Vs. System.org

By Guglio

“He’s going to lose. They all will. Trust me, Superman. I was there!”

Time travel is fun, wouldn’t you agree? You see, I’ve been exerting my power over time for awhile now, casually peering into the future to see what is waiting for me. Among the millions of dollars I will one day possess, one thing caught my eye in particular. It was this preview article. You will be reading this article on November 7th, but by that point I will already have seen it on front page of Vssystem.org and all the comments. I would tell you the number of comments, but that may change the future just a little bit, so I withhold that information for now.

Just like all things, time travel has a flaw. It has one thing that takes an already otherwise perfect object or event just a little worse. For time travel, it is the ability to change the future. For the card I am about to show you, it will be something else entirely.

RAWR is what I say to you, reader. I can already see you scratching your heads. You see, the Future Foes have seen the future of every game they play in, and know exactly what to do. In DLS, the Foes were what Ben Seck described as a “grief team.” They had effects that were moderately powerful, and then got drastically better unless an opponent discarded a card. While a great concept and a lot of fun, the team really never took off. This is was always because players could figure out what to discard to, and what not to discard to, and the Foes lost their edge. But no more.

The Future Foes still love to make you discard. In fact, they strive for nothing else, because a player with no hand has no options, and no ways to stop them. However, as perfect a plan it is, it still has a flaw. That flaw is requiring the opponent to actually pitch the cards. Like all good plans, the Foes have a way to do that.

Each Future Foes character with a Flaw power has an absurdly good effect and, in rare cases, large stats. This allows them to easily overpower any opposing character, which is fitting of their statures as Future war criminals. The opposing player can use the flaw power to “turn off” that character in one way or another for the turn. These flaw powers all have the cost of discarding a card. At any given moment, you could be facing down two or three characters, each with a good ability and a flaw power. This is where the true problems arise.

You have the option of discarding to all of them, making your opponent’s characters just regular guys, but that puts a serious drain on your hand. You could discard to none of them, and then get your face smashed in. You could only discard to the strongest guy, keep your hand manageable and at least shave off one threat.  The choice is yours, but be careful in choosing the discard.

There is one temporal anomaly left, though. When Superman-Prime busted the Legion of Super-Villains out of the prison planet of Takron-Galtos, he brought along some other friends who have their own time powers going on. They were called the Fatal Five. One of my stipulations for work on the DFC set was that my favourite Legion villain, Mano, had to be purely awesome. I think we achieved this.

Much like their DLS incarnations, each member of the Fatal Five (plus the Emerald Eye) have the exact same text template. They are all characters with stats that jump the curve, they all effects that remove them from the game for a turn and they all have effects that fire once they’ve been removed. For Mano, the sting caused by a punch from his Anti-Matter hand leaves a lasting impression during the recovery phase, when the character he hit takes more endurance loss. Then, when combat rolls around again, he flies back in.

Thus brings in two interesting points. First, this allows the Fatal Five to be non-unique in a sense. Because they will be removed from the game and returning during the recovery phase, you can recruit a new Mano next turn, and the original would come back. This is not unlike the time The Persuader used his Atomic Axe to cut dimensions and recruited the Fatal Five Hundred. Second, the balancing factor of the Fatal Five allows an opponent to send a low drop into them and have them fly away. Send your 2 drop into Mano and the 2 drop will stun, sending Mano into the removed from game zone for the turn.

Regardless of what way you play them, the Future Foes have seen the future. And I can tell you that this future includes many people enjoying the DFC set on Magic Workstation or in real life. Other things of course happen, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise . If you have any questions, call the Time Trapper, and he will get back to you (note: Guglio is NOT the current Time Trapper).

Travelling to your nearest future,
Guglio

Hi, I’m Captain Spud, and this is all my fault.

I volunteered to work on the DCU set waaaaaay back at the start, and then vanished. I had various work and personal commitments, and simply couldn’t help for the majority of that set’s development cycle. I finally popped my head in a month before they were ready to ship, and basically just stirred everything up just as they were getting it all settled. I harassed them about balance and templating, and just generally insulted everything they’d worked to accomplish.

So of course, when the decision came down to make a second set, I was a natural choice for Design Lead. Oh, sure, the lead designer gets to have fun guiding theme development and building the first 5% of each team (ie, the exciting part), but it’s also my job to give the final “OK” on… well… everything. I had final approval on all themes and card wordings, so if anything is wrong, it’s my fault. I figure that’s why they chose me… I insulted their work, so my penance is absorbing all blame for the next set.

