Welcome to my first contribution to Metagame.com. My name is Steve Garrett, but some of you may know me by my online screen name, Kamiza. I’ve been involved with Vs. System and the online Vs. community since the game’s earliest days.

My writing will focus on the area I know best: the casual game. I’m afraid you will not find any ridiculous game-breaking tech here. My latest Emperor Joker deck will have to remain secret for now, and The Donkey Club would have my kneecaps if I revealed the fact that all their decks come from me. (Well, maybe that is a little bit of a stretch. I did read Dave Spears’s blog once—that surely must count for something.) What I do hope to show is just how important and entertaining the casual side of Vs. System is. Pro Circuit champions may come and go, but the Hobby League remains eternal!

I would like to begin by talking about one of my favorite topics: me! From what I gather, the story of how I became involved in Vs. is quite unique and demonstrates how important the casual game is to the longevity of the game.

In the Beginning . . .

Welcome to the story of a complete and utter “noob.” (If you’re new to gaming jargon, that’s short for “newbie,” which, in turn, is a somewhat derogatory term for “new player.”)

I was a thirty-year-old guy from the United Kingdom (yes, another bloody Brit) with absolutely zero gaming experience. Add the fact that I had not read a comic since the age of eight and you probably wonder, “How did this guy get into Vs.?”

I will attempt to explain the glorious sequence of events that led to my arrival in the promised land of Vs. System. One well-known member of the Vs. community might describe my introduction to Vs. as Chaos Magic. Personally, I think it was just a case of being in the right place at the right time.

I teach martial arts in my spare time, and one night at the dojo I saw one of my junior students showing off some cards to a small crowd, all of whom seemed very impressed. Curious to know what the hullabaloo was about, I asked what was so important that they felt it necessary to disrupt the lesson. It turned out that these five cards were something collectively known in the world of Yu-Gi-Oh! as Exodia the Forbidden One. This all sounded like geek talk to me (having a dislike of geeky gaming types, I instantly earmarked them for some nasty kind of punishment), so I gave the cards back and returned to the lesson. As I walked away, I heard one kid ask the owner of the cards how much they had cost. His reply was £90 (about $160 in American currency). This stopped me in my tracks. The thought that five little pieces of cardboard could be so valuable was a concept quite alien to me. After the lesson, I learned quite a bit about the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG and the potential value of certain cards. Geeky card games were of no interest to me, but money for old rope certainly was.

Let There Be Light!

To cut a long story short, I joined the YugiohRealms.com online community and became a moderator after a while. A little further down the line, the website owner, Tony “Typhon” Burian, mentioned that he was setting up a new community forum for a game that had recently been announced called Vs. System. (See, I’m getting there.) He asked that all staff members register our usernames on the new site. I did, and despite having absolutely no interest in comics or even playing the game, I somehow got hooked.

The problem was there was no gaming store in my town, and I had no idea where to find one. So here I was, hooked by the premise of an awesome game, but not actually able to play. Cruel, cruel world, I spit at thee! A day or two later, I decided to take a different route home from work (for a reason I will never understand). What do I drive past? Only a new gaming shop that was due to open in the next couple of weeks! This was fate.

The store opened, and I gave it a call. As it turned out, the owner hadn’t even heard of Vs. System. (I was not overly surprised, as it had only just been released in the United States.) I gave him as many details as I could and pointed him in the direction of the Upper Deck Entertainment (UDE) website. After a few days, I began a campaign of annoying phone calls to the store owner.

Eventually the owner ordered a shipment of Marvel Origins, so I made my first visit to the shop, a little unsure of what I would be greeted with. I had been a geek basher for so many years, and now, as I prepared to venture into “their” world, I found myself nervous and hesitant. I half-imagined a scene out of an old Western movie: “He walked through the doors, a stranger in their town. The usual hustle, bustle, and noise of the store suddenly stopped. All eyes turned to the newcomer. They looked into his eyes and saw fear. He looked like a fish out of water, and they decided that this catfish needed gutting.”

In reality it could not have been a more different experience. I walked in, and the owner, a guy named Jason, approached me. A few words and a hearty handshake later, I was being made to feel more welcome than I could have hoped for.

