, is a 29 hour long period of madness. Hell, the store's still open right now and will remain open until 5 PM tomorrow. So get out there if you're reading this, in the area, love comics and can get there before it ends. You've basically got four major things to buy at these sales. Wall Books for the high quality Silver/Golden Age books (Detective Comics 42 was there for a cool $1,100), priced back issues for the less high profile Silver and Bronze Age books, 50 cent back issues of all kinds of random stuff, and recent 50 cent back issues from the past year to year and a half. I love these sales. I went to the one last October and picked up all kinds of stuff, and this trip was no different.

I went to the store hoping to pick up all three trades of Brian Michael Bendis' Alias. I didn't even really look for them after I found 27 of the 28 issues for 50 cents apiece. Once I find issue 22, I'll have gotten the entire run in pristine condition for basically the price of the first trade. I also got a TON of cosmic Marvel stuff, which was mainly the Jim Starlin Warlock and Warlock & The Infinity Watch as well as a big chunk of Peter David's Genis-Vell Captain Marvel series. I pretty much went nuts, and all told (between three different trips to the cash register), I walked out of there with two trades (Jinx and Batman: Year One) and 170 50 cent comic books ranging in publishing years from 1974 to 2007. It was good times, and it should give me a lot of fodder for retro reviews on read/RANT in the future. I definitely plan to review Alias once I get that last issue and read the whole run.

The Ultimate Cosmic Deck

2008-03-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

So I had an idea. I love cosmic characters, both from the perspective of the mechanic in VS System and the characters in the comics themselves. I’ve built all kinds of cosmic decks that revolve around 2 drop Surfer (especially after his Board was released) or 2 drop Franklin Richards or this or that, and wherever I go to play VS, I always have at least one deck on hand based around the cosmic mechanic. But you know what? That’s not good enough. I want to push it further. I want every single card in my deck to have the word cosmic on it somewhere. Whether it’s the name, version, keyword, text box, flavor text, I don’t care. But it’s got to have the word cosmic on it somewhere. Will it be good? Probably not. But it’ll be a fun experiment, and that’s what’s important in this day and age.

I'm limiting myself to Silver Age here, as I don't really have any cards that stretch back to Golden. So after doing some quick research on Doc X’s Search Engine, we’re looking at 23 Plot Twists, 6 Locations and 3 Equipments with the word cosmic in the name or text box. Some of these cards, namely Bestow the Power Cosmic as an example, are completely useless to me, but we should still have enough support cards to put something together. What’s really fun about this is what we can’t use. The king of cosmic stall decks (and all stall decks, really) that is Galactus, Devourer of Worlds? Can’t use him. One of the most popular one drops in the Silver Age that makes his personal job searching out cosmic characters? No Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend for you. Want to draw some cards? No Elemental Converters. Want some pumps? You’d better be running Titans. Exhaustion effects? You’d better be a fan of Air-Walker 3. No I Must Obey or Spider-stall. Recursion? Soul World doesn’t have the word cosmic anywhere on it. Endurance gain? Say hello to Plasma, because that’s pretty much your only option. Indeed, there are only about four to six teams that are legitimately playable in this deck, and two of them, the Skrulls and the Infinity Watch, are mini teams, one of which only has three cosmic characters.

So what options do we have? The two most obvious are the Heralds of Galactus and Legionnaires. Indeed, the Legionnaires have probably the most cosmic support out there. Our other options are the Legion of Superheroes refeature of the Teen Titans, and the Inhumans. But at the same time, both of these teams are very important, as the only two Team-Ups available in this “format” are Extended Family (not stamped, but definitely beneficial to have some Inhumans out there) and Youth of Tomorrow, which requires Titans and Legion. Plus, the only search available to me (outside of Bestow the Power Cosmic, of course) is New Recruits, which requires a Legionnaires discard, but has the added bonus of searching for any character in my deck. Cosmic Tuning Fork will also allow for sifting, and it'll be nice to never miss with it as long as I hit a character card. Considering their support, the Legion should probably be the main focus of the deck, with splashes of the other teams. I am adamant in getting Adam Warlock, Protector of the Soul Gem into the deck even as a one of just due to the fact that I love his cosmic loyalty. I don’t know if I would ever actually play him, considering he does a pretty good job of completely dicking over the Legion’s undercurve strategy, but this is more of a thought experiment than anything else, so I'm trying to have some fun.

From here, we want to start formulating out overall character skeleton. With the Legion as our foundation, we’re going to want to go with a swarm curve that takes advantage of the bonuses from both the Legion and the Titans. The nice thing about this is suddenly cards that are pretty bad for their team (I’m definitely thinking Destroyer, Soulless Juggernaut) are a lot better in this situation, especially with the Legion’s multiple abilities to recur counters. I mean, boosting Timber Wolf on three and dropping Destroyer just put 8 attack on your board turn 3 with both characters able to stun up the curve. The character suite is starting to fall into place, but I’ve still got some combination of 33 characters (15 Legionnaires, 5 Teen Titans, 7 Heralds of Galactus, 2 Inhumans, 2 Infinity Watch and 1 Skrull) that I need to find out numbers and cut down. It’s still going to take a lot of work to try to finish this out, so I’m going to come back later with a second part complete with deck list.

And I’m also going to throw in a quick little extra. For those of you that also read my contributions to the Read/RANT comic review blog, I’m getting my new shipment of comics on Friday. This is what I plan to read in order, and what you folks can look forward to hearing my thoughts on in the next two weeks.

1. Captain Marvel #4 (Secret Invasion)

2. New Avengers #39 (Secret Invasion)

3. Ms. Marvel #25 (Secret Invasion)

4. Mighty Avengers #11

5. The Order #9

6. The Immortal Iron Fist #13

7. Thor #7

8. Angel: After the Fall #5

9. Incredible Hercules #115

10. Captain America #36

11. Green Lantern #29

12. World War Hulk Aftersmash: Warbound #4

13. World War Hulk Aftersmash: Damage Control #3

Plus, Comics Now Issue 2

Not a bad book on the list, and I want to immediately read every single book in this shipment. Pretty sure that the second I get home from work, I’m going to tear through every single one of these books back to back. Then I’ll hold on to Comics Now 2 for the long wait outside Wild Pig Comics Saturday morning prior to the uber sale.

Comic Geek Speak Episode 400

2008-03-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

For the 400th episode of CGS, the Geeks decided to do a call in show. After much fighting for air time with the rest of the rabid fan base, I finally made it through around 7:45. I was a bit nervous and didn't really let the Geeks speak too much (I made a comment about how one of the preconstructed computer characters in Rock Band shares an eerie resemblance to CGS co-host Adam), but when I was asked to elaborate as to why I got into comics as a hobby, I made sure to mention that playing VS System was a major contributing factor to jumping into this crazy medium and buying monthlies.

It's been a pretty slow month for me VS wise. City Champs was at the beginning of the month, and I haven't played a game since. Two weeks ago was washed out by the Boston trip, and last week I was very surprised to find our weekly pseudo Hobby League was canceled by this thing called "Easter." To be honest, it hadn't even occurred to me that Sunday was Easter. These things happen when you're a lapsed Jew that's basically been an atheist your entire life. There's also a possibility that I might miss this Sunday's proceedings thanks to the 29 hour Wild Pig Comics sale in Northern New Jersey that begins on Saturday at noon and ends Sunday at 5 PM. Should be interesting. Lots of 50 cent books for the taking.

Skrulls with no EOME? What is a boy to do?

2008-03-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about how one of my favorite decks is going to look once Marvel Universe comes out and Enemy of My Enemy rotates out of the Silver Age. Of course, some of this is silly considering the fact that we have no clue what is to come in Marvel Universe. Hell, considering that issue 3 of Secret Invasion will be shipping right around the time Mega Weekend New York happens, we might be in a situation where not only did Marvel Universe come out, it might at least partially feature the Skrulls and make the current deck stronger. But I can't assume that that will be the case.

So what can be done to make the Skrull deck still work sans Enemy? Is Enemy even truly needed in the Skrull deck? I would think so, as hitting Captain America on 3 seems tantamount to success and the Skrulls do not have their own in team search. Mobilize isn't an option due to the fact that there are no Skrull characters on turn 1 (shed a tear for the busted, busted Nenora) and Franklin's your turn two play (who would actually play Warskrull anyway?). Heroes of Two Worlds is a turn too late. So do we have any options for searching out Captain America? This is where I turned to Doc X's search engine and did some digging. What I found was New Recruits. I can discard a Legionnaire character card and search my deck for any cosmic character? And it's active on two? So not only can I use it to find Captain America, I could conceivably use it to find Franklin as well if I managed to miss Lockjaw on one and didn't have him in hand. Plus, it's going to pretty much search for any character in my deck sans Lockjaw and Warskrull, both of whom are basically plot twists. But this does create a problem. We need to discard Legionnaires to make it work. This means we're looking at a pretty significant overhaul of the deck to fit in a third major team and at least slightly alter our strategy.

Running the Legion allows us to consider some things. Skrulls, for the most part, are a curve based deck. Lockjaw on one, Franklin on two, Cappy on three, Ethan on four, Paibok on five. Sure, under dropping can occur, but it's unlikely to happen any time before turn five. The Legion gives us a ton of very powerful low drop characters, as well as a free one drop in Jazmin Cullen. Timber Wolf's boost is a swarm curve's dream, as well as being a 4/1, which is great in a deck where you're not getting stunned while attacking. Element Lad can add to the up the curve madness that's already apparent thanks to Act of Defiance. XS is basically Quicksilver on three. And Wildfire can allow for Cap or Ronan or someone equally important to regain their counter once they recover. And, of course, they're all cosmic, so they can all be hidden by Franklin. The only apparent downside to this is the fact that Franklin can basically only hide one guy a turn, so you might have to leave a character or two visible if you do indeed underdrop. The full Skrulls curve is still there, and the addition of a solid swarm strategy with a predominantly hidden board can allow for full Birthing Chamber activations.

Th main drawback of the deck seems to be that the addition of the Legionnaires and Birthing Chambers take away from the number of raw attack pumps in the deck. There's a pretty big difference between running 12-13 pumps and 16-17. Those four missing attack bonuses can end up losing you a game. But this is the type of thing that can be ironed out in testing. Here's a very early build to give an idea of what I'm thinking here.

Characters:
4x Lockjaw, Inhuman's Best Friend
2x Jazmin Cullen <> Kid Quantum, Hero of Xanthu
4x Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth
4x Warskrull, Skrull Infiltrator
3x Timber Wolf, Brin Londo
2x Ferro Lad, Andrew Nolan
2x Element Lad, Jan Arrah
4x Captain America, Skrull Imposter
2x Wolverine, Skrunucklehead
2x XS, Jenni Ognats
1x Ethan Edwards, Visitor From Another World
1x Ronan the Accuser, Starforce
1x Wild Fire, Drake Burroughs
1x Paibok, The Power Skrull
Locations:
3x Birthing Chamber
Plot Twists:
4x New Recruits
4x Act of Defiance, Team-Up
3x Extended Family, Team-Up
4x Flying Kick
4x Savage Beatdown
4x The Uni-Power
3x Blinding Rage

So there you have it. We'll have to see if this even works.

Comic News Wrapup

2008-03-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

Things have been a little slow on the VS tip. Didn't get to play last week due to my Boston trip, so I've been a little out of sorts for the past couple of days trying to get myself back into the VS frame of mind. What did not help this was the crazy amount of comic news that seemed to come out of nowhere from Wizard World LA over the weekend. That con never seemed like a big announcement con, but that sure was the case this year. Some highlights.

~ Matt Fraction announced that he is officially a Marvel exclusive now. This will not be getting in the way of Casanova, as all his exclusive really does is block him from DC (and presumably Dark Horse), and his creator owned stuff would not be affected. I honestly expected them to simply move Cas over to the Icon line, which could still happen, but for now it's staying at Image. Fraction's celebrating this by adding even more to his prodigious workload. It has been announced that his is going to start co-writing duties with Ed Brubaker on Uncanny X-Men beginning with issue 500. All I can say is goddamnit. I really didn't want to start buying an X book, but I go where Fraction goes. The June solicits have come out, and Fraction's all over the place on the Marvel side, which makes me happy.

