I figured I’d use today’s article to answer a number of questions that didn’t make it into my live chat for VsRealms.com. I will undoubtedly still miss some, but you can always try to get those answered in future chats. Some questions are better suited for our designers to tackle, anyway.

The Starter Decks

Magneto Rising asks, “How important will the new Batman and FF starters be to players and collectors who have been buying since the start?”

Latuki Joe asks, “Is there anything you can tell us about the upcoming Batman starter deck? The Fantastic Four Starter?”

The two starters are Gotham Knights vs. League of Assassins and Fantastic Four vs. Doom. There are 52 cards per starter (26 cards for each deck). Each starter will have two extended art foil cards. Some copies of the cards appear in duplicate, but there are approximately 30 unique cards per starter. Almost all of these cards are new, but there are a few reprinted cards, as well. All of these cards have new art!

While the primary focus of these starters is to teach players, simple cards don’t necessarily translate to weak cards. We tried to focus more on the fundamental mechanics of the game. For example, we avoided any recent keywords or mechanics. Other than that, these cards play like most of the other cards you’ve become accustomed to.

We didn’t lose sight of the opportunity these starters gave us for helping out teams that had particular areas of need. There will be a number of exciting cards in these sets for such teams, as well as some generic cards that will be of interest to all.

Justin Gary was the lead designer on the Batman starter, and Andrew Yip was the lead designer on the FF starter. I think they’ve done an excellent job putting together starters that play competitively and easily against one another. These starters will be great to have around if you want to teach a friend.

Legacy Teams

Magneto Rising asks, “What are your opinions on team reprints and ‘legacy’ sets and/or cards in general?”

Dr.Doomisgod asks, “If the Modern Age format is successful, how will the older teams be supported, seeing as they will be lacking pieces (sometimes key ones, for example Doom’s reliance on the presence of Dr. Doom) of their game play? Reprints? New versions?”

Gordo asks, “As the roster of teams gets larger and larger, will any of the major teams actually begin to get cut out of sets? How does UDE plan to keep providing new cards for older teams?”

In terms of supporting the older teams for Golden Age, we will try to include at least one card for each old team in that brand for as long as that is reasonable. It remains to be seen how long we will continue to find room in a set as our roster of teams continues to grow.

As you can see from the above discussion about the starter decks, we will occasionally be able to revisit some old legacy teams. Several of the popular teams are likely to get new content in this manner.

In terms of keeping the legacy teams active in Modern Age, and for giving us more flexibility with the teams in Golden Age, it is also extremely likely that we will be including “old” teams in future sets as one of the set’s main teams.

Off-Curve Decks and Equipment Decks

Viciousbomber asks, “Are there any new ideas about breaking the character curve and for equipment?”

Cannoballism asks, “With the coming of the Modern Age format, won’t the work that’s been attempted for making off-the-curve decks eventually be washed away? What about viable equipment? Or is there an intention in future sets to make at least one team that can be worked off the curve?”

If anything, I feel that Golden Age has cards that make it very hard to build a competitive off-curve strategy. Cards like Reign of Terror, Overload, Flame Trap, and Terra are big issues for those strategies.

Making off-curve strategies work has been a big priority for us in the most recent sets we’ve worked on. Some of the approaches you might expect to see are ways to help a swarm deck replenish its hand, characters with improved stats and powers while a player has more resources in play, methods of making earlier plays more consistently, rewards for having characters of the same cost, rewards for having no characters of cost equal to the number of resources you control, ways to fend off the aforementioned problem cards, and so on. I predict that off-curve strategies will make themselves felt in the near future, especially in Modern Age.

As for equipment based decks, 0-cost equipment is something we can fine tune, and there should be plenty of ways to make sure that some of these equipment cards make the cut in certain decks. As for equipment with a cost of 1 or more, Mr. Fantastic, Stretch sets a very high standard for what we are able to do with any such equipment that isn’t team-stamped. Still, we have some nice equipment in Marvel Knights and in future sets, some of which can be used a little more flexibly.

