Today’s preview card:
First, a little flavor for the Green Lantern novice: Appa Ali Apsa was a Guardian of the Universe (the little blue dudes who give the Green Lanterns their power) who went crazy from loneliness. He decided to take all of the places in the universe he’d visited and put them in one location to keep him company. He literally ripped huge chunks out of planets, pulled them across space, and wove them together, creating the patchwork landscape of the Mosaic World. It took the combined efforts of Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and Guy Gardner, plus some of the varied inhabitants of Mosaic World (such as Tomar-Tu, who would go on to become a Green Lantern) to save the day.
In the Vs. System, we’ve chosen to represent the concept of this motley collection of aliens metaphorically joining hands in an “I’d like to teach the world to sing” moment by making sure all of your characters can team attack and reinforce each other. Pretty straightforward, right?
There are two things about Mosaic World that I really like. One, it’s a new riff on team-ups, a card class I love for the possibilities it engenders. To me, while there’s a certain amount of flavor and elegance to “pure team” decks, it’s the crossover models like Brave and the Bold or Common Enemy and the funky combinations like Evil Medical School or the Marvel Knights/Underworld/Brotherhood power-up deck (does it have an official unofficial name yet?) that really highlight the broad scope of both the Vs. System and comics in general.
Two, I’m a big fan of cards that explore or illuminate fundamental aspects of the Vs. System. For example, I appreciate how Phat demonstrates the hot and cold spots along the resource point/ATK and DEF curve. Similarly, Mosaic World explores the importance or relevance of team affiliations. We all know the three basic mechanical reasons to favor “pure team” or “pure team plus a splash” deck builds:
- Characters with the same team affiliation can team attack.
- Characters with the same team affiliation can reinforce each other.
- The more characters you have with the same team affiliation, the more likely you’ll be to use a team-stamped effect and/or the more powerful a team-stamped effect will be. (This also includes stuff like Loyalty.)
Mosaic World completely trumps points 1 and 2, essentially putting pressure on team-stamped effects to hold the “team affiliations really do matter” fort. The question is, if there’s no longer a concern about team attacking or reinforcing, is there any reason for a deckbuilder to concentrate solely on a single team? Will featuring a smorgasbord of team affiliations and a hearty helping of generic plot twists and locations rule the day?
Probably not.
Team-stamped effects are too powerful an incentive in deck design to be ignored. With rare exception, generic non-characters deal with basic axes of the game such as combat modification, KO/recovery, and reinforcement. They don’t really drive or foster archetypes the way team-stamped staples such as Cosmic Radiation, Reconstruction Program, and Teen Titans Go! do.
Plus, it’s not trivial to have to include four copies of Mosaic World in your deck just to ensure that your characters receive the benefits that natural teammates enjoy. And what happens when you don’t draw Mosaic World, or it gets Foiled or Ka-Boom!'ed? I’ll tell you what happens—suckiness!
So yeah . . . Mosaic World is probably not the end of the world as we know it. But it still has its strong points. Here are three of them:
Sealed Pack Play
At first glance, Mosaic World looks like an inferior World’s Finest in Sealed Pack play because it doesn’t fully team up your characters. But in some scenarios, it’s arguably more powerful. Sometimes in Draft and often in Sealed Pack, you’ll have characters from three or four different teams in your deck. While World’s Finest can only give two of them the hookup, Mosaic World means high fives all around.
But Sealed play is Sealed play, and I know what you guys really want to hear about is Constructed . . .
Cherry Pick Decks
As I mentioned above, it’s unlikely that cherry pick decks featuring all-star characters from any and every team will dominate the metagame. But it’s pretty cool that Mosaic World at least helps to open up the possibility of cherry decks cracking the top tables. So, grab the biggest characters at every drop or the characters with the coolest powers and build your own dream team.
But cherry pick decks are cherry pick decks, and I know what you guys really want to hear about are evil, spineless, television ratings–mongering tyrants . . .
The Mojo Deck
It’s been a while since we tossed Mojo a bone with Mojoverse, but it’s time for Mister Unaffiliated to go large. Mosaic World solves one of the Mojo archetype’s biggest problems—what to do with a truckload of Random Punks when they can’t team attack or reinforce. With Mosaic World . . . well, you get the idea. Add some of the new unaffiliated characters in the Green Lantern expansion, and maybe toss in Longshot for some draw consistency (and flavor appropriateness or irony, depending on your point of view*), and we may have a new tier 1 archetype. ’Nuff said.
Okay, that’s all I got. Tune in tomorrow for a preview that follows up the team-up theme—Army style!
Send questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com.
*Longshot and Mojo are archenemies from way back in the day. I’m pretty sure that Longshot was a designer and Mojo was a developer.
Tomorrow's Preview:
