“303.5 Locations are unique.” Well, that’s what you learn in the comprehensive rules anyway. Locations and their non–resource point depleting buddies, the plot twists, differ in two important regards. Locations are unique, whereas plot twists are not. Also, locations cannot be played from hand, while plot twists can. In the second pass of the DC Origins playtest file, the League of Assassins was trying to shake up the first of these differences.

Because locations have these two drawbacks, you generally get more powerful effects with locations than with plot twists. Locations are “harder” to use since they can only be played from the board and you have to find the time to get them in your resource row. Furthermore, because they are unique, you can end up with “dead” duplicate copies. I’m convinced that Mike Hummel has lost more games to drawing duplicate locations than any man alive, since whenever we are discussing card ideas, it is always his passion to make sure that players can get around this nuisance and find something to do with their extra copies. Because we have made locations comparatively stronger, I’m not so sympathetic to these scenarios. While I’m inclined to let the players “just deal with it,” a number of cards have entered to help out these scenarios a little. Clocktower, for example, is a nice way of trading in extra locations. It is also a nice way of getting out of situations in which you’ve drawn too many characters.

Since the League was planned as a very location-based team, there was a concern as to how they would deal with the challenges presented with the uniqueness of locations. While the initial 4-cost Ra’s al Ghul had early makings of the ultimate Lazarus Pit, “Do not KO this card if it is not recovered during the free end of turn recovery,” the second pass showed Ra’s in this form: “Your locations are not unique. Your opponents cannot flip locations.” Besides considering what locations we might give the League, we pondered what would happen with some of our better locations if they were teamed up with the League. Two Savage Lands would certainly be powerful. How about two Cerebros, two Doomstadts, or two Four Freedoms Plazas? All of these sounded pretty fun to us. I wasn’t really sold on making locations more like plot twists for them but felt that none of the current possibilities really seemed too out of control.

So we all went back to our merry playtesting. You may recall that developers often champion decks around here. Well, I am often poked fun at for playing “Team Magneto” (Eric Lehnsherr and Genosha). Brian Hacker’s decks all feature Hawk and Dove. In general, if someone has out more characters than Brian, something has gone seriously wrong. He’ll be previewing another member of his crew before too long. Meanwhile, Dave Smith seems to have Antarctic Research Base and Cosmic Radiation in every deck he plays. Our newest addition, Ben Rubin, has taken a liking to Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man. Danny Mandel never leaves home without Overpowered. Matt Hyra is too haphazard to discern any sort of pattern, and Mike Hummel plays what we tell him to.

I’m bring up that aside in part because it was Dave Smith who eventually convinced us all that we really didn’t want people having two Antarctic Research Bases in play at once. With all of the 0-cost equipment that we had already printed, especially with ones that can be easily be KO’d to make room for others, it was a big concern that a player could too easily draw through his or her entire deck almost right away or at some point in the near future. It didn’t take much more discussion on the topic to have me convinced we needed to revisit Ra’s al Ghul’s power.

Rather than let Ra’s have access to multiples of any location in play, it was decided that we would make a bunch of non-unique locations just for the League. Lazarus Pit, Mountain Stronghold, and Flying Fortress were all given the text “(Cardname) is not unique.” That’s right; Flying Fortress was not unique until the last moments of testing. There was a lot of debate over that issue, but in the end it was decided that several reusable pseudo-Flying Kicks was a little unfair.

To make the 4-cost Ra’s more exciting again, we made the opponent’s disadvantage of not being able to flip locations more meaningful by adding the current text, which turns down all of the opposing locations to begin with. And what about the 8-cost Ra’s? Well, he costs 8! At that cost, we are not as concerned about a player going through great lengths to do obscene things with non-unique locations. We don’t want somebody auto-winning on turn 8 with anything, but there are enough crazy things out there that can already happen on that turn.


The League and Doom: “Fizzle This” and Breaking Uniqueness Again

In testing the extremes of decks focusing on locations, I had at least one deck without a single plot twist. Probably more important than the actual contents of the deck was its proud name: “Fizzle This.” It ranked up there with my other infamous in-house creations like “9-1-1” (an Onslaught deck in which I believed I might be able to stall with swarm of Wild Sentinels reinforcing each other). Fizzle This had considerably more success than 9-1-1, although that might not be saying much. (I’m not sure 9-1-1 won a single game.) There wasn’t too much revolutionary about the deck but it was very interesting to note the power of using all locations against a deck like Doom or Gotham Knights whose strengths were based at least in part on combating opposing plot twists. The good news is that Fizzle This can only hope to improve with time as more and more locations become available to fill in for some mediocre locations it was running at the time.

The League also tied into Doom in one more important way. Uniqueness has helped us limit the number of cards we have had to test with one another. Because of it, some characters won’t ever see play together. Or will they? Anybody see where I’m going with this? Well, uniqueness for characters checks as part of resolving a recruitment effect, but Dual Nature puts characters into play without recruiting them. Thus, Dual Nature circumvents uniqueness. The scariest scenario I can envision now is that it gives you the first opportunity I’m aware of to get both the 4 and 6 cost Doom into play, eliminating your opponent’s ability to play plot twists at all. Throw in the 4-cost Ra’s, and your opponent can forget about locations, too. Hopefully somebody can find a competitive way to make all this work—just don’t make it dominate the tourney scene and I’ll be happy.

That’s all for this week. Send any comments to dhumpherys@metagame.com.