VS: Bring Your Own Two Teams - Crime Lords/JLI Edition

The Family. A criminal organization. If it gets big enough, if you get deep enough, it could be like a family. Really, anything can be like a family. A small super-team, no matter how ineffectual and goofy, could be like a family. It was, for the JLI. And the Crime Lords, like any good fictional criminal gang, places a lot of emphasis on family, on loyalty.

If you read the VS segments of my blog, you know that one of the teams that, for some inexplicable reason, I've always been quite fond of is Marvel's Crime Lords. For a long time considered one of the worst teams in the game, I loved them nonetheless, and it's always a pleasure to be able to build a Crime Lords deck utilizing old, and with MUN, new cards together.

Another team I've been fond of, though I neither discuss nor make use of them often, is the JLI. A team of goof-off super-heroes having bizarre adventures more suited to sit-com than spandex, the JLI offered an intriguing mix of comedy and drama in the comics, and so they are one of many teams that I'm desperately glad to see in VS.

In the newest Bring Your Own Two Teams format, you get to pick two teams, Golden Age, and you don't have to run a team-up. On the other hand, though, you flat-out can't run any generic cards. Almost every single type of deck in existence loses a lot from this. Savage Beatdown, Mobilize, Birthing Chambers - these are important, powerful cards, and we can't use them. So, you build around it.

The JLI offer two things to the Crime Lords in the way of characters - Martian Manhunter, a board-reinforcement guy on a team that enjoys reinforcement, and Animal Man, a character who gets bigger whenever he enters combat. They also offer effects that will allow Animal Man multiple safe attacks in a turn in Safety in Numbers, and full-on attack negation in Running Interference.

Meanwhile, the Crime Lords offer you Underground Laboratory, a brutally efficient card-draw engine (I wonder if Checkmate could do anything with that...?), a way to make Animal Man your defender whenever you want in Armed Escort, and one of the best defense pumps available in Drive-By Shooting. They also offer a low-cost army character that recovers characters and has range. These things, they are very nice.

So, once again, I present to you - a deck using pet teams and themes that are vastly enhanced by the lack of a team-up needed! Woohoo! I can literally smell your thrill from over here.

6x The Hand, Army * HYDRA
8x AIM Agents, Army * AIM
4x Sue Dibny, Charismatic Coordinator


4x Sin, Synthia Schmidt * RAID
2x Arnim Zola, The Bio-Fanatic * RAID

4x Animal Man, Buddy Baker

3x Martian Manhunter, Founding Member

1x The Sleeper, Doomsday Device * RAID

4x Armed Escort

4x Underground Laboratory

4x Drive-By Shooting
4x UN General Assembly
4x Good Night, Sweet Prince
4x Running Interference
4x Safety in Numbers

And that's that. Obviously, you want Animal Man out on 4 or 5. On or off initiative doesn't matter - he's an extremely efficient 4-drop, nothing more, and one that allows you to under-drop in later turns without penalizing yourself in available ATK/DEF. Martian Manhunter means each and every single one of those army guys are going to be reinforced and a simple exhaust will equal crazy card-draw, while the recovery ability of The Hand, and the ability of Sin, will allow you to negate attacks on Animal Man with Running Interference. Arnim Zola can turn otherwise dead army-characters into a 4-point swing each turn, and when The Sleeper comes down, that should be all she wrote.

I hope you've enjoyed yourself. It could definitely use some tweaking from a more experienced deck-builder, but the deck is certainly fun. I've got a few more decks I'm playing with in my head right now, for future use, and coming up pretty soon we'll see the blog expand into discussion of a few fiction authors some of you might just get a kick out of, as well as the usual rigamarole of my own personal blatherings.

Hope the weekend was great, and enjoy the semi-holiday tomorrow!

Marvel Universe Draft

I suppose I'll start off apologizing - I realize that I waited awhile to update. On the upside, and this is the unfortunate reason for the delay, I am done with finals and I have graduated from Ohio University. I have moved back home for the summer as I prepare for graduate school, and am working as a camp counselor for middle school children. All-in-all, a number of reasons for not updating, but I was nonetheless not updating. Apologies!

Wow. MUN draft is everything that the disaster that MVL draft wasn't. There are a variety of strategies ranging in complexity and style. I ended up taking 2nd place in our 7-man draft after 2 wins, a loss, and a bye - and I did it without a single damn attack pump! I will say, having fully a third of your deck consisting of spot-reinforcement, especially when combined with cards like Baron Strucker, can be pretty brutal when very few, if any, people have access to tricks that blow reinforcement.

One of my favorite parts of DC Legends draft is the fact that that all the teams worked together. MVL was a simple case of picking a big character and turning it sideways. Team themes didn't matter. In MUN, this is no longer the case. You find that due to a frankly embarrassing amount of dual-affiliation, everyone works with everything in a glorious explosion of Vs - a Vs Explosion, one might call it if one happened to have that as his blog address. Theoretically.

