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.
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