You guys are dicks.

I have many things to apologize for with this set, but today I’ll just focus on one: the Legionnaires. The Legion were the team I had the heaviest hand in designing; while I assisted and advised on the other teams, I was the main guy writing card text for the little future folks. I’ve never read a Legion comic in my life, though, so the rest of the kids had to walk me through the characters and storylines I’d be setting up in card form. That freed my hands quite a bit—I just had to worry about the mechanics, and they’d make sure the fluff worked out at the end.

When we set about theming the teams in the set, we looked at their previous incarnations and did a quick evaluation for each. First, we just asked ourselves: was the team any good? If they were, that left two choices—expand their old theme if they were “good, but not an inch away from broken”; or give them a whole new theme if adding to their card pool would tip the scales too much.

For teams that kinda sucked in their first incarnation, we had to try to figure out the reason for their sucking. Does the theme just plain not work? Are their cards just underpowered? Are they too easy to tech against? We’d run through the various reasons that it seemed the team wasn’t performing well, and make a similar decision to the good teams: do we keep their old theme (reworking it to eliminate the bugs), or scrap it and build something new?

The answers for Legion weren’t hard to figure out: No, their old incarnation wasn’t very good. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a strong Legion deck; you don’t even see them popping up often in goofy combo decks. When we tried to figure out why, we concluded that their theme wasn’t useless—we know Cosmic Weenies can work (after all, the Inhumans did pretty well!), so the Legion just needed better cards within that theme.

With that basic information in mind, I sat down with Wikipedia, Comicvine, and DocX’s search engine, and tried to figure out what to do with them. We’d already cut the New Gods from the roster because we just couldn’t think of anything interesting enough to do with them—Cosmic is a good mechanic, but it’s kind of been done to death at this point. I drafted up a list of every team that had ever featured Cosmic, and identified the major twist each one applied to it. Some teams, like Superman and the old New Gods, addressed its need to be protected; the Titans used the synergy with Substitute to refresh counters; a few teams in MHG used it to justify large pump on little beaters; and the old version of Legion used Cosmic counters as ammunition. It had been used in almost every way I could conceive of it being useful; I really needed to come up with something fresh. As I went over almost a dozen different ways the mechanic had been used, I kept referring back to their old cards, hoping something would click.

In the end, what clicked wasn’t something new; it was something old, and something exclusively at home in the Legion. It started as a really silly idea, but as I started drafting test cards, a huge grin grew on my face. I’d finally found something interesting for the team to do, and it was both a wholly new way to play, and at the same time, exactly what the Legion had always done.

The card that made it click for me was one of the most neglected Legion cards in DLS, a card so vanilla in theme and mechanics that I’d simply ignored it on all my read-throughs to date. It was really, objectively, a terrible card. But I figured that since he’d been the inspiration for the theme, he deserved to be the Legion’s only (nearly) straight reprint in DFC.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a round of applause for Star Boy.

Five No-Points to anyone who’s figured out the theme. Anyone? No? Oh, alrighty. I guess it’s time for some exposition.

DFC’s Legionnaires don’t need no stinkin’ plot twists.

The basic concept is two-sided. Bear with me here.

The main members of the Legion—your Cosmic Boys, your Saturn Girls, and the rest of “those ones”—count your counters. Similarly to the DLS incarnation, DFC’s Legion doesn’t really care who has cosmic counters, as long as SOMEONE has them. Unlike DLS, though, the DFC Legion doesn’t want to throw them away. It wants to hang onto as many as it possibly can.

So, you’ll have a few key characters who do your heavy lifting, but who need the support of their friends, in the form of Cosmic-wearing weenies. It’s the same curve and tactical structure as before (off-curve team attacking), but with different mechanics for using the counters.

That part’s pretty straightforward.

The thing is, having a body sit around as purely a Cosmic storage silo leaves one hell of a lot of empty card space. This is where the second side of the team casts Star Boy as its hero and idol.

90% of the Legion team follows a standard three-item template: first, they’re Cosmic. Second, they’re Reservists. And third, they do their heaviest lifting when not in play. Some of them fire powers from your hand, others from other zones; but the key thing here is that your deck is going to be unbelievably light on support cards. As in, you could easily play nothing but characters.

