Thinking Outside the Box

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...