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"Dadadadadadadadadadadadada . . . Batman!"

When I first picked up Vs. System, it was with a completely blank slate. I had not played any kind of TCG before, and I was not a comic book fan. I had not, however, been living in complete Himalayan isolation, so I was aware of the marquee super hero characters. Spider-Man, Superman, and the X-Men were all familiar to me, but the Batman . . . I loved the Batman.

It was a very simple but clever strategy to have the superstar characters make up the first Origins sets. That made it far easier for someone like me to break into the game. If the first sets had been Marvel Knights and Green Lantern Corps, I probably would have passed the game by. Batman was—no, is— one of my favorite characters of all time. I have no comic lore to draw on; instead my pre-Vs. System exposure comes from the Adam West uber-campiness (seriously R&D, you guys need to make a Batusi plot twist in the next DC set) and the Tim Burton film. Don't you find it strange that they made no Batman films in between the Keaton/Nicholson masterpiece and the recent Batman Begins? What? What's that? No! No, no, no! There were no films in between! Part of the allure of Batman was all the cool gadgets he had—the Batarang, the Batmobile, bat-drinking water dispenser, bat-camera with polarized bat-filter . . . the list goes on. But one gadget in particular is the focus of today's article: the Bat-Signal.

The Bat-Signal has been around Vs. System for a while, but it's being thrust back into the spotlight (Heh, see what I did there? Bat-Signal . . . spotlight . . . ah, forget it!) via the exciting new release of Vs. System Gallery packs. When Mike Hummel made the Gallery Pack announcement, you could hear the drool gushing down the chins of players worldwide. Extended Art cards are an amazing way to highlight the fantastic art we get to turn sideways on a daily basis. These cards are incredibly collectible, and there is a huge market out there. The fact that UDE has now taken these eminently collectible cards and put them all together in packs is just mind-blowing. You're going to have to be quick though, because stocks are definitely going to be limited.

So what about this particular card? Well, the first thing I will mention is the most obvious—the art is fantastic. Killian Plunkett has done a great job with a great many DC Vs. cards, but Bat-Signal is definitely my favorite. The lighting is excellent and really gives the impression of a bustling Gotham City a couple hundred feet below. The beacon reflects off the dark night (Knight?) sky, signaling for Gotham's champion. The contrast between light and dark in the art often reminds me of Batman himself, and his two distinct personae. It’s a top-notch image, but how does the card play?

Well, quite frustratingly, the Gotham Knights are probably the biggest underachievers in Vs. System. The team has all the tools to do well, as you would expect of the Caped Crusader: It has reliable search mechanics through our featured card and Alfred Pennyworth. It has perhaps the finest plot twist negation in the game with Fizzle. The character roster is solid (if unspectacular) with many effective powers, including a decent card drawing theme. Yet the Gotham Knighs have not achieved much in the way of results as a mono-team deck. Instead, their successes have been as part of a union between teams. The first taste of success came at the inaugural Pro Circuit Indianapolis 2004.

Craig Edwards saw the potential of combining the Gotham Knights with Arkham Inmates and the Fantastic Four to make the Rigged Elections deck a viable choice. Losing out to Brian Kibler's Common Enemy in the final did not detract from his phenomenal achievement of piloting a multi-team deck to the very top of Vs. System play. Bat-Signal helped to provide the consistency that all combo decks require, and along with Alfred, it set down something of a template for future deckbuilders to follow.

In 2004, Gen Con So Cal was host to the unique Marvel vs. DC $10K event. A Marvel-only bracket ran alongside a DC-only bracket, with the winner of each meeting in a final to decide the ultimate victor (and add a healthy $5K to the prize money for his or her respective bracket). Alex "A-rod" Tennet took a little time out from supporting his football (“soccer,” to our American cousins) team* to pilot a The Brave and the Bold deck to victory in the DC half of the event before beating Marvel champion Michael Dalton in the grand finale. Once more, the Gotham Knights could not quite cut it on their own, but when they were combined with the youthful exuberance of the Teen Titans, Bat-Signal illuminated the path to glory.

It wasn't long before Bat-Signal was in the spotlight again (holy pun abuse, Batman!). In the first $10K of 2005, just one month after Alex Tennet's success, Ben “TBS” Seck had the opposition on its knees as he smashed robots and teenagers aside to claim victory at $10K Melbourne with what would later become known by many names—Cosmic Cops, Fat-Bat, and Fatman being a few.

The basic premise is to utilize A Child Named Valeria to maintain a healthy number of characters until you can recruit Batman, The Dark Knight. At this point, you exhaust all your little guys to draw cards. You use Cosmic Radiation to repeat this process as many times as possible, boosting your Dark Knight to incredible proportions. Press the Attack and Blind Sided make your combat step quite devastating.

While the Gotham Knights have done little on their own, they have proven to be integral in many of the most successful combo decks in Vs. System. This trend continued at $10K Columbus 2005, when deckbuilder extraordinaire Jason Hager unleashed “Evil Medical School” upon the world.

Once more the combination of Bat-Signal and Alfred facilitated a strong multi-team deck, continuing the trend set by Craig Edwards at the first Pro Circuit. There have been a few decks that have evolved from this pattern; New School and Both Guns Blazing are both combo decks that follow a similar path, using Bat-Signal and Alfred to great results. Since the emergence of Enemy of My Enemy, however, Bat-Signal's light has been slightly diminished. The exhaustion aspect of Bat-Signal can put a crimp in the curve player’s plans because having an exhausted character is a pain when you would ideally be using it to attack. This is why the card has proven to be so popular in off-curve combo decks; the exhausted character is not so much of a burden when you have four or five others on the board. That being said, we should not give up on Gotham Knights as a mono-team. With the forthcoming Golden Age PC, could now be the time for Bat-Signal to shine? I've been looking at a mono(ish) Gotham Knights deck for a little while now that explores another aspect of the team's play, which is equipment. Not just any equipment, either—the equipment: the Fate Artifacts.

Since the Artifacts hit the scene, players have tacked them on to just about every viable team out there, so my thought process was: “Why not stick them on Bruce Wayne and his chums?” Here is what I've been working with:

In a casual environment this deck has been amazing, knocking the tar out of people left and right. The Caped Crusader loves being able to swing in twice a turn, and Wayne Enterprises gives a little additional power to the already strong Fate Artifacts. Regardless of whether this deck can succeed in a Pro Circuit, I know that I'll be trying to snap up Gallery Packs to “bling-out” my Bat-Signals!