These are the words that take up the space before the part where you look at today’s preview card.

Granny Loves You incorporates two of the themes we gave the Darkseid’s Elite team—torture and mutual punishment.

By torture, I mean doing nasty things to stunned characters (and their controllers). Usually, the worst thing you can do to a stunned character is Finishing Move it. The ruler of Apokolips, however, is a bit more creative than that. Cards like Darkseid, Uxas make sure stunned characters stick around to let cards like Granny Loves You and Desaad, Royal Torturer (which you haven’t seen yet, nyah nyah) wreck a stunned character’s controller with endurance loss.

By mutual pain, I mean symmetrical effects that hurt both players equally. Of course, just because an effect looks symmetrical doesn’t mean it actually works that way. A savvy Darkseid player can build a deck specifically to turn a symmetrical effect into a one-sided nightmare for his or her opponents.

There are two basic ways two break the symmetry of Granny Loves You:

1. Limit the number of stunned characters you control by recovering them, KO’ing them (ideally for some beneficial effect), or preventing your characters from becoming stunned in the first place. This way, Granny will smack your opponents harder than she smacks you.

2. Fiercely attack your opponent’s endurance total. If you’ve got a decent endurance lead, Granny’s love will suck away a higher percentage of your opponent’s endurance and allow you to win the game through attrition.

Fortunately, the Darkseid’s Elite team has plenty of weapons to enact the above strategies. Of course, if I told you what they were, Mike Hummel would take away my speaking privileges again . . .

Bonus “Flowers and Ponies” Section

Not since the Batcave/Power Cosmic fiasco of ’04 have I misled so many people. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m referring to last week’s teaser: “Tune in next week, where we talk about flowers, ponies, and a grandmother’s love.”

You see, the week before that one, I got say something silly about the (then) upcoming Parasite preview: “ . . . and make sure you come back next Friday to meet another cosmic character that really sucks.”

I’d said “sucks” because, while one might think I was saying the character was “sucky” as in “bad,” what I really meant was that he “sucks” the energy out of people. Get it? Sigh . . .

So when I got to the end of the Parasite preview and needed to tease the Granny Loves You preview, I gotta admit that I was coming up empty. Panicking, I immediately defaulted to what I always do when I’m strapped for ideas—make fun of Humpherys.

But then I thought, wouldn’t it be a change of pace if, rather than making fun of Humpherys, I instead discussed some of his hobbies? And then, when I remembered that Humpherys’s two main hobbies are collecting flowers and talking about ponies, I realized that I had struck gold.

So, yeah, send flowers or topics about ponies to dhumpherys@metagame.com.

Send manly things like car batteries or leaving the toilet seat up to dmandel@metagame.com.

And tune in next week for another article. Heh.