Thinking Outside the Box

It's been an interesting year. Everyone seems to be a little busier with family, work, home building and in general life taking its course. Our gaming group has gotten a little smaller over the course of the year too, which is naturally a little disappointing. As games are a form of entertainment they are usually among the first activities to get hit when schedules or budgets get a little tight. Of course, the Christmas season these kinds of changes are even more pronounced. There are family obligations, work deadlines, company parties, shopping to be done and all that other fun (and sometimes exhausting) stuff needs to get done. As for my gaming habits, they have changed a little bit too. I've tried some great new games this year! Ascension , Warlord , Touch of Evil , EVE Second Genesis and yes, even Magic the Gathering have all been added to my realm of interests. A few games haven't gotten the attention I'd like, most notably being Call of Cthulhu . We did t...

I was recently able to get things underway for obtaining prize support for Warlord . The original idea for running tournaments was once a month to garner interest and get some players comfortable with the game. The tournament day would likely be Friday evenings, but that will be finalized before the end of the year. For anyone interested in obtaining some Warlord cards to play with, they are having a great sale right now over on the US Store . With the move of our VS tournaments to Thursday nights, that opens up some opportunity for a few Friday nights to be used in a more open-gaming type of format. I'll be happy to provide decks for players interested not only in Warlord, but Call of Cthulhu , EVE and Warhmammer Invasion . And don't forget...Trilogy is once again hosting Friday Night Magic as well! More details forthcoming!

This is a variation of Bring Your Own Two Teams. All the regular BYOTT rules apply, but with one catch: each of your teams must be from a different universe. This means that you may not have two DC teams, two Marvel teams or two Hellboy teams in your deck. I will add one further rule... In addition to the approved ban list, I am going to add the cards "X-Men Assemble!", "Legendary Battles" and "Bamf!" to the ban list. These cards may not be included in your deck for this event. So, who are you going to team up?

One of the things about customizable card games that is both a blessing and a curse is the infinite variety offered. Having dozens, hundreds or even thousands of cards to chose from can be liberating and daunting all in the space of a few heartbeats. Additionally, as most of us have some kind of addictive mentality when it comes to these sorts of games, invariably we will devote our time to more than one. We have now taken that variability and likely performed a square operation on it, rather than a simple doubling effect. Whoa, pretty heavy vocabulary for a Monday morning I admit. I'm only two paragraphs in and I'm talking about math. Often when I'm writing something I have only the roughest sense of what my topic is before I start. Even more often I'll simply write a title on the spot and carry on from there. I may change the title after I'm done, but that doesn't change its initial impact on my creative process. In many ways this is very similar to ho...

Well I'm a little behind, but last Friday we capped off our DC Universe season with a final tournament. There were six players who came out for the event (which is probably all of the people who are reading this article!). The rounds shape up as follows; the winners are in italics: Round 1: Jason vs Jordan, Will vs Seb, Roy vs Scott Round 2: Jason vs Roy , Scott vs Will , Jordan vs Seb Round 3: Jason vs Seb, Scott vs Jordan, Roy vs Will I ended up playing in Jason's place due to him having to leave after the first round. He found a really interesting little combo equipping Killer Shark with a Batmobile. Using his pay willpower ability to increase his attack and defense, while becoming unstunnable thanks to the Batmobile is probably not a combination that the designers foresaw, but it was pretty fun nonetheless! One of the great things about this set was the big endurance swings in the late game. I saw a lot of games being played with endurance totals like 10/12 at the en...

VS System I thought that it would be good to update everyone about things with our gaming group as our DCU tournaments are coming to a close. As it stands, I'm very happy with the continuing attendance for the weekly Friday night VS System tournaments. We'll wrap up with DCU on the last Friday of September (Sept 24th) with another big tournament which I trust will be good fun for all. Please make sure to mark it on your calendar! Through October and November we will play some fun tournaments with no prize support while I prepare things for December and into the New Year. The details of those plans will be forthcoming as they are solidified; but have no fear, we WILL continue playing VS into 2011 with more awesome new events and prizes! Scheduling-wise, we've been talking about moving the tournaments from Friday evenings to Thursdays. I haven't settled on this yet, but am leaning toward making the change starting in December. There are a lot of reasons why this wil...

