Thinking Outside the Box

For those of you who aren't members of the forums on VSRealms.com, you should be. There is a long-running podcast that two of the 'realms members have been doing, called The Ring Has Chosen . I've been listening to Cliff and Squire since before Halloween of '07, and tune in religiously every week for the latest episode. These guys do a great job and always make me laugh with their fun banter, off-topic ranting, and insight into the game. A while back I sent Cliff an email to let them know how much I enjoyed their show, and was shortly thereafter invited to join them for an episode! I'll let the episode do the rest of the talking, but I just wanted to let them, and everyone else, know how much I enjoyed being on the show. It was hands down the most fun I've had in a long time. Thanks again for having me on guys! So go listen to The Ring Has Chosen episode 68! It's available for download on iTunes, or can be streamed at www.the-kamiza.com

Well I just got finished talking with the guys from The Ring Has Chosen (the absolute best pod-cast on the inter-webs!), and was gently reprimanded for not having updated my blog in almost a week. We'll talk more about that later on...for now I thought I'd get back to my regularly scheduled programming, and start talking about the rest of the teams from Marvel Evolution. I believe the next team I said I'd look at would be X-Factor. Even if it wasn't, well...it is now! From a broad perspective I like how they were handled. All three eras of the team were covered: the original five X-Men, the government-sponsored team led by Havok, and the current X-Factor Investigations. I know the first two teams best, as X-Factor was one of the books that I read for the longest back in the day. Keeping with the X-Men team, the original five has some great recovery effects from Angel and Jean Grey, some stun and don't-get-stunned shenanigans with Cyclops, and Beast / Iceman r...

In the past week or so since MEV was released, some tricky smart players figured out an infinite combo utilizing a combination of Black Box and Techno-Organic Virus. Today, UDE (ie: "The" Ben Seck) posted an errata of the card's text up on the VSRealms.com forums. The card now reads: "Shuffle up to three target cards not named Black Box from a single player's KO'd pile into his deck. If you control an X-Force character, draw a card." I think this is an elegant solution that still makes the card playable without ruining the usefulness of a good card. Thanks TBS! And now back to your regularly scheduled gaming. :D

Well, if you've taken a close look at the right side of the site lately (providing the color change didn't numb you to sleep)...we have another location running hobby league effective as of yesterday! Due to lack of supply Jason, your other friendly hobby league TO, wasn't able to run a sealed tournament as planned. The sealed tournament will run on Dec 22nd instead. We will try to operate our events as concurrently as possible Legends will be running on Monday evenings, following the same format as Trilogy on the preceding Friday. Of course we may not be able to keep things in sync all the time. For the most part, the format will be the same. Keep an eye on the side panel here for format, dates and times. More gaming, more prizes, more Vs System goodness...sounds like a happy holiday season to me! :D

OK I know I said that my next write up would be about X-Factor, but I really haven't had a chance to look at them very much this week. It seems the big story on Magic Workstation is Exiles. Out of all the games I've played, the only ones that weren't played against Exiles decks were those I played against Roy (a total of 5 out of approximately 25). Everyone else seems to have foregone any sense of autonomy or creativity and jumped on the Exiles bandwagon. I admit, it's a good deck; it's better than good. As you may have garnered from my previous article, I think it's pretty damn amazing. By turn five a regular deck will have garnered a total of 15 resource points. Exiles can almost double that. But does that mean every person online has to play it? Can't we step out of the box a little bit and try something else rather than everyone running variations on a theme? I guess new-and-shiny + wins-almost-every-time is just too tempting to ignore. Right n...

