VS System: Golden Age Musings

With our upcoming tourney on Friday night being Golden Age, it got me to thinking. I have lots of decks that I could play, but somehow I just think I need something new. Last event we cracked a box of Marvel Knights to use for sealed play, and I found that to be a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the Crime Lords / Underworld interplay and was shocked at just how awful the X-Statix really are on their own. After batting around some posts on the forums over at vssystem.org I decided that a mono-teamed X-Statix build just wouldn't be the thing for me to build.

So what does that leave me with? I have been playing the game almost from the beginning be there is a surprising amount of stuff that I've left untapped thus far. Looking back over the past few months it seems I've focused mainly on the mini-teams or those that seemed harder to make work on their own like Doom Patrol, Starjammers and Secret Six. Assessing those efforts as honestly as I'm able, I would say that my Doom Patrol deck is the only one that even remotely works as I'd intended. Where to go from here is a bit of a mystery, mainly because Golden Age has just so many options to explore!

Last month I built a Green Lantern / Gotham Knights deck based on an article by Shadowtrooper. It was fun to play, but didn't work that well for me. So I think I might go back to the first Marvel set and pick a team from there. I've never built a Brotherhood, Doom or FF deck...so maybe that's the way to go. I won't restrict myself to team-affiliated cards from just that set, but at least it will give me a place to start. Just which one I'll use on Friday will have to remain a mystery for now.

I know that a lot of the players in the online community feel that Golden Age is simply too wide open, making it unfair or broken. While there is some merit to the argument, I feel that not allowing Golden Age decks to be played at a time when our card pool will not be expanding further would be a terrible mistake. More specifically, in our hobby league group only a few players will go out and build something massively powerful for Golden Age play. More often than not it will be a new deck that is built for fun or just to try it out. However, the option is there to build something near broken in terms of power level. With the right amount of rare cards, time and solid deck design, Golden Age games can be a real battle of skill, or a straight-up scoop if you get the wrong matchup.

To me though, there's nothing better than playing Golden Age, because of all the options, you never know what you're going to see on the other side of the table!