~ Some artists are on the move, as Tim Sale is returning to Marvel comics to work with Jeph Loeb on their fourth "color" book, with Captain America: White. Terry Dodson also signed an exclusive for Marvel, and he will be joining Matt Fraction as he jumps on to art duties on Uncanny X-Men. Loeb does his best stuff when working with Tim Sale, and Dodson just adds to the excitement of Uncanny post 500.

~ The first issue of DC Trinity is going to be an extra sized issue, and the price point for the weekly series is going to be $2.99. For those that do not know, the major creative team is Kurk Busiek and Mark Bagley, with backups written by Fabian Nicieza. After the disaster that was Countdown, I wasn't planning to buy this one anyway, and I definitely don't like the idea of buying 52 $3 books in a year beyond my standard pull list. It could be good, and the creative team is good, but Dini is a great writer and he couldn't save Countdown. I think what will make the difference is how tied to continuity this book is planning to be. 52 worked because it was its own little corner of the universe and didn't have to worry about anything else. Countdown was too tied into continuity to the point that it either got repetitive (the Karate Kid/Batman fight) or gave away things that hadn't happened yet (the non-Parallax infused Kyle Rayner showing up prior to the end of Sinestro Corps). Either way, it didn't work. So if Trinity is out of continuity, that would be better, but do we really need any more Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman? Wonder Woman maybe, but the other two have plenty of books to fall back on.

~ Joe Pokasi, a writer on Heroes will be joining the Secret Invasion fray, writing the tie in miniseries "Secret Invasion: Inhumans" dealing with the reveal of Black Bolt's skrully nature and how the Inhuman Royal Family must deal with the fallout of their king not actually being their king. Now, I love the Inhumans as characters. Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee's 12 issue Marvel Knights series was fantastic in every sense of the word. I really loved Son of M. I haven't actually read Silent War because I'm missing the first issue, and while I've heard it wasn't very good, I'm still looking forward to reading it at some point. I'm jazzed like crazy for this. New Avengers: Illuminati #5 was my favorite issue of last year, and I'll be loving some crazy Inhumans skrully goodness.

That's all for now.

Franklin Richards, Creator of Cosmic Madness

2008-03-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite VS System characters of all time is Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth. As a huge fan of the Marvel cosmic comic universe, characters with that little cosmic keyword would always catch my eye. It’s a great keyword, which allows for the ability to mix powerful effects with the gambit of losing said effects thanks to an errant attack or power up. The Heralds set granted us the boon that is Cosmic-Surge, allowing for the continued replacement of lost cosmic counters, with the added proviso of having to be face up at the start of combat. Once again, it’s a well balanced system. And then Mr. Richards comes along. He changes things. The ability to move any cosmic character back and forth from the hidden area at will without any kind of team stamping is supremely powerful. Some of those visible cosmic characters with strong abilities that are supposed to be kept in check by having a high chance of losing that counter in combat can be made even more powerful thanks to being shipped to the hidden area by Franklin. So I decided that it would be fun to throw out my personal opinion of the top ten characters that love Franklin Richards. I’ve stuck to the Silver Age here, just to let you folks know.

10. Connor Kent <> Superman, Titans Tomorrow West – So what we’ve got here is someone that’s going to very much enjoy being in a stall build. Granted, most decks dealing in the Franklin Richards trade tend to have a strong hidden area presence, but if you’re trying to do more tricky things where you have a low drop you want to move hidden and mostly play visible characters, Connor Kent can come down off initiative and save you a healthy amount of endurance off initiative, which might be enough to survive to a turn eight or have that extra 11 or so endurance be the difference when you swing back on your attack step.

9. Frankie Raye <> Nova, Soul Searcher – An extra card at the start of the combat phase every turn? Awesome. If not for the fact that there’s a much better cosmic Heralds three drop, she’d be higher on the list. Card draw is never a bad thing. Continuous card draw is also never a bad thing. She’s got synergy with other characters as well, so moving her hidden for some protection is a solid strategy.

8. Triton, Aquatic Ambassador – He is, of course, a cosmic counter based Garth, Tempest. Granted, tricks can be used to allow him to be active a turn early, but the standard way to get him his counter is going to put him active on five just like Garth. I’d rank him higher if not for the fact that I usually use my Inhumans decks for location based effects, which limits the reusability of my KO’d pile. But you can’t deny it’s powerful, nor can you deny that’s it’s a good idea to get him out of the way.

7. Moondragon, Protector of the Mind Gem – Oh, Moondragon. You draw me so so many cards. And you’re very good friends with 3 drop Frankie Raye. And you’re very good friends with Elemental Converters. It’s not difficult to set up the situation of drawing at least one card every phase (in the Heralds team-up, for example, you can trigger off the draw phase, a Mind Gem during build, Frankie Raye at start of combat and Elemental Converters during recovery), meaning that you would be netting at least 9 cards a turn. Which is crazy. And so much easier to pull off when she’s hidden.

6. Human Torch, The Invisible Man – The funny thing about this is that his non cosmic ability is a hell of a lot more important to me than the one tied to a counter. Moving him hidden and making sure all your visible characters are constantly reinforced at all times seems pretty damned good to me. Perhaps you can have him and Connor Kent in the hidden area off initiative on seven, which means you can completely foil some attacks and take nothing. Sure, the endurance gain from his cosmic effect can be a big deal, but that reinforcement thing is wicked.

5. XS, Jenni Ognats – She’s Quicksilver, for all intents and purposes. She’s got Surge, so you can fuel her power with her own counter every turn after three. Sure, you have to keep her up, but Franklin’s going to at least make sure that she gets to attack every time. And with a character like Wildfire (who was definitely an honorable mention for this list), you’ve got ways to keep counters going. I mean, the Quicksilver decks ran Luna, and Quicksilver in the hidden area always wreaked havoc. She’s not as good as Quicksilver for various reasons, but she’s still good.

4. Air-Walker, Gabriel Lan – Puppet Master in the hidden area? Yes, please.

3. Brainiac 2.5, Future Intelligence – He’s basically the Revenge Squad version of Merlyn. Both characters have cosmic counters, which means you can pull them both hidden with Franklin, but as I said, I’m aiming for Silver Age here. Direct KO’s are a very good thing. Revenge Squad is built for ongoings, which means that you should be able to KO their six drop regardless of initiative thanks to moving him hidden. And you’ll be KO’ing a character every turn.

2. Ronan the Accuser, Starforce – Nobody locks down a resource row like the big, bad Kree with his giant hammer. I mean, reservist decks won’t care about Ronan too much, but most other decks are not going to be thrilled about losing use of their resource row. The Ronan lock helped push two Skrull decks into the Silver top eight at Mega Weekend So-Cal, mostly due to it shutting down the Bizarro World deck. But other decks can be really hurt by Ronan’s existence. Hell, a Darkseid’s Elite team-up and the new DCX Thank Granny Goodness card can really mess with their plans. It’s one of the better soft locks in the game as far as restricting your opponent’s options.

1a. Captain America, Skrull Imposter – This guy’s ability is ludicrously powerful. Once this guy’s on the field, it’s very possible that one Team-Up is all you need to make your entire board not stun while attacking. That’s insane. Powerful. Crazy. Then you move him hidden and all kinds of madness takes over. It’s very likely (especially in the standard Skrull build) that everyone’s going to be hidden, and when you get the chance to attack on three and one way their board, you’ve just created a MASSIVE board advantage that’s going to last the rest of the game. This guy can break games wide open all by himself, and Franklin just helps make sure that’ll happen.

1b. Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend – Because if you’re playing Franklin on two, you’re playing four Lockjaws. You just are.

Spotlight On: Alternate Win Conditions

2008-03-12T14:28:00.000-07:00

So today my blog got mentioned as part of the inaugural edition of Rallying Cry! (rock on for that, Mr. Fike) and also got linked to on the Comic Geek Speak boards for my podcasting article (rock on for that, Mr. Rios). One can only assume that such exposure would at least lead to a small bump in the number of people reading this blog, so of course I will be leaving for Boston

tomorrow and probably won’t be able to update this thing until Sunday. Never fear, ye fans of VS, crazy music and comics, I shall return triumphant and hopefully better than ever (which seems like a hollow phrase considering this thing’s only been around for two weeks). Now, on to the article.

Ever since the first VS System set ever made, this game has been a fan of Alternate Win Conditions. Xavier’s Dream set the stage for many different and various AWC’s over the years and sets. I thought I would take a closer look at some of the AWC’s that are available to us in the Silver and Modern Ages. So let’s take a look at the set on its way out of Silver, The X-men.

Ape, Metamorph: “Discard an Energy card à Target opponent with 0 or less endurance loses the game”

This is a pretty self explanatory effect that can be quite useful under the correct circumstances. Ape is a 7 drop from the Morlocks, but it should be noted that he has no loyalty or team-stamping to his effect, which means he could be splashed into pretty much any deck. There is the added restriction of needing a card featuring the Energy trait to make him go, but that shouldn’t be too hard to do. He’s a 16/14, which means that you’re better off playing him on initiative, as a character like this is going to have a pretty big bullseye on his forehead. Still, with the right cards, especially as late as turn seven, it shouldn’t be too tough to get your opponent below 0, and Ape allows you to immediately end things without any kind of shenanigans prior to the recovery phase. It’s also a good deal if you’re both in the negatives and you have less endurance than your opponent. It’s an effect that’s been seen in other places as well, and it’s hard to deny the power of ending the game prior to the recovery phase. Mysterium, Joseph Lightner is another Alternate Win from this set, but for reasons that will become clear later, he’s not exactly the nine drop AWC of choice.

Now, in the Infinite Crisis set, we have multiple iterations of the AWC. But let’s get to the big one.

Captain Marvel, Champion of Magic: “Pay 25 Endurance à You win the game

He is of course an 8 drop with loyalty to the Shadowpact that has some beautiful Alex Ross art on his card. It’s an enjoyable mechanic for the team, due to the Shadowpact having nearly every character and Magic Plot Twist effect involving paying endurance for effects. Plus, even more characters get extra effects from having less than 25 endurance (which of course means Captain Marvel’s effect couldn’t be used). Still, many Shadowpact based stall decks have surfaced, one of the more famous being the ultra counter based Shadow Knights (the Shadowpact/Gotham Knights deck that runs Bat Got Your Tongue? and The Conclave). If you can make it to 8 with enough endurance, you’ve got the added bonus of being able to use his effect the second he hits play. A very good card, and a very strong AWC

Now, the Crisis set has other AWC’s, but not in the way that one would expect. Being the set that established Checkmate, they also established the Alternate Loss Condition via the dreaded King Kill. Sure, the King effects are for the most part extremely powerful effects (Sorry Harry Stein, King in Check), and there are many ways to protect them, but the danger is still there. Now, let’s move on to the Heralds of Galactus set, for a character that’s not officially an Alternate Win Condition, but is pretty damned close.

Galactus, Devourer of Worlds: “When Galactus enters play, you may gain endurance equal to target opponent's endurance total. If you do, that player's endurance total becomes 0”

Sure, it’s not an Alternate Win. It doesn’t specifically state on the card that you’re winning or your opponent is losing because of the card, and Galactus decks still win the game on endurance. However, it is impossible to deny the power of Galactus. There is a reason why every Silver Age long term stall deck plays at least one copy of this nine drop monster. He’s affiliated, which means he’s searchable, and in nearly every case he’s a better choice than any other nine drops currently legal in Silver Age (or, arguably, Golden Age). Mysterium is good, but can be played around. Onslaught and Imperiex can do quite a lot, but are both unaffiliated and cannot guarantee victory to the extent of a Galactus. Agamemno is a joke. So is Superman. Kyle Rayner Ion is cute, but he’s not an auto win. Sure, Galactus isn’t an auto-win either, but he’s going to be gaining you a ton of endurance in addition to putting your opponent at 0, and on top of all that, he still gets to throw his weight around as a 25/25 during the combat phase. This is why Galactus has become the gold standard finisher of stall decks all around the world. To continue, let’s move on to the Legion of Superheroes set.