I've had a few chances to play against some more decks built of cards from the new Marvel Evolutions (which seems to be selling at a very brisk pace locally). In addition to the Weapon X deck I wrote about the other day, I've faced off against an Exiles and an X-Factor deck, both of which were quite interesting to see. I'll concentrate on the Exiles build, which I've taken to calling Shi(f)t 'n Abuse . Since one of my main concerns is the power of MEV in relation to that of older sets, I've been playing predominantly Modern-Age decks against MEV-only builds. I want to see if non-Evolutions decks can compete, or even survive a match-up with the new-and-shiny mutant maniacs. The currently favored Exiles build starts off by recruiting no characters for two or possibly even three turns, rather concentrating on building up shift counters on characters in their removed-from-game zone. The ideal play on turn one involves shifting 3-drop Blink into play with a coun...

I just played my first couple games with MEV, against a Weapon X deck built with a focus on the new Shift and Hunter keywords. Now me, I'm not a crazy combo-creating type of player. None of my decks are overly tricky, but rather tend to rely simply on smashing my opponent into a bloody mess in new and interesting ways. Well, I have seen the future tonight, and his name is Deadpool. So here's the situation. It's the start of turn 5 and your opponent has a 2-drop Deadpool on the board. After drawing and playing a resource he plays a copy of Trouble with Clones (5-cost: To play, KO a Deadpool you control. Gain resource points equal to that character's cost. Spend these points only to recruit characters named Deadpool.) from his hand. Searching his deck he comes up with a Deadpool, Party Pooper. You think it's ugly now...just you wait. So now he's sitting there with a 7-drop staring you down on turn 5. Waking you from your shocked stupor he declares your...

There are a lot of comic book fans out there addicted to 'plasti-crack', also know as Heroclix. I got into clix about a year and a half ago. After asking around in the city and online I had found, much to my disappointment, that no one was playing VS here. My love of comic books being what it was, I decided to look into Heroclix to get my comic-gaming fix. Recent announcements by Topps have stated that they are ceasing production of the Heroclix product line and looking for someone to take it over. Of course, gamers being what they are, gloom and doom talk exploded throughout the interwebs...with conspiracy theories, economic debates and ideas for saving the game flying around all over the place. What does this have to do with VS? Well, I'm not really sure. It might positively grow our player base, if clix really does stop going. Some people might be willing to make the switch simply to fill that comic-related gaming addiction. Others might simply walk away from gam...

But at least it was for a good cause, and a good time. I recently started working with a new company and we had a team of team-building night out. Dinner, drinks, the new Bond flick, and more drinks. All on the company dime...oh yeah! Roy sent me a brief tournament report (thank you!), and I was surprised, but happy with the results. It sounds like our numbers continue to grow. We had another 13 player night. THIRTEEN! And that's not counting another regular plus myself who were unable to go. I know I've gone on about how much I love the people in our hobby league group, but that's still just awesome. Granted the lingering effects of the beer I drank may be increasing my euphoria a little bit, but that's still pretty damned impressive. So here's my report, based on what I heard about (any sensationalism is entirely my doing, blame the beer): The final match after three rounds of preliminaries was Roy's Hidden Injustice Gang deck (I've played this th...

For the most part, I keep this blog for two reasons...the first one is for myself. I like talking about my favorite game, posting ideas and reports about our local Hobby League / gaming group. The second is obviously for the people in that group. I thought that it would be helpful to have a site that everyone could easily check that had information about the upcoming tournament date and format, since not everyone can make it to every event. So for anyone who reads this thing, feel free to pipe up. Leave a comment, whether you play Vs here in Calgary or not. I'd love to hear from you. Give me some ideas on things you'd like to see, article topics, deck ideas, stuff you love or hate about my writing...whatever.

I've been meaning to post for a few days, but with the realms being down...so was I. Not enough to not play any cards, but it saddened me. I was able to fill my need for Vs talk via the boards on the Kamiza's site, and those over on TCGPlayer. For anyone interested in the game I heartily recommend both communities. I think there is a lot of overlap, but that's actually a good thing in my mind. It goes to show how tight-knit our players are on a global-level. It's an amazing thing to see something like that come out of a shared love for a simple game. As for playing, things are still going really strong for me here. A week ago, I was able to organize an impromptu sealed tournament with five players, including myself. It was only the second time I've been able to play sealed, and I absolutely loved it! We had two players (including myself) playing with packs from Marvel Team-Up, one player with Marvel Knights, one with Infinite Crisis, and another playing Wor...

