A Whole Lot of Building Up

It’s turn 3. Your opponent has come out fast with Longshot and Nightcrawler, while your side of the board is empty. Your opponent has the initiative. He or she places the third resource, recruits Wolverine, Logan, and then equips Dual Sidearms to him. Then he or she moves the whole team to the front row, telegraphing that he or she has just drawn Danger Room. You’re in for a rough ride. 

Or are you? You place your third resource. Then you place your fourth resource. And then, after recruiting Dr. Doom, you play two Reign of Terrors to return your opponent's whole team to his or her hand. Good game.

Okay, maybe that story doesn’t make a lot of sense, what with the whole placing-two-resources-in-one-turn thing, but trust me—it used to happen. It used to happen a lot.

Join me today for a brisk walk down memory lane. We’ll visit a simpler time, a time when resources flowed like water and Gamma Bombs ruled the day. A time when the scariest character in the game was a blind sculptress and the most powerful card was a little plot twist named Build Up.


More Build Up

Last week, I talked a little bit about the design and development of Vs. cards. Today, I’m going to take a quick look at the engine itself and how the above absurdity came to be. Afterwards, I’ll walk through the genesis of Alicia Masters. And if you stay till the end, there might even be deck list featuring her.

The Vs. system has a linear resource curve. That is, each player is all but guaranteed to be able to place a resource each turn, and therefore his or her available resource points will grow by exactly one a turn. As a result, each player will slowly bring out bigger and better characters, leading to an exciting climax with the big guns hitting the table and hitting each other. At least that was the plan.

Of course, we wanted there to be alternate strategies as well. Maybe one player hopes to end the game faster with a swarm deck, while another tries to prolong the game with stalling cards until he or she can recruit a really big gun. Wanting to foster these alternative strategies, we knew we needed to put some cards into the set that could shake up the resource system. One of those cards was called Build Up.

An early version of Build Up looked something like this.

Build Up                Threshold 3
Play Build Up only from your hand.
Put Build Up face up into your resource row.
At the start of the recovery phase, KO Build Up.

This card was intended to give a player a one-turn resource point boost at the cost of a card from his or her hand. The idea was that you’d play Build Up during your resource step, then get an extra resource point during your recruit step, only to lose the card later in the turn. In early testing, we felt that giving up the card was enough of a cost to balance recruiting a 4-cost character on turn 3. What do you think? Sounds good, right? And balanced, too? Let’s just say in those days we were a bit overly optimistic.

I, for one, got a little hung up on Build Up’s threshold, always looking to use it as early as possible. But if a turn 3 Dr. Doom was exciting, what about a turn 6 Berserker Wolverine? What if you drew two Build Ups? Chaos! Chaos, I say!

Then one day, Matt Hyra showed everyone his new trick. On turn three you play Build Up, which lets you recruit Dr. Doom. When Doom comes into play, he lets you turn Build Up face down. At the start of the recovery phase, Build Up tries to KO itself. However, because the card is now face down due to Doom’s power, it can’t find itself. (Okay, that sounds weird. I’ve got this image in my head of Build Up wearing ripped jeans and a tie dyed T-shirt, wandering middle America in the sixties searching for meaning.) The bottom line is that with “the combo,” as it would come to be called, you got to place an extra resource and you got to keep it. I remember in one game I did the combo twice and ended up recruiting Dark Phoenix on turn 8. (It was a good thing, too—my opponent had about 90 endurance because of what the old X-Corporation used to do.)

So Build Up was clearly broken. The resource system was too sacred and too fragile for us to be messing with it so callously. It was sad, but there was just no way around it: Build Up had to go. We took a collective deep breath and did what any group of self-respecting designers/developers would do . . .

We tried to fix the card.

That’s right, we couldn’t let it go. We added a discard component. Still too strong. We thought about making it cost endurance. Not enough. We added a clause that made it so you could only play one copy of Build Up per game. Nope.

This is a perfect example of design overshadowing development. (I should take a moment to point out that back then, the creation process was a roiling stew of engine design and engine development, card design and card development, and while different people had different strengths, everybody was pretty much working on everything.) As developers, we should have been realistic and simply axed the card, but as designers we just couldn’t let the idea go. Eventually we came to our senses and Build Up got cut. (This doesn’t mean Build Up won’t rise again someday in a shiny, new, and let’s hope, balanced body.)


Team Dynamics

If you’ve had a chance to crack a few packs or at least have taken a look at a spoiler, you’ve probably realized that each team has its own set of pluses and minuses. The X-Men is full of balanced fighters, while the Brotherhood is all about aggression. We refer to these differences as the game’s “Team Dynamics.” In order to give players lots of deckbuilding options, we try to make each team have its own identity. How boring would it be if every team was built exactly the same and just had identical characters with different names?

When we set out to build the Fantastic Four, we discussed the different aspects of the game at which they would excel. One theme that came up was resource acceleration. Story-wise, it seemed a natural fit given Mr. Fantastic’s penchant for thinking ahead of his time and the team’s affinity for scientific gizmos. Mechanically, it would be nice to give a team with three versions of each of its major characters a way to accelerate out to its heavy hitters. (Or Supernovas, or Scientific Geniuses, or Sue Richardses.)


On a Stick

Back when Build Up still existed, it had a cousin. A cousin with legs. One of the early versions of Alicia Masters looked something like this.

Alicia Masters                Recruit 1
0 ATK    0 DEF
Can only be played if you control a Fantastic Four character.
Activate during your recruit step. Add a card from your hand to your build stack.

If you look past the weird templating, you can see that this Alicia was a Build Up on a stick. She could resource jump every turn. Sure you had to have an FF character in play first, and sure you had to pitch a card from your hand, but c’mon! That’s just crazy talk! (In our defense, times were different back then—for instance, you used to start the game with 5 resources already in play.)

As the game’s engine evolved, cards came and went, but all throughout Alicia kept her Build Up mechanic or something very similar. So how did she go from crazy broken to where she is today? Before I tell you, here’s a quick aside about Alicia’s partner in crime, Franklin Richards.

Originally, Franklin was not a character. He was a plot twist. Vs.’s lead designer Mike Hummel was concerned about the image the game would present by putting a small child on the field of battle where he could be trounced by Wolverine or Magneto. There were lots of suggestions on how to handle Franklin. One popular idea involved him letting a player search for Invisible Woman or Mr. Fantastic, essentially calling for his mommy or daddy. The problem was that the FF already had Signal Flare and another search card felt redundant. What to do?

Development was well under way, and we still weren’t happy with either Alicia or Franklin. Alicia was still broken every which way we tried her, and Franklin just wasn’t taking shape in any practical form. Then Ed Fear (another one of the Vs. designers) came up with the idea to have Alicia do her sculpt-a-resource shtick, but only for Thing and Human Torch. Mechanically this reigned in her power level, and thematically it made sense because Alicia has dated both of those characters*. Best of all, by paralleling Ed’s Alicia idea, we could enact Franklin’s “calling for mom and dad” power. And because of the whole when-they-get-attacked-have-them-run-away mechanic, we could make Franklin a character after all. Alas, poor Valeria . . .

*Okay, continuity purists will point out that the “Alicia” that the Torch dated and eventually married turned out in the end to be a skrull. But she was a nice skrull.


That’s all for our little visit to the past. Now for that decklist I promised you.

Turbo Alicia

Characters

4 Invisible Woman, Invisible Girl
3 Ant Man, Scott Lang
4 Alicia Masters, Blind Sculptress
4 She-Thing, Sharon Ventura
2 Luke Cage, Hero for Hire
3 She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters
3 Thing, Ben Grimm
4 Human Torch, Hotshot
4 Thing, Heavy Hitter
1 Ghost Rider, New Fantastic Four
3 Human Torch, Super Nova
1 Hulk, New Fantastic Four
1 Thing, The Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing

Non-Characters

4 Cosmic Radiation
4 It’s Clobberin’ Time
4 Signal Flare
4 Savage Beatdown
4 Acrobatic Dodge
4 Flying Kick


This is a deck I built a while back to test out Alicia. It turned out to be really fun, so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s really a hybrid combo/fighting deck. Plan A is to try to do something nuts with Alicia. Plan B is to just play it straight—recruit your characters and fight! Plan B you can probably figure out, but here’s how Plan A works.

First of all, if you can, choose to have your opponent start with the initiative. If he or she has no turn 1 character, go ahead and recruit Alicia. If your opponent does have one, you’ll have to wait until you can protect Alicia. The deck is packed with one-drops, so there’s a good chance you can recruit Alicia as well as someone to guard her on turn 2. Once Alicia’s in play, things get really spicy. She lets you recruit Human Torch, Hotshot on turn 3 or Thing, Heavy Hitter on turn 4, but that’s kid stuff. The real deal is when you use a Cosmic Radiation (or two) to activate Alicia more than once in a single turn. Three activations means a fourth turn Thing, The Ever Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing. Hurray!

Of course, that’s the dream. Sometimes you don’t draw Alicia, and it’s seldom worth Signal Flaring for her on turn 3. Sometimes you have to start with the initiative, and you have to gamble whether or not it’s safe to recruit her. And sometimes when you do drop her into play early, it turns out your opponent is playing Sentinels. Groan—almost every Sentinel has flight.

Here are a few more things to remember about the deck:

You don’t have to remove the invisibility counter from Invisible Woman. It’s usually better to let her get stunned on the first turn and save the counter for a more important attack later.

Cosmic Radiation also works great with other characters in the deck. Torch lets you hit them for another 5. Or play it while She-Hulk is attacking so she becomes a 6 ATK/6 DEF again.

The character suite may seem a little random, but that’s because you have Signal Flare to help fill out your curve and find one-ofs that you might not normally need. That said, save your Flares until you’re about to miss a character drop. Don’t use them immediately since you may draw a double of the character you just searched for.


Okay, that’s all. If you give this deck a try, feel free to let me know how it goes. Unless the deck’s terrible and you hate it. In that case, maybe it’s better if you don’t tell me.

Please send any questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com, and come back next week for a look at why Target of Opportunity made a Swift Escape, and some other growing pains.