The theme works with itself on a lot of levels. The biggest problem swarm decks run into is running out of warm bodies to drop on the field; it’ll be turn 6 and your init, and all you can muster is a pair of 1-drops, due to your beefy hand of plot twists and locations. With the Legion, you can simply drop those support cards on the field—you may be playing Timber Wolf for his discard power, but he makes a pretty decent beater, too! The heavy character count in the decks will make the team very consistent to play—you won’t always get the character you wanted, but I’d be pretty shocked if you ever had to let a resource point go unspent.

I could go on for a while here… nothing makes me happier than to wax poetic about my own design prowess. I’m going to mostly leave it to the preview cards to speak for the set, though. I will, however, take the time to address one concern that a lot of you probably have by this point in the article. See, plot twists are pretty powerful in our little game, and that power is generally held in check by the fact that, unlike characters, they’re really hard to specifically hunt out, and once you spend them, they’re kinda gone. With our plot twists on legs, these balance issues are tipped over; our “Savage Beatdowns” can be searched, and out “Acrobatic Dodges” can be recurred. Worry not, children… we were conscious of this from the start, and took what steps we could to ensure they didn’t become problems. The recursion issue was a pretty moot one—after our initial panic about easily bouncing the best pseudo-Plots repeatedly to hand, someone remembered an important fact: Silver has, like, zero recursion. Any Silver play that includes DFC would bump Heralds out of legality, leaving only two easy recursion cards—Remote Facility, which is team-stamped to a team with zero synergy to the Legion, and Asgard, which doesn’t immediately return anything to hand. Some combos are still possible, of course; but our mad scientist playtesting crew couldn’t find any glaringly disgusting ones, so we’re not too worried about them.

The Search issue is a tricky one… I can’t get into a lot of details yet, but suffice it to say, it shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Search cards are plot twists, and playing plot twists in a Legion deck makes some of their best cards stop working.

Anyway, I’m on page 5 in Word, and while I’d love to keep going and hit my usual 3,000 word quota, I can’t really say much more without spoiling things, so I suppose I’ll sign off here. Andrew Bircher will have a key Legion card today, and tomorrow will bring a multitool and my favourite art of the set from DemoN and OSM, respectively.

As always, we welcome your feedback, and I welcome your scorn, blame, and abuse.

Good day, and I am so very sorry.

by lebeau

At long last, it is my distinct honor to be allowed to officially kick off the previews for the Final Crisis set.  For those of you who don’t know me, I was the lead designer on the DC Universe set that came out a while back.

At the time DCU was wrapping up, we knew we wanted to do a follow-up.  The set had been a lot of work, but the community’s reaction was so overwhelmingly positive that it all seemed worthwhile.  Also, we had all learned so much from the experience.  We knew we could do better and we wanted to top ourselves.

There was no debate (at first) about what the subject of our follow-up would be.  Final Crisis was the biggest thing at DC at the time.  And it seemed like it would feature several teams we wanted to refeature.  Everyone agreed, Final Crisis would be our next set.

Ironically, Final Crisis presented a lot of unforeseen challenges as far as the set line-up was concerned.  One of the reasons we wanted to do Final Crisis was that we had left the New Gods out of DCU for space reasons.  But as we read the Final Crisis comics, the New Gods never showed up in force.  And the handful of New Gods who did make appearances weren’t exactly key players.

Over the course of developing the set, the team line-up changed a few times.  Each new issue sparked a new debate about which teams should be included.  (Sadly, the New Gods got dropped again.)  But the one thing we all agreed on from day one was that the main team would be Darkseid’s Elite.

Final Crisis was Grant Morrison’s epic tale of “The Day Evil Won”.  And the evil in this case was Darkseid.  If you’re a Grant Morrison fan, you’ve probably come to expect the unexpected.  That was definitely true of Final Crisis.  This was not your father’s Darkseid.

As Final Crisis begins, Darkseid and his followers are beings of energy (or something) who inhabit host bodies.  The host bodies decay over time.  But they have ways of prolonging their usefulness or finding replacements when needed.  The design team came up with a very inventive way to represent the gradual decay in game terms.

Let’s check the big man out:

That brings us to the first new keyword of the set.  Before I go any further, here’s the FAQ entry for Charge:

CHARGE

Some cards in this set have the keyword “Charge [X]“.