Terror Incognita: “To play, remove three cosmic counters from Legionnaires characters you control. Target player loses 5 endurance. Then, if that player has 0 or less endurance, he loses the game.”

You’ve basically got the Ape, Metamorph effect tied to a plot twist with an added burn effect. For those Legion decks that are designed to manipulate cosmic counters (which is, you know, every Legion deck on Earth), this can turn out to be an excellent finisher. With a card like We Are Legion (which is the namesake of this here blog), cosmic counters can always be replaced, which means the three counter cost isn’t as completely debilitating as it could be. With the way the Legion is built, they can do well with nearly any other team that uses cosmic counters, so team-ups with the Heralds of Galactus or Inhuman or DLS Teen Titans can allow for the quickest possible way to burn down your opponent and finish him off with Terror Incognita. As I mentioned with Ape, any time you can end the game on endurance prior to the recovery phase is a good time indeed. It should be noted that the Legion set also gave us Alan Scott, White King, which is yet another Checkmate king that can lead to an Alternate Loss Condition.

Now, both Marvel Team-Up and World’s Finest took a break from the Alternate Win Condition, with neither set featuring anything that could really be considered Alternate Win. Granted, the Team-Up set did create the stall deck du jour of Spider-Heralds, combining the Spider-Friends exhaust effects with the Heralds of Galactus to stall to the big man, but he’s already been covered, so let’s move on to the Hellboy Essential Collection, where the Alternate Win Condition returned.

Project Ragna Rok: “Ongoing: At the start of the recovery phase, you win the game if there are four or more doomsday counters on Project Ragna Rok. Exhaust a Thule Society character you control -> KO target stunned B.P.R.D. character. If you do, put a doomsday counter on Project Ragna Rok. Use only once per turn.”

I have very fond memories of this card. As I’ve stated many times, I’m still relatively new to this game, and the way my buddy Brian decided to teach me the rules and mechanics of VS System was to bring the Hellboy Essential set to my house and play a bunch of games against me using a preconstructed deck. The second game we played, which was the first VS System game I ever won, was won thanks to the Alternate Win of Project Ranga Rok. It’s a deck that can be made thanks to a B.P.R.D. and Thule Society team-up (or the use of Cavendish Hall to team-up in a solo Thule Society deck) that relies on KO’ing your own characters for Ragna Rok counters, but it’s not one of the best. Still, it’s a fun card that can lead to some really cool deck ideas. And now, on to Marvel Legends.

Xorn’s Takeover: “Ongoing: At the start of the recovery phase, if all characters are stunned or there are no characters in play, you may discard a [Brotherhood Icon] character card. If you do, put a despair counter on Xorn's Takeover. Then, if there are three despair counters on Xorn's Takeover, you win the game.”

This is, put simply, Bizarro Xavier’s Dream. It works in the exact opposite way. Whereas Xavier’s Dream required no stunned characters in play, Xorn requires the opposite to get his mojo going. Now, Xavier’s Dream very rarely saw play, and nearly every time it did, it was usually some kind of crazy ass janky combo deck that was designed for casual silliness. And that card had a hell of a lot easier condition to fulfill than Xorn’s Takeover. It’s going to be damn near impossible to pull this thing off even in a casual vein, and the idea of making a Xorn’s Takeover deck viable in any kind of constructed environment is a virtual impossibility. Sure, if someone pulls it off, it could go down as the greatest rogue deck in history, but it doesn’t seem likely. With DC Legends, however, we’ve gotten the best AWC card since Galactus, and one that has already seen a deck built around him.

Darkseid, Dark God: “At the start of the recovery phase, if no other player controls a non-stunned character, you win the game.”

This 8 drop Secret Society character is an 18/20, which is pretty big for the current stats of 8 drops, and has a fantastic effect. The first thing that I’m sure a lot of people thought of while looking over the spoiler for DC Legends was seeing the blatant synergy between Darkseid and his 9 cost Plot Twist Endgame, that allows him to KO all characters on the board except him to set up the Alternate Win. But there are other ways to pull it off. A card like Koriand’r <> Starfire, X’Hal’s Fury that stuns your opponent’s entire board at the start of the recovery phase would be another way to trigger Darkseid, and with something like Born of Blood, you can just about guarantee she’d be face up at the end of turn 8. At the same time, with the various ways to accelerate resources, which includes Dark Kryptonian <> Dark Superboy, Mockery that’s in team, it isn’t difficult to turn on Endgame as early as turn 7 (thanks to a Samantha Parrington that could allow Kryptonian to swing twice on six and jump two resources). A modern age Secret Society deck that jumped the curve with Silver Surfer, Last Zenn-Lavian to Endgame on 8 made it to the top eight at Mega Weekend So-Cal. It’s a strong effect, and not tough to pull off, which puts Darkseid near the top of the VS System Alternate Win Conditions.

I think people love the Alternate Win Conditions because they’re a good way to shake things up. Combat decks can become staid after a while, and having the option to make a crazy deck around Project Ragna Rok or Darkseid, Dark God not only allows for challenges during the deck building stage, but challenges while playing the game as well. I hope that VS R&D will continue to create cards like this in the future, as they always lead to interesting discussion at the very least.

Two Music Reviews

2008-03-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

I've had two highly anticipated albums become available for musical consumption in the past few weeks (neither album is out yet, but both have been made available via streaming through their Myspace pages), so let's go over them, shall we?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!

Once I truly discovered Nick Cave, I fell in love very quickly. My first foray into the man's work was the 1996 album Murder Ballads. It's a crazy album, with a lot of rich and literary imagery. Other albums I discovered (your Henry's Dream, your Tender Prey, your Let Love In) were all great listens. Then in 2004, Nick released the double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. Now, this was true, transcendent art, and one of my favorite albums of all time. Everything clicked. Soaring musical passages, wonderful singing and lyrics from Cave, and a huge variety of styles. Nick then took a choice few of his Bad Seeds (including violinist and co-composer of The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford Warren Ellis, and no, it's not that Warren Ellis) and made the side project Grinderman, designed to be a more rock intensive album. With the ushering in of 2008, we get Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!, and to be honest, it just doesn't shape up.

Now, this isn't as much of a misstep as Nocturama was, but I can't shake the feeling that this is more of a Grinderman album than a Bad Seeds album. Sure, Nick's at the front of both, and he still wrote all the lyrics, and maybe I've gotten so used to and obsessed with AB/TLOO (wow, that's a really clunky acronym) that my standards were simply too high and lofty. Here's a perfect example of the kind of fundamental difference between the two most recent Bad Seeds albums. On Abattoir, Cave is backed by his band, as well as a full choir. On Lazarus, whatever parts would potentially be sung by the choir is instead replaced by the rest of the Seeds singing backup. Now, this isn't inherently a bad thing. Those parts don't sound bad at all. But when you look at the difference between "Get Ready for Love" from Abattoir and "Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)" from Lazarus, you can't help but notice the difference in scope. There isn't a single moment like the grand crescendo at the end of "Hiding All Away" or the bridge of "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry" or the entirety of any live rendition of "Tupelo" that strips away the outside world and envelops you in a chaotic tidal wave of sound.

And that's the odd thing about this album. Nothing about it is bad. All the songs are interesting and well constructed, but I still found myself being somewhat bored listening to it. It's a more intimate, stripped down and primal album, but it somehow lacks the immediacy of Cave's other work. I'm not advocating that he just recreate the feel of Abattoir on every album he records from here on out, but one of the things I've always loved about Nick's albums was the variety from song to song. And with both Grinderman and Lazarus, that variety is stripped back for more straightforward song crafting. Sure, it's better than most of the stuff you'll find out there that masquerades as music, and it's a great way for someone without knowledge of Nick Cave to acclimate himself to the type of music the Bad Seeds play. But for those seasoned veterans like myself, it just keeps coming up short. Every great Nick Cave album has had that one (or multiple) moment where everything just kicks into another gear and chills run down your spine. I couldn't find a single moment like that on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!.

The album will be out in the States on April 8th. The Myspace page currently has six songs available to listen, which gives a good cross section for what to expect.

Firewater - The Golden Hour

Here we have another band that hasn't put out any original music since 2004 (they released a cover album in 2005, entitled Songs We Should Have Written). I've already expressed my love for Firewater in a previous post on this here blog, and I was very anxious to see just what we would be getting from their next output. Tod A. took a abbatical from the United States after he finished his Firewater touring schedule in 2004 due to being disgruntled by the reelection of President Bush. What followed was a three year journey across the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. While on the road, he often got together with local musicians to play and record music. Nearly all of that music became the foundation for The Golden Hour. And what we've gotten is a very distinct musical piece that fits in perfectly with everything Firewater has released in the past.

Indeed, in many ways this is the quintessential Firewater album. It takes the eastern European and Middle Eastern musical influences of Get Off the Cross...We Need the Wood for the Fire and melds it with the groove intensive, upbeat and catchy as hell hooks of The Ponzi Scheme to create what just might be the best Firewater album to date. It doesn't waste time, opening with the politically charged escapist fantasy "Borneo." The music Tod recorded while out of the country is very apparent here and in the two tracks that follow, "This is My Life" and "Some Kind of Kindness." The mood of the album follows a sort of cosine curve, starting wild and boisterous in the early tracks, and mellowing down during the middle of the album for some cooler and more introspective songs ("6:45" and "Paradise"), before ramping back up right around the best track of the album, "Electric City," kicks in. I can't heap enough praise on "Electric City." It has a couple of those great Tod A tricks of the phrase ("You don't have to be a soldier to fight/But you gotta have a killer in ya/You don't have to be a poet to die/It's the little things that kill ya"), a bouncy bongo/conga/tabla groove and a killer guitar riff to end the song. It's no wonder that most of the musicians Tod played with while abroad predominantly play music designed for belly dancers. You can just feel it.

While The Golden Hour may not have some of the extreme highs from other Firewater albums (nothing quite approaches the greatness of "Refinery," "The Circus," "Dropping Like Flies," "Dark Days Indeed," or "7th Avenue Static"), this is very easily their most consistently great album. There isn't a dull moment throughout the thirteen tracks, and it's very tough to listen to such undeniably fun music and not have a huge smile pasted across your face. It really is a testament to Firewater's power as a band to have such an upbeat album come out of Tod's complete and total emotional upheaval. The album is set for release in April (no specific date as of yet) and every track is available on their Myspace page. Check it out, and be sure you try to see them on tour in May. I've just bought tickets to the May 23rd show in Boston to go along with my Philly tickets two days later. The idea of seeing them twice in such a short time just makes me happy. And isn't that what music is all about at the end of the day?

City Champs Mini Report

2008-03-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

It's not really worth it to do a full write up on our Champs tournament, as we had such poor attendance. I'm still going to post my deck and throw in a report on the final round, which I was a part of. So here's the deck.