For reference purposes, I wanted to post up a list of formats available for play. I'll link it to the side panel and maintain as necessary. Age Formats Modern Age: - DC Legends (includes DCX) - Marvel Universe (includes MUL and MEQ) - DC Universe - Marvel Factions Silver Age: - Legion of Super-Heroes - Marvel Team-up (includes Hellboy) - World’s Finest - Marvel Legends (includes MAA, MCG and MEX) - DC Legends (includes DCX) - Marvel Universe (includes MUL and MEQ) - DC Universe - Marvel Factions Golden Age: - All sets are legal in Golden Age. Banned cards may not be played. Block Formats Origins Block: - Marvel Origins - DC Origins - Web of Spider-Man - Superman, Man of Steel - Marvel Knights - Green Lantern Corps (includes Batman TCG starter set) Crisis Block: - The Avengers (includes Fantastic Four TCG starter set) - Justice League of America - The X-Men (includes The X-Men TCG starter set) - Infinite Crisis - Heralds of Galactus - Legion of...

Hm...that title is better than the first one I almost went with, but on second thought, not by much! What I meant by that is that it seems most of the trading card games I like playing, or have been recommended, seem to die. With VS System in our area, the resurrection came through my refusal to let a good gaming group die. We still have weekly tournies with a decent turn out, prizes and good times for all. I hope this will continue for a good long time. Call of Cthulhu died as a TCG and was brought back as a living card game by Fantasy Flight. I ran a weekly league for about six months, but attendance was a problem. I still love the game and we do get to play occassionally. Seems everyone I introduced the game to enjoyed it as well, and we'd all like to play it more often. The GIJoe TCG , well, it just died, but I still bring it back to life a few times a year at home or the local game shop. Good mindless fun with beloved characters from the 80s. Warhammer: Invasion , is s...

Last Friday was a great event. We had eight players some out for our DCU tournament. We were missing a regular player as well, which was too bad but it was still great to see so many people come out for the games. We all built sealed decks using mock-packs from DCU. I had a ton of locations, but was pretty light on plot twists. Given that...I decided to play a mixed deck of Green Lantern, Anti-Matter and a few JSA characters thrown in for good measure. My mock-packs only had one team-up card (Janus Contract?), which was good for a three-way team up...but if you didn't choose Suicide Squad it got replaced at the end of the turn. My first game ended in a coin-toss as Jason arrived too late to play (technically we should have given me a bye and he a loss for being late), but since we're pretty informal I just decided to flip a coin. The second game against Nathan was a tight race, with the health gains from my early Central Power Battery nearly being the difference. In the ...

Legends Block is pretty simple and follows the same structure as the previous two block events that we've played recently. Build a deck from the following sets. Legends Block - DC Universe - Marvel Universe - DC Legends - Marvel Legends - World’s Finest - Marvel Team-Up - Hellboy

With July coming up really fast, we get to celebrate Canada Day. Flag waving in the sun is good fun, but I think I'm looking forward to having an extra gaming night this month. And what a cool event it's going to be! Make sure to clear your schedule, send the wife out of town or play dead then sneak out of the house...because the event on July 30th is one that you absolutely don't want to miss. Before we get to the 30th though, we have some other games to play. The Avengers sealed event is pretty self explanatory. If we have more than four players we'll draft from three packs. If there are four or less, we'll play sealed instead. I think most of us have played the Alter Ego format as well, but we're going to add another twist to it this time: switch deck. Not only will you get a random Alter Ego to play with each round, but it will be accompanied by a deck made by one of the other players. Talk about warping your mind...this one should be a lot of fun. A...

So last week was our first time with a new format, and I have to say that I thought it went really well. It was a lot of fun being able to play a game with all the big characters out on the table. With the big guns on the table, the games didn't last very long and we were able to play four rounds. I decided to go with Darkseid's Elite, using Darkseid and Kara Zor-El as my 7-drops. One thing that did come up with this format was that if you missed your 7 cost character it was really tough to survive the game. I feel that adding a little more chance to the game was part of what made it fun! Here's an example of the craziness that ensued: My last game was up against Will, who was playing a Heralds deck. He got his 7-cost Galactus out, and having first attack, simply burned me for 25 endurance right off the start! I was able to hit all my drops a cause us to gain a resource, allowing me to play a second 5-drop Darkseid to his 4-drop Human Torch. With an Apokalips in my r...

Well summer is here, or so the calendar would have us believe. It's almost a week into June and I don't think we've broken 20C since March. But that could just be me being pessimistic! Anyway, I'm a little late with the format list for this month. I've been swamped in paperwork, but for my job and on a personal front. If you take a look at the list of tournaments on the left you'll notice two tournament names. Let me explain them. Countdown This is something completely fun and different. It works like this: 1. Roll or flip a coin to decide initiative. Both players start with 50 endurance. 2. Each player places the top SEVEN cards of their deck down into their resource row. Players may look at their resource row, but no cards may be flipped yet. 3. Each player draws an opening hand of four cards and may decide to mulligan or keep. 4. Each player draws their two cards and turn 1 begins. Resources may now be flipped up. 5. At the end of each turn, each pla...