So, we drafted a couple days back. I hadn't yet had a chance to draft, and I hadn't been looking at draft strategies online, so I wasn't sure what was viable and what wasn't. I thought that Avengers would be huge, as would SHIELD, while Thunderbolts would be a tough play, even if no one else was playing it. Knowing very little about the set except, of course, what was previewed (Thunderbolts Mountain for the WIN?) and a brief look at the full set spoiler posted a few days ago, I decided to try and force-draft Crime Lords. Why? Well...because they're the Crime Lords. I really don't have a better reason than that.

Anyway - first pack, I saw 3-drop Red Skull. The pack rare was Avengers stamped, and I suspected Avengers would go big. I had the advantage of knowing exactly what the person to my left was forcing: Warbound. I wasn't worried about him stealing my stuff. Another guy at the table was definitely going to be stealing the Thunderbolts stuff, so I was safe there. There were four people I were unsure about, but I figured I'd be the only one pulling all the Crime Lords stuff. I was wrong, of course, but not by much.

I tried to keep just pulling Crime Lords stuff. I got Crossbones, Sin, and a few of the 1-drop Crime Lords army character that spot-reinforces. On top of that, I got Radically Advanced, the Red Skull legend plot twist, and things seemed to be going well. I ended up getting Cosmic Control Rod shoved on me, but I didn't mind too much, because I was shaping up to have a decent Crime Lords curve, though I had by now noticed that there was a strange lack of CL attack pumps.

Pack 2 came out, and I was a little disappointed - not a single crime lords card I wanted to pull. I ended up taking one of the Negative Zones (Harvester of Sorrows), as it didn't require I control a NZ character. Next pack had Sin in it, so I yanked her out, but the pack after that, again, had no CL characters I particularly needed. I ended up pulling a second Negative Zone, again because it didn't require that I control a NZ character. Pack after that? Again, a lack of Crime Lords.

It was here that I began to suspect that someone else might have been playing Crime Lords. I went through round two, pulling whatever CL cards I could, including 7-drop Red Skull and two copies of 6-drop Baron Strucker, but other than that, round two was dedicated to pulling all the Negative Zone cards I could. Round three came, and I had a pretty strong suite of support cards for Negative Zone and Crime Lords, but not nearly as many characters as I knew I needed. I always over-pull either on support or on characters, and this time, it was support.

First pack I opened, I pulled Blastaar as my rare, and considering that I had three Negative Zones, I figured that it his downside wasn't too much of a downside. I pulled another Negative Zone, bringing me up to 4 total, and I pulled 5-drop Annihilus and two 4-drop Centurions.

Despite my lack of attack pumps, I thought my deck was pretty tricky for a draft deck. I'd be gaining life and drawing cards from my Negative Zones, and if I got lucky, like I did against the Warbound deck, the rare Negative Zone that KO's would hit the field, and I would be controlling the board pretty fiercely.

Round 1: Crime Lords/Negative Zone vs Avengers Reservist

My tendency to overpull support cards nearly killed me here, as on turn 5, I took over 20 damage, only hitting a 5-drop and a 3-drop the entire damn game up to that point. He had me at 20, while he was sitting comfortably at 43 going into turn 6.

Baron Strucker came out, and he sat pretty in front of my off-team off-theme She-Hulk. Strucker swung into his 5-drop, dealing a little breakthrough and taking him below 40, and then I waited for swing-backs. He threw his 6 into Strucker, but spot reinforcement and spot invulnerability meant he was taking 6 while I was taking nothing, and it meant that he had no other attacks that turn - he wanted a big board for his swings next turn.

Next turn, he under-dropped a few Young Avengers, planning to team attack into my 5 and 6 and...7, as 7-drop Red Skull hit play. He had enough flight to take down Red Skull, but he could only get a single stun on Strucker, and She-Hulk. I let She-Hulk out of her misery, and recovered Red Skull.

Turn 8, Blastaar came down, and my opponent winced. I should have been at 3 endurance, but thanks to having two Harvester of Sorrows, I actually had more than 10 endurance. Radically Advanced was flipped, and Blastaar took out his 6-drop, who had been placed to squeeze out some reinforcement, gaining me 6 and losing him 6. I believe it pretty much ended there, with me coming from more than a 20-point deficit to pull out a win.

Round 2: Crime Lords/Negative Zone vs. Warbound

This match, I was worried about. I wasn't sure if he had found the 2-drop Warbound character who blew reinforcement, but I eventually learned that he did not, in fact, have said character, and from then on, I was sailing. Wrongfully, I learned - while I had strokes of good luck, he made it so that whenever a Hulk he controlled stunned a character, that character was KO'd. Worse yet, I didn't hit a team-up until turn 8!

