A little later than the beginning, there were the Fate Artifacts.

And Grijalva looked upon the face of The Base and the Fate Artifacts, and saw that they were . . . problematic.

Later still, probably around time for a light afternoon snack (go ahead, everyone needs snacks), there was . . . the New Baxter Building.

Is it good? Take a look for yourself.

Today’s preview card is a piece of Marvel real estate that represents the truly absurd heights to which Reed Richards’s insurance premiums must have risen. The New Baxter Building is the current home of the Fantastic Four (barring any “Civil War”–related upheavals of which I’m unaware). It replaced their warehouse base at Pier 4 (destroyed during a battle with Diablo), which in turn replaced Four Freedoms Plaza (destroyed by the Masters of Evil while the FF were in Franklin’s pocket universe after the cataclysmic battle with Onslaught), which itself replaced the original Baxter Building after its destruction by Kristoff von Doom. Just remember that little list if you ever get invited for a sleepover. You just know you’d get halfway through the first trashy Steven Seagal flick and tub of popcorn with Johnny Storm and the Thing, and suddenly there’d be some gibbering alien behemoth crashing through the wall.

Now, I figure that should have given you enough time to go through the various stages of reaction:

“The new Antarctic Research Base!”

“But is it any good?”

“Man, that’s . . . that’s good.”

Runs for a pencil and pad and starts scribbling

“Okay, now, where’s that article again?”

Obviously, the New Baxter Building isn’t as powerful as Antarctic Research Base, but it makes up for that with a couple of interesting advantages. And, y’know, not being banned. That helps, I hear.

So, let’s break it down. New Baxter Building is a 1-cost location, just like Antarctic Research Base. It has terraform, which is not only always welcome on any location, but is also (I am guessing) a neat reference to the Building’s construction: it was built in orbit, then teleported onto the site of the old Baxter Building and Four Freedoms Plaza.

Moving on, we have the card’s activated power: “Activate >>> Draw a card. Use only if you recruited an equipment this turn.” Alert readers will already have picked out a big difference from Antarctic Research Base—there’s no “if you control a Fantastic Four character” clause. This time, Reed is spreading the love. Note that all you need to do is recruit the equipment—that is, put the recruit effect on the chain. The equipment doesn’t actually need to come into play in order for you to be eligible to start drawing cards. This is important to remember if something like Reign of Terror or Flame Trap interrupts your recruit.

So far, so good. But what would a location so important to the Fantastic Four be without a little payoff for running them? And so we come to the second payment power: “Discard a Fantastic Four character card >>> Ready New Baxter Building. Use only once per turn.” What does this mean? It means that every team gets to use New Baxter Building to balance the hand size–depleting effects of equipment, while the location provides an extra boost of card-filtering to the FF themselves.

One of the interesting things about this card—and one of the nice things about the design—is that in plenty of “fair” situations, this card is actually better than its ill-fated predecessor. For a curve Fantastic Four deck recruiting a character each turn and then recruiting an equipment onto it, New Baxter Building will provide the same pure card advantage as Antarctic Research Base, but the additional filtering effect will allow you to dig twice as deep.

I’m not sure which aspect of New Baxter Building will get people most interested—the availability of a solid card-drawing engine to equipment-heavy decks of any team, or the extra card filtering available to the Fantastic Four themselves.

Personally, after having just featured the Fantastic Four in a Deck Clinic, the latter looks pretty good. (And no, I didn’t know this little beauty would arrive in my inbox a few days later. Sometimes it’s just nice how these things work out, isn’t it?) New Baxter Building makes old tricks like Unstable Molecules / Salvage—and new tricks like the Infinity Gems and Quadromobile / Salvage—even more attractive. How much better is Reality Gem when you have New Baxter Building to offset the discard cost? Same question with Mind Gem. If you add Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster, is the world liable to implode?

How will decks like FF Toys, which plan to have a big turn 5 for equipment, adapt to a desire to recruit equipment on as many turns as possible? I imagine that question will be answered in part by the Gems and the self-KO’ing equipment / Salvage interactions already mentioned. Unstable Molecules just got a whole lot more interesting again after spending some time in the wilderness without its partner in crime, Antarctic Research Base. While it might seem extravagant to spend turns 2-4 paying 4 endurance each turn to Salvage back Unstable Molecules, when you consider the endurance savings that that +3 DEF bonus can provide and the board advantage that can be generated by avoiding stuns, that extravagance suddenly seems justified. Quadromobile not only lets you use the KO’d pile as a storehouse for character cards for later use, but the Quadromobile / Salvage cycle also satisfies the equipment recruit requirement of New Baxter Building. This provides you with an immediate option to fetch back a character card, discard it to ready New Baxter Building, and draw your second extra card. How does “Pay 4 endurance >>> Draw two cards” sound?

On the flip side, how about non–Fantastic Four decks? What sort of decks might those be, you ask? Well, how about Checkmate? Either curve or off-curve, the team has a substantial location sub-theme with Ahmed Samsarra, White King searching up New Baxter Building, Checkmate Armory, and Brother Eye. As for equipment, how about Knight Armor, Tricked-Out Sports Car, Laser Watch, and maybe the Fate Artifacts? That’s not very far from the popular Checkmate off-curve Sealed Pack strategy. Not to mention that Threat Neutralized is a pretty good card right now for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with it giving +1 ATK / +1 DEF for the turn. If you want to go on-curve and are running Threat Neutralized, I hear that Alan Scott, White King is a reasonably large man. Thankfully, he’s not too large to fit behind the wheel of a Sports Car. What’s better than a 9 ATK / 9 DEF 4-drop with flight and range? How about a 12 ATK / 10 DEF 4-drop (with one Armory and a Sports Car) and a card draw? Don’t forget that the off-curve version in particular would benefit from the inclusion of Huntress, Reluctant Queen against the ascendant Crisis Doom decks with Reign of Terror and Mystical Paralysis.

In the end, I’m not even going to be able to scratch the surface of the decks New Baxter Building will improve or make viable almost by itself. Even as a non-FF card, it’s a powerful location that can help smooth the draws of anything from Good Guys to Secret Society with Fate Artifacts. In particular, it could be a huge boon for off-curve decks that want to run equipment. These decks are most likely to have serious problems keeping their hand size up because they recruit multiple cards in every recruit step. For the Fantastic Four themselves, New Baxter Building gives them back an edge they’ve been sorely lacking recently, while doing a huge amount to bring their equipment theme back into the limelight. It may be too much to ask for, but the thought of again seeing Stretch in a Fantasticar at the top tables gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Okay, that’s only half true. The warm fuzzy feeling is because I’ll be the one waiting for It’s Clobberin’ Time! with a Tower of Babel . . .