Hopefully, by now I have both reinforced the importance of having a strategy for whatever you’re doing and given you an idea of what that actually means. Unfortunately, generating and refining strategy can be tricky. That’s where practice comes in.
As a final year student with an ever-increasing workload, I have rapidly diminishing amounts of free time for indulgences such as practicing Vs. System. I’m sure that this is the case for a great many of you, too. One way or another, time is running out for us all. I heard a scary fact recently—when we pass the age of 21, our bodies switch from growing and developing to wearing out. If time is running out, how can we justify spending hours, days, and even weeks practicing Vs. System?
Things got a bit melodramatic in that last paragraph, so let’s move on. The key, when faced with limited time in which to practice, is to make every second as useful as possible. Louis Pasteur said that without theory, practice is only routine born out of habit. This Frenchman may have been on to something. Playing hundreds of games will probably improve your skills a little, but if you target your practice, the rewards will be higher.
Hopefully, this article will give you a few ideas that will allow you to improve at a faster rate and still have fun in the process. If this sounds a little like one of those fitness schemes advertised everywhere at the start of a new year, it’s because it’s similar in many ways. Everyone knows that gamers don’t really exercise, though, so let this be your alternative.
Practice tip #1: Find a practice buddy (or two)!
Solo rehearsals aren’t overly effective in this game, as the games where your opponents don’t show up don’t require a huge amount of preparation. I’ll run through the areas that you can reasonably work on alone in a bit, but I would recommend that the majority of your practical practice time be spent as part of a collective. Try to find people whose goals are similar to your own and who are of a similar or higher play level. While it isn’t much fun having someone point out all your play errors every turn, it will allow you to work effectively at correcting them.
Practice tip #2: Pretend you have X-Ray vision.
This isn’t something I would recommend taking too far, as in my experience, most gamers aren’t the sort of people I’d want to see naked. Sorry, but it’s true.
What I actually mean is that you should play some games open-handed, with both players able to see what the other’s options are. In the long run, you want the ability to magically, mystically divine the cards in your opponent’s hand through pure intuition, but at the beginning, this is a workable alternative. Play out a few games where everything is visible—hand, resources, and so on.
One of the key differences between Vs. and a game like Chess is that Vs. is a game of imperfect information. You have to make decisions without full knowledge of the outcomes. This makes “perfect” play very difficult to achieve. Playing with your hand face-up removes much of the ambiguity, which in turn eliminates excuses for making bad plays. I also encourage both players to get involved in all complicated decisions, regardless of whose decision it is. If you can see that your friend’s formation is clearly suboptimal, let him or her know. If you are going to develop routines through practice, then you want to make sure that you develop the right routines.
Practice tip #3: Have deck lists out in front of you.
Most decisions you make in Vs. will affect more than just the current board position—they will continue to make ripples throughout the game. If you use your Acrobatic Dodge on turn 3 to keep your Wolverine, Logan around, then your Rogue, Power Absorption, will have to do without it when she’s attacked later on. Planning ahead is very important in most games, and Vs. System is no exception. Your planning will be more precise if you know exactly which options are still available.
Imagine for a second that you’re playing a Curve Sentinels deck. It’s turn 1 and you have Boliver Trask, Bastion, Reconstruction Program, Savage Beatdown, Cover Fire, and Nimrod. From turn 5 onward, you’ll probably have a very strong game. You need to decide which character you want to fetch with Boliver, though. With a deck list in front of you, your options become a lot clearer. The relevant pieces of information are how many copies of each character are in your deck and what your chances are of naturally drawing into each by the allotted turn. Via the magic of Microsoft Excel, I have determined the following probabilities.
If you have six Sentinel Mark IIIs, you have about a 22 percent chance of drawing at least one on curve if you fetch something else.
If you have seven Sentinel Mark IIs, you have about a 54 percent chance of drawing at least one on curve if you fetch something else.
If you have six Sentinel Mark Vs, you have about a 71 percent chance of drawing at least one on curve if you fetch something else.
Within my testing, I have found Sentinel Mark II to be of greater importance than his smaller brother, so I’m confident about fetching one of him and still being safe in the knowledge that most of the time, I’ll curve out on turns 3 through 6.
Additionally, when you have a deck list in front of you, it brings your luckiness (or lack thereof) into stark reality when you make or miss drops. You cannot hide behind anything when you draw both copies of Overload by turn 4 against a New Brotherhood deck.
Practice tip #4: Don’t worry about win percentages.
