Wolverine Rush (2PCG)

So my son and I have been playing the new game for a couple of weeks now, and we do enjoy it. We've tried a variety of deck types at this point. The ones we seem drawn to the most are Star-Lord, Thanos, Magneto, and Storm, but we've also been experimenting with some others. Of these others, I believe my favorite is this Wolverine deck I've been working on. It hasn't been tested exhaustively, but so far it seems pretty good.

One thing you'll notice about it is that it plays at least as many Guardians cards as X-Men. I don't know about anyone else, but I find it very hard to build decent 2PCG decks that don't do that, even aggro decks. Yondu seems to end up in every deck I build, along with Even the Odds, and Give 'em a Lift is really solid in aggro decks.

Main Character 

Wolverine (X-Men) 

Supporting Characters - 25

[1 - 4]
4x Yondu (Guardians)
[2 - 11]
4x Agent Venom (Guardians)
4x Daredevil (Avengers)
3x Namor (X-Men)
[3 - 6]
4x Rocket (Guardians)
2x Gamora (Guardians)
[4 - 4]
4x Storm (X-Men)  

Plot Twists - 16

4x X-Factor (X-Men)
4x Even the Odds (Guardians)
4x Give ‘em a Lift  (Guardians)
4x Open Fire

Locations - 19

4x School for Gifted Youngsters (X-Men)
4x Knowhere (Guardians)
4x Fortress
4x Training Ground
3x Laboratory

The mulligan condition for this deck is a 2 drop and one or two cards that will allow the L1 Wolverine to stun an opposing character, so either Open Fire or Training Ground. The key to winning with this deck is to level up as quickly as possible. He gets an XP every time he stuns any character in a solo attack, but generally you want these to be attacks against their main character. Aggro decks can win very quickly in this game, but they can also run out of gas very quickly as well. You can only afford at most one or two turns where you don't wound the opposing main character. The L2 Wolverine 's ability to heal can sometimes buy you an extra turn or two to finish the job, but that's about it. If you are down to topdecking cards and have two wounds left to inflict, you probably aren't going to get it done.

If you are going first, attack with Wolverine and a pump into their main character. If you are going second, Yondu is a good play on your first turn, but not a necessary one. This deck is OK with underdropping, so he can be equally useful later in the game, to take out an opposing Cosmo or other troublemaker with cost 3 or less.

All the 2 drops are solid, and there are a lot of them, because turn 2 is the one where you don't want to miss or underdrop. You need someone else to attack with besides Wolverine early on, and Yondu can't do the job, usually. Agent Venom is a 3/3 who can grow to 5/5, although when you add the counters you become susceptible to Even the Odds. Daredevil is a 3/3 who becomes a 6/3 when attacking a main character. That means you can attack a supporting character with Wolverine and wound their main character with Daredevil, increasing the chances of avoiding a wound on Wolverine. Namor is a 3/2 with flight who doesn't stun back when attacking the back row. With an Open Fire, he can generally stun an opposing main character.

The best 3 drop is generally the 4/1 Rocket, because he can get back a used plot twist or location for you from the KO'd pile. That is a potentially game winning effect. In the few games I've played with this deck, the difference between winning and losing has often been a single plot twist, which you have or you don't. (I induced a scoop the other night when Rocket got back Even the Odds, for example.) Gamora is a 3/4 who KO's any supporting character she stuns while attacking. Her job is to help keep the path to their main character clear.

Storm is a 4/6 4 drop that I play here both because of her great effect, and because of her flight. When the game goes a little longer than you would like, it really helps to have Give 'em a Lift, to give Wolverine flight, and someone to team attack with. When you are going for that last wound, it's nice to only have to worry about stunning their main character, because this deck doesn't have a lot of big bodies to take out front row blockers.

This deck plays a full complement of special locations for both X-Men and Guardians. School for Gifted Youngsters is for use with Wolverine and Storm. Knowhere is for Rocket, Yondu and Venom. Of the basic locations, Fortress (Green) is needed for Venom but more especially the L2 Wolverine, who uses it to heal wounds. Laboratory (Blue) is used only by Storm, and perhaps should be dropped to two copies. Training Ground (Red) is the key one. It is used by Wolverine to get +3/+0, by Yondu, and by Rocket. Obviously the deck is heavily dependent on red locations, but each character that needs them has eight ways to get one. The takeaway here is simply to save the special locations for use as reds or, later in the game, as greens.

Three of the four plot twists are purely offensive in nature. The fourth, Even the Odds, is multi-purpose. You can use it to shrink pumped up opposing attackers back down to size, or to remove a defender's counters to push through an attack. In my opinion, it's simply too good and too versatile not to play in any deck that plays a significant number of Guardians characters. Underwhelming as it is by the standards of the original game, Open Fire is the best generic attack pump in this one. The L1 Wolverine generally needs one of these or a red location to stun an opposing main character. X-Factor is not a pump, but it does allow your biggest character to attack twice if he doesn't get stunned back during his first attack. Some people would play Squad Tactics here, but so far I think X-Factor is a stronger play.

The MVP of the plot twists is Give 'em a Lift. The only bad thing about this card (and this goes for Even the Odds as well) is that you have to have an upright Guardians character in order to use it, but that will normally be the case when you are attacking and need flight. The +1/+1 counter is nice, but it's the flight that is critical. Against decks that don't play their main character in the front row (as this one does), you need to be able to hit the back row, and often that requires leapfrogging a blocker rather than attacking him. Storm and Namor have flight on their own, but everyone else needs a little Lift.

