Long Live the Legion!, Part 1

I started playing Vs while Crisis was the current set, so DLS was the first new DC set I got to see when it was released. I remember being very excited when it was announced, crestfallen when it actually appeared. The set was simply terrible. Darkseid's Elite was playable in Modern, but that was about it. Worst of all, the Legionnaires were just worthless.

A crushing blow. When I was a kid growing up, during the Silver Age of comic books, my favorite comics were generally the team-ups: Avengers, X-Men, Justice League, Justice Society, Teen Titans, and especially the Legion of Super-Heroes. I loved the variety of heroes, with their sometimes odd-ball super powers (Bouncing Boy!). And for some reason I cared that they were closer in age to me than older heroes like Batman, Superman and Captain America.

If you had asked me, prior to DLS, what team I most wanted UDE to showcase in a set, and have that team really done right, it would have been Legionnaires. They could only manage half of what I wanted.

The killer blow was in making all the characters cosmic. Understandable, from a flavor point of view, but ugh. What a terrible mechanic. The one good deck that used it was Skrulls-Inhumans, and then only because the deck gave you a good way to keep the cosmic counters on all the characters. With the Legion characters, UDE gave them underwhelming powers even when their counters were on. Seriously? Remove someone else's cosmic counter for the privilege of recruiting a 7/7 4 drop with a ho-hum ability?

A few weeks ago--before I got sidetracked by Bombshells--I was trying to think if there were any more custom Vs decks I wanted to create, and it occurred to me that I had a chance to right the cosmic wrong that UDE had done to my beloved Legion. The question was, how to do them right? My first thought was that there are a LOT of Legionnaires, and that the deck should allow you to play as many as possible. When the Legion fought a powerful enemy, like Validus, it won the battle by attacking with waves of superheroes fighting as a team. So, my next thought was that the deck should flood the field with lots of characters who generally took down much bigger opponents by means of team attacking.

When I thought about what such a deck would look like, I immediately realized that I was describing a mono-team version of X-Faces. If you aren't familiar with that deck, the basic idea was to team up X-Men with Masters of Evil, using Faces of Evil as the main team-up. Poison Ivy was used to fetch locations (X-Corp Amsterdam to get Faces, Birthing Chamber to get cards, Slaughter Swamp to manipulate the pile). Dr. Light (in the good old days, pre-ban) was used to bring characters onto the field from the pile. Hard Sound Construct was used to bring out additional characters for free, and Kyle Rayner was used to get it. Characters got ATK boost from Faces, Blackbird Blue, The Wrecking Crew, and maybe Cyclops, Slim.Tutoring came from Enemy, Yellowjacket, Rita DeMara, and Beetle, Armorsmith. The deck wanted odds. On turn 4 you would play Marcus Daniels to give all your characters reinforcement, to limit the damage you could take, then on 5 you would flood the field with attackers and swing for game.

It was always one of my favorite deck archetypes. There were lots of ways to build it, and variations on it worked in several different formats. In any case, it seemed like a perfect concept for my Legionnaires deck. I could give some of the key Legion members (Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, Brainiac 5) the powers of Dr. Light, Poison Ivy, Yellowjacket, Beetle, and Kyle Rayner, and then most of the other team members could become 1-of attackers.

Another decision that I made early on was that I wanted to do a special futuristic looking card template for the deck, along the lines of what I did for my Asgardians deck. Mainly this was a matter of taking my Asgardians template and changing the fonts to something with more of a sci-fi look. For a little extra fun, I gave some of the cards colored borders, like this orange-bordered Triplicate Girl.

The other thing I did was to create a custom back for the cards, as I do with all my custom decks. This one looks particularly nice, I think.

That's enough background. In Part 2 I'll show you the cards and describe how the deck works.