The Great Vs. Resolution #7 - Squadron Supreme

About stupid time that I get back into the swing of this. If I’m not careful, I’m going to fall WAY too far behind…

Anyways, as you can see, this week’s TGVR article is about the Squadron Supreme. SS is probably best known for the No-Hand Supreme decks that ran around back in the day and could easily get the win by turn five (I’ve personally piloted one to a turn four victory where the opponent had three endurance going into the turn). These decks focused on dumping all the cards out of the player’s hand in order to get some nastily strong effects.

There is another side to the Squadron, though. That side is the “alternative breakthrough” side. Quite a few of the SquadSup. characters have effects that negate their own breakthrough in exchange for another effect. Other cards give out bonuses in exchange for penalties if breakthrough is done. These go hand in hand in order to give you some nice pumps and effects in exchange for a lack of extra damage. In my opinion, this theme was really weak until the X-Men set where the Squadron got their Mysterium 9-drop which could instantly win the game, just by inflicting breakthrough.

That, combined with the fact that I love the Mysterium art, is why I built the following Squadron Supreme Alternate Breakthrough deck.

Poker Night!

Back from another unnecessary hiatus, it’s time for Kalee’s Jank Deck of The Moment! *cue applause sound effect*

Now, I’m sure all of you have seen the new City Champion prize cards that are up at VsSystem.com at the moment. If you haven’t go ahead and take a look. The first one is really “meh” and the second is usually going to be a Stalwart Defense that you can use outside the build phase. The third card, however, makes me smile.

This group of guys and gals are awesome for three reasons. One, they take advantage of the new Hats/Clouds rule where blanket effects are constantly inplay meaning that when one of these cards enters play, it gets its own effect and becomes a 2/1. Two, they break a pair of Vs. System’s core rules about non-army characters: uniqueness and amount of copies. Three, they give me a new way to abuse Bodyslide.

Custom Card Thursday #2: Schizophrenia is nasty business

After an unintentional hiatus where I skipped last week, CCT is back!

This week I’ll be sticking with my original theme of the Arkham Inmates as I take down another bigwig in the Batman Rogue’s Gallery. I find it delightfully ironic that I happened to do this guy’s cards for the second edition of this posting series thing.

Two-Face. In my opinion, he has the coolest gimmick out of every villain ever except for maybe The Joker. Ol’ Two-Face was originally Harvey Dent, District Attorney of Gotham City. However, in an unfortunate turn of events, half of his face was permanently scarred by acid which drove Dent insane and split his personality in two. This created the criminal known as Two-Face. Ever since his scarring, every decision Two-Face makes is determined by the flipping of a double-sided coin with one marked head and one plain head. If the unmarked head comes up, the “positive” outcome is followed upon. If it is the scratched head, however, Two-Face follows through on his villainous desires.

In my opinion, the Two-Face cards that have been made so far are really, really weak. Only the DC Origins version has anything to do with coin flips while the rest have either an exhaustion theme, an “evens or odds” theme, or both. Weak. Two-Face is about the flip of the coin! So that’s what I went with for Two-Face’s three cards; every single card has a coin flip involved. How fun :).

I live!

Whoops! That unintentional week-long hiatus definitely falls under the category of “going longer without an update than a site should”.  You can tell you need to update when your daily views for a day is worse than the first day the blog went up online…

Anyways, reason for the hiatus can be attributed mostly to just not having anything in particular I felt like talking about. I really meant to put up a Custom Card Thursday and even made the Two-Face cards for it but didn’t feel motivated to post. The problem is definitely NOT my Vs. System love dropping off since I’ve built so many decks this past week, it is simply non-motivation on the blog front.

Now, to make this post Vs.-Oriented, a quick update on the household metagame. Basically, not much has changed on the opposing side. I have these two decks to face:

1. Avengers Reservist (My younger brother FINALLY took my advice and went straight Reservist and has since been kicking my low-tier decks’ butts. Good for him!)

