Players with two losses are dropping out of the tournament each round. It is virtually impossible for them to make the Top 8, and they have almost as remote a chance of finishing in the money. Fortunately for them, they are at a weekend-long gaming convention with plenty of gamer-friendly activities. They do not even need to look beyond the boundaries of the Vs. System to find such diversions.

All weekend long—or until they run out of cards—the Upper Deck crew will be running Limited tournaments with DC Origins packs. Last night there were five Sneak Preview tournaments using DC Origins. They were Sealed Pack tournaments with each player receiving five booster packs to build his or her thirty-card deck with. All PCQs held after July 18 will feature this format for Sealed Pack.

Today they tried something new. Each player signed up for the Sealed Pack received three packs of DC Origins and two packs of Marvel Origins to build his or her 30-card deck from. Like many of the players when they first heard about the tournament you may be wondering how viable that is for play since you would be hard pressed to have enough characters from either set to reliably team attack, reinforce or play affiliation specific plot twists.

When they sat down for deck construction they were surprised to learn that they would be playing in these tournaments using the Crossover Option from the tournament policy page.

B-15            Crossover Option

Heroes and villains often cross over from one comic to another to team up with a new ally. Often these are the most interesting and unique stories. To simulate this, UDE supports a variation of Sealed Pack called the "Crossover" option.

This option may only be used when using packs from different expansions set in the same booster draft or sealed deck tournament.

Crossover formats follow the same rules as Booster Draft or Sealed Deck, with an important twist: After drafting their cards or opening their sealed decks, players select two team affiliations. These team affiliations must be noted on their deck registration sheets and cannot change during the tournament.

Players must tell their opponents, at the start of each round, which team affiliations they have selected for their Crossover options.

For that entire tournament, all of each player’s cards from each of those teams will act as though they also had the team affiliation of the other team written in the team affiliation area.

This Crossover format option allows some very interesting combinations of teams and allows tournament organizers to use their imagination when selecting booster packs for their tournaments.

Example: Danny plays in a draft using a pack of Marvel Origins and two packs of DC Comics Origins. After the draft, he builds a deck using mostly Gotham Knights and Brotherhood cards. He chooses those two teams as his Crossover teams, creating one of the most unique team-ups in comic history! For the remainder of the tournament, all of Danny's Gotham Knights cards will act as though they had Brotherhood written in the team affiliation area, and vice-versa.



That works out much better than you thought it would, doesn’t it? Mike Krumb seemed pretty pleased as he showed off a trio of plot twists. Mike took two early losses in the main event and dropped to try his hand at Sealed Pack. He was trying to make the final cuts on his deck and showed off his cards. “I have three generic team-up cards,” he held up a Marvel Team-Up and two copies of its DC equivalent, World’s Finest. “I will have the uber-team. I have the 2-drop Cyclops and only two other X-Men, but I will be Cyclops-ing my opponents out every game.”

Krumb chose Gotham Knights and Arkham Inmates as his two affiliations, but with three ways to join other groups into his oddly aligned team, anything is possible. One card that Krumb is hoping to exploit is his GCPD Headquarters. With that card in play whenever three or more Gotham Knights team attackers you control stun a character it is KO’d instead.

Gotham Knights and Arkham Inmates were the most popular combination of teams selected to team-up by players in the first tournament today. I asked Matt Hyra if any consideration had been given to making players choose one team from each set--essentially enforcing a Crossover. With two fewer packs of DC than in a normal Sealed Pack it was more necessary for the DC characters than the Marvel ones. “There are only about six or seven highly playable characters in Marvel that are team-stamped. With the addition of Loyalty it is very important to be able to play the DC characters.”

There will be DC Sneak Preview tournaments held all night and through tomorrow until they run out of product. They already had more players than there were seats available so the early buzz on the format seems to be strong.