Well maybe that's a rather extreme statement, but I sure felt like it on Friday night! We had our Bring-Your-Own-Two-Teams tournament, and I ran my first-ever build of a Team Superman / Gotham Knights team-up deck. It was a lot smaller tournament than most that we've had in the past two months, but we had some great decks brought in. With only 5 of us playing we had time for every player to play against everyone else, which I really liked. BYOTT World's Finest (65 cards) Characters: 2x DCX-023 Superman/Batman Robot (0) 2x DCR-212 Lois Lane (1) 4x DBM-006 Commissioner Gordon (1) 2x DJL-209 Kelex (1) 3x DWF-010 Krypto (2) 3x DWF-042 Batman (3) 4x DOR-007 Cassandra Cain Batgirl (4) 1x DWF-127 Catwoman (5) 1x DWF-025 Wonder Woman (5) 2x DCL-028 Superman (5)4x 4x DCL-070 Dick Grayson Nightwing (6) 4x DGL-159 Azrael Batman (7) 1x DWF-008 Kara Zor-El Supergirl (8) 1x DOR-020 Superman (8) 1x DWF-022 Superman (9) Total = 35 Plot Twists: 1x DCX-005 Flying High 2x DSM-032 Man...

As promised, here's the listing for my SHIELD Ultimates deck. I'll post up the cards first and then address how it's supposed to work. Lightning Strikes Twice Characters: 3x MUN-094 Hank Pym Yellowjacket (1) 4X MUN-051 Beetle Mach (2) 3x MUL-019 Clint Barton Hawkeye (2) 4x MUL-020 Nick Fury (3) 2x MUN-064 Radioactive Man (3) 4x MUN-062 Lady Deathstrike (4) 1x MUL-005 Natasha Romanoff Black Widow (4) 1x MUL-030 Jean Grey (4) 4x MUL-008 Iron-Man (5) 1x MUN-118 Wonder Man (5) 1x MUL-029 Cyclops (5) 2x MUL-004 Captain America (6) 1x MUN-084 Ares (6) 4x MUN-101 Mar-Vell Captain Marvel (6) 1x MUN-096 Iron Man (7) 2x MUN-088 Carol Danvers Ms. Marvel (7) 1x MUL-018 Thor (7) 1x MUL-007 Hulk (8) Total = 40 Locations: 2x MUL-006 Subterranea 2x MUN-127 Stark Armory 1x MUL-021 The Triskelion Total = 5 Equipment: 1x MUN-121 Hulkbuster Armor 1x MAV-035 Mjolnir 3x MUN-120 Extremis Upgrade Total = 5 Plot Twists: 2x MUN-137 You're Under Arrest 2x MUN-134 Scarlet Spiders 2x DCL-262...

Over the past week I've built three brand new decks, including one for the upcoming BYOTT event this Friday. Thanks to convenient scheduling, I've actually been able to play test all three of them against several of Scott's formidable decks. All in all I'm really happy with them, and am actually trying to figure out what to build next. Of course I could always refine something that I've already built, but shiny-and-new seems to be winning out over tried-and-true with me right now. Two of the three decks I'll share, but the other I'll keep under wraps until Friday arrives. The first deck that I built was a team I haven't played with since the release of DOR; League of Assassins. When DC Legends came out I was really excited to play with all the great cards in it, but looking back I really haven't built any decks centered on that set. I suppose one of the reasons would be that I wanted to build a JLA deck using my favorite characters (Batman, Sup...

This event is similar to BYOT events, except that players choose two teams that are automatically crossed-over during the game. Players may only play with characters from, or cards that reference, one or both of those teams. You may not play with "generic" cards. This includes ALL cards in your deck, so plot twists, locations and equipment must also reference one of the two teams you are playing with!