This isn't the best deck in the game, by any means, but it is a fun one that is well worth giving a try. From what I have seen so far, though, aggro is not nearly as strong as control right now. There just aren't enough strong pumps available that don't rely on having a specific basic location available, so winning with an aggro deck requires average to above draws in order to win consistently. (If you watched the video of the finals of the 10K, you know what happens when an aggro deck gets bad ones.) A control deck can often survive three straight turns of poor draws; an aggro deck generally cannot, at least not against control. Once Star-Lord gets Drax in front of him, for example, it is very hard for an aggro deck to win, since the aggro deck will be running on fumes, and now has to go through Drax to get to Star-Lord. But the game will get awfully boring awfully fast if you are just playing with and against Star-Lord, Thanos and Magneto all the time, so my plan is to keep one aggro deck and one control deck built at all times. This one should see heavy rotation in the aggro slot alongside Storm.

Speed Force Press

After I finished my Awesome Mix deck, I was surprisingly motivated to do another set of custom cards. In no time at all, I had some ideas. I wanted to work with a team that had been given short shrift by UDE, and I wanted to play with a fun game mechanic that had been underused. I was always unhappy with how little attention had been given to the Flash--although I had heard the story that Speed Force was to have been featured in the next DC set after DCL if there had been one, and that the Energize mechanic used for X-Force was originally intended for Speed Force. I also remembered thinking many times that Press was a great mechanic that should have been featured more than the one time. Put them together and, presto! I had my idea.

If you are not familiar with Press, here's the way it works: each time you recruit a character with Press, your next character costs one less to recruit (minimum cost of 1). So on turn 3, you can recruit a 2 drop, then another 2 drop, which costs only 1. On turn 4, you can recruit a 2, another 2, then a 3. And so on. Obviously, the Press mechanic relies heavily on 2 drops, because you need to recruit two of them each turn from 3 on in order to maximize your recruits that turn. If you can only recruit a 2 and a 3 on turn 4, you might as well recruit a 4 and save the 2 and 3 for the next turn. 

The mono-team Kree deck was a solid play in Modern Age when MHG was the current set, and Kree-Villains was a good deck in Silver Age for a while. Both decks, however, had the same basic problem, which was that they really couldn't win consistently before turn 6, and that's a big problem, especially when you are on odds. The only Kree-centric deck that really solves it is a deck known as Press Chess (Kree-Checkmate). I fooled around with it back in the day, but I never realized that the key to making the deck work was a normally mediocre card, Neutralization Protocol. ("Stun another character you control >>> Gain 1 resource point. Spend this resource point only to recruit a character card with the identity OMAC Robot. Use only once per turn and only during your recruit step.") Years later I learned of my folly while reading ukyo's write-up of the deck on his blog.

The basic idea behind Press Chess is that you get your Neutralization Protocol out on 4 and keep him there, then you do a normal Press chain on 5 where you go 2-2-3-4. But Neutralization Protocol lets you gain a resource point that you can use to recruit an OMAC Robot. So you stun a 2 (or maybe a 1 drop Jacob Lee), and now you can recruit a 5 drop in addition to the other four characters you just recruited. That's 16 resource points worth of characters on one turn (although you do lose someone, probably a 2 drop). If you are on evens, you can do 2-2-3-4-5-5, for a total of 21. Bottom line: the deck now has the firepower to win on a turn 5 initiative.

So, the first thing I did with my deck was to come up with a way to get a 2-2-3-4-5 Press chain on turn 5. If you've never played a Press deck before, this probably seems ridiculously broken. The thing you have to understand is that a) on turns 3 and 4, a Press deck is playing multiple smaller characters rather than one big one, and b) you normally have only one character left over from the previous turn, whom you usually bounce and re-recruit. Consequently, Press decks really don't gain board advantage until their kill turn, and fare poorly against faster decks that can win before they get there.

Anyway, back to getting the 5 drop out on turn 5. What I came up with was a plot twist called Cosmic Treadmill. To play it, you have to bounce a 2 drop back to your hand, then you gain a resource point you can use to recruit a character with the identity The Flash. To me this seemed fairly comparable to what Press Chess can do, and I added in the restriction that you could use the effect only once per game, whereas Press Chess can do it on both 5 and 6 if it wants.

I also wanted to follow the (New) New Brotherhood model for aggro decks, where most of the attack boost comes from effects that give all characters a smaller boost, rather than ones that give a single character a bigger one. My first attempt at a signature attack pump was a New Brotherhood-like card that gave all Speed Force characters a continuous +2 (see picture at right). There were a couple of problems with this card. First, +2 ended up being way too good, so I had to tone it down to +1. Second, I wanted the deck to be consistent, which meant it had to be searchable. I also wanted a pair of continuous resources akin to Stargate and The Science Spire, and these only worked as locations rather than ongoing plot twists. So I ended up changing The Speed Force to be a location.

The other thing I did with The Speed Force was to have it give the deck a way to break uniqueness. I really didn't want the deck to have to play any minor Speed Force characters. I wanted all the focus on Barry Allen, Wally West, Bart Allen, and Jay Garrick. But I also didn't want you to be able to play multiples of the same card. So it allows you to play both the 4 drop Barry and the 5 drop, but not two copies of the 2 drop, for example. There's plenty of precedence for this with Superman and Darkseid decks, most notably. If you think about it, it makes sense for these guys not to be unique, too, since they can travel through time and have encounters with earlier/later versions of themselves.

That's enough background, I think, so let's look at my current deck list and then get into the cards themselves.