Just to clarify, if by ”breaking” you meant “jumping,” then I suspect that character curve breaking will continue to exist primarily on a “per character” basis. We can reasonably balance ways to get out a specific character, like Thing or Human Torch, via cards like Alicia Masters or Infinity Man.

As for equipment, it’s hard to say if there will be another general enabler like Mr. Fantastic, Stretch, although there are likely to be more cards like Punisher, Jury, where certain characters can be more easily equipped.

The Metagame

TCCJoe asks, “Do you feel that the current Vs. metagame is a healthy one?”

I’m reasonably happy with the current metagame, though Teen Titans and Curve Sentinels are being played in numbers a little too high for my tastes. But then, each $10K event still has a decent number of interesting old and new decks in the Top 8.

On any given weekend, it seems as if there are plenty of different decks that can make the Top 8 of an event. It would be nice to see teams featured in the post-Origins sets doing better, but we’ll see what we can do about that from our end. Hopefully, the players themselves will venture out and take some more risks! I’m still a little surprised that more success hasn’t been found with teams like the Spider-Friends and New Gods, either on their own or via teaming up. I guess it’s still a bit early to have seen much with the Marvel Knights teams, and some players may be hiding their tech until after Pro Circuit Amsterdam.

Modern Age Design and Development

Difficulty66 asks, “Has the implementation of Modern Age affected the set design and development process, and if so, how?

We are proceeding with our design and development with the assumption that Modern Age will continue to be explored beyond this year.

To this end, we are looking to make sure that each pair of consecutive sets for a given brand has continuity in terms of mechanics, and synergy between teams in those sets.

In planning out future Modern Ages “pairs,” we’re also trying to ensure that each pair of such sets has certain basic types of cards resembling cards you’ve grown used to. We want variations of cards like Have a Blast, Acrobatic Dodge, Flame Trap, and so on. While doing the Marvel Knights and Green Lantern sets, we had some sense of what form Modern Age might take, but we didn’t have the full details worked out until the Avengers Set.

In terms of development, Modern Age means a great deal more testing for us, with an even greater emphasis on the importance of balancing teams within a set and within the entirety of Golden Age.

Initiative

TimsWheelbarrow asks, “With the initiative being such an important factor in so many games, what are your thoughts on introducing a system where players bid endurance points in order to determine who gets the choice of odds or evens? Or, what about modified Swiss pairings, such that you get the choice every other round?”

We’ve discussed the very examples you raised. Bidding is interesting, although it is weird in that it would effectively change the game. Our cards are, after all, based around the assumption of 50 endurance as the starting total. This would probably work itself out in deck construction, but it seems a bit jarring to me. Bidding is also a fairly complex “game” in and of itself, and it probably wouldn’t be all that well received by many players.

As for the modified Swiss, you could set up a structure where you begin with the initiative (or have the choice) in alternate rounds. I believe you’d eventually encounter some logistical problems here, although I’d have to see an exact model. Let’s take an extreme example in which everyone with the choice of the initiative won the round. Then you’d go to pair the next round, and by Swiss pairings, you couldn’t pair a winning player with somebody who was supposed to have choice this round because they’d all lost. It seems like you’d get more skewing than from a normal Swiss pairing. If I’m missing something here, or if you have a nice model for a system, by all means let us see it. Currently, we aren’t convinced that such measures need to be taken, but we are open to further discussion on this.

We are also trying to tackle the issue from a development standpoint so that games aren’t all ending on the same turn in a given format. We want to ensure that there aren’t specific turns where games are all but decided in a typical game. Certainly, the more we can do to reduce the impact of whether a player has initiative choice in determining the outcome of a game, the less we’d need to implement changes to organized play in any of the above ways. Other than that, you’ll have to deal with the variance on those pre-game coin flips and dice rolls.

Comments welcome at DHumpherys@metagame.com.