Marvel Universe Preview: Thunderbolts Mountain

“Gotta keep
One jump ahead of the breadline
One swing ahead of the sword”
-Aladdin

Just so you know, I had a huge, sprawling paragraph planned. Typed up, even. I have a grueling, marathon-style race-to-the-preview-paragraph saved on my computer, right now. But, my benevolent, card-loving friends – screw that. Many of you guessed today’s cards, but…here it is!



“One jump ahead of the lawmen
That's all, and that's no joke”
-…Aladdin, again

Now, there are a number of uses. First things first – man, didn’t Bullseye, Closer to God get just a smidge better, allowing him to stun on curve? Penance can be used on three instead of four. Right away, two of the three Thunderbolts previews have gotten notably better.

Radioactive Man also got better, although slightly more subtly. Because of him, plot twists will be getting progressively more expensive for your opponent, while you’ll consistently be playing them a turn earlier. And considering the number of Legend plot twists that have that little four up in the corner, you could be shutting your opponent down something fierce. Thunderbolts Mountain is the insult you add to Radioactive Man's injury.

It’s more than that, though. Think about some of the BIG cards of Modern Age. The Thunderbolts get access to a few important cards a full turn earlier than anyone and everyone else.

Pathetic Attempt can come out on turn 3 now. Pathetic Attempt is a powerful card, capable of negating such effects as…Deadshot, I believe? There’s that. But as you know, Pathetic Attempt has a number of targets right now, and the Thunderbolts will be shutting ‘em down a full turn early.

Another important card – and don’t worry, this isn’t going to become a list of what cool shenanigans can be pulled off a turn early now – to think on is Savage Beatdown. There’s not really an in depth reason – I just wanted to point out that you can now humiliate your opponent by swinging your 1-drop to the face for 21 damage on turn 3.

Well, with the Super-Hero Registration Act, seen a couple weeks back, you always know exactly what you’re rowing. A character with reservist? Thunderbolts Mountain doesn’t specify which resource you KO, so you can get rid of a useless character or a used plot twist to keep your later curve. Similarly, you can get rid of a used plot twist to keep the shiny new one you just rowed. In many instances, Thunderbolts Mountain is essentially reusable card draw.

Add that to the fact that it has Terraform, and I think you’ve got yourself a winner. Thunderbolts Mountain appears to be fairly crucial to the Thunderbolts ‘getting better over time’ strategy, by making that time come RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW. It also happens to be quite flavorful – the government gives the Thunderbolts all the resources they need to get the job done as quickly as possibly, and UDE took that quite literally. But, beyond just helping the Thunderbolts, this seems like a great card in a Reservist-heavy set. Thunderbolts Mountain appears to be a card that will go in every Thunderbolts deck, and quite a few Thunderbolts team-up decks. It’s simple, powerful, and versatile. I have to say, I like it.

The Best Books You Aren't Reading: The All-New Atom

First, I have to apologize for not posting that deck-list - I left the deck at my girlfriend's place. Apologies, all. Now, back to me telling you what you should be doing with your life and your money.

The All-New Atom is insane. I mean this literally. The book has some of the craziest imagery, settings, and characters imaginable. Born from the mind of comics legend Grant Morrison and written by one of the industry's best, Gail Simone, The All-New Atom deals with Ryan Choi, a young Chinese professor come to America to teach in place of his mentor and friend, the missing Ray Palmer.

The first thing the book establishes Ivy Town, the traditional home of Ray Palmer, as a magnificently warped town. There are Lovecraftian-style Old Ones in the sewers and a group of the most bizarre aliens around living on and controlling the town's dogs. Some of the parts of town dress and talk largely like it were still the 1700s (but with updated slang). And let's not even star talking about the Ivy University teaching staff...

The one thing this book has that most other books on the shelves right now don't is a sense of humor. A great sense of humor. The dialogue is fun, but it's more than that. The supporting cast is great - especially the Lighter Than Air Society, and Head, and Doctor Zuel, and... - and it has, in the Big 2 of Marvel and DC, some of the craziest visual storytelling around.

So, here are a few things that should entice you to read The All-New Atom.

The first arc deals largely with a war between Magic and Science for the soul of Ivy Town, with Ryan Choi stuck in the middle. On one side, the Waiting, alien conqueror wannabes. On the other side, representing magic, is M'Nagallah, an ancient Cancer God and former enemy of Swamp Thing. There's betrayal, a little bit of romance, an enormous romance, fighting, fighting, mad science, and the Old Ones. How much better could things be?

