Choose 3 blogs. Ongoing: Crossover those blogs

If you have, you may have noticed a little something unusual about posts over three of your favourites for the last couple of weeks. Here’s the deal: We’ve been up to something.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

1. Identify the three blogs involved. This bit shouldn’t be hard.
2. Analyse the linked posts on the three blogs.
3. Solve the puzzle.

To help you out:

The first portion will lead you there, if you can interpret the key 3.19.3 3 6

The second portion will provide the path, if you can decipher the clues 1 18.5.4 8.5.18.18.9.14.7

The third portion will tell you how to submit your response 13.5.24 16

Only submissions using the correct method will be accepted.

Now, the question remains: Why bother? Why should you make the effort of digging through a bunch of posts on three different blogs? Howzabout for a mixed bag of a dozen booster packs?

On behalf of the three of us, I trust that whets your whistle.

Titans of DOOM!

No, this post has nothing to do with Roy Harper so set aside those worries.

One of the first jank decks I ever built (other than Atlas abuse) was a Bart Allen <> The Flash, Titans Tomorrow West abuse deck. The idea was to make it to turn 6, play Cable (or a 6-drop Darkseid Elite character), turn 7 you play Bart and then Bodyslide (or Curse of Darkness) him out of the way, turn 8 you sub in another copy of Bart and then recruit Raven <> Dark Raven. The combination of Raven’s “no team attackers stun” power and Bart Allen’s “ready when you stun opposing characters while team attacking” power lets you clear the board and then swing into the opponent’s face with all three Titans for the win.

However, the deck was an amalgam. It had to have a ton of focus on the turn-8 combo and the teams involved (Darkseid, Titans, X-Men for Cable) didn’t have much in the way of stall elements. This made the deck sad.

A Clash of Worlds arrives. The Bart Allen combo becomes incredibly deadly because it can now team-up with a plot twist searcher/controller named Doom.

Sorry again…

No one call the cops, I wasn’t missing that long!

Like two days ago, my apologies for lack of posting, I was busy the entire day being the Guitar Hero Ovoid Mentor to a friend’s Guitar Hero Dr. Doom.

What is that, Thing?

Play on words! Nobody get jealous just because I am king of wordplay…

Lots has been said about the Legend format and the various characters getting Legend treatment. Marvel Legends is generally considered to have done Legends properly by giving each character lots of support. The only real problem I personally have is why some characters like Juggernaut and Cable are legends for their teams. Sure, they’re good characters but I don’t personally think they should have been done in the first set.

DC Legends was lacking in support for legends and I feel the design team stretched the legend love way to thin. I mean, Roy Harper got more character cards than Wonder Woman or The Joker. Roy “Speedy” Harper!

Anyways, the Legend treatment has brought some excellent decks to the table and a lot of fun deckbuilding. From Punisher to Flash to Human Torch to Jean Grey to Ghost Rider, there are a ton of options on the table. However, there is one Modern Age Legend I have never seen a deck for and that is a revoltin’ development.

Sorry…

My apologies for the lack of a post today. I was kidnapped by Harry Osbourne and forced to try and defeat Guitar Hero III’s Through The Fire And The Flames on Expert mode. I failed miserably. Harry then kicked me out of his house but only after forcing me to dress in woman’s clothing. So embarrassing…

Anyways, tomorrow will be a new post. For now, how about some Talking Frankenstein Cyborg Nazi Monkeys?

Vines wrap their way about your FEET…

hort post today since I just got back from a weekend long trip (during which a pre-scheduled Hellfire Club post was made).

Feraks. These plant-based gals have become quite the thought experiment for myself ever since I got 14 copies in my DC Origins packs and built a very shoddy deck around them.

Since then, I’ve been wanting to take a load off my feet, sit down on MWS, and build a deck around them that actually works. The card is Golden Age for Pete’s sake! There has to be some way to break them with all the available options. Off the top of my head, I’m seeing Feraks -> Mr. Fantastic/Invisible Woman -> We Had A Team-Up -> Cosmic Radiation/A Child Named Valeria. You’d never run out of Feraks in the hand with a deck like this. My only thought is how one would actually win with such a deck… Xavier’s Dream since you should never have stunned guys inplay and Feraks have low enough attack to not stunback? Ponder on this, I must.

On another note, I owe Number6 a mentioning due to him taking up my challenge at the end of this post. He came up with quite the decent combo to go with Natasha Romanoff:

The Great Vs. Resolution #19: Hellfire Club

I was actually sorta WORRIED that I wouldn’t get this round of the Resolution done by the end of this week, therefore forcing me to pull double duty next week. However, it appears that I got enough time to write this up while looking back and forth between various DCR cards for my next deck so hurray for me!

Anyways, Hellfire Club. It’s basically a bunch of rich weirdos who like to try and influence the world while having the men dress up like its Victorian times and the women… well, I’ll just say they’d probably be thrown out of the old Victorian stereotypical “polite, modest society”.

The Hellfire Club are also the second take on one of my favorite themes: Loner. Even back when I was playing around on Marvel TCG for the DS, I was loving the X-Statix just because they’re so completely different. In fact, I’m pretty sure my X-Statix build has beaten the game’s Curve Sentinel build quite a few times but the AI is quite stupid so I wouldn’t use that as an example.