Last week we had 7 players out for our clone saga tournament. I always love to see that many players out for events! It's been a week since then, so I'll do my best to recall what everyone was playing. Colin - Superman Jordan - Magneto Nathan - Dr. Doom Roy - Iron Man Scott - The Thing William - Jean Grey Me - Batman I was only able to play two games, my third round being a bye. My first game was up against Scott, who started his early game strong. By turn four he had a copy of Yancy Street and an ongoing plot twist that made it so I couldn't target his clone character. I had the hidden Batman, Founding Member and used it to replace his Yancy Street on turn four. The tide seemed to be turning, as even with the Scott's character advantage things were looking pretty good for me. Next turn however, I replaced his ongoing (which I wish I could remember the name of!)...with another copy of Yancy Street! Things that were untargetable and massive meant my game was over...

Last week was a Modern Age event that I played an illegal deck at. At least in the first game I did anyway. I had it in my head that it was built entirely from DCU cards, but in fact I had built it for the BYOTT (Bring Your Own Two Teams) event a few weeks back. As such, it had cards from DGL and DCR in addition to DCU. Roy had no problem with me playing it, but as the organizer of these things I really should have been paying more attention! For the second and third games I promptly switched to my Doom Patrol deck. It's apparently the only Modern Age legal deck that I have at the moment, which I really should change soon. I've been neglecting my deck building lately, and in fact feel like I haven't even had much of a chance to play in the past few months. I'll be missing the Golden Age event that finishes off April as well, but after that I certainly hope to not miss any more for quite some time! The schedule for May's events are now up as well. Just in cas...

Ok this will seem a little random for most of you...since I usually keep my stuff here related to gaming and whatnot. Here's the story. Something sorta freaky happened recently. There’s a band I have liked since high school called Type O Negative. I hadn’t given them much thought for a few months (they haven’t put anything out since 2007), but during lunch on Wednesday I brought them up in conversation…saying that I wanted to see if they were working on anything new. So, when I got home and was doing some work in the evening I flipped open the Type O Negative website and saw that two of the band members had a new band called Seventh Void. I opened youtube to see if I could find a tune. I did…and one of the comments said “RIP Peter”. Peter Steele is…or rather was the lead singer for Type O. He died Wednesday. It was confirmed by the band on Thursday morning. The time of day we were having lunch was within an hour of the likely time Peter would have passed away. I've co...

Greetings all... I've been a little lax on the updates lately. I have no excuses, so I'll not offer any. Last week we had four players join in for the Infinite Crisis sealed event. I opted to sit this one out, as I'd have made it an odd number and I didn't want someone else having to sit out for byes each round. Will took top spot and I owe his two copies of one of his prize cards, because I apparently couldn't count past four when I added them to the pool. Oh well, he'll get them this coming Friday. I had also been meaning to post up a deck list for my BYOTTs deck from a few weeks back. I don't have it handy with me, but I had chosen Anti-Matter and JSA. I was able to build a deck using about 50 cards from DCU, with a few Anti-Matter supplements from DGL. It was fun to play, and a lot of the Anti-Matter characters I had were also Manhunter which proved pretty interesting. I actually intend to keep the deck around and refine it some more...likely dr...

We had 4 players come out for the Marvel Team-Up sealed event on Friday; included one new player. It's always nice to have new people come out to play. Before we got started I asked if there were any rules he wasn't clear on. He wanted to see some examples of using reinforcement, so ran a quick demo for him before we started the tournament. Having an even 4-players I opted not to play and force one of the other players to sit out for byes. With the players holding their packs and set to go, I lent my assistance to Nathan to help him build a somewhat balanced deck of Underworld and Defenders. He was lucky to have pulled two different team-up cards and a few generic pumps (including a copy of Big Leagues)! His first game was up against Roy and things were going well into turn seven, where Nathan dropped a Crime Lords Hulk in front of his 6-cost character. I don't remember who that character was, but they did not share a team affiliation. Roy had his 7-cost Defenders Hu...

We're well past the 1-year mark when it was learned that the VS System game was no longer going to be produced by UDE. And I'm happy to say that things are still going strong for our hobby league. Our players are having a good time in our weekly tournaments and we've seen some cool new decks arise from the themed formats I've been setting up in our monthly schedule. Last week's Ban-10 tournament saw some pretty interesting decks hit the table such as Secret Society, Speed Force, Team Superman / Crime Lords, League of Assasins, and Avengers. I know I'm forgetting Will's deck in there, but I didn't play against him so I'm not entirely certain what kind of dirty tricks he was using this time around. One of the things that I realized was just how good our players are at building decks. Even without 50 of the most disliked or powerful cards being available to build with, people still come up with excellent combos and interesting effects. Jordan's...

