It’s my pleasure to bring you the second of Metagame.com’s Superman, Man of Steel previews. The card I get to show you today is The Prophecy Fulfilled.
When both players go below 0 endurance, the person whose endurance total is closest to zero wins. However, with The Prophecy Fulfilled in your resource row, you win before the game checks for a winner during the end-of-turn wrap up. The New Gods won’t have any trouble keeping an unstunned character under their control at the start of the recovery phase.
While this card can be included in the “instant win card” category, it’s much subtler than Rigged Elections or Xavier’s Dream. This isn’t the sort of card that you’d build an entire deck around. Instead, it can go into any New Gods deck as a contingency plan, should you and your opponent knock each other silly into the negatives. However, with very little effort and just a few cards that wouldn’t normally be played, you can build a New Gods deck that pushes players to sub-0 endurance. Teaming up with Darkseid’s Elite will bring you even more options for ensuring that everyone takes a fair share of endurance loss on the crucial turn.
The New Gods have enough board presence and control elements to ensure an orderly game, but the team can spend endurance when it wants to. Keep in mind that the object of the Prophecy is not to dip below 0, but to have a contingency plan should you do so. You can play without fearing the negatives as long as you keep your opponent’s endurance low, as well. When you’re in the build phase and your total endurance is less than the total ATK of your opponent’s two biggest characters, that’s when it’s time to go into Prophecy ModeTM. It’s better to be safe than sorry, so don’t leave it face down if there is any chance you’ll dip below 0 this turn. Of course, if your opponent is still at 40 endurance, you might as well leave it face down and hope for better luck next time. The play restriction on the card means that you can’t trick your opponent into giving away the game, but you can do plenty to make sure that you both go below 0.
During development, we had to figure out when it was appropriate to play The Prophecy Fulfilled, and I’m not talking about the threshold cost. Choosing the threshold was the easy part. What I mean is that it’s not much of a prophecy if you turn it face up two seconds before you win the game. Even the start of the combat phase wouldn’t give the opponent enough time to properly prepare for it. So, we finally settled on the build phase. Loyal readers of this column can rest assured that my trusty d10 was the final arbiter. Here’s the chart, for the “try this at home” crowd:
Random Phase/Step Determiner
1: Draw Step
2: Build Phase
3: Resource Step
4: Recruit Step
5: Formation Step
6: Combat Phase
7: Your Attack Step
8: Opponent’s Attack Step
9: Recovery Phase
10: Wrap Up
Loyal readers also know that I use a loaded d10 that rolls a 2 around 80 percent of the time.
The best time to play The Prophecy Fulfilled is when you have the initiative, but also have less endurance and board presence than your opponent. A character like Big Barda (sorry, not gonna spoil her today) is amazing in this situation, as you can spend some endurance to make sure she punches through anything while remaining unstunned. Just make sure you get your opponent to at least -1 endurance by the end of your attack step. When you’re done attacking, even if your opponent’s biggest character is ready and able to attack, it won’t be able to prevent you from having an unstunned character at the start of the recovery phase. Even if that big character causes massive breakthrough and sends you far lower into the negatives, you still win the game. If your opponent doesn’t have enough characters or tricks to take down all of your New Gods characters, he or she might as well concede—the Prophecy will come true on that sorry behind.
DC Comics History 203
For those of you who don’t know, Orion is the true son of Darkseid. Darkseid and Izaya (Highfather) decided to call a truce to the long war between their planets of Apokolips and New Genesis. To seal the deal, they traded sons. Orion went to Izaya and Scott Free (who would become Mister Miracle) went to Darkseid. Oh, wait. That information should be in the preview for the card The Exchange. I’m here to talk about the prophecy.
The prophecy foretold, “The final battle of chaos and order shall take place in a firepit—a burning, blasting sore on the surface of Apokolips. There the father shall face the son he gave to his greatest enemy, and die at his hand.”
Orion and Darkseid have had many heated father/son exchanges, including a few knockdown, drag-out fights, but so far the prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
Questions and comments may be sent to mhyra@metagame.com.