So, to recap:

1: Awesome Fights!
(I had to leave out the tragically awesome fight that preceded this scene between him and a giant, naked Giganta)


Aw, man, the above image is obviously not working. That's tragic - I'll try and find my copy to scan.

2: Gail Simone gives you Head.



Head is an evil alien overlord conqueror captured by Ryan Choi while he was trying to stop the aliens from killing his father and best friend. Ryan never really got around to returning him to the aliens, so now, Head lives with him.

3: ...interesting cameos?



Indeed. Reality has jumped the shark.

Give the book a shot. Remember what I said a week or two back? If you want to try an issue of one of my The Best Books You Aren't Reading, leave a comment here telling me which book you're willing to try, and I'll give you a good jumping off point. If you aren't satisfied with the book, PM me on VSRealms and let me know why you didn't enjoy it, and I'll send you a MVL or DCL foil or rare.

The list is now as follows
The All-New Atom (Gail Simone)
Criminal (Ed Brubaker)
Blue Beetle (John Rogers)
The Immortal Iron Fist (Ed Brubaker)

TT/FF: The Return

Deck list coming over the weekend, but here are some thoughts.

Weaknesses: You NEED to hit Luke Cage, Roy Harper, and Human Torch. If any of those three characters are taken offline permanently, it's very difficult. If ALL of them are taken offline, you lose, flat-out. Teen Titans Go! is also absolutely crucial.

Because of this: Have a Blast! and Pathetic Attempt are fairly vital cards. Pathetic Attempt against the weenie-hate, Have a Blast against Omnipotence.

I played the deck three times tonight.

Game 1: Brave and the Bold single set.

Thoughts.

Missing Luke Cage until turn 7 hurt me, but when I hit him, I hit him hard. Luke Cage + 3 TTG! drew me 8 cards that turn.

Have a Blast shutting down their team-up hurt them a lot, especially when they team attacked expecting the protection of Dynamic Duo.

Firewall is brutal in this deck. I found that my opponent had to dedicate a significant amount of resources towards shutting down Roy Harper and Human Torch, because those two hurt him too much. Adding Miss Martian to the mix shut him down fairly completely.

Game 2: Check/VU

Thoughts.

Fatality hurts. A lot. However, if they don't put the cloak on Fatality, I can and will shut her down every single turn - and if they do, I will King Kill him. So while Fatality hurts, you have easy answers.

The Torch/Harper engine shuts down a number of their effects. It's hard for them to reliably swing down-curve, and they begin to lose the ability to keep their board presence.

All that aside, I ONLY won because I got lucky. I put up a good fight against Check/VU, but the reliability and power of that deck is fairly brutal.

Game 3: Pax Romana

...okay, I wiped the floor with him. Sorry, Saker - I just drew really, really well.

General Deck Thoughts.

The deck is undeniably powerful, but it doesn't reliably have a kill-condition, a problem I ran into repeatedly. The deck struggles to kill - it's struggling is powerful and the engine runs beautifully when you get it online, but it still struggles. My highest drop is 5-drop Miss Martian, but I'm unsure what exactly I want to use as my kill. 7-drop Starfire, maybe? I just don't know. Any suggestions for a good kill?

I need to have Roy and Torch on the field together by 5. I also need to have hit Luke Cage before then. I hit him on 2, I gain at least 4 cards before he leaves play, possibly more. Otherwise, I drop him and a 3, or another 2 and a 1 on turn 5. But Luke is important.



Deck list will be up this weekend. It's a really fun deck to play, even when it's falling apart, so I recommend you give it a shot. For all that I say it's so, Luke isn't absolutely necessary - Roy is the only rare you really NEED, I think. Anyway...

Hope you enjoy!

DC in VS: Rallying Cry!

Rallying Cry! It's more than a VS card - it's more, even, than Rian Fike's excellent series of articles on Vssystem.com.

Recently, UDE announced that they were still in negotiations with DC Comics over licensing. UDE is doing the smart thing and going on making sets regardless of what DC is doing, but that means two Marvel sets this year, and no DC sets, and that's pretty undeniably a bad thing.