Characters (29):
4x Catwoman, Cat O' Nine Tails
3x The Penguin, Gentleman of Crime
4x Johnny Quick, Earth 3
3x Superwoman, Earth 3
3x Black Manta, Deepwater Denizen
3x Owlman, Earth 3
3x Jemm, Son of Saturn
1x Ultraman, Earth 3
3x White Martian, Earth 3
2x Prometheus, New Year's Evil
Plot Twists (29):
4x Secret Files
3x Mobilize
4x Flying Kick
4x Savage Beatdown
4x Path of Destruction
3x Blinding Rage
3x The Uni-Power
2x Big Leagues
2x Crime Syndicate of Amerika
Locations (3):
2x Hunte Castle
1x The Hellfire Club

And now, the finals. Both myself and my opponent were 2-1 (Yep, three rounds...) going into the final. My loss was to World's Finest, Josh's loss was to me. This was a matchup of concealed beats vs. concealed beats, as he was running what was basically a standard Skrulls deck (though he was running Titannus). The first time we played earlier in the day, I burned him out with direct attacks on turn four. This time he took evens and tried to stem the endurance loss by keeping some characters visible. An Uni-Power allowed me to take Cap's cosmic counter on turn 3, and Ethan Edwards lost his counter on the defense turn four. Paibok lost his counter on five, but he wouldn't have a problem regenerating it. So let's set the stage for turn six. Going in, he had Captain America behind Frankin Richards in the hidden area, with Paibok in the visible area. Paibok was joined by a Quicksilver, Terrigenesis Rebirth, who took up shop protecting him. I had Black Manta, White Martian and Jemm in the hidden area, and instead of search out Prometheus, I decided to under drop. The three hidden beatsticks were joined in the shadows by Owlman, Earth 3, Superwoman, Earth 3 and Catwoman, Cat O' Nine Tails. Hunte Caste was face up in my row.

Josh had the first attack, and no hidden hate to take advantage of Paibok's counter. He also couldn't flip up his entire row to take advantage of Quicksilver. His only choice was to attack direct with his entire board, dealing a hefty 29 damage and putting me at -20 endurance. He passed the attack to me. I first declared Superwoman to fly over Quicksilver into Paibok. The combination of her effect and the bonuses from White Martian, Owlman and Hunte Castle put her at 9 ATK without pumps, and Paibok went down, taking Superwoman with him, and putting me to -22. Next, Jemm decided to rough up Quicksilver, attacking as a 13/9 into the speedy guy. We both stunned, and I found myself at -26 endurance. At this point, I team attacked direct with a 12 ATK White Martian, 12 ATK Black Manta, 8 ATK Owlman, 6 ATK Catwoman and a Path of Destruction for an additional +4. I gained the two endurance and Josh scooped. We never finished calculating his final endurance total, but I ended up dealing out 54 endurance loss that turn, which would have put him well into the -40's.

It's a shame that I won my first City Champs when so few people showed up. Sure, I have no control over such things, as we tried to get as many people there as possible, but I believe that a lot of people might have thought it was next week. Everyone knows that VS Players thrive on competition, and I am no different. Even still, you take the hand you are dealt, and that makes me the Great Traditions City Champion of DC Legends.

Spotlight On: Podcasting

2008-03-08T12:36:00.001-08:00

I first discovered the notion of a podcast when iTunes added podcast functionality, but I didn't listen to my first podcast until December of 2005. A Tom Waits themed blog I read from time to time mentioned that the music podcast Coverville had done an entire show dedicated to covers of Mr. Waits, and considering that Tom Waits is basically my favorite guy, like, ever, I downloaded it and gave it a listen. It was a lot of fun, but the rest of the Coverville stuff didn't set my mind on fire, so I decided to drop it. A couple month later I discovered The Instance, which led me into ExtraLife Radio, which through a phone call played at the end of an Instance show led me to 1 to 70 and the rest of the RealmsRadio gang. I've got a list of 10 podcasts I love on the side of this here bloggy thing, so I thought I would throw out my thoughts on each podcast to give you folks an idea of what to expect if you decide to take a listen.

The Ring Has Chosen - You guys all know The Ring Has Chosen. Cliff and Squire have fast become the ambassadors of the game, especially from a casual perspective. I love this cast, and I really look forward to seeing it download into iTunes every Friday/Saturday. Sure, the sound quality isn't the best in the world, but it's better than a lot of other podcasts I've heard, so it's perfectly reasonable to listen to.

Comic Geek Speak - One of the true old guards of comics podcasting. CGS just past their three year anniversary, and have recorded well over 400 episodes. CGS is a rotating panel of eight guys headed up by Bryan Deemer and Peter Rios. They do interviews, cover big events and many many other things. I went to their 300'th episode celebration last September in Reading, PA, and it was one of the most enjoyable weekends of recent memory. The guys from the show are cool as hell, the community is cool as hell, and everything is just cool as hell. They pump out 3-5 episodes a week, so there's always content readily available.

Quiet! Panelologists at Work! - British comics podcasting at its finest. These guys could quite possibly be the funniest people on Earth. If you listen to podcasts at work, you might get some strange looks, because you're going to be laughing your head off multiple times in every episode.

Comic Timing - Two hosts and a variety of guests, this is one of the many podcasts that grew out of the Comic Geek Speak forum community. Ian is a very capable host and tends to create very interesting topics for episodes that tend to last somewhere between two and three hours. It's not as frequent with updating as some other casts, but there are other shows on the feed that can hold you over.

Extra Life Radio - The crown jewel of Scott Johnson's podcasting empire. Covers all things geeky from movies to video games to TV to comics and so on. Co-hosts Obsidian and Brian add a lot to the proceedings, and there is a very strong rapport between the guys. They record every week nearly without fail, and it's a very good listen.

The Instance - More Scott Johnson, with his trusty co-host Randy. This is a great cast for the casual World of Warcraft gamer, with an emphasis on news and community involvement. There isn't much else to say. It's just solid as a rock.

Comic Book Page - This isn't so much a specific podcast as it is a feed of multiple podcasts. Weekly Comics Spotlight looks at three books a week with one Marvel, one DC and one Independent. They also have a previews spotlight every month, as well as ones that go over the sales numbers of individual comics and trades. There is a lot of variety here, and nearly all of the podcasts have a ton of interest to them.

Around Comics - This was one of the best pure roundtable podcasts out there, with four guys just sitting around, talking comics and having a good time. However, the guys have recently gone on indefinite hiatus. The mantle has been taken up by the grad students of a sequential art class in Georgia. It's not as good as it was, and there are some audio issues, but it's still a good listen. Once the Chicago crew comes back, it'll get a lot better again.

So there you have it. Check them out. Links are of course on the side of the page. They are all worth your time and precious hard drive space.

Deck Theory: Ultimate Control

2008-03-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

After a new set comes out, I usually make a lot of decks involving characters or teams that interest me. I went on a crazy deck constructing tear the first week I got my hands on Marvel Legends. With DC Legends now among us, I’ve picked out a couple cards I really enjoyed and started to build decks. I built the Darkseid, Dark God/Endgame deck for Build a Legend (which ended up morphing into my Substibuse deck, so I’ll have to revisit that at some point). I built the IG/Birds of Prey deck around Earth 3. I built a JLA draw deck around Recharge!. The other card I’ve been trying to figure out the best deck for since the set came out is Lex Luthor, Megalomaniac. I fooled around with some builds of IG hand burn, but that deck pretty much gets completely neutered by Pathetic Attempt, which can still be played from the row or played to negate Lex’s effect. But I couldn’t deny how powerful completely shutting off Plot Twists from the hand for a turn every turn. Of course, with Lex there is no restriction on playing things from the row, which is his greatest weakness. But we have a Silver Age character that loves to lock down an opponent’s resource row: everyone’s favorite blue skinned alien with a giant hammer, Ronan the Accuser, Starforce. Ronan’s got a cosmic counter that needs protecting, and who loves to protect people with cosmic counters by shipping them into the hidden area? Why, Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth! And who loves to make sure that Franklin Richards is in your hand by turn two? Could it be Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend? Yes, it could. So we now have the skeleton of where we’re going here.

With off team cards that early in the curve, we’re going to have to be packing four Enemies too. Playing a strong Inhumans curve past this will allow us to use both Attilan and The Great Refuge as additional search. So who should be the five drop? I’m aiming for the oft neglected but very good Alaris, The Outgoing One. He’s a walking around Coast City that also has the option of swapping places with another Inhumans character by paying some endurance. You can keep both Ronan and Lex protected this way. Alaris stands in front of Lex so he can’t be attacked. He can then switch places with Franklin if someone gets some hidden hate into play. Plus, thanks to Attilan, we can always stack Mr. Sinister on the top of the deck, which means he can be played as a one off. On six, we can use Medusa to shut down a dangerous drop and make sure it can’t ready or use its payment powers. Plus, if you’re really worried about payment powers, Attilan and Enemy allow you to throw out a Batman, Cape and Cowl. On seven, since we’re looking at a stall deck that’s trying to win in the standard stall deck fashion, we’ll be playing Silver Surfer, Last Zenn-Lavian, who will proceed to pave the way for Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. So here’s a quick sketch of the character suite so far:

4x Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend

4x Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth

4x Lex Luthor, Megalomaniac

4x Ronan the Accuser, Starforce

4x Alaris, The Outgoing One

1x Mr. Sinister, Visionary Geneticist

3x Medusa, Queen of the Inhumans

1x Batman, Cape and Cowl

3x Silver Surfer, Last Zenn-Lavian

2x Galactus, Devourer of Worlds

We’ve already mentioned Attilan, Great Refuge and Enemy of My Enemy as non-character cards. So what else do we want? Extended Family will allow for the restoration of Ronan or Medusa’s cosmic counter, as well as allowing for reinforcement in a deck that runs multiple teams. For a heavy control based deck, Omnipotence and Pathetic Attempt seem like a must. As I mentioned before, Pathetic Attempt is not Lex Luthor’s friend. It’s something that’s tough to counter. So here’s what I was thinking. On turn four, when Pathetic Attempt is online, if you’ve got the initiative, you can stop them from getting Lex by chaining to the draw phase with his effect and playing Ronan. However, from then on, they’re free to play it from hand as a response to Lex. They can’t do this, however, if Lex is equipped with a Time Gem. Most of the Plot Twists I plan on playing in the deck are reactionary, which means I won’t have to worry too much about it countering my own Twists. This also means that I won’t have to worry about calling Pathetic Attempt with Omnipotence so it doesn’t turn my own PA’s off. To finish off the rest of the deck, one Reality Gem’s always a good idea, as is A Proud Zinco Product. The other cards I’m considering, which is mainly a way to fight against combat based decks is Poker Night. It’s a good way to assure reinforcement if I don’t have my Team-Ups online. This is a very early deck, but here’s what I’ve got.

Characters (30):

4x Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend

4x Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth

4x Lex Luthor, Megalomaniac

4x Ronan the Accuser, Starforce

4x Alaris, The Outgoing One

1x Mr. Sinister, Visionary Geneticist

3x Medusa, Queen of the Inhumans

1x Batman, Cape and Cowl

3x Silver Surfer, Last Zenn-Lavian

2x Galactus, Devourer of Worlds

Locations (7):

4x Attilan

3x The Great Refuge

Plot Twists (19):

4x Pathetic Attempt

4x Enemy of My Enemy

3x Extended Family, Team-Up

3x Omnipotence

3x Poker Night

2x A Proud Zinco Product

Equipment (4):

3x Time Gem, Infinity Gem

1x Reality Gem, Infinity Gem

And there we have it. Some crazy assed piece of Mental VS that probably doesn’t even work half the time. Sure was fun to build, though.

Top Five Flavorful Characters

2008-03-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

I'm kinda running on empty blogger-wise today. Pretty sure I blew most of my creativity on my review of Casanova #12 over at read/RANT, so I thought I'd throw up some examples of character cards in VS that I think do an excellent job of portraying their comic counterparts.

5. Lex Luthor, Nefarious Philanthropist (DJL)
Seems right up Lex's alley. One of the things I've always enjoyed about Lex as a character (which is subject to change from time to time) is that the general public doesn't realize that he is a truly evil man. They only see the business tycoon and, well, philanthropist and not the sociopathic and obsessive genius behind the scenes. He gives out good tidings to other players in the form of letting them draw two cards, but every deal Lex makes comes with a catch. Well done here.

4. Captain America, Loyal Patriot (MVL)
This one's pretty self explanatory. Cap's got a shield, thus the shield counter. Cap throws his shield, thus activating and losing the shield counter. Cap makes sure that no one dies on either side of whatever fight he's involved in, thus no one gets stunned during the attack. Simple, and elegant. I'm still not a huge fan of the art choice here, which is not to say that the piece itself is bad. Dan Jurgens does good work, but a card based so heavily on the importance of Cap's shield with the shield itself being barely visible in the art? Seems a little silly. Still, the flavor is excellent.

