Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

This may not be the first Mobilize article you have read (and I am certain it will not be the last), but when a card of this nature appears on the horizon we need to take one step beyond and explore its potential impact.

On November 17, 2006, I woke up and made my way downstairs. I had a horrendous day at work ahead of me, since I had a meeting with Flight Crew Union officials. It’s not unreasonable to generalize and say that the vast majority of pilots have huge egos—even greater than my own. But pilots who are union officials . . . they would make Galactus feel insignificant. I made my way into the kitchen and found there was nothing in the house for breakfast; I was getting a bit uptight. I had five minutes to spare, so I booted up the PC and clicked straight to Metagame.com. What I saw before me quickly blew the dark clouds away.

Dave Humphreys had introduced the world to a new card from the Legion of Super Heroes expansion: Mobilize. When I saw the card, I knew it was going to be very important to the future of Vs. System. This sort of thing is not new to the game, though. On January 29, 2006, Dave Humphreys unleashed Enemy of My Enemy onto a salivating public. When Dave said, “Here’s a search card that’s likely to change the face of Vs. as you know it,” he wasn’t exaggerating. I don’t think any other card has had such a major impact on competitive Vs. System play. Enemy of My Enemy has single-handedly facilitated the construction of so many viable tournament decks that some players believe it’s impossible to compete at the highest level without four copies. I seem to remember hearing a story about Pro Circuit San Francisco in which a well-known pro approached Ian Vincent (the eventual winner of the tournament) and asked, “Why do you only have three Enemies in your deck? Don’t you own four?”

In a wide format like Golden Age or Silver Age, I think the card is at its most valuable. In the two PCs we’ve seen with those formats since The X-Men hit stores, Enemy of My Enemy was a four-of in every deck except Ian Vincent’s PC: San Francisco–winning Deep Green. That’s a pretty impressive record. The reason it’s so useful is that it makes multi-team decks far more reliable than ever before. This allows the creation of “toolbox” decks that are able to adapt to almost any opponent.

There is no doubt that Enemy has changed the face of Vs. System. Some players embrace this with open arms; others aren’t quite so happy with the situation. I have always been supportive of the impact Enemy has made, but some people are disappointed and say that this effect detracts from the flavor of the game. Back when Curve Sentinels was the dominant deck, many comic fans were up in arms because Magneto, Master of Magnetism formed an integral part of the deck. I’ve never had a problem with this, as it seemed to me that the point of the game was to find interactions between cards and combine them into a workable team. In today’s game, it’ not uncommon to see seven, eight, or even more teams represented in one deck. Still, I have absolutely no problem with these decks being made viable by the potent search card from The X-Men.

Something I can sympathize with is the feeling that in today’s game, single- or even dual-team decks cannot compete on the tournament scene. Not many teams have search cards on the same power level as Enemy of My Enemy, and as we all know, the ability to search your deck for cards improves its consistency by a large factor. It comes down to simple mathematics: a multi-team deck with Enemy of My Enemy will often be more reliable than a mono-team deck with a less reliable search card (e.g. X-Men with Cerebro).

Mobilize is not the anti–Enemy of my Enemy card that many are touting it as, but the reason that it will be so important is that it will help increase the consistency of mono-team decks to the point that they could become tournament viable. This will not detract from Enemy of My Enemy’s influence, but it will bring a degree of equilibrium to tournament viability among many decks.

The card itself is, in my opinion, stronger than Enemy of My Enemy. The threshold cost is just the same as Enemy—so it isn’t going to see play any earlier—but the discard cost is the big difference. Being able to discard any kind of card to meet the requirement makes it an improvement on the generic search card from The X-Men. I also like the fact that all characters you control must share an affiliation for the card to work. While I don’t have any problems per se with multi-team decks, I do think that having your characters work together to take down a large opponent or support a colleague under attack is an integral part of Vs. System. In my opinion, the recent trend of players not teaming-up their characters goes against this somewhat.

Predictably, as soon as the card hit the ’net, the forums were alive with debate and discussion surrounding the most worthwhile teams to be Mobilized. So, for the next couple of articles, I will be looking at teams that could use the Mobilize treatment.

X-Statix

I have said this many times before—I love the X-Statix as a team, and the loner strategy is absolutely fascinating to me. At $10K London in March 2005, I took the newly debuted team into battle. Inconsistency (and ridiculously poor preparation) left me on the wrong end of a few results. Since then, I’ve teamed them up with a new team after every new set released. Enemy of My Enemy has made that possible, and with Villains United, we finally saw a deck in which X-Statix could compete for top honors. It would be nice to see them succeed on their own, though, so I put together a quick list, proxied up four copies of Mobilize, and did a little testing.

Characters

I’ve been playing with the X-Statix / Villains United team-up for some time now (and with a fair degree of success), so this deck had a fairly stiff reputation to live up to. I also compared it to the early mono-builds I used and found that (quite obviously) it was a far more consistent deck than the $10K London version. It was not as consistent as the Villains United team-up, though—The Science Spire really tips that deck over the edge. What I did find was that it was a far more capable aggressive deck than the Villains hybrid. Having room to squeeze in Mind Over Matter was a real bonus. Overall, Mobilize vastly improves the deck, but not to the point where it surpasses the Villains United team-up.

Arkham Inmates

I don’t think any team has cried out louder and longer for a reliable search card. Every DC expansion since Origins has been met with a horde of Arkham friends desperately clamoring over the card lists looking for an Arkham search card.

Characters

These guys have access to some wonderful cards, and one of my favorites is Kidnapping. That card can seriously mess with an opponent’s best-laid plans, and it won me quite a few of my games in testing. I’m positive that this is not the best build of Arkham Inmates, but I was surprised at how well it worked. Against any kind of curve deck, it does some pretty smart things; against off-curve decks, it is less effective. Charaxes is a problem because of his low DEF, but his power is fantastic when the deck is working well. On the whole, I think this is the better deck of the two that I covered today, and I can’t wait to see what an experienced Arkham player does with a decklist once Mobilize comes online.

I’m really excited about the potential of Mobilize, and next week I’ll be looking at its impact on a couple of other teams. X-Men, anyone?

I’ll see you again next week. Feel free to email me with your own deck ideas for Mobilize.

Cheers,

Steve

Steve “Kamiza” Garrett is an ardent supporter of casual Vs. play and has been an active member of the vast Vs. System online community since day one. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to email him at kamiza989@gmail.com or pester him at his website, www.the-kamiza.com.