Characters - 33 

[1 - 6]
3x Wally West * Kid Flash, Truly Speedy Sidekick
3x Iris West Allen, Barry's Bride
[2 - 11]
4x Barry Allen * The Flash, Speed Force Conduit
4x Bart Allen * The Flash, Speed Force Scion
2x Wally West * The Flash, The Thinker
1x Jay Garrick * The Flash, One Last Time
[3 - 9]
3x Barry Allen * The Flash, A Study In Scarlet
3x Bart Allen * The Flash, Full Throttle
2x Wally West * The Flash, Against a Deadline
1x Jay Garrick * The Flash, True Original
[4 - 4]
2x Barry Allen * The Flash, Quick Change Artist
1x Bart Allen * The Flash, In Death's Shadow
1x Jay Garrick * The Flash, Relentless Crusader
[5 - 3]
2x Barry Allen * The Flash, Rebirth of a Legend
1x Wally West * The Flash, Sidekick No More 

Plot Twists - 15 

[2 - 2]
2x Fast Forward
[3 - 4]
4x Molecular Magic
0x Scarlet Speedster
[4 - 7]
4x Infinite Mass Punch
3x Race Against Time
0x Into The Speed Force
0x In Hot Pursuit
[5 - 2]
2x Cosmic Treadmill 

Locations - 10 

[2 - 8]
4x The Speed Force
4x Speed Vortex
[3 - 2]
2x Crimson Tornado 

Equipment - 2 

[0 - 2]
2x Costume Ring

The two 1 drops are both character tutors. Wally West lets you get any Flash character card you want, at the cost of a discard. Iris West Allen has eyes only for Barry.

As I hinted at earlier, the 2 drops are the key to any Press deck, so there are a lot of them. If you have a way to bounce him at the start of turn 3, then Bart is the best one to have on turn 2. When he leaves play, he gets you a location. If not, then Barry is the better play, because he helps generate card advantage. Wally is best used on turns 3 onward as your second 2 drop recruit. Same for Jay Garrick. Wally can make your opponent replace a resource, Jay just helps you press out on subsequent turns, because he can bounce himself back to your hand.

Brief digression: all of the Barry, Bart, and Wally cards have range, even though Upper Deck never gave them range. This is partly a concession to the needs of the deck, but I think it's justifiable in that all of the more recent versions of The Flash can generate cyclones and vortices that can take out an opponent without ever touching him. A bit of a reach, I suppose, but not a silly one.

There are also quite a few 3 drops, because they are almost as important as the 2 drops for making Press work, and it helps to draw one of them rather than having to search for one. Barry is not especially strong on turn 4, but he can be helpful on later initiatives. Bart is probably the best play until your kill turn. Wally is a stronger version of the 2 drop. Jay is like the 2 drop version, except that when he leaves play he can get you an equipment card.

The 4 drop Barry and Bart are both very strong plays on your kill turn. Bart is better on turn 5 than Barry if you are on evens. Jay is only useful on your initiative.

The 5 drop Barry is clearly the best play on your initiative, as he gives all adjacent characters a big boost. Wally is good on off-initiatives, and as the final recruit on a turn where Cosmic Treadmill is allowing you to go 2-2-3-4-5-5.

Along with the 2 drops, the locations are the keys to the deck. If you are searching for a location, and don't have it already, grab Speed Vortex. It is this deck's equivalent of Stargate. The usual play at the beginning of each recruit from 3 on is to bounce a 2 drop back to your hand, then search for a character that you need. If you don't have it, Crimson Tornado (Science Spire) is a decent substitute. If you have both in your row, even better. More about that combination later. The Speed Force is what gives this deck its firepower, when it is working as designed. If you can get Speed Vortex and 2-4 copies of The Speed Force in your row, the deck should really click. The Speed Force is also critical on later turns for breaking uniqueness. You can give your characters even more continuous boost if you can get Costume Ring out. I tend to put it on the 5 drop Barry.

None of the plot twists is a must-have in order to win, but they all help. Race Against Time is another effect that gives all your characters +1 ATK. The greater cost requirement is normally a non-issue, since most attacks are up the curve anyway. Infinite Mass Punch is generally a +3 to +6 attack pump for one character. If it's a +6, you are probably going to win without it. Molecular Magic allows a Flash character both to hit the hidden area and to attack as if he had flight. In Hot Pursuit would be a good card against curve decks with big bodies to be taken down, as it gives each attacker in a team attack against a character +3 ATK,

You can win on 5 without Cosmic Treadmill, but it sure makes things a lot easier. It's tempting to play three copies, but you can only play one per game. Fast Forward is a good substitute for Speed Vortex, or a complement to it. You don't need to bounce everyone every turn necessarily, but you definitely want to be able to do a full Press chain every time, and Fast Forward helps with that. The last two plot twists are ones I probably wouldn't play. Into The Speed Force is kind of like Switching Sides. Scarlet Speedster helps cycle through your deck.

This deck is quite good, and quite fun to play, but probably not as good as you think. Although the deck can win on a turn 5 initiative, it is still vulnerable to losing on a turn 5 off-initiative. Other than having lots of characters who can potentially reinforce, it has no defensive presence, and all the characters have minimal DEF. In almost all the test matches I've played with it, when it has lost, it has lost on 4 or 5. I have not tested much against stall decks because, frankly, those are probably auto-losses. Anything built to win late can probably survive this deck's 5/6 initiative, and it will run out of gas after that. The results of a recent test match will tell you much about this deck's strengths and weaknesses.

I was playing my Instant Replay deck. My son was playing this deck, so I could get his impressions of it. On my turn 5 initiative, I was way ahead and almost finished him off. I was attacking with my last ready character, and I had a whole bunch of pumps available. I could have gotten him down to 5, if not for Crimson Tornado. I had played 10 in pumps already, and I was afraid that if I played one more Savage or Trouble With Dinosaurs, he would bounce the defender and reset my attack. So I settled for a 40-15 lead. If he had not drawn Crimson Tornado, I might have won on 5. But he did.

In fact, on his turn 6, he had a row consisting of Crimson Tornado, Speed Vortex, and all four copies of The Speed Force. Because he had Crimson Tornado very early on, he had been bouncing characters back to his hand with it on each turn and cycling through his deck. His hand was loaded. He had almost everything you could have: 2x Infinite Mass Punch, 3x Molecular Magic, 1x Costume Ring, and 2x Race Against Time. He pressed out completely, 2-2-3-4-5-5, then recruited Iris for free by discarding. His first attack was with her. She had 8 ATK. Everyone got bigger from there. When the dust settled, I had gone from 40 to -65. 105 in damage on that one turn. I have since toned down a few of the cards, but even with those changes I would have been at -51.

I know that account sounds ridiculous, but that was virtually a best case scenario for this deck. I've never come to close to doing that in any of my other test matches, and I've lost quite a few of them to decks you wouldn't think of as overpowered, like Skrulls / Inhumans. This deck basically loses that match-up every time if it doesn't draw Molecular Magic, and one copy might not be enough.

In short, I think this is a really good, really fun deck. Very good against some decks; not nearly so good against others. It would be a tournament-worthy deck, but not necessarily one you could win with. Which is really the sweet spot for me with these custom decks I've been building (Star Wars, Watchmen, Guardians). I want to create decks that you would feel good about playing against almost anything, even if you knew you couldn't beat it. Completely overpowered decks like Bosom Buddies don't retain my interest, any more than woefully underpowered ones. This one seems about right to me.

You can download the cards from here. MPC-ready versions are here.

Vs. System Is Back! Kinda Sorta.

When Upper Deck announced at GenCon last year that Vs System was coming back, I was happy but apprehensive. Their track record in general, and especially with this game, was at best mixed. When they fessed up back in May that the game they were "bringing back" would be radically changed, I was ticked off. Nevertheless, it was a similar game with some of the same mechanics and, at least for now, the same basic characters, so I decided that I would try to keep an open mind and give the game a try when it came out. And now I have.

Before I get into that, let me say that, while I really do understand many of the concerns they had about the old game, I remain convinced that they could have addressed almost all of them without such drastic changes (adding the main character concept, changing the scoring, changing the power curve, etc.). They could have made most of the rules changes that they made concerning flight, range, formation, etc. without fundamentally altering the game, for example. Lots of other inherent problems could have been solved simply by not making certain kinds of cards (tutors and team-ups, most notably) and by not creating so many game mechanics that had to be learned and accounted for while playing. But it sounds like their initial plan really was to tweak the game, so they must have decided early on that they simply couldn't accomplish all their goals without starting over. I've been on projects that took sharp 90 degree turns, so I can well understand how that could happen, even if I don't like the result. It's water under the bridge now, in any case.

Anyway, yesterday I got a text from the owner of our LCS saying that he had received a small initial shipment of VS 2PCG, and that he was holding a box for me. I swung by after work and picked it up, then went home and started checking it out. Fortuitously, my son DJ had the day off, so we were able to explore the game together. We quickly decided that we'd each build a mono-team deck on our own, and learn the game by building the decks and playing them against each other. I picked Guardians and Star-Lord, while he opted for X-Men and Storm.


Neither of us knew much about what a deck for this game should look like, really. I had read some of the coverage of the 10K at GenCon, and glanced at some of the decklists for the Top 8, so I did know a few things. All those decks played 14-20 locations, for instance, so I knew to aim for that. Plot twist counts were all over the map. Some decks played a mere half dozen, others 2-3 times as many. I hadn't paid much attention to the distribution of character drops, but I did know that you had to play more characters than you would have in most Vs 1.0 decks, because there are no tutors and few draw effects.

That was about all I knew, other than that the most successful decks at the event seemed to be playing one of a handful of main characters: Star-Lord and Thanos, especially, then Storm, Magneto, and Professor X. (Storm actually wasn't played much, 8 out of 199 decks, but one of them made the finals.) I also knew that some of the best supporting characters were in Guardians—Cosmo, Mantis, Yondu, and Drax—which was one reason why I chose them for my first deck. Plus, it was an aggro-control deck archetype, which is right up my alley. DJ wanted to go aggro. He liked Storm's flight, and thought he could hit early and hard with her.

We spent an hour or so reading the rules and putting together a first cut at our decks, then broke for dinner. While we ate, we did a little reading on our phones about the 10K results. Based on that reading, we each decided to make a few minor changes to our decks before we started playing. Finally, at about 8:00 or so, we were ready to flop some cardboard.

DJ won the dice roll and opted to go first. He recruited a 1 drop and swung into Star-Lord, after giving him -2/-2, to inflict an early wound. This was part of an early pattern in the game. I think I had 2-3 wounds on Star-Lord before Storm got her first. But I got Cosmo out on my turn to take away Storm's abilities, and after he was KO'd on DJ's turn 2, I played another one with a Yondu on my turn 2. Star-Lord was racking up wounds, but also lots of experience points. I was going to level up first, despite needing 5 XP rather than 3 to do so.

I won't go through the entire match turn by turn, but I do want to point out a few things that we learned along the way. First, my strategy of loading up on early drops paid off, as Star-Lord was able to level up a couple of turns before Storm, which greatly limited Storm's ability to do damage late. I got four wounds pretty fast, then stabilized on turn 5. It seemed clear to us that an aggro deck like DJ's really needs to hit early and often AND get its main character leveled up quickly in order to win. I don't know yet if leveling up first determines the winner more often than not, but it seems like it could, all else being equal (comparable quality of draws and decks, etc.).

Second, although I didn't draw any copies of Mantis to fuel the deck's resource acceleration theme, I did luck into a copy of the 6 drop Drax when I drew for turn 5 and play him a turn early with Star-Lord's ability. That was pretty much the game decider. Storm was running low on gas at that point, and had to sit in the front row in order to be able to attack. Star-Lord had range, and with a 7/7 Drax as a blocker in the front row, Star-Lord became essentially untouchable, since no one could fly over him. DJ no longer had the firepower to get through a big blocker and Star-Lord.

A key lesson we learned here is that although flight, range, and formation are all different than they were in Vs 1.0, they are still just as important and almost as complex. Sure, you don't have to worry about reinforcement, but there are still tough decisions to be made about where to place your characters to allow for optimal offense and optimal defense. For example, if you put your main character in the front row so it can team attack with another character, it is going to remain exposed there (if it doesn't get stunned while attacking) on your opponent's turn.

Third, hand management seems more important in this game than it did in 1.0. Late in the game, I still had several cards in hand, while DJ was down to topdecking. While I admittedly needed a lucky draw of a 5 and a 6 drop on turn 5 in order to win, it was very clear that I had a huge advantage by virtue of having more cards to work with. That was not the case quite so much in 1.0, where you could play plot twists from your row, and search for needed characters with tutors. If you have no cards in hand in this game, the chances of getting the character you need for your next turn are very slim, and you definitely won't be playing any plot twists. Which reminds me: since your opponent can see the locations you have available to you face up in your row, there are fewer surprises in this game than there could be in the old one, where every face down resource and every card in hand was an unknown threat.

Getting back to our game, that turn 5 Drax was decisive. DJ could no longer touch my back row Star-Lord, and his front row Storm was a sitting duck. I was gradually able to overcome my early deficit, and on the final turn of the game I slammed his solitary Storm with four team attackers sporting a combined 20 ATK for the win.

After we finished, we talked for a while about our impressions of the game. We both enjoyed it—far more than we expected—and will probably continue playing it to some degree. We liked it enough that I'm going to go snag a second box, since there are some plot twists and characters that you want more than four copies of, even if you are only building two decks. But we also agreed that, at least for now, we can't see ourselves getting into the game nearly as much as we did the original. Partly that's just stubbornness on our part, I suppose. We both loved the first game so much, and this new one seems like a not wholly satisfactory substitute. Beyond that, though, we have some big concerns about the game.

First, there's no OP right now. This is a biggie. If there are no regularly scheduled tournaments to bring us and others together to play the game, then it is going to be hard to generate and maintain enthusiasm for it. Supposedly something is coming from Upper Deck around the end of the year, but that seems awfully late to me. That something should have been in place as close to the release as possible.

Second, given the one-box-has-everything distribution model and the non-existent OP, local retailers have little incentive to carry the game, much less actively support and promote it. Games sold in booster packs can generate hundreds if not thousands of dollars in gross revenue from a single customer. This one will generate only a few dollars in net revenue per box for a card store. Have to sell a whole bunch of boxes to pay one light bill. I've seen lots of posts on Facebook by people who say that their local stores either don't know about the game or don't have any current plans to carry it. Therein lies the major flaw with this distribution model. It's good for the players—a single person can spend 50 bucks and have all the same cards as everyone else—but it's lousy for local retailers. It remains to be seen how long the game can survive when it is set up this way. I would think that Upper Deck would have to really work overtime to compensate for its inherent shortcomings, to give those retailers incentives to carry and support it. Obviously they are not doing that right now.

Finally, the planned development cycle just sucks. Period. Reportedly the plan is to develop the game in one year cycles. Each cycle would feature a "core set" to be released at or around GenCon, followed by two half-sized expansion sets, roughly four months apart. That part sounds OK. But supposedly each cycle is to be devoted to a single intellectual property, or group of properties, completely distinct from the previous one. So if the first cycle belongs to Marvel, we could expect to see two expansion sets for it over the next 8 months (roughly now to April 2015). Then the next cycle would be something else, like Aliens/Predators. For a whole year. We wouldn't see another Marvel set from roughly April 2015 until August 2016. I can't see many people retaining interest in the game in the interim, assuming it even lasts that long. Personally, I have zero interest in Aliens/Predators or Firefly or any of the other non-comic book properties that have been mentioned, and I know I'm not alone. I might be OK with a single expansion set of something like that, but nothing more.

If this is all true, and they stick with this plan, I think it is a monumental mistake, and one they can't easily recover from. If they were to release a new core set of Aliens/Predators and it bombs, its not like they could instantly shift gears and go back to Marvel, They would already be well into development of the first A/P expansion set at that point. This is just typical of Upper Deck, too. "If we build it, they will come" is a great line from a good movie. It is not a sound business philosophy, as they should have learned by now.

In short, I remain just as skeptical and conflicted now as I was back in May. I like the new game and think it is fun to play, but I am very, very reluctant to become emotionally invested in it. I made that mistake with Upper Deck once before, and if I were to make a similar mistake again, then shame on me, not them. Their track record is not good, and they are going to do things significantly better this time around. The fact that they ran out of product on the first day of GenCon, leaving lots of people twisting in the wind who had traveled hundreds of miles to play in the 10K, is just further evidence that this really is the same old Upper Deck. (Don't have all your product on the first day? Then don't let people buy up to 10 copies. Reserve 1 for each registered player in the 10K, since they had no way of getting it beforehand, and limit sales to one copy per person for a day. This isn't rocket science, just common sense.) Anyway, caveat emptor.