3. Black Bolt, Devastating Decree (MHG)
I mean, come on! It's Black Bolt letting loose! Of course he's going to KO pretty much the entire board. As opposed to Cap, the art is what really does it for me on this one. It makes you almost feel bad for Lilandra, but she's tough. The card's pretty simple in its execution, and fantastic if you've got the Inhumans working to the best of their ability. It makes perfect sense that the apex of the Inhumans curve is Black Bolt letting loose. It's not something he likes to do, nor is it something he does particularly often, but if the Inhumans are pushed hard enough and threatened to some true capacity, Black Bolt's going to make sure that everyone's going to have to go through him, which you really don't want to do. It's a really pretty foil, too.

2. Deathstroke the Terminator, Ultimate Assassin (DCR)
You piss off Slade, you pay the consequences. And those consequences will most likely involve very sharp swords and death.

1. Galactus, Devourer of Worlds (MHG)
As if this were even a question. Galactus is my favorite character in the history of comics. I love the idea that he's a holdover from the previous universe. I love that he is eternal and part of the cosmic balance. I love the Heralds. I love all of it. It's so nice that R&D completely nailed both versions of Galactus, but the nine is of course the standout. He comes to your planet (player), he devours your planet's energy (endurance) and is satiated (gains said endurance) Plus, the fact that he's a full on EA in all forms is a stroke of genius. It's great artwork from Bryan Hitch, and more importantly, it's a card deserving of the power of Galactus.

Well, that's all I got for today. I'll probably do a more in depth write up on the three or so decks that are still in the running for Champs this Sunday, and I also hope to throw up an article on the pros and cons of the self-milling strategy in current silver or modern age decks. Stay tuned!

There's a Light at the End of the Tunnel

2008-03-04T18:09:00.000-08:00

From Thursday to Sunday of next week, I will be making my first trip up to Boston since last June. I had always considered Boston (and by extension, Massachusetts as a whole) my home away from home. The family has had friends that live on the Cape for as long as I can remember. We've made at least one trip up there a year for as I can remember. It doesn't come as a surprise that come college time, both my brother and I ended up in the Greater Boston Area, with him at MIT and me at BU. I only lived in the city for three and a half years, and ever since I left, I've counted the days until my grand return. This trip will be enjoyable enough simply because I'll be in Boston the weekend of St. Patrick's Day, but at the same time, I have ulterior motives. While I'm there, I will finalize the details of my true grand return, when I move back to the city full time come September.

As with any giant life changing decision, there are good points and bad points. The good heavily outweighs the bad in this case, as I will be returning to the city I love and living in an apartment/house with my three best friends on Earth. We've already got plans to start a podcast once we all get settled. I'll be close to my beloved Boston Red Sox and Boston University Terriers. I'll once again be surrounded by colleges on all sides, which will give me ample opportunity to enroll part time in programs in order to earn M.A.s in English and Philosophy, as well as become a certified secondary school teacher. I'll be within walking/T distance of bars and clubs. Concerts. Baseball games. Walking the Common on a beautiful fall Saturday afternoon. Comicopia, one of the best comic shops I've ever been to, which is right down the street from Nuggets, my personal favorite used record store, which is in turn right down the street from the Boston University Pub, purveyor of all things yummy and beer flavored. All of these are good things.

What is a little bittersweet, however, is that most of the bad has a direct impact on my ability to play VS System. World's will pretty much be an impossibility on my budget if it is anywhere beyond driving distance. Not on the Northeast Corridor? Not going to happen. I'm still going to MegaWeekend New York, but it may turn out to be a farewell of sorts from competitive VS play for at least a while. Considering how expensive Boston as a city is, I'll be operating on a vastly reduced disposable income budget. I wouldn't expect myself to be getting more than two boxes of Marvel Universe, if I buy any at all, and considering the size of the set, it's doubtful two boxes is going to cut it. I'll also lose touch with the handful of people I actually get to play the game with on a semi-regular basis.

Does this mean I'm quitting the game, throwing my hands up to the sky and selling off all my money rares? Hell no! I named this blog VS System is LEGION for a reason. You can't just walk away. I can't get all the cards? I'll make proxies or use Magic Workstation. No one I know in the area that plays? Boston's a pretty big city chock full of college kids and graduates in the 18-30 age bracket. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of VS players out there. I just have to find them. Plus, I'll be living with (at least) three bright, like minded guys who I can personally run VS experiments on. I expect that between bar nights and Rock Band nights, I'll have us drafting old boxes of Marvel Knights on the cheap within two months.

I kinda view this game like Kudzu. It looks harmless at first, but once things start spreading and you can't see your shoes anymore, you realize that maybe your little bottle of spray on weed killer isn't going to do too much damage against that botanical juggernaut. Hell, it's probably more accurate to think of this game as the antagonist from the 1971 Genesis song "The Return of the Giant Hogweed" (yes, I'm under 40 years old): "They are invincible. They seem immune to our herbicidal battery." I can't really explain the plant references. There are some places my brain goes when I'm not fully paying attention that defy all rational means of logical thinking. Still, oddly enough, the reference seems apt. Many people, some of which are very vocal, seem to think that UDE considers VS System to be a neglected weed that's popping up from between the two slab of sheet rock known as "World of Warcraft" and "YuGiOh" in the sidewalk of life. I personally do not believe these sentiments, but I do like the idea that we as a group and an ideology refuse to die. We're stubborn. They take away our PCQ's and Sneak Previews? Whatever. They cut out the money and the Pro Circuit, watch the high profile pros leave for other games and expect us to die on the vine? Screw that. We've only gotten stronger. I suddenly have this picture in my head of this giant, spreading, lush foliage completely taking over the WoW piece of sheet rock (because let's face it here, that YuGiOh slab is made of fucking Kryptonite) and spreading onwards and outwards. If such an undeniable OP upheaval didn't kill this game for us as a community, why the hell would moving 350 miles up the coast kill the game for me? It doesn't make sense, so it won't happen.

As I said earlier, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And it's shaped like the Citgo Sign. Rock on.

Old Deck: Jean Grey Legend

2008-03-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

Considering that our Champs is coming up this weekend, I thought I'd take a step back and give a tournament report of my previous City Champs experience. When my local store was gearing up for our Marvel Legends City Championships, I had to choose between three decks. The first, a Marvel Knights/Fantastic Four equipment deck that spotlighted a Fated up Punisher, was a very good deck and quite consistent, but I couldn't go in that direction due to my lack of a full playset of Enemy of My Enemy. The second deck was a Jean Grey Legend deck that I had been tooling around with pretty much since Marvel Legends was released. It was a fun deck and I liked playing it, but I always thought something was lacking. The addition of a couple cards I had ordered online helped things, but I was still reticent. My favorite deck at the time, and the one I was positive I was going to run, was a solo Inhumans stall deck that was designed to basically stop my opponent from ever readying characters thanks to cards like Jolen, The Treacherous One, Nahrees, The Negative One, Medusa, Queen of the Inhumans, Gorgon, Thundering Hooves and Waking the Ancestors. Plus, the addition of Attilan allowed me the opportunity to throw in tech cards like Pathetic Attempt, This Bores Me and Mr. Sinister, Visionary Geneticist. I liked the deck and still do. The Inhumans are some of my favorite comic characters, and thus one of my favorite teams in VS. I often find myself thinking about new sets and new teams in VS in relation to how they could potentially team up with the Inhumans. I had my deck finalized and was ready to go.

However, and you can probably tell this was coming given the title of this article, I had a change of heart the morning of the tournament. Maybe it was the way the Inhumans betrayed me in my last City Champs, I don't know, but I wanted to play something fun. The Inhumans deck is a different kind of fun than Jean. Jean is much less susceptible to play mistakes. Plus, I just like playing combat builds. So I made the switch and decided to run Jean. It was an extremely good choice, as the meta would have absolutely wrecked a concealed stall deck that day. So here's what I ran.

Characters (29):
4x Jean Grey, Teen Telepath
3x Jean Grey, Telekinetic Fighter
4x Wolverine, Logan
1x Jean Grey, Age of Apocalypse
3x Emma Frost, Ice Queen
1x Nightcrawler, Hit Factory
4x Jean Grey, Phoenix Rising
2x Colossus, Organic Steel
1x Mimic, Exile
1x Jean Grey, Red
2x Juggernaut, The Unstoppable
1x Professor X, World's Most Powerful Telepath
2x Jean Grey, Phoenix Force
Locations (3):
3x Cerebro
Equipment (2):
2x B.P.R.D. Signal Device
Plot Twists (27):
4x Mobilize
4x Splintering Consciousness
4x Flying Kick
4x Turnabout
3x Savage Beatdown
3x Telepathic Suppression
3x New and Improved
2x Sneak Attack

And here's what went down

Round 1: JSA/Marvel Defenders
I was going against a relatively new player who was borrowing a new from his friend, so I decided to take it easy on him and slow play on a lot of my abilities. No Flying Kicks to the back row, no Telepathic Suppressions to take away reinforcement, nothing like that. I could have finished him on five, but we ended up going to turn seven, where Juggernaut did some serious damage to end the game.
1-0

Round 2: Jean Grey Legend
This wasn't exactly a mirror match, as Tom's deck was based around getting Jean as large as possible over and over, while mine was more focused on a strong curve in addition to the giant turn 5 Jean. With two big characters and lots of reinforcement, we went into turn 8 with my endurance in the high 20's and Tom at 10. The Jean Grey, Phoenix Force duel had begun. My mind was working overdrive here, as I had no recursion and only one 8 drop Jean at my disposal, while Tom has a Slaughter Swamp in his row. I knew this had to end before turn 13, but I didn't know how that would happen. I lucked out. On turn 10 Tom's initiative, he decided to play a Jean Grey, Teen Telepath so he could KO her to New and Improved and bring out a ludicrously large Jean Grey, Phoenix Rising with 22 +1/+1 counters on her. I laid my resource, played Jean Grey, Telekinetic Fighter and dropped Professor X, World's Most Powerful Telepath into play. The bald wonder proceeded to activate, targeting Jean, which would have burned Tom into the negatives by a pretty large margin. So Tom responded by KOing his Jean to New and Improved. With the board empty, my Telekinetic Fighter swung direct. With three power-ups and a Flying Kick, I was still one point of ATK short. I had a Mobilize in my row, so the game was already won, but I decided to be a little dramatic and flipped Cerebro, pulling a Jean Grey, Phoenix Rising off the top of my deck to end the game in my favor. It should be noted that this was my single favorite game of VS I've ever played. Excitement, drama, and victory all rolled into one.
2-0

Round 3: The Next Brotherhood
I made a huge play mistake in this game. I had a Mobilize in my row turn four that would have allowed me to search for my one off Nightcrawler, Hit Factory, who was put in the deck for the specific instance of being able to severely deplete the board advantage Kellen was slowly building. He would have been huge. But since I already had an Emma Frost, Ice Queen in hand and no guarantee that I would draw into a Jean Grey, Phoenix Force the next turn, I decided to go with Emma. With Nightcrawler, I would have been able to suppress his board, and he wouldn't have been able to barely eek out a victory on his initiative turn six. If we went to seven, Juggernaut would have caved in his skull, but sadly that was not to be.
2-1

Round 4: The Next Brotherhood
This was a different version of the deck than my last opponent, but it was hard to tell. Both of our decks weren't being cooperative this game. I missed on two, which is a cardinal sin with my deck, and ended up without a 4 drop on turn 4. I ended up having to play a Jean Grey, Teen Telepath, KO her to New and Improved and play another Jean Grey, Teen Telepath, who ended up one-waying my opponent's four drop thanks to a Turnabout. I was able to take control from there, as my less than inspiring four counter Jean was too much for my opponent to handle, and he scooped on five.
3-1

Finals: The Next Brotherhood
So it came down to another match against Kellen, wherein I happened to make THE EXACT SAME MISTAKE I MADE THE FIRST GAME. I had initiative on four. I had a Mobilize that could search out either Nightcrawler, Hit Factory or Emma Frost, Ice Queen. Hell, I even had a Sneak Attack in hand, which would have led to much board smashing. But I assumed that Kellen would stay on curve until turn 5, like he did in our first game against each other. But no. He underdropped into a 3 and a 1, and with Nightcrawler on the field, I would have one-wayed his entire board and shut down his game. But no. I went with Emma. And lost. I gave up during turn five, knowing I had messed up my chances at coming back.