2. Kang (Decent deck, it just doesn’t have a large amount of “Oomph” to it. I’m considering buying some of the pieces to build Kang City so my older bro can hang with little bro’s Reservist deck and my top-tier’s. Only problem is that it’d be a good $15 to get the set and that would be last of my cash. Decisions, decisions…)

Now, while the decks that are opposing my own creations are few, I’ve spent the past week building SIX decks. They can be seen after the jump and are in order from worst to best:

The Great Vs. Resolution #6 - Future Foes

First, I’m going to kick off this post with a big old “Hello!” Thanks to the latest article by Rian Fike of VsSystem.com, I theoretically should be getting hits from some people who check out the main Vs. System hub. So, hello to them and a big thanks to Mr. Fike.Today I’m finally getting back into the swing of things with The Great Vs. Resolution. For the new viewers, this is the main feature of Planet Kalee. Basically, this past New Year’s, I swore I’d use MWS to build and play a mono-affiliated deck for every single affiliation in the game and I’d do it by the end of the year. This blog series is about the decks I build for that mission as well as my thoughts on them.

The rules of the Great Vs. Resolution are simple:

All characters must share a printed affiliation, at least 50% of non-character cards must be team or character-stamped, remaining cards must be from the same universe as the affiliation for the deck, deck must be in as recent of a format as possible.

With the introduction out of the way, time to get to the meat. The Future Foes.

Collection Comprete!

If you don’t get the title, then you haven’t played Super Smash Bros. Melee and listened closely to Falco. He’s got a bit of an English impediment making “Mission Complete!” into “Mission Comprete!” and I find it to sound really cool so I used the term “comprete” in lieu of “complete” sometimes…

Anyways, my final batch of Vs. cards came yesterday. Whoo boy, was that fun. From about 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. I was sitting there sorting every single card into affiliations which were then sorted into characters, plots, locations, and equips. The characters were then sorted into drops, then everything was sorted so all the multiples were in batches. Finally, I alphabetized each of the drops and non-characters so you could quickly find the card you were looking for. From there, they were each popped into one of the ten Fantastic Four starter boxes that we got and those were then labeled with the team affiliation on the top. Those starter boxes are packed FULL. I’ll post an image of the setup later.

So, how were the pulls? Pretty darn good! I got at least a playset and a half of basically every common, I believe I got at least two of each uncommon, and the Rares were nice. The only bummers were TWO Hired Hits, TWO Spider-Man, Peter Parker, one Spirits of Vengeance, four Thunderbolts Plaza, and three AIDA. I didn’t mind drawing a few of those last ones but that many of each? We don’t have much in the way of cards that target others so AIDA is a bit useless while Thunderbolts Plaza is not worth the cost.

This was made up for by the fact that we got two Avengers Mansion, another New Identity (got three of the buggers), two 6-drop Captain America, two 8-drop Ultron, another Jarvis, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, another Monica Rambeau <> Captain Marvel, Mt. Charteris, 4-drop Karla Sofen <> Metorite, Hard Sound Construct, two more Shocker, 8-drop Kang, 2-drop Kang, 6-drop Kang, two Null Time Zone, and a single copy of Mjolnir, 4-drop Thor, and (my little bro’s favorite) 8-drop “awesome text” Thor.

I believe the only Rares we don’t have at least one copy of are Mutant of the Year, Zorba, System Failure, Game of the Galaxy, 3-drop Kang, Under Siege, Marvel’s Most Wanted, Genis-Vell <> Captain Marvel, Rocket Central (bummer), and 7-drop Power Princess.

In all, I’m loving what we pulled. I’d guess we have enough for a mono deck of each affiliation and then enough to team them up with someone else. Those Fantastic Four starters provided us with a bunch of generics to use (40x No Fear FTW) and I really do think we have enough to build at least a good 12 decks or so.

So, yeah, excitement in the household. The metagame has revived considering that we deconstructed all our old decks. My younger brother then rebuilt his Avengers (he’s still holding onto those leader characters rather than going all-in with Reservists, silly boy…), my older brother finally got to build his Kang deck, and I have my Thunderbolts ready to go (playset of Deadly Conspiracy and Win-Lose Deal!). Today I’m probably gonna build and update to my Masters of Evil decks and then, after that, it’s serious playing time.

Oh, and I’m gonna use one of the Fantastic Four starter decks to get my dad into the game. He’s been wanting to learn how to play but I’ve been holding off teaching him until we got the starters so he had a simple deck to run/fight. That combined with a printed copy of the rules and I think I can at least get my dad hooked enough that he’ll be able to play the game with us when he wants that “Father/Son” time. That, and it means that in the future we’ll have four-players in the household. Can you say “Galactus”? I know I can.