• A card with Charge has the text, “At the start of the combat phase, put a charge counter on this card.”
• A card with “Charge [X]: (charge text)” has “(charge text)” while it has X or more charge counters. X can be a fixed number, or the variable X.
• A card without charge can still have charge counters.
• A charged card is a card with one or more charge counters.
• Notes:
  If a card’s Charge effect would trigger at the same time as its gaining of a charge counter, its controller chooses the order that the effects are put on the chain, and so decides whether the Charge effect triggers before or after the gaining of a new counter.
• A card can have more charge counters than it needs to have its charge text be active.

I see some of you scratching your heads.  Allow me to simplify.  Charge is designed to be a very versatile keyword.  In some form or another, it represents the passing of time.  Some things will improve over time.  Others (like the decaying Darkseid’s Elite) will get worse.  And some things will trigger once a big enough charge is built up.  You’ll definitely see more uses of Charge as some of the other teams are previewed.

So, how about the new Darkseid?  The first thing that jumps out at me is his cost.  Now, Darkseid legend decks have options from drops 3-8.  Crazy, huh?  Well, it gets crazier.  But you’ll find out what I mean by that when you see the whole set.  In the meanwhile, let’s focus on Dan Turpin.

In the comics, Dan Turpin was a good man who got became Darkseid’s host body.  In the comics, Dan Turpin resisted Darkseid’s influence longer than any other human.  But eventually, he lost and Darkseid incarnated within him.  This version of Dan Turpin attempts to resist Darkseid’s power too.  But as long as you’re able to keep two charge counters off of him, Darkseid will win.

(Hint: Darkseid’s Elite will have ways to remove charge counters!)

Like most Darkseids, Dan Turpin is skewed towards defense statistically (he has a “big butt” as they say).  And that substitute is sure to come in handy.  Let’s say you have another three-drop on the field who’s decayed past the point of usefulness.  Sub in a fresh Darkseid, Dan Turpin and you’re good to go.

Let’s continue with that scenario.  Say you have another character who has decayed past his or her expiration date.  Stun the useless minion to Darkseid’s power and remove a useful character from your opponent’s board.  Sounds like a good trade to me!

Hungry for more?  Let’s take a look at Darkseid’s kid:

I’ll say he’s brutal!  First, you have to love the stats.  The first power probably looks familiar.  It comes word-for-word from Scarlet Witch, Mistress of Magic.  “But she was a three-drop!” you say.  Yes, she was an under-statted three drop who needed a lot of help to make use of her power.  Kalibak, on the other hand, will be lowering endurance levels like crazy.

Which brings me to the second half of the card.  Kalibak, like a lot of the Darkseid’s Elite, gets worse over time.  He’ll still be a beast every turn.  But he’s going to start eating your endurance as well.  If Kalibak attacks during the first combat phase, he’ll cost you two endurance.  And each turn after that, he’ll cost you an additional two.  That is, unless you find a way to reverse the process.

One of the team themes of Darkseid’s Elite has always been across-the-board endurance loss.  As you can see from Kalibak, that theme continues in this incarnation of the team.  In fact, your opponent just might burn up their endurance on their own thanks to cards like this one:

Let’s check in with the FAQ for the second new keyword in the set:

FLAW

Some cards in this set have the Flaw keyword followed by a payment power.

• A Flaw payment power can be used by all opponents, and cannot be used by its controller.
• A Flaw payment power with a usage restriction (ie, “Use only once per turn.”) can be used up to its restriction by each opponent.
• No effect or modifier you control can restrict an opponent from using the flaw powers of cards you control. For example, if you control Lex Luthor, Metropolis Mogul and a character with a flaw power, your opponents may still use that flaw power even though Lex Luthor would ordinarily restrict them from using the payment powers of characters and equipment.
• No effect or modifier you control can explicitly negate an effect created by a flaw power on a card you control. (Effects you control can still indirectly negate Flaw powers on cards you control by invalidating their targets).

So, Flaw is basically a payment power that your opponents can use against you.  For Darkseid’s Elite, Flaw is mostly found on the Justifiers.  The Justifiers force your opponent to choose between allowing you to keep a very good power or slowly bleeding away their endurance.  (Then there’s also the matter of that Anti-Life affiliation.  More on that when I get done talking about Black Lightning.)

First of all, Kalibak is going to love Black Lightning.  (And if you’re worried that BL won’t last till turn 6, the team has other ways to prevent reinforcement.)  Plus, no team attacking?  Pretty good for a team that has a lot of big butts on it.

