I’m here to tell you a little something about Limited play. I’ll be looking out for variants on Limited play and ways for you to improve your Limited game, both for building and playing decks. Since this is the first article in a series, I'm going to take some time to introduce what Limited means, so if the terms “Draft” and “Sealed” are already near and dear to your heart, you may want to skip down to the last section of this article. That is, unless you haven’t given much thought to what makes those formats tick. If those terms don’t trigger some excitement, please read on to see what you’ve been missing out on.


The Merits of Constructed Play versus Limited Play

Most of you familiar with trading card games (TCGs) are undoubtedly familiar with Constructed play. In fact, many gamers have likely only played their favorite TCGs in a setting where each player can draw on any cards in his or her collection to construct a deck that is honed to do exactly what he or she wants it to do. Those players are constantly tuning their decks with new cards and ideas to optimize its ability to win or work with some fun, zany theme. It's certainly a lot of fun to build the many viable and amusing themes in Vs. into Constructed decks and play them all out against one another. If you have plenty of time on your hands, you may eventually figure out the best decks and the optimum builds for those decks. If you are trying to build competitive decks, you may find a few decks rise to the top and are very efficient in doing what they do. Such decks often become filled with many copies of certain cards. There is a lot of craftsmanship involved in this process. Furthermore, it is challenging to take your favorite deck and learn to play it inside and out. As prominent decks emerge, it can also be challenging to find ways to dethrone a deck that is dominating the scene.

While one person may find the above process rewarding to no end, most players should find Limited play to be, at the very least, a refreshing change of pace. By Limited play, I refer to virtually any type of game play where both players are limited in terms of the number of cards they have access to when building a deck. Two tournament-supported formats that should also prove popular for casual play are Draft and Sealed. A description of these two formats is given in the Marvel Origins rulebook.

From your experience with Constructed, you may be very familiar with how to build a X-Men deck, but when you don’t have four Children of the Atom and a plethora of Wolverines at your disposal, it may not be so apparent how to build the optimal deck from your card pool. You have to ask yourself which teams are the best teams in your particular cards. How many teams should you play? Is it worth including a third or fourth team for a powerful card or two? How many Brotherhood characters would you have to include to reliably play your Sabretooth, Feral Rage? Would you be better off playing another copy of Shadowcat instead? How many characters should you ideally play at each cost? Which of these generic plot twists should be the last to make the cut into a deck: Micro-Size, Medical Attention, or Backfire? That’s right—in Limited, some cards that would otherwise only collect dust may now collect some war stories. Pitting your decision-making skills in these processes against opponents who have to make all of these same decisions is a blast. They can’t draw from a finely tuned deck of a friend’s or of one off the Internet. It is just their small stacks of randomly selected cards versus yours. I consider it my duty to give you sound advice in answering questions like the ones above correctly.

In case I haven’t already sold you on the interesting situations present in Limited, here are a couple of other points to note. Limited play is a nice leveler of the playing field for players who haven’t built up a sizeable collection and feel they can’t compete with players who have invested more time or money in the game. It is also a good way to get the most value out of your packs, since you can get a lot of entertainment value out of opening them before moving those cards into your collection for Constructed play. Drafting in particular is also a great way of getting a bunch of people together at the same time in an interactive setting to compete in trying to put together the best deck.


Limited Tips 101—An Overview

The following advice should hold true for both Sealed and Draft formats.

Don’t play more cards in your deck than the minimum required. The fewer cards you play the, sooner and more likely you are to draw your best cards. In case there was any doubt, this also holds true for Constructed.

While there is such a thing as superiority in numbers, there is also superiority in, well, size. Little characters have their place in reinforcing, team attacking, playing various powers, and making sure things don’t get out of control early, but come on, when it's all on the line are you going to look to Ant Man or Thing? While in Constructed you can make sure all of your little characters are looking out for one another, in Limited it will be hard to avoid mixing and matching teams, and in these scenarios, little characters are not at their finest.

If you want to play Limited well, you have to keep in mind that Limited often revolves around knowing the commons. These are the cards that will show themselves frequently. They are the cards you have to worry about during game play and the cards you can generally expect to see in the course of a Draft. Familiarize yourself with these cards.

Assume your Limited game will last seven to eight turns, and occasionally six or nine. Since characters get bigger and better at alarming rates with higher costs, you should definitely be hoping to play some, if not all, of your characters costed between 6 and 8. It is worth noting for Draft that there are only four common character cards costed above 5, and they are all costed at 6. Two of those are Brotherhood characters. There are a few more big drops at uncommon, and a whopping twenty are found as rares. So when you are drafting, make sure you don’t pass these giants. At the same time, don’t fool yourself into thinking Dark Phoenix will ever see much play before the game is over in Limited.

The fewer teams you can play the better. While it is worth splashing for larger characters, you will be rewarded for playing more characters within one or two teams.

Quite likely the most fundamentally important part of doing well in Limited is trying to see to it that by turn 3, you start playing a character almost every turn. If you do not, and your opponent does, you will find yourself falling behind. Furthermore, ideally, you want to be playing a character of cost X on turn X. It won’t be the end of the world if you are playing a smaller character on any given turn, but it will make things more challenging. Also, if you have a powerful character that requires a teammate to be in play for an effect or for recruiting, make sure you get those teammates into play in case you draw it later, otherwise the delay in getting out your “bomb” could be disastrous.

As a general guideline for how many characters to include in your deck at each cost for a 30-card deck I’d recommend the following: one at cost 1, two at 2, four at 3, three at 4, three at 5, two at 6, two at 7, and one at 8 cost. This assumes you have access to such cards. For example, you’d have to be lucky to have that many high-costed characters. If you don’t have enough cards at a given cost, try to put in cards to make up the difference at the next lower cost, or possibly by putting in additional non-character cards up to a point where they reach about 50 percent of your deck. If you don’t have many good plot twists and events, it's also fine to add in a few more 1- and 2-costed characters. If you are low on characters at a certain drop, you might also consider mulliganing if you don’t have a character at that cost in your opening hand. However, mulliganing correctly is an art of its own, and this is just one small consideration in that process. The values I have recommended are based on having at least one character of cost X on turn X approximately 80 percent of the time starting on turn 3, with less of a priority put on lower-costed characters. Mulliganing is not taken into account for this calculation

You also want to play a plot twist or location face down into your resource row every turn, beginning with the first, if possible. Unless you are incredibly fortuitous, there will be turns where you wind up playing characters face down as resources, since you will want to include a sufficiently large number of characters to ensure good “drops” on each turn. Once you are on turns 4–6, for example, it shouldn’t be a big deal if you are playing 3-cost characters face down as resources. Make sure you have paid attention to which of these characters might be most important to keep in hand for later. For example, there are many characters that require the discard or revealing of a specific team affiliated character for an effect or at times even for recruiting. In total, you should probably be shooting for about 16–20 characters, 0–3 equipment, and 9–13 plot twists/locations in a 30-card deck, although these are only rough guidelines and it is possible that time will prove me wrong.

I’ll go into these issues and many others in detail in the ensuing weeks. If you have general or specific questions you’d like to see addressed in future articles, please let me know. We here at Upper Deck would also be curious about any Limited variants you’ve found enjoyable or challenging.

Thanks for reading,

Dave Humpherys
DHumpherys@metagame.com