I know there are many people who are wildly enthusiastic and optimistic about the new game, and I am happy for you/them. Enjoy the ride while it lasts. I won't be taking it with you, for the most part. I will continue playing the game, but I refuse to go all in on it. If the game grows and prospers, and I continue to enjoy playing it, maybe I will get with the program. For now, though, I'll be proceeding with an abundance of caution and a boatload of skepticism.

Awesome Mix

About the time I was finishing my Watchmen deck, one of the members of the Vs. System Custom Designs group on Facebook, James Ashbury, started posting some card ideas for a Guardians deck in which some of the card names were songs from the movie soundtrack, with the musical artist's name as the version. He had no effects for these cards, wasn't really sure where he wanted to go from there, and asked the rest of us for ideas. James' Cherry Bomb card is shown below.

After giving it some thought, I said, "You could also do them as one-of equipment cards, like the Fate Artifacts, where a character can be equipped with as many as you want, and then have a Mix Tape location that moves them around like the Tower." No one on Facebook seemed that
at keen on the idea, including him, but I was really enamored with it and gave it a lot of additional thought as I was wrapping up Watchmen.

I had just finished my Ten Rings deck not that long before, where a 4 drop Punisher could theoretically be equipped with 3 Fate Artifacts and 10 copies of Ten Rings, and I started thinking it would be cool to do another deck kind of like that one, but one where each equipment card was different. I quickly ditched the idea of allowing one character to have all the equipment cards at once, but I liked the idea of having multiple ones on a single character, each with a separate effect. Then I thought it would be nice to give additional bonuses for having a character who was fully equipped. And that was how I conceived of my Awesome Mix deck.

All of the equipment cards and some of the locations have names that are songs on the soundtrack. Some of them sort of make sense as card names, others not so much, but the deck is intended to be a little wacky, like the Guardians themselves. A single character can have three of them equipped at one time (four in the case of the 7 drop Star-Lord). Equipment can be moved using Awesome Mix, Vol. 1, which is like Dr. Fate's Tower. And there's a Vol. 2 location that is sort of a cross between Fate's Tower and New Baxter Building. Both allow you to search for the equipment card you need most that turn.

The plot twists are all song names too, from the same era as the ones on the soundtrack, and these are called Bonus Tracks. (There's also a Bonus Track location and a couple of equipment.) Basically I wanted all non-character cards to be song names, so I had to improvise a bit, since there are only 12 songs on the soundtrack. I tried to pick songs that I thought could work in a movie sequel or deleted scene. There are also some character cards with the Awesome Mix version, to further the theme. The characters all have normal character names, but their versions are all riffs on lines from the movie.

That's a basic overview of the deck. Here's the list I play with now. Note that the plot twists are intended to be mixed and matched however you wish. I play one copy each of as many as I can, for variety and whimsy, but if you were trying to create a really competitive deck you would probably play multiples of more of them and cut others entirely.

Characters - 29

[0 - 2]
2x Baby Groot, I Am Groot? * Awesome Mix
[1 - 4]
4x Star-Lord, Who? * Awesome Mix
[2 - 7]
4x Groot, I Am Groot
3x Gamora, Not a Dancer
[3 - 6]
4x Rocket Raccoon, Oh, Yeah!
2x Drax the Destroyer, Fast Reflexes
[4 - 4]
4x Star-Lord, Legendary Outlaw * Awesome Mix
[5 - 3]
2x Gamora, No Pelvic Sorcery!
1x Groot, I Am Groot!
[6 - 2]
1x Drax the Destroyer, Nothing Goes Over His Head
1x Rocket Raccoon, Ain't No Thing Like Me, 'cept Me!
[7 - 1]
1x Star-Lord, Finally! * Awesome Mix 

Plot Twists - 8

[1 - 1]
1x Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Bonus Track
0x Rocket Man, Bonus Track
[2 - 2]
2x Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, Bonus Track
[3 - 4]
2x Blitzkrieg Bop, Bonus Track
1x Stayin' Alive, Bonus Track
1x Thriller, Bonus Track
0x Ain't That Peculiar, Bonus Track
[4 - 1]
1x Let's Get It On, Bonus Track

Locations -  13

[2 - 10]
4x Hooked On a Feeling, Non-Unique * Awesome Mix
2x Awesome Mix, Vol. 1, Awesome Mix
2x Awesome Mix, Vol. 2, Awesome Mix
2x I Want You Back, Awesome Mix
[3 - 3]
2x Go All The Way, Awesome Mix
1x Higher Ground, Bonus Track 

Equipment - 11

[0 - 11]
1x Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Come And Get Your Love, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Fooled Around And Fell In Love, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Footloose, Unique * Bonus Track * Awesome Mix
1x I'm Not In Love, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Moonage Daydream, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x O-O-H Child, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Spirit In The Sky, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Cherry Bomb, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x Escape <> The Piña Colada Song, Unique * Awesome Mix
1x War, Unique * Awesome Mix

Baby Groot is a card you might look at and say, "Whoa! Way TOO good!" I hear ya. I have spent more time futzing with that card than I care to think about. A character you can recruit for free, and bring back from the pile for free, on every turn?! Seems crazy. But. He serves an important function in the deck, and it simply doesn't work very well if I dial back his power level too much. I have two basic 1 drop variations on him with alternate recruit costs: one where you have to discard, another where you have to exhaust someone else. If you build the deck, feel free to substitute one of the alternative versions of him. The deck still works, but not nearly as well. Remember, there's only two copies of him, and some games you don't have him until turn 5. In my opinion the deck as a whole is not overpowered, no matter which version of him you use, but others may disagree.