Back on the “loner” topic, rather than going with just one character, good ol’ Hellfire Club just wants to have one VISIBLE character. It could care less how many hidden guys you have. Heck, it WANTS you to have hidden guys. So, with that said, my Hellfire build.

Puzzle Pieces: Duck! Five Mini-Combos Ahead!

I haven’t posted any of my random combos lately so I figured that now is the time since I have nothing better to talk about. Theoretically, I could ramble about cross-dressing sea monkeys or the tangled web of college applications but this is a Vs. blog so I’ll stick to the topic.

We’ll kick things off with an obvious one from the olden’ days of DOR that I’m only now getting to take advantage of.

Flip USS Argus during the build phase of turn 4 and then nuke it to Terra to stun their 3-drop. You get a free mill and stun at next to no cost to you. Actually did this to my brother in a game just now. I then followed it up by freebie stunning his 7-drop Joker off-initiative via Roy Harper. He proceeded to throw cards at me.

Next up, another obvious combo from days long past but, hey, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, its still a combo.

Through the power of Scarecrow’s fear toxin and Joker’s laughing gas, you’ll leave your opponent crying. A simple way to turn every single one of your characters into Charaxes, which is awesome. Fortunately, my brother’s Arkham Inmates deck doesn’t have this combo… yet.

Let’s move onto some newer cards. Dim the lights, please. This gentleman prefers the dark and, with this nastiness, it’s a good idea to keep him pleased.

Fallout: Post-DC Origins Box Opening

So, I had a really, really bad day today while doing stuff to apply at college so this is going to be quick and then I got to split faster than a banana at an ice cream parlor.

I opened my first box. Hot dawg was I excited. I got three Bat-Signals and two Mountain Strongholds right out of the gate which got me excited. My “rare” haul by the end of the first box was a single copy each of Alfred, Have A Blast, Total Anarchy, Concrete Jungle, 8-drop Ra’s, Garth <> Tempest, Trigon, The Demon, Terra, Lady Shiva, Optitron and a couple other cards that I didn’t mind seeing. Things were going great.

Box 2 + 3. I open up four or five Barbara Gordons, three GothCorps, three Deathstroke, another Trigon, three USS Argus, Lucius Fox, Wayne Enterprises, two Batcave, FOUR Shrike, FOUR Wheel of Plagues, two Mad Hatter, two Ventriloquist, three Neutron, two Psimon, and three Blackfire.

That’s right: Utter. Junk. Rares. No Fizzle, no Rigged Elections, and only one Alfred/Terra/Garth/Have A Blast. Ugh! It’s like someone handed me a banana (which, to make the allegory work, I must say I dislike) instead of the apple I was hoping for. Sure, I wasn’t expecting perfect draws and I was expecting a good portion of junk. There aren’t a particularly large amount of amazing rares in DOR, most of the power is in the common/uncommons. However, my second and third box were just sad. The only “good” cards in them was a single copy of the 7-drop Batman and 8-drop Superman.

All grumbling ceased, playing with the set has gone well. My younger brother is learning the randomness of Arkham Inmates with the lack of search. The deck can go from running horribly to KOing/Kidnapping everything in sight.

Older brother has a decent League of Assassins build. It could use some fine tuning but it’s still quite runnable. He was able to lock younger bro’s Arkham deck’s locations out of the game via the 4-drop Ra’s and then went to town until turn 8 when he played the 8-drop Ra’s and younger bro scooped. One really fun play I did while running this LoA deck for fun was waiting until after younger bro flipped up his key locations (No Man’s Land and Arkham Asylum) before stripping them away via Remake The World. Fun, fun play.

My decks are currently a Fizzle-less Gotham Knights build that makes me grumble due to the lack of negate and a semi-Roy Harper abuse Teen Titans deck. Nothing better than pumping Roy into an 18 attack 3-drop on turn 4 and swinging into The Penguin for massive damage.

So, in all, things went all right. Sorta like a hot dog with mustard. It could’ve been better but, hey, it’s still a hot dog with mustard. Oh, and I’ve learned to love this card:

Snape kills Dumbledore and Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father.

The Incredibly Late DC Origins Celebration Day!

It’s time to party like it’s 2004 because today is the day I receive my three boxes of DC Origins. Oh what pleasures shall I find inside the second oldest set in the game? Will it be as good as finding a five dollar bill laying on the floor of a taxi you just got into? Let’s break it down.

Batman! About time! Finally I’ll be able to use my childhood hero in my Vs. System decks. To give you an idea of how much I loved Batman when I was a kid about every one in five of the old pictures set out during my graduation open house had me wearing a Batman shirt or with a Batman toy. He really is the greatest. Plus, the Gotham Knights have uncommon search which is going to be awesome in this small-house metagame. Will I be able to build a deck based around the above Fatbat? Highly unlikely. Still, that 5-drop Bats with double burn is looking mighty, mighty good.

Joker! Who doesn’t love an evil clown? In particular, I really like this one’s effect and art. The art reminds me of the Heath Ledger interpretation of the Joker in the upcoming Dark Knight film. Plus, random burn is great. It’ll be my younger brother who most likely plays this guy, though. He’s going to be “majoring” in Arkham Inmates. I even went so far as to grab him three copies of their legacy “Smiles, Everyone” rare from DSM just to help him out. Between that and Fear And Confusion, he should be able to build something usable.