Why is that a bad thing, you ask? Because if there are no more DC sets, I'll never get my printed Seven Soldiers team affiliation - and that would be terrible.

Anyway, on Vsrealms.com, we've all been talking. General consensus is that, if we want DC to know that we WANT them back in the game, we have to let them know! Now, we could e-mail them, but e-mails are reliably unreliable. They're better than nothing, but they aren't the best option. It's old-fashioned, but letter-writing campaigns still work best. And who better to go to than the President of DC Comics himself?

Paul Levitz
c/o DC Comics
1700 Broadway, 7th Fl.
New York, NY 10019-5905

Now, a few things. Don't be mean. Don't be angry. Be informative. Be passionate. Be literate. And, just to show that this is a united movement, if you can, throw in a copy of RALLYING CRY, that old DJL common that I'm sure most of you have about 20 of somewhere in your boxes. If you want to throw in a copy of your favorite character, to let them know WHY you care, I fully encourage it - but throwing in a Rallying Cry or 4 makes it a movement.

Hopefully, we'll get a fair number of letters going out. But it's up to YOU to get the word out. If you want DC back, then you'd best get a letter in the mail.

That's all I've gotta say on the matter right now. I got some letter writing to do!

Deck Idea: FF/TT

So, I did a lot of trading this weekend. Got rid of Berserker Rage, 2 Gladiator, a foil Defensive Formation, and more. In return, among other things, I got 4x Roy Harper <> Arsenal, Additional Firepower. Now, recently, I also managed to pick up 4x Signal Flare and built a modern-age F4 deck. And, you know what, I like the synergy between Roy Harper <> Arsenal, Additional Firepower and Human Torch, Nova Blast. Luke Cage, Steel Hard Skin works pretty well, too, and though the Titans lost Tempest, the Four found Namorita.

Over the course of the next week, I'm going to be testing out some team-attack builds between the two teams, and then playing a few games with it over the next couple weeks to let you know what I think. It could be interesting - though I must say, I definitely don't want to be seeing an Omnipotence across the field.

So, the core of the deck.

Roy Harper <> Arsenal, Additional Firepower
Human Torch, Nova Blast
Teen Titans Go!

With definite additions
Luke Cage, Steel Hard Skin
Namorita, Atlantean Warrior Princess

The Best Books You Aren't Reading Best Deal You Aren't Taking Deal Offer Extravaganza

Now, I've opened my mouth and gone and told you exactly what books I think deserve your attention. But it's not just your attention I'm asking you to give - it's your money*. And your money could be going towards other things, not better, but at least as good. VS, just to name one.

And not all of you are comics fans, or you don't read too much beyond a core set of books you've always read. It's tough, generally, to convince people to branch out to these titles with characters they know nothing about.

So, I'm making you an offer, and I'll remind you of this offer every time a do a new The Best Books You Aren't Reading segment. If you buy an issue of one of these series on my recommendation and don't like it, PM me on Vsrealms at SeventhSoldier, let me know what series is was. I'll mail you a random Marvel Legends or DC Legends rare or foil, or a random EA (don't worry - I'll only pull from my pile of Silver Age hobby league stuff)

Now, you can't go and buy 10 issues of Blue Beetle, tell me you hate them all, and then expect 10 rares. I'll give you once chance per series.

I know you won't make back the money you spent on that issue, probably - I don't have a lot of the pricey rares. So, I apologize for that. But, hey, you get a random card if you give one of these series a shot and aren't satisfied with it. That's not a bad deal, all things considered.

And, you know, you'll have an issue of a comic that you don't want. I won't ask you to send it to me, 'cuz that would be too much of an expense to you. So, I'll ask you to give that comic away somehow to another reader who has never done it.

You could give it away as part of a hobby league, or as a contest of some sorts - deck-building, a small tournament, I don't know. Or, you could just ask your local comic shop to give the copy away to someone else who hasn't read it before.

So, there you have it - pick up an issue of John Roger's Blue Beetle, Ed Brubaker/Matt Fraction's Immortal Iron Fist, or Ed Brubaker's Criminal. If you don't like it, tell me about it, I'll reward you for giving it a shot. That's the deal. I'll remind you sometime soon.

Finally, if you want to give this a shot, you can always ask me what issue I think you should pick up. 1 isn't always the best place to start, after all...

Enjoy!