Ok I'm really late with this, but the card lists have all been available since Sunday in the comments for the last post. Here's the list in easy readable order, and keep in mind that ALL version of a card are banned if it has been reprinted in any other sets: MOR-105 The New Brotherhood MOR-101 Lost City MOR-112 Dr. Doom Victor Von Doom MOR-183 Cover Fire MOR-189 Flying kick MOR-210 Press the Attack MSM-109 Bamf! MSM-130 Devil's Due DGL-024 Sinestro Green Lantern of Korugar DJL-049 Guy Gardner Egomaniac DCR-017 Michael Holt Mr. Terrific DLS-187/MVL-258 Mobilize MVL-029 Bererker Rage MVL-045 healing factor MVL 204 Dr.doom diabolical genius MVL-217 Mystical Paralysis MVL-267/MOR-214 Savage Beatdown MCG-039 Pathetic Attempt MEX-013 Silver Surfer's Board MAA-003 X-Men Assemble! MAA-019 Holocaust Age of Apocolypse DCL-065 Beast Boy, Freak of Nature DCL-141 Earth 3 DCL-144 Crime syndicate of Amerika DCX-023 Superman/Batman Robot DCX-026 A Clash of Worlds MUN-026 Spider-Man...

There have been villains, and heroes putting themselves on the line to stop them. Well VS System is no different. With the end of UDE's set releases the fan community has taken things upon themselves to continue the game with fan sets, ban and card wording updates and other suggestions. With our local group adding fan sets on our own schedule I will be maintaining the following "age" list. Modern Age: - Marvel Factions - DC Universe - Marvel Universe (includes MEQ and MUL) - DC Legends (includes DCX) Silver Age (includes Modern Age sets) : - Marvel Legends (includes MAA, Coming of Galactus and MEX) - World's Finest - Marvel Team-Up (includes Hellboy) - Legion of Superheroes Golden Age (also includes Modern and Silver Age sets) : - Heralds of Galactus - Infinite Crisis - X-Men - Justice League of America - Avengers - Green Lantern Corps - Marvel Knights - Man of Steel - Web of Spider Man - DC Origins - Marvel Origins - Marvel Evolutions As you'll see, Evolution...

Ok it's been a few days, but our first constructed VS System event for 2010 has come and gone. I was really happy to see an increase in our attendance to a total of eight players! Round 1 put me up against Jordan's Avengers deck. He had a great start with 2-cost Captain America in the hidden area complete with Captain America's Shield. I was playing my JSA-Lobo deck. When the 4-cost Iron Man arrived to bolster Cap and Black Widow things weren't looking too hot for my lonely visible Atom Smasher. I did have the Mr. Terrifics hiding and making him mean, but things weren't looking good...but the shield's exhausting effects were starting to help more than hurt at that point. On turn five I was able to bring out the 5-cost Carter Hall. I got some choice stuns and was able to avoid triggering Iron Man's effect, only to have my Hawkman stolen by a timely-played Switching Sides! Drawing into another 5-cost Hawkman actually proved to be the game-breaker, and ...

Hey hey hey kids! Things are looking up for us this year. I'm very excited about the move to weekly tournaments. With this change you might have noticed the little monthly schedule on the right panel, which replaces the bi-weekly tournament information. It's easier and more practical to post the schedule for the entire month, as it gives you a chance to plan your gaming in advance. Our first tournament of the year will be sealed Marvel draft. The set hasn't been determined yet, so you'll just have to come down and see what we've got. The schedule will follow the pattern you see there *points to the right*. The first Friday will be a sealed event of some kind, for as long as I'm able to get sealed product to play with. The second and fourth weeks will remain as Golden Age constructed events, and the third will be different a themed event each month. Should we end up with a fifth Friday in the month...well I'll come up with something! On a different bu...

Greeting gamers! It seems that Fantasy Flight games has a gift for us in the New Year: "FFG will be changing the collation of our monthly packs, adopting an approach that both existing and potential LCG customers have been requesting. Once fully implemented across all of our LCG’s, your monthly packs will include 60 cards, consisting of 20 unique cards in triplicate copy!" No longer will we have to buy multiple packs in order to get three copies of that one super-awesome card needed for our decks. I love the living card game model, and this upcoming change makes thing even better. The change to the new pack model will come into effect for each LCG with the start of their next pack phase. For Call of Cthulhu this will be after Dreamlands . For Warhammer: Invasion the changes will take place after the final pack of the Skavenblight cycle. Excellent news makes me happy.