The 1 drop Star-Lord is nice to have, especially if he sticks around to turn 3 and you don't have Baby Groot, but not essential. He is basically a Guardians version of Ape X.

The 2 drop you almost always want is Groot. A good mulligan condition for the deck would be Groot or a way to get him, or the 3 drop Rocket or a way to get him plus a lower drop. The real goal is to get Rocket, but you can't use his effect without someone to sacrifice. Besides getting Rocket, Groot's Sarge Steel-style effect is very useful, as I'll discuss later. Gamora is very nice to have if you have Rocket and Baby Groot, but if you don't, Groot is better.

You'll notice that each of the characters has a theme that makes sense if you've seen the movie. Groot protects others, and he's Rocket's best buddy. Gamora is an assassin. Drax is all about vengeance. Rocket sends others off to fetch things for him ("I need his leg!"). Star-Lord's theme is a bit nebulous, but he gains his power and usefulness from the Awesome Mix equipment cards named after songs on his mom's mix tape. Baby Groot keeps coming back after being discarded or KO'd. (I had to make him a separate character from Groot so they could co-exist. In early versions of the deck, I used Cosmo, but Cosmo isn't really a factor in the movie, whereas the baby Groot dances to one of the songs.)

To be honest, the 3 drop Drax is in here just for flavor. You always want Rocket, and will lose if you don't have him. In a more competitive version of the deck, I would drop Drax for two more copies of Blitzkrieg Bop. Rocket gets you the locations that the deck needs in order to function, and as with Ahmed, once you have him (and Baby Groot) you can get anyone else you need by searching for Hooked On a Feeling. He's modeled on Poison Ivy, obviously, but he is as critical to the deck as Ahmed is in a Checkmate deck.

The only 4 drop is Star-Lord. He has the MUN Iron Man effect, but only when he has three Awesome Mix equipment attached. When this deck is working right, on turn 4 you have Star-Lord with three equipment (normally giving him +3/+3 or +4/+4), Groot, Rocket and Baby Groot. If you are on evens, attack with Groot and Rocket as needed. If they stun, they will recover and gain a counter thanks to Star-Lord. Attack with Star-Lord last unless he can't be stunned while attacking. If you are on odds, Groot goes in front of Star-Lord, so he should always survive the turn. Rocket may require help, and there's both a plot twist and an equipment card that can assist with that.

On turn 5, you always want Gamora. Groot is much like the 3 drop Drax, a flavorful addition. I've only ever recruited him on turn 7 or 8, never on 5. Looking at Gamora's effect, you might assume that you would always want to move equipment from Star-Lord to her, but that's not so. If you are defending on 5, it is often better to leave them on Star-Lord, to help you preserve your field. If your opponent doesn't have flight, put her in front of Star-Lord so she auto-recovers, then maybe move the equipment to her on 6. Her effect is great if you are odds, though. Give her the equipment and let her take out the opposing 5 drop.

Turn 6 is normally Drax. You can recruit Rocket if you need to fetch a location and you lost the 3 drop prematurely. He's just a better version of the 3 drop. Drax is a game changer in a lot of match-ups. This deck auto-lost to stall until I gave Drax evasion. Now it's 50-50. Assuming that you are ahead going into turn 6, and they are exhausting all your guys each turn, you can usually win by double evading a fully equipped Drax. That's the old Electric Eve trick: evade him once during combat, to do 6 in burn in exchange for 6 to yourself. When he auto-recovers at the start of recovery, evade him again to do another 6, then use your one recovery per turn on him. Doing that on 6 and 7 will win most matches against stall.

The usual play on 7 is Star-Lord, although it will sometimes make more sense to underdrop Rocket. It depends whether you still have the 4 drop, and what equipment is still in your deck. His effect is not overly powerful, but if you put the right equipment on him he can get +6/+6, and a 21/21 7 drop is nothing to sneeze at.

As I've indicated, the location cards are critical to the deck's success. Awesome Mix, Vol. 1 is the most important, and is often the first one to search for with Rocket. It's essential that you be able to move the equipment around, because normally you want to max out the equipment on your biggest guy. If you are on turn 3 and no one is equipped yet, though, get Vol. 2 instead. Search for the equipment card you want most, equip it to Rocket, then activate and draw. If you get or already have a character card you don't need, discard it to draw again. Because of all the discard effects and the fact that you have to commit so many cards to the field, it is important to create card advantage whenever you can.

Next in line is usually Go All The Way or I Want You Back. If you need to get your discarded 5 drop back, grab I Want You Back. If not, get Go All The Way, which is a lot like Brother Eye. On init use it to boost someone's ATK, usually by 3-6. Off init, use it to get back Baby Groot or a Star-Lord. One trick I really like to use on an off init is to activate Go All The Way in chain to the draw to get back Baby Groot, then discard Baby Groot for Blitzkrieg Bop. Draw for the turn, then get Baby Groot back again at the start of your recruit. The secondary effect for I Want You Back, which lets you put an Awesome Mix card from your pile on top of your deck, is one I don't think I've ever used. But against certain decks it could be really helpful. Suppose you have one Awesome Mix, Vol. 1 in your row and one in your pile. They Have a Blast! the one in your row. In response, activate I Want You Back, discarding a spare Star-Lord, to put they other one on top of your deck. Evil scheme foiled!

The other location you would search for most frequently would be Hooked On a Feeling, which is like Brother I Satellite. The combination of it, Rocket, and Baby Groot makes the deck very consistent in terms of hitting its preferred curve. And since it costs 2, you can use it to get Groot, who can get you Rocket. The other location, Higher Ground, is a recent addition to the deck. I've never actually searched for it, I don't think, but it is nice to have against aggro decks. You can give your biggest guy +3 DEF when defending, usually, and if someone gets stunned who you can't recover, you can bounce him to your hand to create card advantage.

