Welcome to another installment of Week in Review. The countdown to Pro Circuit: Atlanta has begun! With the X-Men set ready for release and only four weeks to go until the big event, players everywhere are getting down to business. New decks featuring the Brotherhood, Hellfire Club, Morlocks, and X-Men teams are being created in both Modern and Golden Age. To the casual observer, this is a quiet time for Vs. System—the new set is out, and there aren’t any major events for several more weeks. Beneath the surface, though, the community is abuzz with activity. Unfortunately, preparation for big tournaments tends to be a little hush-hush, so the testing season doesn’t provide a whole lot of informative reading material. The only further thing I can say about the PC at this point is that if you haven’t started testing yet, you should. Marvel Modern Age is a great format. If you aren’t qualified for the PC, you should work on that, too. Pro Circuit Qualifier events are happening all the time, and you can find a list of them here.

Even though the contents of the X-Men set are now public knowledge, there’s still one little loose end to wrap up. The starter set, which is also legal for the Pro Circuit, won’t make its debut for a few more days. While the starter set doesn’t feature any characters with Mutant traits, it does feature a whole lot of new Brotherhood and X-Men characters. As with any other starter set, it has the potential to make an impact on Constructed. And, naturally, if you’re a player who wants to introduce someone to Vs. System, the starter set is a good way to go. More on that later. For now, let’s look at what happened this week on Metagame.com.

Paul Ross started off the week with his twenty-sixth installment of Cerebro. Paul goes over all of the loose ends and recurring issues from before the X-Men release. Of special importance in this article is a rules change that alters the functionality of several cards. Effects that trigger when a character “defends” will now trigger only once per character that becomes a defender, as opposed to once per attacking character. Check out his article for specifics on which cards this rules change will affect.

On Monday, Rian Fike brought us a Valentine’s Day–themed Risk Vs. Reward. He explores the unlikely links between love and Vs. System. I’ll leave my commentary at that—read it for yourself.

Our next article was a special feature from Mike Hummel, the guy in charge of the guys who design Vs. System. Mike’s thoughts on the design and development process are always insightful, and this time is no exception. For those of you who are interested in TCG theory, this is a must-read.

There are a lot of problems associated with revisiting older teams. How do you balance one team having far more cards than another? Is it a good idea to maintain a consistent theme from set to set? Is it ever correct to reprint cards? Mike addresses all of these questions, and more.

Michael Barnes delivered another installment of Breaking Ground on Wednesday. His featured deck for this week focused on . . . Roll Call!. It sounds unorthodox, but what he ends up with is a solid JLA power-up deck. As always, Michael does a great job explaining how each card in the deck works together. He also provides a little glimpse into his local store and playtesting group.

Nate Price had a monopoly on Thursday with two excellent new articles. First, he continued his series on drafting JLA. Now, you might be asking, with X-Men released, why should you care about drafting the previous set? The answer, of course, is that JLA Draft is the format of choice for PC Atlanta. By the way, if you happen to be heading out that way, I strongly recommend reading all of Nate’s articles. You can have the best Marvel Modern Age deck the world has ever seen, but it won’t do you any good if you don’t know how to draft.

Nate’s second article of the day was another one of his puzzles. The first person to solve this one will receive boxes of X-Men, Marvel Origins, and DC Origins. That’s a sweet prize for a few hours of mental gymnastics, if you ask me. I already know the solution, and it’s not that hard. Really. Not that hard at all. Get to it!

Remember that X-Men starter set I was talking about earlier? Well, R&D member Patrick Sullivan provided a bit of a preview of it in his article on Friday. In addition to showing off four cards that you haven’t seen before, he covered the hows and whys of starter deck design and development. Balancing things so that the decks are interesting yet not mandatory for competitive play is a challenge, and Patrick discusses how R&D solves this and other problems.

Also on Friday, Tim Willoughby talked about playing control. Well, not really. Tim’s article goes into detail about the type of attitude it takes to be a winner in Vs. System. It’s not so much about how to play a control deck—it’s more along the lines of how to control your play. Get the picture? Good. Read the article. It’s a good one.

The week and the Week in Review both wrap up with Part II of Ben Kalman’s Dark Phoenix Saga. In this series, Ben details the back story behind the teams in the X-Men expansion. If you’d like to gain insight into the relationships between the various teams, and you’d rather not have to read a huge backlog of comic books, you should certainly take a look.

Unfortunately, the week has run out of days, and my testing group has run out of patience. I am going back to building Marvel Modern Age decks, and you should, too. Until next time . . .