R.I.P. Vs. System

Remember in Iron Man 2, when they replaced whatshisname in the role of Rhodey with Don Cheadle? No big deal, right? It was actually an upgrade. Imagine if they had replaced Robert Downey Jr. with another actor but filmed the movie as if it were the same guy. A little weird, but a good actor/director/script combination could pull it off, I suppose. Now imagine that they replaced Downey with an actress, changed Tony Stark to Tonya, inserted a bunch of retconned flashback scenes that were supposedly from the first movie but showed Tonya as "Iron Man" instead of Tony, then generally pretended that we wouldn't notice the difference. Yeah, probably would have been best not to name that second movie Iron Man 2 and call it a sequel.

That's kind of how I feel about the news that came out today from Upper Deck concerning "Vs. System 2PCG". If for some reason you read my blog but haven't kept up with the announcements, they posted an "FAQ" last week about the new version of the game. (The news about the official name actually came a couple of days earlier, when they created a Facebook page for it, containing nothing but a logo image. Come to think of it, I first saw the page when it didn't even have the logo, but I digress.) If you haven't seen it, the FAQ is here. The FAQ was something of a disappointment, in that it answered a few basic questions but left all the bigger ones unanswered. It ended with a promise of far more detailed information about rule changes in the near future, and said that this update "should be posted the week following Memorial Day." Cynic that I am, I interpreted that to mean Friday the 29th by midnight, or maybe even Sunday, with multiple delays and postponements a very real possibility.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I checked Facebook this evening and learned that they had already posted the promised update, by the end of the first business day of the week. I was far less happy about what was in it, but before I get to that, let's give credit where it is due. The old UDE was almost never this open and certainly never this punctual. I don't know if VS2PCG is a game that I will like enough to play regularly, but if it is, I now am more inclined to believe that they have learned from past mistakes in dealing with the player community and will be better caretakers of the game than they were the first time around. A modest round of applause is in order here.

Now for the bad news, at least in my estimation. This is not a tweaked/simplified version of the old game, in my view. It's not a dumbed down version of it, either. Nor is it really a reboot. It's a brand new superhero card game that took some of its ideas from an earlier game with a similar name and concept. Time will tell whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is most definitely not what I (or I think anyone else) was expecting when they made their announcement at GenCon 2014 that Vs. System was back.

At the time, they said that they were going to keep the game the same, but change the distribution model from that of a collectible card game sold in booster packs to that of a playing (nay, Living!) card game sold in complete sets, somewhat like the Hellboy set, but significantly larger. They did confess that old cards would not be legal, but the impression at the time was that they were doing that just to give themselves a clean slate, so they wouldn't have to worry about whether their new 4 drop Captain America was grossly overpowered when played in a deck containing cards from MEV, MUN, et al. Until fairly recently, folks were under the impression that new cards could be played together with old ones on the kitchen table, if nothing else. Uhh, no.

The poorly named Vs. System 2PCG is vastly different from the old game. Today's update contained a section that listed the things that are the same as in Vs. System, and if you just read that list it does sound like there are lots of similarities. Rows, formations, resources, flight, range, stunned characters, recovery phase, plot twists, locations, power-ups, team attacks--so many similarities! Then you read the rest of it and you realize that the differences are far more numerous, and vastly more significant.

There is no more endurance, for example, no more counting down from 50 to 0. Each character has a Health value, and when your main character goes down from 5 or 6 Health to 0, you lose. But wait, I don't lose just because I went to 0, do I? What about my attack step? Yeah, you don't have one, at least not on my turn. There is no more shared turn, no concept of initiative, no alternating attack steps, no stun damage (per se), no breakthrough, no attacking your opponent directly. You attack opposing characters to wound them and thereby lower their health.

On my turn, I get to draw, and you don't. I get to set resources; you don't. I get to attack; you don't. It sounds like they've taken steps to try to limit the inherent advantage of going first, but it's still going to be there, no matter what. The player going second will always be playing catch up. If I go first, then on my turn X I will have drawn two more cards than you did up through turn X-1 (assuming no cards drawn due to effects), and that tips the odds in my favor. It just does. [NOTE: After I wrote this, we learned that the player going first does not draw for his first turn. Hopefully that will mitigate some of the advantage of going first.]

Does that mean this card game will be less skill-based and more luck-based than the old one? Absolutely. And intentionally so. People who knew people who knew people inside UDE back in the day have been saying for a while now that this was coming, and they were right. One of the perceived barriers to entry for new players back then was that new players could rarely beat more experienced players, even if they were given comparable decks to play. It was just too easy to make a critical mistake in the formation step, or to make poor choices during your attack step. A new player would form haphazardly, or waste attack pumps on turn 3 that they would need later to avoid being brickwalled on turn 5. He would fail to account for the cards that his opponent, playing Good Guys, was likely to already have or could get with Kooey. Or she would play all her copies of Savage Beatdown while attacking a character with evasion. Since these noobs could never win, the story goes, they would quickly lose interest in the game and move on (or back) to a game where they could lucksack their way to victory fairly often, like Yugioh.

Depending on your point of view, this was the worst thing about the game, or the best. People in the first camp didn't buy cards, unfortunately. Upper Deck wanted their money too. They already had ours.

So anyway, for me, this is the day that Vs. System 1 PCG truly died. Sure, there was a long gap between the day in early 2009 that it was cancelled, and the day in 2014 when its return was announced, and sure it seemed plenty dead in the interim. But there was always the hope of resurrection, and just last year it seemed that our prayers had been answered. Today we learned that it was all just a mirage. The game as we have known it all these years is officially dead, at least as far as Upper Deck is concerned. Now a new game with a similar name and some similar concepts has taken its place. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Having said all that, let me add that I have pre-ordered two boxes of this new game, and I don't intend to cancel my order. I will give it a chance. It might be a very good game. But it is not the game I learned to play back in 2006, not even close, so let's all be honest here. They didn't just replace the guy playing Rhodey. They replaced Tony with a chick named Tonya.