The Chosen One

The Ring may have chosen Hal Jordan of Vs. Corps banner fame; but he certainly isn’t the only chosen one out there.  That’s right, I’m talking about Buffy Summers of Sunnydale California, er… formerly of Sunnydale California.  It kind of imploded in the last season of the TV show.  Luckily for me though, the story lived on in one of my favorite mediums: Graphic Novels!  In my book, that’s all you need to get the Vs. TCG treatment.  After all, how cool was the Hellboy expansion.  A small set like that would be perfect for Buffy and Co.  In fact, I once made a thread about it on Vs. Realms.  I think it was the only thing I’ve ever been “repped” for.  Here’s the link:

The Gunsmith, Death Times Five

Rarity always seemed to matter to me in Vs.  Most rare attack modifiers like Savage Beatdown, Big Leagues, Steely Resolve, Armageddon, Blinding Rage, etc. outshine their more common counterparts like Combat Reflexes and Acrobatic Dodge.  There is, however, an occasional common or uncommon that is so good you wonder how in the heck it got past the rare-detector.  Teen Titans Go! is the first card that comes to mind.  Though, when you really think about it, only one out of all twelve banned cards is actually a rare, so maybe I need to rethink my hypothesis about the value of rarity.

Back when the Justice League set came out I thought I had found another common card on par with the power of Teen Titans Go!  The first time I read this card I was taken aback.  I thought, “Like ‘Bill’ in the Pokemon TCG that nets you free cards with no drawback, you’d be an idiot not to run as many of these as allowed in your deck!”

Aloha!

As I write this I’m sipping a fruity drink from the comfort of a Hammock.  My Hammock is actually a bed, and is not at all in Hawaii as hinted at, though I’m going to pretend because I’m weird like that!  As I mentioned last week, my summer work hours have fried my brain and I needed a week off from thinking.  That being said, I went to see some movies.  Last Friday I saw The Dark Knight;  Tuesday I saw HellboyII; and tonight I’ll be watching Step Brothers, which looks hilarious!

JUSTICE… IS DEAD!

After all the craziness of Worlds and the DCU set being unveiled, I thought I’d slow down and do what I used to do with this blog… take one card, and examine a bevy of possible uses for it, obvious and otherwise.  The card I want to look at today is called Phyla-Vell <> Quasar, Protector of the Universe.  As far as the sealed environment goes Phyla is dyno-mite!  She grants your entire team the ability to team attack and reinforce as though they had all team affiliations.  This ability means that you don’t have to run as many team-ups in the sealed environement, or at least you don’t have to stress about hitting them as consistantly.  However, it’s another one of her abilities that I want to focus on today.  I’m far more interested in her ability to auto-recover whenever she becomes stunned.  “Whenever” might be a poor word choice on my part because this ability is a cosmic one.  After the first time that she stuns and recovers she loses her ability to do it again.  My goal today is to look at ways to eliminate that drawback.  Before we can do that though, we’ve got to think of reasons we would want Phyla to stick around…

Worlds 2008 – Best of the Wurst!

I’m finally ready to relay my Worlds 2008 experience to the masses.  I must apologize for the lateness of this submission but I put in 100 hours of work last week (barely humanly possible) and typed a preview article for the DCU set (which is sweet!), so I had little time for a tournament report.  As such, I may have forgotten a few details, but I’ll do my best to recreate my super-fun-adventure time!

I went to the Origins Game Fair with my friends Paul and Eric Madden.  These were the same two that accompanied me to Mega-Weekend Chicago, and like Chicago we used the drive and our first night in the hotel to do all our playtesting.  Why so little testing you ask?  Well, I put in insane work hours (see above) and the Maddens don’t own Vs. cards.  It’s all good though because we go for the experience.  Winning is just a cool bonus… a bonus that the Maddens experience more than me!

DC Universe is Finally Here!

My journey through the world of CCGs has been a slow, but progressive chapter of my life. I started out sucking hard at multiple games (Decipher’s Star Wars; Score’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Upper Deck’s Vs.). Eventually I became almost competent at Vs., at least competent enough that I was comfortable writing a weekly blog.  Now, starting July 2008, I take my biggest step forward as a CCG gamer. That’s right… preview card entitlement!

