The Great Vs. Resolution Update: Teams On The Way

I announced in my last post that I was going to work on a list of what I still needed to get done for my resolution. I went in, looked at all the affiliations in the game, and then took off everything that I felt was too small to work properly in a mono deck. Then, I deleted the affiliations I already have decks posted for and ended up with the following list.

The Great Vs. Resolution To-Do List

Marvel (18):
X-Men
Brotherhood
Doom
Sentinels
Skrull
Negative Zone
Spider-Friends
Marvel Knights
Crime Lords
Underworld
X-Statix
Avengers
Masters of Evil
Kang Council
Thunderbolts
Heralds of Galactus
SHIELD
Warbound

DC (13):
Darkseid’s Elite
Green Lantern
Manhunters
Justice League of America
Justice League International
Injustice Gang
Secret Society
JSA
Shadowpact
Villains United
Checkmate
Legionnaires
Birds of Prey

Total Decks Remaining: 31

Total Weeks Remaining: 29

So, if my math is correct, then all I have to do is one affiliation a week for the rest of the year and I’ll basically be done. If I throw in really easy decks to build (Sentinels, for example), I can easily get the two “two-in-one-week” weeks done. Heck, I might even break my rules and post some of my mono decks that I have laying around the house (they break the rules because none of the teams are “most legal available” except maybe the Masters of Evil or Kang). In all, the Resolution should keep rolling as long as I don’t get too swamped come college this fall. Good time.

The Great Vs. Resolution #21 Presents A MWS Gem: Shi’ar

It’s time to play with the rules of the Resolution.

A few days ago I played a deck on MWS that was simply insane. It was a near mono-Shi’ar deck built by a user at TCGplayer with the handle jack1893. He requested that I leave a comment on the site’s deck feature and I said I would and I also asked if I could post it on my blog which he said was fine.

After further thought, I realized that with a build this exceedingly perfect, I really didn’t need to build a Shi’ar deck for my Resolution. With a single Shi’ar shaped stone, I get a new MWS gem and a Resolution deck done. How cool is that?

For the record, this deck defies a few of the rules for Resolution deckbuilding. For a quick refresher on said rules:

The Great Vs. Resolution Guidelines:

“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.”

Like with the Secret Six, I am skirting the rules for this deck. One character in the deck is unaffiliated because the deck requires it or it would literally do nothing. The Shi’ar have no non-character cards so they can’t fulfill the 50% requirement. Finally, the deck requires several DC cards to work properly. To sum all this rulebreaking up, the only rule this deck doesn’t break is “legal in most recent format”.

So, with that all out of the way, jack1893’s Shi’ar deck.

The Great Vs. Resolution #20: New Gods

Bah! I should have had this up yesterday. Oh well.

New Gods. A name that strikes fear into every Vs. System player’s hear— wait. That’s not right, is it? From the top.

New Gods. A name that strikes laughter into every Vs. System player’s heart. Introduced in the Superman: Man of Steel set (widely considered one of the worst sets ever), the New Gods pretty much never saw any real competitive play. Why is that?

Here’s why: No. Freaking. Theme. The New Gods actually have some pretty nice cards in there bag of tricks. However, there is no true cohesiveness to the team and that is why they often fail. That, and most of their cards are just plain average at best which, combined with lack of theme, makes them fail. No wonder DC has killed all these guys off…

But there’s a twist to this article and the deck list you’ll see below. A twist I never anticipated while in the building process. A twist that most likely can be attributed to sheer luck but is quite the twist nonetheless. A twist I didn’t believe until it happened not once, not twice, but three times in a row: The New Gods can win.

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.

The Great Vs. Resolution #18 - Morlocks

I have been accused many a time of being something of a Morlock. My family doesn’t use that nerdy comic book term, of course. They just make jokes about me always being in the basement. But, hey, not my fault I’m a teenager with muchos free time and the computer with all his Vs. stuff is underground.