The past few events have been great in terms of participation! Over the past two months I don't think we've had an event with less than 10 players signed up, and to me that is just awesome. I love seeing the group grow and change with the addition of new players, deck ideas, and friends. For the multi-player game night last week, it was a little odd. I was running a little late and had had a rather long day before heading down to Trilogy, and wasn't quite prepared to be greeted by a dozen beaming faces all waiting to play some cards. I hadn't expected quite that many players, and had only brought one Galactus set and one Starro set, which wasn't enough for that many players. What we ended up doing is something we've done once before, and while I'm a fan of it, I am sure some of the players aren't quite sure what to make of it. We ran two 3-player games, and one 2-on-2 game, for three rounds. The way we determined the winners for the tournament wasn...

Another really good tournament has come and gone, this time with 11 players coming out to compete in our Clone Saga event. There were a few gimmes, and a few surprises among the characters chosen; including Darkseid, The Joker, Captain America, Dr. Doom, Captain America, Brainiac 13, Silver Surfer, Rha' al Ghul and more! I wasn't able to take a close look at every player's deck, but I was very impressed with the creativity shown in some of the builds. From those that did have a chance to look at I think the Captain America and Silver Surfer decks had some really good potential, with the Cap deck coming in second only to Doom. Once again Scott walked away with top prize, smashing all comers in an impressive 4-0 tournament win. We'll have another Ultimates play mat and the final three MUL cards up for grabs in an upcoming event. Next time however, we're going to play some multi-player games. Depending on the number of players we'll either play some 2-on-2 te...

Ok well this isn't so much about what I think of the individual cards we've seen previewed on various spots online, but an overall impression so far. Maybe. First and foremost, I am sad that with Evolutions being a direct follow-up to Universe we see an end to the previous Marvel / DC alternating release schedule. I know that many other players share my fear that DC may no longer be represented in the game. I admit to leaning more towards the DC camp when it comes to what characters I enjoy more, but this really isn't about personal preference. The fear for my player group is that over time, we will lose players who play more DC cards, or DC exclusively. That's not a good thing, and I hope it won't happen should DC sets truly be out of the picture. So along comes Marvel Evolutions, the first time ever that we've had two Marvel expansions released back to back. Unfortunately, I feel there are a lot of things going against this set. I can't really prior...

We had an amazing turn-out for this weekend's tournament; 11 players total. That is really sweet as far as I'm concerned...since the only time we've ever broken that number was for our DC Legends release celebration back in December! Since I put a 30 minute time limit into place a little while back we've be able to play tournaments with four rounds rather than our previous three. I think this is more fun and certainly gives the players a chance to see more of the decks the other bring in. For some reason the first match of my four has totally evaporated from my memory, beyond the fact that my search-less Darkseid's Elite won out in turn six. The second and third matches were up against Heralds of Galactus and Avengers respectively. The Heralds player was new to the game and had a terrible draw. Overall I'd say that he only pulled four or five plot twists through the entire 8 rounds we played; and the Avengers just didn't have the oomph to survive all th...

I've been meaning to make a Darkseid deck for quite some time now, and finally did so about a week ago. I've been able to play 4 or 5 games with it and am very happy with how well it's been performing. The first game was a three player game and Kanto was a serious threat for both of my opponents to face. I was able to use his power twice; once to remove a 7-drop Defenders Hulk, and the second time to remove an Iron Man equipped with four pieces of extremely nasty equipment! There was a lot of swearing in that game... :) Darkseid has also had success against an X-Men build running Sage and Bad Press (thank god for resource row manipulation!), Gotham Knights and a Secret Society team up. There are a few cards I'd like to switch in, but I need to hop online to buy them. I'll post a deck list up after tomorrow's "Luck of the Draw" tournament. I think that my next project after this one will be something involving the League of Assassins. Oh and in o...