I see Jason as the perfect ambassador for Vs. System. He is not a pro player. He has not won money at a tournament. He does something far more important than that. He nurtures the game at a casual level.

While the Pro Circuit may get all the glitzy headlines, it is (in my humble opinion) far from being the most important aspect of the game. The casual game is the grassroots of Vs., and if you let it, casual play can really make a positive change in you. Well, at least it did for me. A couple of years ago, I had never picked up a card game. I was (I’m ashamed to say) a real geek basher (and in a very literal sense when I was at school), but after exposure to Vs. in a friendly and casual environment, my opinions have been radically altered for the good. If my first experience had been at a store full of hardened players whose only interest was making money, I think my love affair with Vs. would have been short-lived.

If you are reading this trying to decide whether or not Vs. System is the game for you, please-please-please waste not one more minute. Pick up the phone book and find the nearest game store. If you’ve never played a game of Vs. before, don’t worry about it. This game is so well designed that you can invest as much or as little time as you like and still get a worthwhile return.

The Equalizer

Speaking of investment, something that can deter the casual gamer is the misconception that you have to spend hundreds of dollars to build a deck worth playing. This is—as we like to say ’round my way—complete bollocks. There is no disputing the fact that there are quite a few “money” cards out there that are particularly powerful in a number of decks, but do not feel put off by this. You can build budget decks that are both fun to play and quite powerful. 

If your local store runs a Hobby League, ask the store owner to run casual formats on some weeks. One format that we used at our store was “Pauper.” This is not an official UDE format, but it is an excellent way to allow casual players to compete with those who are rich in cards. When I first started playing, I found it quite frustrating to get my deck slapped silly by the guy running four copies of Savage Beatdown. If you don’t have the budget for that kind of arsenal, the fun can quickly dry up. The Pauper format works around that. Jason decided that in order to level things up a bit, he would impose restrictions on deckbuilding for one week. Our decks could contain no rare cards at all, and only eight uncommons. This meant that everyone was competing on the same level. If I remember correctly, the night of our Pauper tournament was one of the busiest Hobby League nights ever.

Here is the deck I used for the Pauper tournament:

“Crime Doesn’t Have to Pay”

Characters

4  Roscoe Sweeny, Fixer

4  Sniper, Rich van Burian

2  Cobra, Klaus Vorhees

4  Kingpin, Wilson Fisk

1  Mr. Hyde, Calvin Zabo

4  Saracen, Muzzafar Lambert

1  Masked Marauder, Frank Farnum

4  Mr. Fear, Zoltan Drago

2  Jamie Ortiz ◊ Damage

2  Helmut Zemo ◊ Citizen V, Warmonger

2  Bullseye, Master of Murder

Plot Twists

4  Face the Master

4  Mega-Blast

4  Tag Team

3  Cover Fire

3  Crushing Blow

3  Burn Rubber

3  Prismatic Shield

3  No Rest for the Wicked

Locations

3  Coast City

This deck is a couple of sets old, so it could probably use a little updating, but it was quite strong in our Pauper format. Its strength lies in stealing the initiative the good old-fashioned way, by surviving your opponent’s attack step. It’s really fun watching your opponent get increasingly frustrated as attack after attack gets bounced.

The Hobby League can really be an awesome creative outlet and is a great way to bring more people into the game. If you’re a store owner or Hobby League regular, I’d love to hear some stories of some of the more casual formats you’ve played in and any ideas you have for bringing more people into the game.  

I’m Nothing but a Cliché

The Hobby League is one of the best recruitment tools that Upper Deck and your local store have at their disposal. Bear in mind that if all you do is play your Squadron Supreme or GLOCK deck, you are going to put off some casual players who are just beginning on their Vs. journey. If new students turned up at my dojo and I spent the night kicking the crap out of them, they would not come back. New or occasional players need to be exposed a bit at a time. If at your next Hobby League session you are paired up with someone you’ve not seen before, put down your Faces of Evil deck and pick up Thunderbolts/Secret Society counter abuse instead. You’ll have fun and so will your opponent. Of course, at the end of the day we all like to win, but winning really is not everything. Hey, I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true.   

Steve Garrett

kamiza989@gmail.com