Anyways, I’ve always been a big fan of misfits. The freaks, the people who don’t quite fit in with regular society. The Morlocks are like the comic book incarnation of them and, as such, I really like them. They’re cool.

Now, there are three ways you can go with the Morlocks.

One is the “move hidden people visible for effects” route. With Sewer System, you can easily slide a character back and forth between the two zones and constantly get there effects. However, those effects are so random that I just didn’t feel like building on them. Scratch one option.

The second option would be the group of characters that have insanely high attack (Sunder: 14 ATK 5-drop), stupidly low defense (Sunder: 7 DEF 5-drop), no way of gaining reinforcement, and usually a “pay 1 resource point to get effect” style power. Again, cool theme but I wasn’t really feeling it. Insanely beefy guys has been my theme for awhile and I wanted something different.

That left the final option, the Morlock trademark: Evasion. Tons of support with lots of silly tricks that means lots of fun. Oh, and they’re insanely beefy. That’s always good.

The Great Vs. Resolution #17: Inhumans

Yes, yes, I said I’d have this up on Saturday. It got away from me. Sorry.

There is a coincidence to the fact that I’m posting the Inhumans at the start of this week. I wish I could claim I timed the selection of this Resolution team article on purpose but, sadly, I can’t. You’ll find out what I mean later.

The Inhumans. My experience with this ragtag group of misfits is much like my experience with the Outsiders, I never knew of them before getting into Vs. System. All I really know is they’re a bunch of people (aliens?) that were mutated by these Terragen Mist stuff and now they hide out on the moon. They’re lead by a guy that can’t talk for fear of his voice’s destructive power which I find really interesting for some reason. Just that whole concept is really cool and I might just have to swipe it for some of my creative writing works.

Anyways, Inhumans. The Inhumans really have a whole bunch of themes. The first is to have a face-up row. The second is Cosmic-Surge. The third is stopping opponent’s from readying. The fourth is to attack multiple times. The fifth is having the Fantastic Four built into their team via dual affiliations. Via some paradox inhibiting construct, this team is both all over the place and yet incredibly strong.

I personally, am focusing on three of the above themes: Face-up cards, the Fantastic Four, and swinging more than once. That’s right. My deck is based around Quicksilver. But not the wussy Quicksilver, I’m talking about the Real Man’s Quicksilver.

Manly!

The Great Vs. Resolution #16: Sinister Syndicate

After the past couple of happy fun time days of choosing and tweaking a deck for the Team Marvel vs. DC BYOS Modern tournament, its high time that I return to the meat and potatoes of this site which is the Vs. Resolution.

I’ve always been up front about one thing with me and comic books and that’s the fact that I don’t read ‘em. I rent the movies, I watch the television shows, I pick up the TPBs six months to a year after the comics are originally printed, and I research via the internet but I believe I can honestly say I’ve never picked up and skimmed an actual comic book.

One of the television shows I most remember watching back in the day was the old Fox Spider-Man cartoon that was on every Saturday morning. That show was great. You had all the classic Spider-Man villains, occasionally there was a neat crossover like when Punisher or Blade showed up, and there was always a big cohesive primary plot that tied through most of the episodes of each season.

Now, the thing I personally remember most about the Spider-Man villains was that they rarely worked together barring the times that the Sinister Six was chasing after ol’ Spidey or when Kingpin was hiring them to break poor Parker’s legs.

That’s why I never quite understood the rush theme of the current Sinister Syndicate. It involves swarming out with a bunch of guys, killing your own resources for pumps, and then burning yourself. I don’t see how that makes any sense (although the burn makes sense for the Symbiotes, no one else). The Spider-Man villains usually had some pretty tricky plots to catch Peter in their web and they usually didn’t just go and stab themselves to try and get at their nemesis.

That - along with a desire to do something off the wall - is why I built a CURVE Modern Age SinSyn deck. That’s right. Curve. Yes, I’m an idiot. However, does this idiot have a plan? Well, sorta.