Another fine tournament event has come and gone. Last Friday we held our City Championship event. We had an 8-player pool with a diverse field as usual. I played my Fearsome Five / Infinity Gauntlet deck through four rounds. In the first round I was up against a Thunderbolts deck piloted by newcomer Dan. I was able to hit every drop as planned and draw into a fistful of gems. By turn six I had Thanos on the board against his 5 and 6 cost characters. Dropping a Power Gem and a copy of Armageddon on the table ended the turn, and the game, in my favor. Round two saw me up against an Insanity deck. Ben hit his one-drop Ratcatcher and caused me a few rounds of grief by burning me for all the stuns I was causing. By turn four I was able to get my team-up out and the New Baxter Builder and Moondragon combo running. I had to go to turn seven this time, but Thanos, a Power Gem and a copy of Armageddon cemented the win. Round three is where it started to go downhill for me. The first ...

I had been having a lot of trouble coming up with something new after building my not-yet-complete Green Lantern deck. I tried putting together a build of Manhunters, but it seemed to fall a little flat. They just don't have the support cards that Sentinels seem to enjoy. I have been able to get it to run well a few times, but I need a lot more than my 6 copies of Manhunter Soldier to make it run better. I do rather enjoy dropping Cyborg Superman on turn 5 though. I was able to do that against a Negative Zone deck and remove ALL the copies of Negative Zone from my opponent's deck, which made me laugh in a most sinister fashion. For our switch-deck event last weekend I didn't have time to build something new, so I grabbed something at random out of my rather large demo deck pile. I ended up with Revenge Squad. It didn't do very well against a lot of the others, but I was told that if you could hit the curve it was actually fun to play so I took a closer look at it...

Our switch team tournament went off spectacularly! I was really excited to see eight players show up with eight completely different decks. The format was embraced by all the attendees and was claimed to be good fun by everyone. And for me, that's what playing Vs System is all about. Rather than go into detail I'll just give a brief run down of the decks and the winners. As usual, this is from memory, so I may make a few mistakes, but I'll do my best to overcome my middle-age memory gaps! Our pool of submitted decks consisted of Warbound, Thunderbolts, Brotherhood, Crime Lords / Avengers, Gotham Knights, Avengers / Thunderbolts, Revenge Squad and on other deck that currently slips my memory. I want to say Shadowpact, but that just doesn't sound right. So the way the switch deck tourney works is that each player submits a deck to the pool. Each round, the players are given a random deck from the pool. They cannot pilot their own deck, or one that they have alread...

Never fear, the title is only that...I'm not going insane and lighting all my cards on fire or anything. It's just been amazingly hot here over the past few days... Friday's tournament was pretty good. We started out with what looked to be a small four, but two late-comers bumped us up to a respectable six players. With the weather being so nice and it being a Friday night, I was actually really happy with that. It was another interesting field as well. I believe we had X-Men, Negative Zone, Thunderbolts / Avengers, Crime Lords, Injustice Gang (I think), and my newly-built Green Lanterns deck. All of the decks were really strong and almost all of the games looked to be very close affairs. We had some really good prizes too! After digging around in the back Pascal found us another Fin Fang Foom mat and a Silver Surfer t-shirt. I also still had some rares from our batch of MUL cards too, so the top three guys all walked away with something cool. Everyone also got som...

The first weekend of August is a holiday around here, which means more time for gaming! Actually it meant more time for a lot of things, and I had a packed weekend schedule. First up was the Weird Al concert on Friday night. I think this one makes four times that I've seen him live. The seats were really good and while he was walking around during one of the songs he stopped about three seats away. The guy in the row in front of us got a great shot of it on his iPhone too! Saturday was a barbecue, then off to play some Heroclix. I started playing last spring, and had been playing almost weekly up until about two months ago, but haven't really been enjoying the game as much as I used to. I think part of it is the quality of the current set. The dials are really strong overall, but the figure sculpts and paintjobs are really awful. I think the other part of it is the competitiveness of the other tournament players. I enjoy winning too, but don't really care about it...