*Unless, of course, you do what I did when I first tried a number of series' and avail yourself to your excellent local library system.

The Best Books You Aren't Reading: Immortal Iron Fist

This one was iffy for me. Not because it's not good - the insane kung-fu exploitation style action meshes so well with the super-hero genre it continually amazes me that we don't see more of it - but because, unlike Criminal and Blue Beetle, and some of the books I'm going to talk about in upcoming segments, it's not on the verge of cancellation. Still, hovering on 30,000 readers and not coming out monthly, it's still not exactly a high-profile book, and the sheer awesome it contains compels me to compel you to read it. So, we're going to have a little talk.

The Immortal Iron Fist is very much a product of cheesy 70s martial arts films. Daniel Rand is a rich white kid, owner of an enormous corporation. One might be tempted, in fact, to call him a millionaire playboy. But, in truth, Danny isn't a playboy. He doesn't have the heart for Bruce's lie. Danny is, really, a pretty sweet, optimistic guy. He's also a guy who plunged his fist into the still-beating heart of Shou-Lao the Undying in one of the Seven Cities of Heaven, and emerged with the powers, and responsibilities, of The Immortal Iron Fist.

Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker work together here to do more than just turn Danny into one of the best pulp action heroes in the Marvel Universe. They're also greatly adding to the mythos. Almost every issue of the first arc, titled "The Last Iron Fist Story", opens with a 1-3 page intro to a past iron fist, some of which have even gotten entire awesome issues, and some of whom have become fan-favorite characters in their own rights. Like, meet this Iron Fist of the past...



The Pirate Queen of Pinghai Bay was one of the more popular single-issue stories, both for its action, but also because it's a genuinely sweet love story, in a way. And the entire first arc of Immortal Iron Fist deals with Danny meeting the Iron Fist from WW II, Orson Randall. The two are confronted by the Hordes of Hydra, led by the Steel Serpent, an old nemesis of the Iron Fist legacy due to a bad past. The action comes heavy, but the story and dialogue are never sacrificed to make room for action scenes. Lots of fun.

Finally, I want you all to remember, I was talking about madcap exploitation action? Well, Iron Fist is joined by an excellent supporting cast. First off, there's Orson Randall, introduced above. Then, there's the Old Guard, Danny's friends that have always been there. As much as Bendis wants me to love Luke Cage in every book he writes, Brubaker is the one who got me to like him. Luke and Danny, along with Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, the old Heroes for Hire. Here they are, together again despite the fact that they're on opposite sides of the Registration Act.





Immortal Iron Fist is probably the best action comic on the market. David Aja, the artist, seems to have immense fun drawing the martial arts action, and I've never seen an artist with a better sense of how to do it. The book is crazy and keeps up its sense of fun. The plot is great, the one-shots are gorgeous and bizarre, and the book is just pretty. Go pick it up.

Politics: Orphan Works Bill

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3605&page=1

On vsrealms.com, if you go into Another Realm, you'll find that poster Bendrix started a thread to let people know about a bill being discussed right now dealing with Orphan Works and how it affects you. The link above is to an article discussing what the bill will mean to each of you, since I know a lot of comic book readers and Vs players are creative people, and since I know that neither Another Realm nor my own blog sees as much traffic as General Discussion on Vsrealms, I would post it here, double the chances of you all finding out about it.

Now, I haven't done any of the requisite research on this topic yet, but I plan on doing some reading over the next couple days.

Here are quick bits from the article, to give you some basic info.

"An Orphaned Work is any creative work of art where the artist or copyright owner has released their copyright, whether on purpose, by passage of time, or by lack of proper registration. In the same way that an orphaned child loses the protection of his or her parents, your creative work can become an orphan for others to use without your permission."

The jist of the bill is that it will make it extremely expensive to copyright things, as well as time-consuming, and could involve multiple private registries that you would have to sign up for. Rather than your works being inherently protected, barring you getting rid of that protection, the bill seeks to make your works inherently unprotected, with you having to pay to protect them.

So, there you have it. Again, I haven't done much research on this topic - at this point, I've just read one or two articles. But I encourage all of you to do your own research and see what you think of these shenanigans, and if it pisses you off as mch as it looks like it'll be pissing me off, make sure to contact the politicians and LET THEM KNOW. General apathy costs us a lot, and I hope it doesn't cost us this, too.