But realistically, the odds are your opponent is going to pay that one endurance to keep you from using this power.  Don’t you think?  Well, don’t be so sure.  First of all, there’s the obvious endurance issues.  Endurance is going to be in short supply when Darkseid’s Elite is on the field.  But then there’s that Anti-Life affiliation.

What’s that all about?

In Final Crisis, anyone who was exposed to the Anti-Life Equation was infected by it.  The Justifiers were generally heroes and villains who had been infected by Anti-Life and who went on to expose others to the equation.

Being infected by Anti-Life is not a good thing.  For example check out:

Mary Marvel is Kalibak’s best friend!  Like Kalibak, Mary Marvel has a great body… I mean stats… I mean… her ATK and DEF are both higher than average.  And she has a power that cuts both ways.  If you’re playing Darkseid’s Elite, the odds are pretty good you’ll control some Anti-Life characters.  Obviously Mary Marvel’s power affects herself.

But if you have done your job and spread Anti-Life across your opponent’s board, Mary Marvel + Kalibak should make for a good turn 6.

That should just about do it for today’s team preview.

What?  Four cards wasn’t enough for you?  Well, in that case, be on the lookout for the other Darkseid’s Elite preview scheduled for today brought to you by the Baldman.  Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up Darkseid’s Elite before moving on to a team that will finally get a chance to reign (vague hint!)

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of the previews!

From Number 6:

By now, readers may be aware of the Revenge Squad previews featuring the two Legend-type characters of that team, Brainiac and Lex Luthor, so it may seem like there wouldn’t be much interesting left to cover. Well, as the primary DSM2 designer for Revenge Squad, I can assure those of you reading this that such is not the case (at least, not in my clearly-biased opinion). But before we get to the nifty new stuff, I feel it’s my duty to bore you with some details from the development of the affiliation. Fortunately for you, I’ve already discussed a fair segment of that (concerning the Revenge Squad’s increased adaptability with the resource row) in the initial preview that kicked off this week.

But the resource row (along with the Ongoing plot twists) is only one of the underlying themes in this revival of the team; the other major theme is DEF reduction. From DSM’s Kryptonite, through Bizarro Ray and into DWF with cards like Never-Ending Battle, the Revenge Squad have greatly enjoyed bringing down the DEF values of their opponents (gloating monologues notwithstanding). While DEF reduction seems like little more than a style of “pump”, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to explore the possibilities for generating effects by checking DEF values, and that was my plan for putting a new twist on an established theme. So you can expect to see both resource-row-relevant and DEF-relevant abilities scattered throughout all of the Revenge Squad’s DSM2 material; and once you read the other articles (assuming you haven’t already), I expect you’ll have a new appreciation for how those cards work.

However, that’s not the only new aspect of the Revenge Squad team design. They’re in possession of a brand-new ability, seen on the following preview cards:

That’s right, some of these vicious-minded villains have taken their obsession with the Man of Steel to the next level, and introduced Hunter to the Revenge Squad’s team roster! If the Atomic Skull’s design looks familiar to you, that’s intentional; there was a strong feeling that his DSM text was one of the best things from that set, and so it became easy to keep its row-related emphasis and adapt it to the Hunter mechanics. When it came to Mongul, I combined both the resource-row themes and DEF-reduction themes into a single effect operating within Hunter constraints. Having it work on characters in the same row was my way of making an oblique reference to the Revenge Squad’s minor front-row theme from DWF (which I liked enough to create one other card for the team that more explicitly references that theme…but you’ll have to wait a bit longer before you see it).

While some of the Hunters among the Revenge Squad are translations of other cards and effects, the rest have interesting new abilities and I hope they all will see plenty of action. At any rate, expect to see a full curve of Hunters in the DSM2 Revenge Squad as well as a Vengeance curve (continuing its contributions from DWF), both existing alongside an assortment of non-keyworded characters. But despite the seeming segregation of these characters by keyword (or the absence thereof), the prevalence of the Revenge Squad’s two major themes means that you can still expect them all to work together very well in any number of combinations…some perhaps a bit more easily than others

As with all previews, I can’t reveal all the possibilities available; but suffice to say that the Revenge Squad has a lot of potential (both within and outside DSM2), and I look forward to seeing the reactions of VS players once the full set spoiler is released.