The plot twists are mostly pumps. I originally designed them to get most of their boost from being equipped, but what I found was that the equipped guys didn't usually need help. So then I changed them all so that you always got something out of them, but you got more for a fully equipped guy. Let's Get It On (think Savage Beatdown) is a +4 for anyone, but +5 for a character with three equipment. Thriller (think It's Clobberin' Time) is +3 for anyone, but +3/+3 for the fully equipped. Rocket Man (think Flying Kick) is +3 for anyone, or +3 and flight for the turn. Take a Walk On The Wild Side (think Mega-Blast) is +3, or +4 and range for the turn. The two for-the-turn pumps are leftovers from a time when I had one equipment card that let a fully equipped character attack twice per turn. Way too powerful on Gamora, especially. Now the only real benefit is that you can play them during the build and then replace them with Rocket.

Blitzkrieg Bop ("Hey! Ho! Let's Go!"--kinda goes with the Alex Ross art) is the other tutor for the deck. It does enough drawing and cycling and tutoring that you don't need four copies, but I think two are essential, and three would be better. I recently cut one for Higher Ground, and I'm undecided about the move. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough is another equipment tutor. You normally want to exhaust Baby Groot for the cost if you can.

Stayin' Alive should probably be played in multiples. The deck only works well when it is preserving its field on most turns. A more competitive version of the deck would probably play 2-3 copies. Ain't That Peculiar (Invasion Plans) is a recent addition to the deck, when I was experimenting with the 1 cost version of Baby Groot that requires a discard and needed to compensate. Probably should not go in the version with the 0 drop.

Now for the really cool stuff, the Awesome Mix equipment cards. I love these things. They are fun and flavorful, and I love being able to pick cards from a toolbox to counter various threats. Most of them are geared toward making the main guy of the moment more powerful, though. The two building blocks are Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Fooled Around And Fell In Love. The former gives him +1 ATK for each equipment, and the latter +1 DEF. Combine these with something that gives him +1/+1, and you get +4/+4, just like you would get with the Fate Artifacts. (On the 7 drop, who can have an additional +1/+1, it would be +6/+6.)

O-O-H Child is another one inspired by the Artifacts. Use it to draw and cycle through your deck. Same for Footloose. +1/+1 and your guy can't be targeted by your opponent's effects, so a Cloak. The Kevin Bacon thing is mainly for flavor, although it would let you recruit two copies of Drax, for example.

The one I search for most often is probably Spirit In The Sky, On your biggest guy, having +3/+3 or +4/+4 and not getting stunned back when attacking gives you a huge advantage, especially when that guy is Star-Lord, who protects the guys around him. Moonage Daydream is important to have against decks with key hidden characters. The deck normally struggles against all-hidden decks like Skrulls/Inhumans, which can attack on every turn, but this card levels the playing field a bit.

Come And Get Your Love is the last of the cards that boost your guys. It's a +1/+1 when attacking, and a +3/+1 when defending, for that Nasty Surprise effect. Makes it hard to avoid stunbacks. Cherry Bomb is like Reality Gem. Use it to take out Omnipotence, New Brotherhood, or whatever else is giving you problems in your opponent's row. Just don't equip it to Baby Groot.

War and I'm Not In Love go together. War is like a Death Warrant. Exhaust Baby Groot to equip it to an opponent's biggest guy, and when that guy stuns, he'll get KO'ed. And you'll get it back so you can rinse and repeat. I'm Not In Love is important for neutralizing opposing characters with troublesome effects, like Ahmed or Mr. Sinister. It's based on Electron Scrambler, which is a cool card that I never saw anyone actually play.

Finally, there's Escape. I originally designed it to work like Extremis Upgrade, but I found that effect to be a little too good. So I changed it so that you get to keep the guy who got stunned, but they don't recover until the recovery phase. I normally use this on Rocket or Gamora, so I can keep both them and Star-Lord around. A common play on 4 against aggro, for example, is Groot in front of a fully equipped Star-Lord, with Rocket next to him equipped with Escape. Star-Lord will preserve Groot, since Groot always stuns first, and if they attack Rocket last, Escape protects him. Similar logic would apply if you wanted Gamora next to Star-Lord on 5.

Besides being a whole lot of fun, this is a very competitive deck. It does really well against a variety of very good decks, including New Brotherhood, because it has answers for most threats. It struggles mightily against anything with equipment and resource row hate--Jester is a pain in the butt, for example. It also struggles against good defensive decks that aren't stalling, like Family of Four. It really needs to finish you by the end of turn 7, because if it can't, it runs out of gas. Drax's burn effect helps against pure stall, but not against aggro-control decks that want to attack on 8. It did actually beat Crisis Doom the one time I tested against it, but only because it missed Reign of Terror on 4 and never got Mr. Sinister or Death of a Dream. Decks that can KO characters easily are like kryptonite. If you lose Rocket on 3 or a fully equipped Star-Lord on 4, you simply aren't going to recover. My Nasty Surprise deck eats this one for lunch, for example,

Again, if you are building this deck, I would encourage you to experiment a bit with Baby Groot. I don't find the 0 drop version overpowered within the context of the deck, myself. I think of him simply as a combo piece that it is important to get. But in order to really appreciate that you need to see the alternative, so it's worth proxying up the other versions. The regular cards are here, and the MPC-ready ones are here, so help yourself if you are so inclined. If nothing else, I think you'll enjoy looking at the art for this one. The Skottie Young ones are hilariously cool, especially Go All The Way and Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough.