Intelligence.

It’s a tricky thing to define, but in the DC Universe, there exists a broad scale on which it can be measured. On this scale, the entire population of twentieth century Earth rates a middling six and a “Could try harder.” Average members of the Coluan race might reach an eight; the inspiration for today’s card, while from Colu, is anything but average.

Querl Dox—better known as Brainiac 5—is a member of the Legion of Super Heroes, an alleged descendent of the original, villainous Brainiac, and is far smarter than those with piddling, single-digit Intelligence Levels. In school, Brainiac 5 was the one leaving teachers weeping into their sandwiches and joining monasteries. To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel, lead guitarist of rock titans Spinal Tap, this one goes past eleven.

 

 

Level 12 Intelligence isn’t a card that’s going to set off fireworks in the brains of all that see it (some brains maybe, but not all). It doesn’t jump up and down, screaming at the top of its lungs and demanding attention.

It sits. And it waits for you to catch up. And then you start to think. . .

“How tough is that additional cost, really? A lot of the time I won’t have the initiative, or won’t want to attack. . .”

“Is the restriction to ‘equipment with cost 0’ really that big a deal? Some of the best targets cost 0 anyway. . .”

“Gaining 4 endurance really is quite a lot in a controlling deck, isn’t it? Surely cards that gain 4 endurance have been used to good effect before. . .”

The answers, as far as I can see, are something along the lines of “Not very tough at all”; “No, not really”; and “Yes, yes they have.”

The card flavor is quite appropriate too. If you’re prone to wastefully illogical flights of fancy, you can just imagine your villainous opponent equipping his or her 7 ATK / 7 DEF 4-drop with a full set of the Fate Artifacts and then crashing it up the curve at your 9 ATK / 9 DEF 5-drop, breaking furniture and generally being a nuisance. At this point, your studious and entirely more civilized character notices the intruder alarm, frowns, and reaches over to a keypad to punch a few buttons. He then goes back to whatever he was doing before he was so rudely interrupted.

The crunch you just heard was your opponent’s 4-drop—the Amulet of Nabu suddenly snatched from around its neck by a particularly ingenious home-defense system—crashing headlong into a bulkhead that was expected to give way without any difficulty. One of those handy robot servants will be along for the intruder in a few minutes; they’re so very convenient for the discerning hero or heroine.

This obviously represents something of an ideal case, but it’s not as far from reality as you might think. If you doubt it, think back to six months or a year ago, and consider what your reaction would have been if someone had told you that Meltdown was rapidly shifting from an interesting novelty to a staple of multiple Ages? As the power level of equipment in the game has shifted up from its humble beginnings, the relative power level of equipment disruption has increased as well, with cards like Meltdown and Jester, Jonathan Powers flying the flag. Level 12 Intelligence is joining a relatively small and exclusive club, and thankfully it brings something new to the table—a new direction from which to approach the disruption of equipment. Existing equipment disruption tends to fit best into aggressive strategies; decks like High Voltage don’t really mind recruiting an otherwise uninteresting character like Jester or Metallo, John Corben, because they still attack perfectly well. The anti-equipment characters are often less suitable for stall or control decks because the full curve becomes a finely tuned machine with each part building on the rest. You can’t simply dump Jester into the X-Stall curve and expect it to function as smoothly as before any more than you could splash Katma Tui, Green Lantern of Korugar into High Voltage.

Level 12 Intelligence is the first truly control-friendly equipment disruption card since at least Commissioner Gordon, James Gordon, and arguably since the start of the game (given the suboptimal endurance payment on Gordon in our burn-happy times). Unlike Meltdown’s minor endurance benefit, Level 12 Intelligence provides a genuinely noticeable endurance kick if you have no need to take out an Amulet, Cloak or Gem. This difference is amplified if your control or stall deck of choice can re-use plot twists like the Mental deck led by Emma Frost, Friend or Foe, or cycle through enough of its deck to reliably see multiple copies.

Of course, the card isn’t without its downsides. The additional cost of exhausting a character isn’t completely trivial, although in a stall or control deck you will have little difficulty finding opportunities to use it on your opponent’s initiative, when it will be most needed to interfere with attacks from equipped characters. The restriction to equipment with a cost of 0 is a problem for Golden Age, where Advanced Hardware and Flamethrower show no sign of declining in popularity, but in Silver Age and Modern Age 0 is the number to beat. If you really want to make your opponent cry, keep a careful watch to see if he or she sets up a Fate-suited character without natural range in the support row. Then flash your best Level 8 Smugness grin as you snipe the Amulet out, grounding the character for the turn as your opponent declares an attack. In addition, Meltdown rotates out of Silver Age as Marvel Team-Up rotates in early next year, consigning the card to Golden Age where it’s sorely needed to keep gun-toting snakes and panthers in check. With Meltdown gone from Silver Age, you may just need to break out the old thinking cap.

Oh, and one last point, just in case it needs making: even though I have no insider knowledge of the rest of the set, Level 12 Intelligence tells you something about some of the likely contents of Legion of Super Heroes. After all, what good would even the most perfect countermeasure be without a threat? In this case, probably a threat with a cost of 0. . .