Once again I've had the good fortune of being given a card to preview from the DC Universe fan-set created by some of the players over on VS Realms . So far the set is looking fantastic, and contains all kinds of Green Lantern and Sinestro Corps shenanigans. It's almost a shame that it's a fan set, because some of these cards are so damn good. It's been promised that the set will be available for both Magic Workstation and OCTGN (my preferred virtual tabletop). Being able to play with these cards, even if only just online is a very exciting prospect. So with that, let's have a look at the next preview! Now I have to admit that my JSA knowledge is far more limited than my Green Lantern lore, but I know the characters and have tried a deck or two out. However, you don't need to be a JSA expert to realize that Pancake Breakfast is a good card! The JSA's theme seems to be based on getting bonuses for having a lot of exhausted characters. So, if you're...

The group that's come together to play Vs. at our regular Hobby League events is definitely a good one though. We're also lucky to have a supportive store to play at, which makes all the difference in the world. Yesterday's event wasn't any kind of special event, nor did we have any special prizes, but we still had eight players show up with mostly new constructed decks. There was quite a field too including Avengers, New Brotherhood, Crime Lords (two different builds), Outsiders, Gotham Knights and a tweaked Thule Society deck. I've been really impressed with some of the deck building skills of the players lately too. Some of this stuff is amazingly inventive. I have played against both of the Crime Lords builds and find them to be very strong decks. Master Man is a serious threat if you can't get him off the board. With cards like Hired Hit he can be made huge even if you're trying to avoid attacking him. Add in all of the reinforcement mechanics w...

I love rare cards. The near-brokenness of their effects, awesome artwork and sheer cardboardy goodness all make me smile. And if you're lucky, sometimes you get that extra-shiny rare-card treat! Just the other day I received an envelope in the mail containing 70-plus rare cards that I had ordered online. With these cards added to my collection I can finally declare my first two complete sets: DC Origins and Green Lantern Corps. Now to clarify, "complete" to me may not mean the same as it does to you. I'm a collector as well as a player, and as such my aim is to obtain at least one copy of each card from each set. Many other players would consider a complete set to be 4 copies of each card from the set. The fact is that there are just too many cards out there and not enough time for me to play. And of course some rares I may never have a chance to use, and thus don't need four copies, or they are cards that you simply dont need four copies of (basically any...

Other obligations came up and I had to miss out on our last event. I had pretty cool deck put together and was disappointed that I wouldn't get a chance to try it out. It's a really interesting team-up that I wish I could have come up with myself. I found it on VsSystem in an article back in October of last year my Michael Barnes. You can read the article here . I had to make a few substitutions, as I didn't have four copies of a few cards. The most notable one I remember was tossing in the Marvel Knights 4-drop Wolverine. Otherwise it was almost exactly as the deck list there shows. Happily enough Darren, who was also unable to make it to Friday's event, was able to get together on Sunday. He ran an Avengers deck based on reservists and rallying for equipment like Hulkbuster Armor. After losing three games (the first being the closest), he conceded defeat. It just seemed like luck wasn't on his side, as he seemed to be missing draws and failed a lot of hi...

Today I have something very cool...our first card preview! Hot on the heels of the release of Marvel Universe is a new fan-set, DC Universe . This set is being put together by a hard-working group of members over at www.vsrealms.com . I liked the DC Legends set a lot, but found it really tough to get the rare cards of my favorite Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. With Beware My Power you can really lock down an opponent's board. I think I'd build a legend deck centered around Hal Jordan, Hard-Traveling Hero. Pump up his willpower with a Green Lantern Ring, Mogo or Power Surge and then exhaust a pile of your opponent's army characters, their big gun or both!

This is an idea I got last year when reading some articles over on www.VsSystem.com. I can't remember the author who mentioned it (sorry!) but I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge: No plot twists. That's right, you have to build a deck that includes only characters, locations and equipment. No plot twists can be included in your 60-card build. I think we're going to see some really unique ideas with this one.