It is very easy to play ten, twenty, or even a hundred games of a particular matchup, look at the record, and determine a makeshift win percentage. Unfortunately, these percentages tell you nothing of use in terms of winning a given matchup, and they become increasingly inaccurate as either the players or the deck lists change. In my experience, the only thing win percentages reliably do are frustrate you when you lose a matchup that was “favorable” in practice.
It’s more useful to note the reasons that a particular deck won or lost each game, and then look for trends. These will in turn give you an idea of which strategy to employ against a particular deck. Let’s imagine that I tested a New Brotherhood burn deck against X-Stall. If, after ten or so games, I found that I won most games where I played Ka-Boom! on Cerebro or A Death in the Family on Puppet Master, then I might start looking differently at what constitutes a good starting hand against X-Stall—maybe in this matchup, I won’t base a mulligan on the presence or absence of The New Brotherhood.
Practice tip #5: Set up the important situations.
Some decks in Vs. are harder to pilot than others. Sentinels are fairly forgiving (contrary to what you might think from the comic books), as all that flight and range make formation easier, and their plot twists are reactive and not terribly tricky to play. Decks like Teen Titans, on the other hand, do everything they can to make your decisions as tricky as possible. The price of your deck being versatile is that you need to be versatile enough to recognize which one of its paths to victory is best at any given time.
Often, Titans will have an explosive turn where a great deal happens. Several turns before that explosive turn will have been spent setting it up. Knowing how best to play for later turns and how to play out the complicated turn is important, but in terms of learning how to do each, a process of reverse engineering works the best.
Rather than playing out hundreds of matches, each of which take twenty minutes or so, set up example board positions and play them out. Then, tweak it a bit and see how you should alter your play for the best effect. Once you know everything important that happens on the turn you go off, you can lay your schemes all the more effectively.
Practice tip #6: Stack your decks.
Please, please, please don’t do this in real competition. It is cheating, and cheating is very bad. However, in practice situations, it can prove quite informative. Set up your deck to give you a good (good, mind you, not completely ridiculous) draw. Take note of the order of your deck and play it in that order against current Tier 1 decks. If your deck does lots of shuffling, it’s probably simpler just to make a list of what you intend to draw each turn and pretend, rather than literally ordering your deck.
If you cannot consistently do well against your opponent’s decks when you’ve stacked your own, it’s time to consider returning to the drawing board. This should be fairly self evident, but it’s a great deal easier to realize that fact when you give yourself an artificial advantage and still lose.
At some point, let your opponent do the same thing. It’s important to know just how bad things can get in any given matchup, and if you can win with a random draw under these circumstances, then you’re looking pretty good.
Practice tip #7: Set definite goals for your practice time.
So far, these tips have related to a couple of areas—either improving your play skill, your deck, your strategy with a deck, or a little of each. When you sit down to practice, think about what it is that you actually hope to gain. If you’re looking to form a strategy about how to beat Arkham Inmates with your Fearsome Five deck, you should go about things differently than if your primary motivation is to improve your ability to form up correctly.*
Try to ensure that both you and your opponent (or “practice buddy,” or “punch bag,” depending on how you want to view that person) are on the same wavelength. If that isn’t the case, you might as well be playing the slapping game**.
So there we have it—a nice, convenient, seven step program. Feel free to utilize as many of the steps as you feel appropriate. Virgil (no, not the Thunderbird, the ancient Greek philosopher) once said, “Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art.” If any of you happen to forge something that might look nice on my shelf, then please send me a picture. Incidentally, if anyone has any feedback at all on this or any of my articles, please send it to MYNAME at hotmail.com, replacing the MYNAME bit with my name (as in me, the writer of this article). I like to think of the spelling of my surname as a little barrier to stop silly people from getting in contact with me.
Until the next time . . .
Tim “Mr. Mxpasfahoidnvszlkcvnzfa” Willoughby
*Incidentally, if you are looking to improve your general formation skills, I would recommend playing Arkham Inmates for a bit. They have a nice mix of big characters that can act as walls, little guys that really want to stay alive, flight, and range. I’ll do an article on formation soon if people feel it would be useful.
** The slapping game is one of the least fun games in existence for the competitors, though it is quite entertaining for spectators. One player slaps the other one in the face. This player (the slapee) then has the option of slapping the other player (the slapper) in the face. Play goes back and forth until one person decides that they don’t particularly want to be slapped any more and stops. There are no winners in the slapping game, though frequently, the person who decides to stop is deemed the loser. There are, however, many red faces for all.