One day, Danny Mandel and I were taking a ride in Otto—or was it Carla? You see, Danny thinks it’s very clever to name his inanimate possessions using bad puns. He frequently has conversations with these objects. He’ll say something like, “Hey Otto, want to go take a bath?” when he approaches a car wash. Here at work, we have names for Danny as well, but they aren’t so clever.

As I was starting to say, Danny and I were discussing how we felt Dr. Doom decks imposed certain constraints on the competitive decks that players could build. We were worried that it was hard for a deck to play around the anti-swarm power of Reign of Terror and the anti-“fatty” power of Mystical Paralysis. Even if a deck could get around those cards, a player still had to be careful not to get his or her plot twists stuck in his or her hand or have them on the board, unable to be used. Doom decks could further complicate matters by playing powerful cards like Robot Destroyer.

While Mike, Matt, and Danny are busy coming up with ideas that are in flavor with Marvel and DC Comics characters, I try to come up with card ideas that will give each deck access to the tools it needs to be competitive. While some teams will take a different approach against a given strategy, we don’t want any deck type to just roll over in any particular matchup. During that car ride, I bounced some ideas off of Danny, and later that night, I wrote up a bunch of those ideas, hoping they’d make it into the final set. Some of those ideas that made it through the process were designed specifically to combat Doom. During that week, I also realized that a number of cards the designers were suggesting would allow similar opportunities in different ways.

Meanwhile, Brotherhood decks were winning tournament after tournament, so Danny and I started to look like Chicken Little, running around screaming, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” (While I only started to look that way, Danny pretty much always acts that way.) Danny had been touting “mono”-Doom decks, and I’d been a big fan of Common Enemy, but these decks were only making tiny impressions in the metagame. Fortunately, we stuck to our guns and developed some of these potential cards to the point where they also seemed interesting outside of a Doom-heavy metagame. After Web of Spider-Man had been finalized, we still looked slightly foolish for focusing those efforts with Doom decks in mind.

Now that Common Enemy stormed the Top 8 of the first Pro Circuit and won the whole event, our motives don’t look unjustified.


How can you expect to fight Common Enemy after Web of Spider-Man is released?

I’m not going to give you specific decklists, but I will mention the specific cards that I was referring to above. There were five cards that were intended to be useful against Doom decks—three Spider-Friends cards, one Sinister Syndicate card, and one generic card. Any guesses?

Let’s start with Bad Press, which is the generic card. This was one of the unanticipated finds in Web of Spider-Man. It was a simple effect that we found in a long list of ideas, and we realized that it would be a considerable nuisance to Doom decks. When Reign of Terror effectively has a threshold cost of 5, it doesn’t look all that playable. With the same limitation, Mystical Paralysis is still impressive, but not nearly as strong as it would be otherwise. And when you are talking about Common Enemy, even slowing down Signal Flare can be an annoyance. Certainly, any player playing a Gamma Bomb version would have his or her hands full.

This leads us directly to the first of the Spider-Friends cards. Black Cat, Master Thief is another delaying tactic. In some ways, it’s easier for a Doom deck to play around Black Cat, since the Doom deck only needs to stun her. However, this won’t always be easy, especially if you guard her on the appropriate turns. The extra cost she tacks on now becomes a further hindrance and starts to reduce the effectiveness of cards like Faces of Doom.

Besides delaying the use of Doom’s powerful cards, you can also try to protect your characters from being targeted in the first place. The next two cards will do just that. Nice Try and Ricochet, in this regard, are the counterparts to Bad Press and Black Cat. Nice Try differs from Bad Press in that it will be a surprise rather than a preemptive measure. You exhaust your Dr. Doom for Mystical Paralysis or stun your Robot Destroyer to come after my Puma? Sorry, try again next time. Those are some pretty hefty costs to pay when they result in no effect. Nice Try is powerful, even though it is a one-shot effect rather than a continuous modifier like Bad Press or Ricochet. Likewise, Ricochet’s effect is preemptive and somewhat narrow, since he only protects your characters with evasion. If you want to go that route, there are plenty of small, effective characters with evasion, and they don’t even have to be Spider-Friends characters to benefit from Ricochet’s power.

Finally, we have Alistair Smythe. It might be painfully obvious what card we were trying to neuter with this card. Maybe . . . Reign of Terror? We may have lucked out by making this card useful against many other decks as well—Alistair Smythe can be good against Rigged Elections when you name Alfred. Then again, there are several other cards for that matchup—for example, Political Pressure, if your deck type is “desperate” enough.

An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Who knows? Decks based on Dr. Doom will probably still continue to thrive. Their world is not going to completely fall apart as a result of these cards. However, even in a world without Dr. Doom, t