With Blastaar free-stunning his enormous Hulks, I was able to avoid that fate fairly often by the time it was a serious problem, and the Negative Zone that KO'd his people was an enormous help towards keeping his board exactly as I wanted it, but even so...in the end of the match, I had him at 0 endurance, and he was barely there. He had a stronger early game and a stronger late game, but I got lucky in the middle, and I had too much reinforcement to punch through the damage he needed to kill me. It was a close game, and he bled my character count dry, but in the end, the Warbound were shut down by the simple AIM Agents.

Round 3: Crime Lords/Negative Zone vs. Cap Legends

You hear me right. One member of the draft got, and I'm not kidding: 2 copies of 2-drop Cap, a 6-drop Cap, Cap's Shield, Shield Slash x2, and Stars and Stripes. On top of all the Cap stuff, he pulled a full Avengers reservist curve, including 3 copies of The Big Three. In the end...what could I do against such a ridiculous draft deck? Well, a lot, as it turns out.

My first big stroke of luck came on turn 6. He wanted to kill, and with a 4-6 curve, he played 3 copies of The Big 3, paying the full replace costs - a board-wide +6 ATK for the turn. He thought he had me, but Sin gave me a free reinforce, AIM Agents gave me a second freebie, and his final attack, which he was positive would deal me some serious hurt, was blown out by a No Retreat, No Surrender. I was sailing high going into next turn, as I wasn't losing anything particularly big and that's when Blastaar came down. Unfortunately, 6-drop Cap is kind of a buzz-kill when it comes to using Blastaar's ability - I had to use it on Cap, and that left me with barely enough attack power to swing back into Iron Man. Still, I was able to do so - not that it mattered, as he flipped Stars and Stripes and paid himself down to 5 endurance to recover Captain America. While we were both going into turn 8 with our 5, 6, and 7, I just didn't have the defensive power necessary to surviving his attacks and he knocked me to well-below -10. I struck back...but it was too little, too late, and I got my first loss.

Round 4: Bye

That's all I got for that one.

This earned me 2nd place in the 7-man draft, netting me an extra pack.

We divvied up the rares and each got our fair share of 'em. Our host, who had paid for another guy to get in and thus was claiming his prize cards on top, said that he would abandon all his further picks if he got the Captain America, Champion License, Captain America, Sentinel of Liberty, and the Captain America's Shield. The rest of us didn't much care, and so we let him take 'em, then we dug in. I ended up with a pretty good haul

Carrying the Torch
Vision, Young Avenger
Wolverine, Secret Avenger

and a few others. I also got the bulk of the commons and uncommons needed for my SHIELD/Crime Lords deck, and traded for a Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas! from another one of the players present, as well as getting a 3-drop James Barnes <> Winter Soldier, a Mandarin, and one or two other Crimes Lords rares in return for my Charging Star. There was some good trading going on at 2 AM. Or some bad trading. We aren't quite sure.

MUN Draft was a pretty good experience. It was fun and unpredictable, with a variety of interesting strategies available. The number of ways to prevent taking damage is barely exceeded by the number of ways to push through all that damage. It was an enjoyable draft, even if I did have to return to really, really bad paper writing as soon as the draft ended. Okay, as soon as the draft and then Starship Troopers ended. Okay, the draft, Starship Troopers, and a few more chapters of Cursor's Fury. An my...okay, you know what, you get the point. The paper-writing sucked, the draft rocked, and everything in between was just peaches and cream.

Have a great night! Tomorrow after work, I'm going to call around my new area and see if anyone has any MUN left. I doubt it, but anything's possible.

And to my Athens group - I'm gonna miss playing with you guys. I don't know if I'll find a VS group in Pittsburgh half as good, but I'll be lucky if I do. Hopefully, I'll be able to afford Worlds, but I doubt it. If I don't see you there...well, then, good luck, and I hope you keep rockin' out some crazy decks!

CRIME LORDS!

So, Marvel Universe previews are in full swing. While I've swung wildly from "Woo! That's frackin' awesome!" for things like the Avengers previews to the "Oh...it's that...thing" for the Illuminati. Generally, my gut reaction has been spawned from how much I care about the teams/characters. Thus, the Illuminati invokes a sense of Bendis Dread, while Squirrel Girl made me smile and yell at my roommates.

Now, there's something of a...cult. A cult of, let's call it, awesome. And that cult is dedicated to the use of the Crime Lords team in Vs. The art isn't great on many of the crime lords cards, and they are and always have been massively underpowered. The characters are far from big-name, and their theme, while interesting, wasn't the most useful one you could imagine. It was a lot of fun to play, though, and the effects were frequently hilarious. People were generally unsure what to think when they saw Marked for Death or Untouchable.

Today begins Crime Lords week. Now tied in with Hydra, the Crime Lords are back and better, perhaps, than ever. Over on Vssystem.com, they gave us our first taste of the Crime Lords goodness to follow.



Yup. Bucky's gotten bigger and badder. After almost dying in the explosion that froze Cap, Bucky was found and captured by the Russians. During the Cold War, the brain-washed but highly trained Bucky was used as the Soviets premiere assassin, always put back to 'sleep' after each mission. Recently, however, he broke free and remembered himself, but before then, he was a killer for hire, working with Lords of Crime in order to destabilize Captain America and get revenge for slights during WW2 and the Cold War.

THIS is the kind of power level the Crime Lords needed. Instead of making them almost curve if they're reinforced, giving them a free-stun - now that's potent. If this is an indication as to what the Crime Lords will be like, expect me to pick up a playset of each of them.

The second card for today?



A finishing move that requires a little bit of planning, but it's great for playing the psychological games the Crime Lords love so much. With Death Warrant, opponents will never know exactly when it's safe to attack without automatically losing their characters.

There's a lot of potential here. I can't wait to see what UDE has in store for us this week!

Good Night, Sweet Prince

In honor of the Crime Lords month trend that has popped up, I thought I'd do my own little homage to one of the best teams in the game. Now, I was not always the purely average, middle-of-the-road (but handsome and stylish) deck-builder that I am today. I was once a new player, stubbornly refusing the not-big-enough starter decks or far simpler mono-team decks in favor of my own genius creations.

Ah, to be young again.

To make a short story even shorter, I shall present you now with a fairly faithful recreation of that deck. I say fairly faithful because I remember certain drops much better than others - and the deck changed literally every time I opened a pack.

So here, my friends, is...

KANG LORDS X

3 Roscoe Sweeney, Fixer
3 Dazzler, Alison Blaire
3 Vanessa Fisk, Mob Matron

4 Kobra, Klaus Vorhees
3 Bishop, Lucas Bishop

2 Mr. Hyde, Calvin Zabo
3 Kingpin, Wilson Fisk
2 Banshee, Sean Cassidy

2 Echo, Maya Lopez
2 Jester, Jonathan Powers
2 Masked Marauder, Frank Farnum
1 Kang, Earth Mesozoic-24

2 The Russian, Contract Killer
2 Cyclops, Scott Summers

2 Colossus, Peter Rasputin
2 Storm, Weather Party

1 Kang, Lord of Limbo
1 Wolverine, Berserker Rage

Characters, 40

3 Face the Master
4 Good Night, Sweet Prince
3 Marked for Death
3 No Rest for the Wicked
4 Rough House
1 Sold Out
3 The Family
1 Untouchable
3 Fastball Special
4 Marvel Team-Up
1 Made Men
2 Psyche Globe
3 Spheres of Solitude
3 Burn Rubber

Plot Twist, 38

Yes, this 78-card monstrosity was responsible for a great many victories in its day. I mean, also a great many losses - can't forget that. It was these three teams because these were the three teams I had the most cards for - right there, you can almost taste the prodigious care that went into my deckbuilding.

So, the plan? The way the deck played was, I hoped, desperately, to draw Roscoe Sweeney on turn 1. I don't think I ever did. Then I wanted Kobra on turn 2, 'cuz then I knew I'd have a 3. This was also comparatively rare. In reality, I dropped whatever I had to to stay alive until turn 7, when Kang, Lord of Limbo came in for the win. When Kang moved their smallest character off to the hidden area, they thought they were getting a massive benefit of some kind, that I had just, unwittingly perhaps, protected them from that damage. Oh, how deliciously wrong they were. My favorite card at the time, the card that I proudly had traded and bought to get a full playset of, was Good Night, Sweet Prince. I liked looking at it. I loved saying it. I would, at the start of my attack step on turn 7, smile condescendingly at my befuddled opponent and say, all saccharine sweet, "Goodnight, sweet prince." I might even be tempted to reach across the table, to pretend to stroke their cheek once, lovingly. And then Kang, with all his 15 ATK glory, would pound the ever-living hell out of the poor, unreinforceable bastard.

Thus did I win - sometimes. I could also hope for a Wolverine sighting on 7, which became more and more important as the sets came out. JLI Four or Fewer hated either ending. And, eventually, the deck was dismantled. I learned that 60 cards really are better than 80. I learned that search was my friend, and that I should probably use occasional attack pumps. I've learned a lot about the game since then, but I keep hoping to see the Crime Lords again sometime. The reinforcement theme was fun - the ability to give your opponent the initiative, laughable. And, there's always that tiny, hidden desire, to be able to buy yet another foil playset of one of my favorite cards in the game. It would be an absolutely brutal card today, with the prevalence of hidden beats. And I would love every second of it.