I can tell you this: This game rocks and there is nothing better than busting 3+ boxes worth of cards. I can also tell you this: Life works in mysterious ways. About one week after talking about how I didn’t own any Vs. cards, my collection shot up from 1 card to 1,528 cards. Life is weird but it can be a lot of fun.

Custom Card Thursday #1: When it’s cold outside…

I probably should have spent the past hour or so typing up my next Vs. Resolution report. I really should have. That’s why I got on the computer in the first place. But as I scanned my desktop shortcuts for Magic Workstation, my eye caught a different “Magic” computer program: Magic Set Editor. MSE lets you easily build custom Vs. System cards and is a massive timesuck. I decided to procrastinate on my resolution and hit that program instead.

With the past hour behind me, I can say that I’ve built some fun little cards plus I came up with an idea for a new featured article. The current trend on Thursday’s is the Thursday Thirteen where you list thirteen things on some topic. I’ve also seen “Wordless Wednesday” which is when you make a post with just a single image and no words. I don’t like those ideas. I don’t like joining groups and whatnot, I like doing everything on my own terms. So, instead, every Thursday I will be posting at least five new custom Vs. System cards. We’ll see how long this lasts but with my free time, I should be able to keep this up for a while.

Now, I’ve delved into MSE before. I originally downloaded it and used it for some custom Star Wars legendary cards. Darth Vader, Boba Fett, Luke Skywalker, General Grievous, all of them are currently sitting on my hard drive in Vs. System form. However, when I sat down and opened up Magic Set Editor instead of Magic Workstation, I had a different series on the mind and a completely different character.

The series? Batman: The Animated Series. An absolute classic in every sense of the word. The character? The tragic figure known as Mr. Freeze.

The Household Metagame

So, after receiving a shipment of Marvel Knights and X-Statix cards from Baldman and Paypal finally posting so I could order my two Avengers boxes and ten Fantastic Four starter sets, I’ve decided to take a moment to talk about the metagame of the Kalee household.

My brothers, who are pretty newbish as far as Vs. is concerned, are primarily playing the same Avengers deck they built last week. It works pretty well for them, especially when I help them out in figuring out the best move. The deck can team attack or regular attack, it has Reservist so it doesn’t care about character-flood, it has some search via Falcon, Avengers Assemble, and Jarvis, and it has Vision who can negate pretty much any combat pump (I hate that guy…). It’s really quite the easy, noob friendly deck so that’s what they run.

There’s also the Marvel Knights deck my younger brother built yesterday. I haven’t looked through it but from what I saw during a game between him and older bro, he has way too many characters and equipment. However, this is mostly a symptom of all the generic pumps already being used up. The multiple Fantastic Four starters should fix that via their 20 Flying Kicks and whatnot. He also, for some strange reason, isn’t running Borrowed Blade in combination with the 5-drop Punisher. For some reason an 11/11 with range on turn 5 doesn’t thrill him…

Whoosh!

Did you hear that? That was the fastest man alive smacking you in the back of the head while on the way to foil a bank robbery. I think he’s upset with you. It might be because you’ve ignored him, left him to sit in the bottom of a box of cards that might as well be marked “unusable”. Yeah, Wally isn’t all that happy about that.

That’s why I’m here. You see, the fastest man alive wants to make a comeback. The Flash wants to do what he does best: Smack the taste out of an opponent’s mouth before they so much as have time to react.

ThunderGang

Yeah, I’ve been hitting the Vs. pretty hard lately. Four decks have already been built in total, one of which has been scrapped: Avengers, Masters of Evil, Thunderbolts/Squadron Supreme team-up (scrapped), Thunderbolts/Kang Council team-up. All four of these decks are wicked fun to just play with. My brothers have been using the Avengers almost entirely, just because its a relatively easy deck to run. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between the various villainous groups, playing the “wicked” to their “benevolent”.

Now, as you can see, the Thunderbolts have been involved in two team-ups. This is mostly because I want to use the Bolts but don’t have enough cards for a mono-deck which leaves me with the option of teaming up. However, this all hasn’t been in vain. I’ve noticed something about the Bolts. They like allowing an opponent to draw cards in order to give themselves effects. Now, I don’t know about you but I seem to remember a certain philanthropist that just hit the Golden Age pile that also likes to give opponents some drawing ability…