The Great Vs. Resolution #15: Kree

Alright. Today’s post is going to be short and sweet for one simple reason. This is the Kree. Everyone knows what the Kree do. I would have liked to have gone with their “face-down” theme rather than their Press theme but I didn’t because Kree’s face-down-ers just don’t have enough support and Darkseid does it so much better. Instead, I just did your standard mono-Kree Press build. My thoughts after the deck list.

Power Kreep

Kree

Silver Age

Characters:
4x Sintariis - High Kronamaster

4x Dr. Minerva - Starforce
4x Lieutenant Kona Lor - Lunatic Legion

4x Mar-Vell <> Captain Marvel - Soldier of the Empire
4x Commander Dylon Cir - Lunatic Legion

4x Admiral Galen Kor - Lunatic Legion
3x Ultimus - Starforce

4x Shatterax - Starforce
1x Korath the Pursuer - Starforce

1x Supremor - Starforce

Plot Twists:
4x Live Kree . . . or Die!
4x The Lunatic Legion
4x Mobilize
2x Remnant Fleet
1x Strategic Retreat

Locations:
4x Penal Colony
4x Hala
4x Stargate

The Great Vs. Resolution #14: Kre— Secret Six? WTF?

I swear, I wanted to write an article about a Silver Age Marvel deck. Really, I did. But, you see, I sorta got distracted and went on a deckbuilding frenzy and built this one incredibly fun deck that I started playing instead of my Kree deck and I really wasn’t enjoying the Kree much since they were way too powerful and…

Anyways, I’m going to open this article by running through the Vs. Resolution rules. Why? Well, for one thing there might be new readers who haven’t been around since my last rundown which was WAY back during my Future Foes article two months ago. Second, because its gonna be important to this article.

The Great Vs. Resolution Guidelines:

“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.”

Why is that important? Simple. For the intents of this article, the guidelines look more like this…

“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.”

That’s right! Rules be damned! Secret Six are too good for some silly rules. The deck is still primarily Secret Six but in order for this deck to run, it needs another affiliation that is from the Marvel universe. Normally I wouldn’t bend the rules like this but, come on, how can’t you make concessions for these guys and their sweet alternate win condition?

The Great Vs. Resolution #13: Revenge Squad

About time I got back to my Resolution. As you can see via all the below posts, I’ve gotten a bit busy with other content but the Resolution will continue in full force with at least one posting a week. Combine this with my Doctor Who fan set, The Game of the Galaxy match reports, and an upcoming feature which will be debuting sometime this week and Planet Kalee is in the middle of getting kicked into high gear. Hold on because I’m hoping it’ll be quite the ride.

Anyways, Revenge Squad. The last of the great DC Modern Resolution decks, at least for a while. They have their awesome little theme of ongoing plot twists which I utterly love. They also have my favorite three-drop ever.

Now, hidden in their little ongoing plot twist theme is a theme I really like. That’s the “put everyone up front” theme. I have no idea WHY I like this theme so much… Oh, wait, I do. It’s called “Beats” and as much as I love a combo that sweeps an opponent by surprise, I love smashing face with hugely oversized drops just as much.

Step Forwards!

Revenge Squad

Modern Age

Characters:

4x Terra-Man - Toby Manning
4x Brainiac 13, Mental Giant

4x Professor Emil Hamilton <> Ruin - Power Suit
3x Mongul - Son of the Tyrant

4x Livewire - Leslie Willis
2x Atomic Skull - Cursed

4x Preus - Citizen’s Patrol
1x Lex Luthor, Metropolis Mogul

3x Doomsday, Evolution Advanced

1x Lex Luthor, The Everyman

Plot Twists:
4x Battle for Metropolis
4x Standoff
4x Executive Privilege
4x Never-Ending Battle
4x Future Shock
4x Mobilize
2x Imprisoned in the Source
1x Total Anarchy

Locations:
3x Graveyard of Solitude