I never thought this day would come, yet here it is… my first preview card(s)! I’m not quite sure how they paired these preview cards up with me; it’s almost like they knew I was a Green Lantern fan! Anyway, without further ado, here are your cards.

Concealed MKKO Software version 7.0

Concealed MKKO (Marvel Knights Knock Out) made a big splash back in 2005 taking down $10K (remember those?) crowns everywhere. The success of the deck was due to its speed. It was too fast for Titans and Sentinels. Titans needed to make it to turn six to flood the board with weenies, and Sentinels needed to make it turn six to stonewall with Bastion. MKKO consistantly killed on turn five. Here’s the list of the deck that won a Golden Age $10K in Germany.

1 Micro-Chip, Linus Lieberman
4 Mikado and Mosha, Angels of Destruction
4 Iron Fist, Danny Rand
3 Hannibal King, Occult Investigator
3 Death-Stalker, Phillip Sterling
4 Elektra, Elektra Natchios
4 Luke Cage, Street Enforcer
3 Yelena Belova <> Black Widow, Enemy Agent
4 Daredevil, Matt Murdock
1 Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man

4 Crime and Punishment
4 Crushing Blow
4 Flying Kick
4 Quick Kill
4 Savage Beatdown
3 Swan Dive
4 Wild Ride

2 Punisher’s Armory

I’m Rick Jones, B!&%#

Who knew that Hulk Hogan was thirty seconds in MS Paint from becoming an awful rendition of The Incredible Hulk? That ref in the background sure looks surprised at the transformation. Seriously, I need Adobe PhotoShop or something!

As you can probably guess, this week’s article is about The Hulk. I did not go to the first Hulk movie in theatres. The trailers for it looked awful, and my friends that went opening night had nothing good to say about it (they actually saw a boom in the shot). Eventually, I rented the movie through my online Blockbuster subscription and found that I hadn’t missed much. It had an incredibly slow story that focused on character development a little too much for such one-dimensional characters. Also, I still don’t think I understand what happened in the final battle.

Burninating all the Peoples!

*****Addendum/Apology*****

Apparantely nothing in this article is valid according to Ben Seck’s recent post on the mothership…

Fin Fang Foom – I made a little mistake in my preview article about the dragon with pants. I said you could chain plot twists to an FFF entering play. Except this isn’t possible, as the resource KO’ing is part of the alternate cost, and therefore the resources aren’t even there when he actually enters play! ~TBS

This does not make sense to me because of Fing Fang Foom’s text.  The key thing to note is that his text says, “…when you recruit Fin Fang Foom this way…”  This means Fin is already recruited before his KOing crap goes on the chain.  This should give you a window to chain effects.  I’m not sure who went wrong with what, but an explanation for this error needs to be posted pronto!

*****Enjoy this now worthless article!*****

TROGDOR!
TROGDOR!

Trogdor was a man
I mean, he was a dragon man
Or maybe he was just a dragon

But he was still TROGDOR!
TROGDOR!

Burninating the countryside,
Burninating the peasants
Burninating all the peoples
And their thatched-roof COTTAGES!

THATCHED-ROOF COTTAGES!

(Woah, this has wicked dueling guitar solos!  It’s like, Squeedly versus Meedley over here.  Go Squeedly!  Go Squeedly!  SQUEEDLY WINS!)

Full Frontal Lobo-Tommy

I was trolling through the blogs the other day on the Vs. System Network (see my links) when I came across Lost Hemisphere’s “Thursday 13” about cards that have yet to be broken.  When I got to his #10 on the list and saw that it was Lobo, The Main Man, I slapped myself.  I had not thought of that card since it was previewed before DC Legends was even released!  Now that he was freshly in my mind I decided to build a deck that included him.  I decided not to build a deck “around him,” just one with good synergy.  The fact is, I can’t really see how to break him in a format that usually ends the game before he even comes into play!  However, that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun and find ways to put his power to use.