So I finished in second place. It was an extremely fun tournament, and one I'll always remember.

Choices, Choices

2008-03-03T16:51:00.001-08:00

My local City Champs is this Sunday. Kinda snuck up on me, really. I luckily just received the commons and uncommons (and a few rares) I needed to complete a few of the decks that are in the running for a chance at the Champs. Let's go through them now, shall we?

1. Injustice Gang hidden beats.

Now this is a simple deck. Play characters. Attack with said characters. Play pumps. Beat faces.
Strengths: It's super fast and not very prone to play mistakes. Strong against non-stalling curve decks.
Weaknesses: No visible characters means that it's very dependent on how many pumps I draw if going against another rush deck. Plays fast and loose with endurance. Has more and more trouble dealing with later turns. I only have two copies of Crime Syndicate of Amerika.

2. Skrulls

More hidden beats, this time with the added bonus of not stunning on attacks.
Strengths: It's also super fast and probably has the most raw ATK on the board thanks to cards like Ethan Edwards, Visitor from Another World, Wolverine, Skrunucklehead and Quicksilver, Inhuman By Marriage. Not stunning on attacks is a very good thing. Also affords the opportunity of Ronan lock.
Weaknesses: It's not required, but the deck nearly falls apart if I don't hit Franklin Richards on two and Captain America on three. Extended Families can restore cosmic counters, but it's not an exact science. I've got enough tutors not to worry too much about hitting Franklin, but I'd either have to draw into Cap or an Enemy by three, which isn't a guarantee. This deck also really doesn't like hidden hate.

3. Substibuse

Capable of massive burn in one turn, as well as strong card draw, this is a potent deck.
Strengths: Most damage is done during the build phase, which is harder to disrupt than during combat. Able to take away nearly all your opponent's endurance in a single turn.
Weaknesses: Another hidden area heavy deck. Losing any amount of characters hurts your ability to substitute. If your opponent doesn't play anything from the row (or everything in his row costs 1), the main strategy of the deck falls apart. Unravel Realities susceptible to replacement effects.

4. Earth 3/Birds of Prey

Teams up and uses the Earth 3 location to combine the ATK power of both IG and the Birds of Prey, as well as allowing for a single massive visible character to soak damage off initiative.
Strengths: Whenever a character like Vixen or Jemm is shipped into the visible area, they're going to have a huge DEF. Still allows for the raw power of a concealed beats deck. Allows for card cycling via The Hook Up.
Weaknesses: I don't have the optimal build, as I only own three Lady Blackhawks and two Crime Syndicate of Amerika. Requires both Earth 3 and a Team-Up in the row, as well as Aerie Ones on the field. The added complexity of a second team dilutes the raw aggro potential. I haven't had a chance to test this deck.

So that's what I'm thinking. At the moment, I'm leaning toward Skrulls, but I need to consult with Brian. We share our playsets, which basically means that he has the Enemies, while I control the Mobilizes. If he's running a deck with Enemies, I'm most likely going straight IG. More updates as the week rumbles on, and expect a full tournament report come Sunday Night/Monday of next week.

New Deck: Doom Needs Only Grodd

2008-03-03T16:20:00.000-08:00

After hearing about the interaction between Coup d’Etat and Ultron on The Ring Has Chosen, both Brian and I decided to take a crack at building the deck. Most of this was Brian, with me adding in a couple of character ideas and interactions. Here’s the deck list.

Characters:

4x Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom

1x Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster

1x Roy Harper <> Speedy, Mercurial Marksman

2x Charaxes, Moth Monster

2x Lancer, Samantha Dunbar

1x Silver Surfer, Skyrider of the Spaceways

4x Dr. Doom, Richards’s Rival

4x Gorilla Grodd, Grodd Awful

4x Ultron <> Ultron 11, Army

1x Darkseid, Destroyer of Life

1x Black Manta, Underwater Marauder

2x Deathstroke the Terminator, Killing Machine

1x Holocaust, Nemesis

1x Molecule Man, Owen Reece

1x Doomsday, Engine of Destruction

1x Mark Desmond <> Blockbuster, Mindless Brute

Plot Twists:

4x Enemy of My Enemy

4x Monkey See, Monkey Do

4x Savage Beatdown

4x Flying Kick

3x Mystical Paralysis

3x Straight to the Grave

2x Master Plan

2x Have a Blast!

1x A Proud Zinco Product

1x Coup d’Etat

Locations:

1x Soul World

In the standard Brian tradition, this deck features quite a lot of one-ofs. Too many, in my opinion. I’m going to build my own version of the deck as well, which you’ll see some time soon in order to give you our own sort of improvisational Battle of Wills. I haven’t piloted the deck myself, but as I did mention in my last post, it did manage to beat the Alan Scott deck four in a row. It’s a very strong controlling build. Monkey See, Monkey Do and access to Mystical Paralysis go a long way to foil your opponent both on and off initiative. Of course, the Coup d’Etat/Ultron and Monkey See, Monkey Do/Molecule Man combos are in the deck, but they aren’t the overall focus, as both interactions are turned off if you lose the die roll and end up going evens. This deck really wants odd initiative, where everything comes together quite beautifully.

There are some issues, however. I’m not a huge fan of some of the one-of’s. It didn’t seem to be a problem for Brian, however. I can see why Coup d’Etat is a one-of, as you just search it out with Doom or Boris. But is there really any worth in wasting one slot on a random Soul World with no way to search it out? Or only one APZP when Black Manta is an alternate drop? The deck only has so much search, and while seven search cards should be enough, but in a stalling and controlling build that will nearly always hit turn seven, it’s a bit risky only running three sixes and three sevens without using the built in mill strategy that exists in Society. The lack of running something like a Riddler or Dr. Sivana or Forced Conscription also doesn’t guarantee being able to pull off the Ultron combo, which was the interaction around which the entire deck is built. There is a more serious problem, though, which I’m not so sure I would know how to fix. Mystical Paralysis doesn’t come online until four. Grodd and his tricks (Coup d’Etat and Monkey See) also doesn’t come online until four. The deck doesn’t really do much before then. Because of this, the deck seems to get absolutely wrecked by rush decks, especially the speed decks like anything Quicksilver involved, Skrulls or the IG Hidden deck that push most of their damage through before turn four. And in the case of IG and Skrulls, they work the hidden area and thus are faced with not losing much more than a Lockjaw or Catwoman to Monkey See, Monkey Do. It’s a very good deck, but I don’t think it can compare to the Tier 1 decks in the Silver Age in its current incarnation. If we were dealing with a metagame dominated by curve decks, this would really get a chance to shine. It’s a fun idea, but it’s not quite there.

Further thoughts on Alan Scott in Practice

2008-03-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

My original plan for today's playtesting was to bring the Future Faust deck and see how that runs in practice. However, with that Alan Scott card showing up and me falling in love with it, I decided to proxy him up in the Fantastic Four of Earth 2 deck, with a couple of provisos.

1. I didn't have nearly enough 2 drop Luke Cages. I thought I had three. Turns out, I have one, which led to me running four Mr. Fantastic, and one each of Luke Cage and Namorita as my two drops.

2. I didn't realize this until after playing the last game, but I apparently forgot to put Black Adam in the deck. Silly me and my lack of seven drops.

I played the deck solely against another new build, a Doom/Gorilla Grodd deck that I helped Brian build. He won all four games, with the last win due to a play error on my part, which I'll get to later. Here are some general thoughts.

I missed three drop Invisible Woman during the first two games, which made the Force Field Projections and Invisibilities dead cards. I have two fixes for this. The first involves playing more of the character at one and five as alternate drops. I'd still rather have Jakeem or Thing on those turns, but Invisible Woman is quite important to everything running smoothly. The second fix is to swap Heroes of Two Worlds for Enemy of My Enemy. I don't particularly want to do this, due to my having the requisite HoTW and only one Enemy. If Heroes hit on turn three, everything would be fine. It's still a great search for later in the game, but Enemy's probably the way to go here.

Luke Cage HAS to hit the field on turn 2. With the ability to play four of him, he is an automatic mulligan condition. The deck really needs the card draw he generates, in order to truly make sure you can draw into the Team-Ups, as well as extra pumps and combat tricks. This is necessary.

I either need to run more Team-Ups or Teamwork. I wasn't getting teamed up every game, which needs to happen.

I should probably throw a Fantastic Four seven drop in there as well.

As far as the play error I made is concerned, I mixed up which card goes where when you activate Jakeem. I was convinced during turn seven that if I played Jakeem and activated him to search out Jay Garrick, Jay would be the one going on top of my deck instead of my hand. Had I searched out Jay and played him, I would have had enough to put myself over the top. I won't be making that mistake again.

Overall, I'm still proud of the deck. It needs some tweaking, and it's a testament to how strong the Grodd/Doom deck is in that matchup. I got my revenge, though, as I brought out my IG concealed beats deck and caved the monkey's head in when I got frustrated. Expect to see write-ups on the new version of the FF/JSA deck, as well as the Grodd/Doom deck in the next couple days. I've got a pretty hectic March up ahead of me, with concerts, car inspections, cat sitting, a vacation to Boston and the Wild Pig 29 hour comic sale at the end of the month. It's a lot on my plate, so I wouldn't necessarily expect to see posts every day, but I'll do my best to keep this thing as regularly updated as my sanity allows.

Musings on a Music Scene

2008-03-02T09:02:00.000-08:00

Those of us who fancy ourselves music fans often have a band they can call their own. It may not always be their favorite band, but something about them keeps us coming back and creates in us a strange sense of ownership. Whether it be an unabashed love for the musicianship, quality of lyrics, or just being so damned catchy that it's impossible to ignore, music has that special immediate place in our hearts. It cuts through the mind's reason receptors and heads straight for the realm of instinct. For the past twelve years, I have had such a band with that sense of undeniable immediacy. That band is Firewater.

Firewater is not a band that ever reached the point of mainstream success. It was formed out of the ashes of Cop Shoot Cop, which was led up by bassist/vocalist/lyric virtuoso Tod Ashley (Tod A. to the world) and featured a gaggle of musicians from New York's indie scene pieced together into a deranged nomadic carnival. Their first album, Get Off the Cross...We Need the Wood for the Fire came out in 1996, and was accompanied by an opening spot on Soul Coughing's national tour. This of course made sense, considering the drummer of Soul Coughing, Mr. Yuval Gabay, was doing double duty for Firewater on their first album. My brother went to that tour stop in Philly, and couldn't stop gushing about this Firewater band when he came home that night. I listened to the album, and have been hooked ever since. The music is this wonderful mix of 1980's Tom Waits carnival music (think Rain Dogs) and eastern europeon klezmer music. In any given song, expect to hear the standard trappings of a rock band tinged with interludes of violin, accordion, horns, balalaikas, clarinets, and any number of other instruments. It is one of the most distinctive sounds I've heard from a band, and was instantly recognizable as something different and special.

All that gushing, and I haven't even had a chance to mention the lyrics. It's obvious that Mr. A. has had a colorful life, and his lyrical flourishes are wonderful. Take, for instance, this verse from the song "7th Avenue Static":

Bring out the Gin, and the small violins
I'm a raging success as a failure
And it's colder than hell in this cardboard hotel
Which I share with a chronic embezzler
So I beat my retreat down Collister Street
To one of my holy places
And they tangled my wings with wire and string
And I'm spinning in a whirlpool of faces
And I'll take what the dumpsters are giving
But I'll do my best to survive
Because I still think that life's for the living
Yes, I still think that life's for the living

It's just breathtaking. Powerful, clever, well designed phrasing and rhyme schemes. The lyrics paint these evocative pictures that come to life in the mind's eye. That doesn't happen for me much. Tom Waits is that good of a lyricist. So is Pete Townshend and the other greats of the British Invasion. But beyond that? I'm hard pressed to think of anyone with such a grasp of the English language and the ability to manipulate it to serve his whims and excite the populous.

Shortly after releasing their fourth album, The Man on the Burning Tightrope in 2004, they announced a national headlining tour. I was a sophomore in college at Boston University at the time, and they happened to be coming to the Paradise Rock Club, which happened to be on BU's campus. This was, quite possibly the best concert I have ever seen in my life. 8 musicians on stage having a ball. Nearly every song was extended in some way to include an extra improvisational solo of some kind. I never wanted it to end. And when the pre-encore finale, a ten minute rendition of the dirty jazz tune "Another Perfect Catastrophe" kicked into high gear, I had what was probably the closest thing to a spiritual experience in my still short life. It was a once in a lifetime scene.

So why talk about Firewater when I should be musing on cardboard superheroes? Well, Firewater is putting out their first album of original content, The Golden Hour, is to be released in April, with a World Tour to follow. I already have tickets to the show at the North Star Bar in Philly on May 25th, and I can't wait to see the boys do their thing again. I implore any of you who came to thing blog to read up on some VS and decided to read through this article to check this band out. Buy The Ponzi Scheme off the iTunes music store. Order the albums off Amazon. Use whatever means you see fit. You won't be sorry.

I'll be getting us back to our regularly scheduled VS conversation tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the music you brave souls who want to take a chance.

Comics: The End of an Era

2008-03-01T19:16:00.000-08:00

Last week marked the 50th and final issue of Marvel's Cable & Deadpool ongoing series. Of course, with Cable's apparent death in issue 42, the comic became increasingly inaccurate in its title and morphed into what can only really be described as Deadpool Team-Up. Often, the cover art would feature this special guest prominently (whether it be Wolverine, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and so on), with his/her/their name replacing a hastily crossed out Cable. Many fans of the comic seemed to have been turned off by this change, but I quite enjoyed it. Indeed, the cover to Cable & Deadpool #45, featuring World War Two era Bucky Barnes standing next to Deadpool in his own version of a Captain America outfit carrying a backpack with about 25 guns poking out of it, was what got me to pick up an issue in the series in the first place. I was obviously late to the party, and while the giant 50% off the entire store sale at Wild Pig Comics in Kenilworth, NJ last October allowed me to pick up issues 34 to 43 for 50 cents apiece, I still haven't read any of the earlier portions of the run. Even still, the charm of Fabian Nicieza's writing (good luck on your part in that weekly series over at DC there, Fabian) was irresistible, and I grew to really enjoy the series overall. It's a wonder such a quirky book made it all the way to 50, to be honest.

But what about the comic itself? Well, it was a lot of fun. Picking up right at the end of issue 49 with Deadpool accidentally teleporting quite a lot of dinosaurs from the Savage Land into the middle of New York City during a Venom virus outbreak (as seen in Mighty Avengers #7-8 and New Avengers #36), and creating some particularly ferocious Venom dinos. It was a star studded issue, featuring cameos from the Mighty Avengers, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Antics ensue, including the standard fourth wall digs at One More Day, Deadpool's non-involvement in Messiah CompleX, some of the less recognizable Mighty Avengers, and the general cool factor of fighting giant alien dinosaurs. It was a really good issue. Pretty much everything you expect out of a Deadpool book, with a surprising amount of heart (well, that's a relative term when Deadpool's involved, but the last scene had some nice moments). It was an extra sized issue with some nice back matter, including a double sized Dear Deadpool, some comments from Fabian and the Editor, and other goodies. It was a fitting way to end a series at right around when it probably should have ended. We're going to be seeing a new Deadpool ongoing that will apparently be headed up by the current creative team of Wolverine: Origins. Deadpool's in the current W:O story arc, and it seems like Daniel Way has a good grasp of the character, so there's no reason not to believe he'll do the Merc with a Mouth justice.

New Deck: Fantastic Four of Earth 2

2008-03-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

I said I was working on it, so here's the preliminary build for my Fantastic Four/JSA team up that uses the new Alan Scott card from the hobby league kit.

Characters:
4x Jakeem Williams, JJ Thunder
2x Atom Smasher, Al Rothstein
4x Luke Cage, Steel Hard Skin
2x Mr. Fantastic, Stringbean
4x Invisible Woman, First Lady of the Fantastic Four
1x Thing, Idol O'Millions
4x Alan Scott, Golden Age Engineer
1x Mr. Fantastic, Critical Thinker
3x Thing, Heavy Hitter
1x Thunderbolt, Yz
3x Human Torch, Flame On!
1x Jay Garrick <> The Flash, Golden Age Speedster
1x Black Adam, Ruthless Hero
Plot Twists:
4x Signal Flare
4x Flying Kick
4x Allied Against the Dark, Team-Up
4x It's Clobberin' Time!
3x Invisibility
3x Force Field Projection
3x Savage Beatdown
2x Clobberin' Pine!
2x Heroes of Two Worlds

The general idea is to make sure you hit Luke Cage on two, Invisible Woman on three and Alan Scott on four with FF and JSA teamed up. Invisibility can ship Alan Scott to the hidden area, where he can proceed to wreak havoc on turns five and six. You pretty much want odd initiatives, because turn five can become very strong, and the Torch antics can still happen off initiative. If you still have Luke Cage on turn five, you can use his discard ability and swing him up the curve with a Beatdown or Flying Kick, bring him back with Alan Scott and then stun another character to draw four cards. You could also just have a giant Thing swing twice, but there's less chance of getting him stunned. Turn Six you activate Torch twice to burn them down. Add in the healthy amount of Force Field Projections and Clobberin' Pines, and you should be able to foil a lot of their combat while Mr. Scott runs roughshod on your opponent.

Thoughts?

Alan Scott is my New Best Friend

2008-03-01T06:32:00.000-08:00

Some time recently (I believe it was yesterday), the new promo cards for Hobby League went up on the VSsystem.com site. We'd known the names and versions of these cards for quite some time, but we had no idea what they do. Now that the cat's out of the bag, Jared Stevens <> Fate has been getting a lot of attention due to his built in ability of paying resource points to KO unique equipments (like, oh I don't know, the fate set and Infinity Gems), as well as the added bonus of reducing the cost of Magic plot twists by one. He's a very good card, but I think Mr. Scott here outshines him. There are so many ways you can abuse ready effects. We all know this. Quicksilver, Berserker Rage, Samantha Parrington, Fate Has Spoken, the new six drop Flash, various Rock of Eternity decks, they're all good. Well, we can add Alan Scott to that list. There's no real reason to not use his effect any turn past four when you're on initiative to just add to the beats. Why wouldn't you want to swing your six across the curve for the mutual stun and then bring him right back to go barreling down the curve? Of course, the character has to be stunned, so that would play in to any attacking choices, but keep in mind that he has other uses, especially if you can find a way to move him to the hidden area with cards like Rook Control with a team up, The Outside World with a team up or Dr. Mid-Nite in some kind of under drop curve of JSA.

There are so many things he can do here. It's not limited to any phase of the game. It's not like Lilandra where it's only during combat, it's not anything like that. Your opponent breaks up your reinforcement on his initiative and is swinging down the curve on your little guy with a bunch of pumps? Activate Alan to recover and ready the guy next to him and exhaust him to reinforce. Want to take out two guys in the hidden area? Pop an Uni-Power on someone and make sure he gets stunned that first swing (yes, folks, Blinding Rage is your friend) so he can come right back to some other important hidden area character. You want to use Human Torch, Flame On! twice in a turn as a game ender? Why not? Seems like a pretty good trade to take 12 when your opponent burns for 26. There are so many facets to make this guy super crazy good, that I knew the second I saw him I would have to make a deck around him. And I will.

Hell, that Torch idea is sounding better and better the more I think about it.....

Old Deck: Random Heralds

2008-02-29T15:28:00.001-08:00

When I picked up VS System as my main card game, I was, to say the least, a bit late to the party. Marvel Team Up had just recently come out, and right as I started buying cards (as I mentioned, I decided to start with the Heralds of Galactus set), the first City Champs happened. I didn’t have the cards or the experience, so I decided not to participate. The next major tournament at our local place was the inaugural Random Punks tournament. It seemed like a very good way to get started, considering I had very few rares, so I started to put together a deck with my buddy Brian. Since I was mostly working off the Heralds set, my choice for a deck seemed pretty simple. The Heralds of Galactus had a non rare search (and a very good one) in Kindred Spirits, and at the time had the only non rare 8 drop in Tyrant. I also wanted to splash in some Inhumans, mainly because every major character in the deck was cosmic, and no one loves cosmic counters more than Franklin Richards. The general idea was to create a mostly stall deck based on moving characters hidden, cosmic effects, card draw and endurance gain. It’s pretty straightforward.

Characters (30):

4x Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend

4x Franklin Richards, Creator of Counter Earth

4x Frankie Raye <> Nova, Soul Searcher

3x Human Torch, The Invisible Man

2x Moondragon, Protector of the Mind Gem

3x Air-Walker, Harbinger of Despair

1x Alaris, The Outgoing One

3x Destroyer, Harbinger of Devastation

1x The Fallen One, The Forgotten

3x Galactus, the Maker

2x Tyrant, The Original Herald

Locations (7):

3x Elemental Converters

2x Worldeater Apparatus

2x Soul World

Plot Twists (23):

4x Cover Fire

4x Extended Family, Team-Up

4x Kindred Spirits

4x Cosmic Necessity

3x The Power Cosmic Unleashed

2x A Proud Zinco Product

2x The Herald Ordeal, Team-Up

The deck almost always wants even initiatives, due to the deck turning aggressive on turn six, with Destroyer making a big swing as a 15/15 thanks to a Power Cosmic Unleashed. Even though this might lead to Galactus losing his counter off my initiative, it usually works really well. Most opponents would not exactly expect Destroyer, especially with a counter put on him, so you can usually either one way across the curve or swing down for some healthy breakthrough. Cover Fire is absolutely insane in the deck. Since the deck isn’t really designed to attack, and Franklin should be pretty much hiding everyone on the board until turn five, Air-Walker should be the only visible character with the potential to pump his defense into the 15-17 range on turn 5. With Frankie and the Converters drawing you cards, and either Moondragon drawing you even more cards or Torch taking away breakthrough and gaining endurance, it shouldn’t be too hard to reach turn 8, at which point Tyrant steals Torch’s counter (provided he still has it), and you absolutely obliterate your opponent’s board on 8. What I really like most about the deck is that the Heralds strategy really isn’t nerfed too much by the loss of rares. Sure, Air-Walker 3 (whose version happens to be my Gamertag on Xbox Live. Yes, I’m a geek), Red Shift, Terrax and 9 drop Galactus are fantastic and important cards, but I really dig how the team plays in the Punks environment.

I didn’t write anything down during the tournament as it happened, mostly due to the fact that it was the first tournament I ever played in and was a bit nervous due to that fact. There were seven or eight people there. I’ll try and go on memory to give a little tournament report.

Round 1:

I went against a New Brotherhood reservist deck (which I guess is New New Brotherhood. I’m not really up on the older deck names). He was having a lot of trouble drawing into his TNB’s, and thus didn’t have enough raw attack to get over a Cover Fired Air-Walker, which let me stall out a couple turns and use Galactus and Destroyer to very great effect.

1-0

Round 2:

This was my buddy Los’ Kree/Darkseid build designed to completely lock down my row with a Fated Up Ronan. He ended up putting the Fate Gear on Commander Dylon-Cir on three. I blew up his cloak with a Proud Zinco Product from the row and when he attacked into my Frankie, I replaced the APZP into a second APZP (the only other one in my deck) and broke his Amulet, which pretty much completely shut him down. I was brickwalling left and right on his initiative, and ended up clearing his board on 8 and swinging direct to gain 25 or so endurance due to Torch’s effect, which put me around 70 endurance to his ten. He scooped shortly after that.

2-0

Round 3:

Brian’s pseudo High Voltage Squadron burn deck based mostly around Black Panther with an Advanced Hardware and Golden Archer. This game went back and forth like crazy, and I ended up eking out a victory with both of us in the negatives. This game was probably the best example of the importance of Cosmic Necessity and Worldeater Apparatus in the deck, as the endurance gain let me hold on enough to win.

3-0

Round 4:

Another TNB Reservist deck. This was the first time all day that I missed a drop, and the lack of Frankie Ray on 3 and Lockjaw on 1 seriously neutered my Cover Fires. I ended up scooping on five after Air-Walker got taken down.

3-1

I ended up splitting with Brian for the finals, as he agreed to give me the win if I agreed to trade one of the EA Mobilizes for a standard Mobilize. I felt pretty good walking out of my first ever VS tournament with two Mobilizes, a Howard the Duck playmate and a bunch of packs. Not bad for my first foray into VS. One thing I must say, and this could simply be due to the format, but Cosmic Necessity was an extremely important card in every one of my wins. It either allowed me to draw into action (either a power up or Cover Fire) or gain enough endurance to keep my stall active into the late turns when Tyrant took things over. I still believe it’s an underrated card. This tournament led to a nice little streak of victories over the next couple months, with my winning a Marvel Team-Up sealed event, the World’s Finest Release and the Alter Ego Marquee Event. Of course, I ended up burning out in the World’s Finest City Champs with my extremely consistent Inhumans deck (I couldn’t draw a Lockjaw or Great Refuge to save my life) missing drops right and left. I guess the karma realigned itself that day.

New Deck: Future Faust

2008-02-28T15:12:00.001-08:00

The first deck I’m going to spotlight here is an early build of my first attempt at Future Foes, which was brought on by one of the new 4 drop Felix Fausts from the DC Legends set. I know I’m not the only one that thought of Future Foes when I saw the Injustice Gang Faust that burns your opponent for 2 every time they discard, especially since Squire, Cliff and special guest Steve Garrett mentioned that selfsame idea on The Ring Has Chosen (the best damned gaming podcast on the net, people). The nice thing about this is the fact that Faust fits into a pretty good spot in the Future Foes curve. The standard 4 drop in the discard strategy is more than likely going to be Lightning Lord, who is a very good character in that he’s almost guaranteed to force a discard, or ends up being the size of a 5 drop. This is great, but my main issue with it is the fact that it’s a one time discard effect. Characters like the two Ra’s Al Ghuls, Cosmic King (provided you can protect his counter), Time Trapper, 5 drop Computo, Ol-Vir and (to a much lesser extent) Glorith can force multiple discards throughout the game. Those are the types of effects I would prefer if I’m going along with the Felix Faust strategy of really setting up a bad situation for your opponent. Nearly every card in the deck is designed to affect your opponent while using as few card as possible that actually target my opponent’s side of the board, considering the proliferation of Pathetic Attempt in nearly every deck these days.

The hope would be to use these discard effects early, as a way to try and limit their hand size as soon as possible through the use of 1 drop Ra’s Al Ghul and Cosmic King, as well as the Asteroid JS-1967 location and Plot Twists like Chain Lightning. To be honest, Faust isn’t really in the deck to deal endurance loss, but more to further discourage my opponent from wanting to discard so I can get the effects I want, giving me the option to swing down the curve and do tons of breakthrough by taking away reinforcement, which also turns on my search, Fatal Five Hundred. Let’s go through the important drops in the deck, shall we?

Characters:

4x Ra’s Al Ghul <> Leland McCauley, U.P. President

4x Emerald Empress, Fatal Five

2x Saturn Queen, Legion of Super Villains

3x Cosmic King, Legion of Super Villains

3x Time Trapper, Temporal Manipulator

4x Felix Faust, Soulless Mystic

1x Lightning Lord, Legion of Super Villains

3x Computo, Rogue Program

1x Ra’s Al Ghul, Engine of Change

2x Ol-Vir, Legion of Super Villains

1x The Persuader, Fatal Five

1x Universo, Vidar

Locations:

3x Asteroid JS-1967

Plot Twists:

4x Chain Lightning

2x Dominated

4x Fatal Five Hundred

3x Five Against One

4x For Khundia!

3x Return of the Demon’s Head

2x Sorcerous Suppression

2x Enemy of My Enemy

4x Flying Kick

Here's specific breakdowns of most of the cards and why they're in the deck.

Ra’s Al Ghul <> Leland McCauley, U.P. President – This is a very strong reusable forced discard effect. He works much like Dark Martian can (post turn four for the Martian, at least) in that he’s basically Blind Sided on a stick that can be used at any time. He’s very important for those effects that require breakthrough (Computo, Fatal Five Hundred), and because of that, he just might get a card out of your opponent’s hand.

Emerald Empress, Fatal Five – One of two oversized recovery character I’m putting in the deck, mainly because Saturn Queen is pretty underwhelming. She’s big, and will most likely do some good damage turn two if Leland’s on the board.

Cosmic King, Legion of Super Villains – Here’s a strong character. He’s a 7/6 if your opponent doesn’t discard, and they most likely will try to discard due to the fact that his ability is tied to a cosmic counter. Because of this, if Cosmic King is played on turn three, especially on your initiative, it’s a good turn to throw out some of the Plot Twists and possibly knock them down to only one or two cards in hand, or otherwise do a ton of damage that turn.

Time Trapper, Temporal Manipulator – This is basically a match dependant call. Any teams designed to constantly search are going to be very upset to see Time Trapper in the visible area. Checkmate, the Inhumans, and a Ruin based Ongoing Plot Twist Revenge Squad deck are all going to hate this guy. Plus, he’s a 5/5 and not cosmic, so bonus.

Felix Faust, Soulless Mystic – As I mentioned before, Faust just amps up the whole “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” ideal of the Future Foes team. The choice between having your lowest drop losing reinforcement on turn five or discarding a card and losing two endurance is a tough choice indeed. It’s especially strong in tandem with Time Trapper, when a Mobilize is going to cost your opponent two cards and two endurance. Lightning Lord is your backup here, and he’s already been talked about.

Computo, Rogue Program – This is where all the various reinforcement neutralizing effects comes into handy. One swing can shift card advantage pretty handily, especially if you’re using one drop Ra’s to take away reinforcement, and respond with a Five Against One when they discard.

Ol-Vir, Legion of Super Villains – Another good discard ability. It’s certainly not as damning as the others, but there’s absolutely no reason to not use his effect every turn he’s on the field.

The Persuader, Fatal Five – He’s a finisher. He really likes using Dominated to swing down on your opponent’s lowest drop, recover him, and stun the six, allowing you to swing down on him again.

Universo, Vidar – If it goes to seven, he can wreak havoc. He’s a one of in the deck.

Asteroid JS-1967 – A reusable location that can take away reinforcement if they don’t discard? Yes, please.

Chain Lightning – Think of this as basically either a +2 or +4 attack that works on attack or defense with the built in discard mechanic. Very good for causing breakthrough or swinging up the curve to break someone’s formation.

Dominated – Potentially a supremely powerful card. Out of combat stuns are fantastic, and it’s a very good way to create board advantage. Very good with the oversized recovery characters.

Fatal Five Hundred – I love search that doesn’t involve a discard, and with the rest of the support from the team, causing breakthrough should not be difficult at all.

Five Against One – This is great, as it acts as both a Chain Lightning style attack pump while at the same time usable to take away reinforcement.

For Khundia! – Nothing wrong with +2 attack, and hidden decks are going to be really upset when Computo comes ravaging into the hidden area to take out their one drop…

Return of the Demon’s Head – This card is just mean. You can play it on five to completely wreck their board and cause a ton of breakthrough, and there’s a very good chance that they’ll just discard the two. Hymn to Tourach effects are awesome, especially if they’re taking four at the same time. Swarm decks really don’t like this card.

Sorcerous Suppression – Once again, use it to exhaust a potential reinforcer or possibly hose their initiative on three.

Enemy of My Enemy – Gotta get Faust into your hand somehow.

Flying Kick – Don’t exactly need to explain the importance of Flying Kick here.

I pretty much want odd initiatives just about every time. It helps with Computo on five, and it's always fun to have Time Trapper on the board before your opponent even lays his fourth resource.

I’d love to hear some feedback on this, both in the form of critiques about the deck itself or the article. Is it too long? Should I lose the individual card breakdowns? Let me know in the comments. I'm hoping to throw out a deck just about every week, whether it's new or old. I believe my next deck post will most likely be a write up on the first deck I ever built, Heralds/Inhumans Random Punks.

You can't stop the signal, Mal...

2008-02-27T20:53:00.000-08:00

I've decided to throw my hat into the ring of VS System themed blogs. Now, I know there are quite a lot of us popping up, especially with the changes to the main VsSystem.com site as pertains to articles, but another can't hurt, right?

I think the main motivation for my creation of this blog stems from my current situation as relates to VS System. My local card store technically doesn't exist. Tournaments are run every Friday by our pseudo-store owner Dan, who operates out of his house and rents out space at an obedience school about ten minutes from my house. It's safe to say that this isn't exactly the most glamorous setup, but I can play cards there, and that's what matters. The sad thing is, hobby league doesn't exist. On a week to week basis, there are two of us that play VS, and the other player also plays WoW and judges YuGi. I still show up every week and usually get two to three games in, and we still get outsiders to come out for release celebrations and City Champs, but it can get a little frustrating at times when you're basically playing the same decks against the same guy week after week. But who am I to complain? I still get to play.

Despite the lack of hobby league, I can't stop thinking about VS on a daily basis. Being a pretty big comic fan, superheroes have a tendency to be on my mind for a good part of the day as is, which will usually end up crossing over to some crazy VS deck idea that leads to me creating way too many decks, but it's a good way to keep my interest up. Indeed, that's my main motivation for the creation of this blog. I'm basically going to use this as a dumping ground for deck ideas, as well as some commentary on how those decks work in practice either at my pseudo hobby league or Magic Workstation (if I ever actually start playing it online, which should start happening soon).

Some quick background on myself as a card player. I started in the wonderful world of collectible cardboard in late 1993 with the Unlimited release of Magic. I played nearly every card game under the sun for a couple years, from Magic to Jyhad/Vampire to Net Runner to Illuminati: New World Order to On the Edge to all kinds of other stuff. I took a break for a while due to silly things like college and the need to save money, but came back to the gaming scene with the release of the World of Warcraft CCG. It's an ok game, and I enjoyed my time playing it, but I always thought something was lacking there. To be honest, I think they made it a bit too open ended with the turn sequence, but that's neither here nor there. Around April of last year, I wanted a bit more of a challenge, so I switched over to VS, starting with the Heralds of Galactus set and moving forward from there. I fancy myself a deck builder first and foremost, as I don't get many opportunities to practice my sealed and draft skills. Not much else to say there due to my relative inexperience compared to those that have been playing since go.

I think the first deck I throw up here will be the preliminary build of my first crack at a Future Foes deck, namely one that focuses on the inclusion of the new 4 drop Injustice Gang Felix Faust that burns your opponent for two every time they discard. Look for that most likely tomorrow, and I might throw up my current JLA and Skrull builds in the near future.

Wow. I must be tired, as I usually consider myself to be a better writer than this post would indicate. Note to self: write when awake. I'll also let everyone know when I get fully set up with Workstation as to my username and all that jazz. Until a later date, we are legion, and VS will never die.