It's been a good two weeks. I've played more Vs. in that time than I probably have in the past 3 or 4 months put together. We've got a few new players who are really into learning the game and older players are playing more often. It's all good stuff, because the more games I get to play, the more fun I have! I've had a chance to play with and against most of the main teams in Marvel Universe. I'll cover each one below based on my play experiences. Of course they all have their pros and cons, like any other team previously. A lot of my testing gets done with decks made entirely of commons, to get a feel for what the teams can do if a person only has a few packs to work with. Any uncommons or rares that get added in after that are even better. So let's get started. Avengers: This team has some amazing rally effects. Coupled with the sheer volume of reservists and leader cards available you can really do some crazy stuff. With a few good rally effect...

Ah good times, good times. We had eight players in for the tourney and everyone seemed excited about the prospect of playing our first sealed games. As an aside, we've only been playing here in Calgary for about 7 months, me having started the group back at the end of November last year. I was expecting around a dozen, because we had 14 for our DC Legends release event back in December. We didn't have DCL cards for that one, so it ended up being a constructed event...but back to more recent gaming. Everyone cracked packs and furiously set about building their decks. I saw some copies of nice rare cards in a few of the players piles, but in the four games I played, I didn't see many of them on the table. I think it was more that they didn't fit in that well with the other cards than that they were bad ones. I know that I had a few in my deck that I was never able to use... I ended up constructing a Crime Lords / SHIELD deck, as they had the most characters which wo...

Friday June 20th, 6:30 to 9:00pm Each player will get 5 packs of the newly-released Marvel Universe set to create a deck from. This will be the first organized event in which Marvel Universe will be legal. Come down, crack some packs and play a few rounds in our very first sealed event!

Before I left the shop on Friday night, I decided to grab a starter set of the new Marvel Ultimate Battles card game and a few boosters. The friend who had come with me to the tourney bought the same and we headed off to grab some pizza and beer before settling down to play. The game is definitely intended for younger players, but that doesn't make it less fun. The set contains 12 different hero cards around which you build a deck of Ally and Action cards. The first player to knock out all of their opponent's heroes wins! After the first game spent flipping over the rule sheet a few times, we figured out things well enough that the following games proceeded at a furious pace. They were often over in less than three rounds. Ultimate Battles has nice card artwork, fast gameplay and is great fun to play. There is room for some good strategy and strong themes to deck construction too. I'd highly recommend it as a game to get younger players started if you think Vs. might...

I often like to set deck building challenges for our players. It helps mix things up so that we don't see the same decks played night after night, and also encourages players to try cards and combos that they wouldn't usually attempt. For the last event I came up with something extremely challenging: Beatdown Beauties. The format breaks down as such: each card in your deck must have a female character somewhere on the artwork. Card artwork with no characters are also valid for play. I didn't have a chance to look at all the decks in detail, but I know we had an all X-Men (or should I say X-Women?) deck, an X-Men team-up (I wasn't able to catch what the other team was). Between rules questions and teaching a lonely WoW player how to play VS, I wasn't able to look at two of the other player's decks...so I apologize for not mentioning them here. I provided two decks for use as well; one being a Darkseid's Elite / Underworld deck centered on endurance burn ...

So it's been almost a year since I put anything up on here...not for lack of happenings, more a lack of desire to write online. You never really know who's reading and what kind of weird things they may be thinking about you. Of course, I don't really care if someone out there in the wide, wide world of web thinks I'm strange, but I digress. I've been working on a lot of things, work being one of them. A large portion of my non-work time has been devoted to my various hobbies. Gaming (that's the non-video kind for you young kids out there) has kept me sane when I'm bored or frustrated. It's also helping to keep me largely devoid of any disposable income as well, but it's a fair trade off. I started playing Heroclix last May and try to play at least once a week. There are easily three or four places I could go to on various days of the week, but my dice still frequently choose to betray me in my moment of need, so I limit my disappointment accor...