“I’m obsessed,” admits Ben Kalman. “I’m the first to admit it.”

The man’s not kidding. As the proud owner of 2,000 records and CDs, 500 videos and DVDs, 5,000 comics, more trading cards than he can count, numerous coins, and countless stamps, when the man starts something, he doesn’t finish it. He’s that obnoxious pink bunny that claps its way across your TV periodically, except the commercial doesn’t end. Of course, this can be a good thing.

Ben started playing games when he was five years old, when his older brother taught him how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Card and board games provided the base for quality family time, and before he hit double digits, he’d already started his vast comic collection. Vs. System was a natural fit, but it was a long trip getting there.

Ben would be the first to tell you that this is the game he’s been waiting for his entire life. ‘I tried Overpower and I really didn’t like it, but I’d always been a Marvel fan, so I really wanted something similar to the Wildstorms TCG (a game based on the independent Image comics) in terms of the system, but with Marvel characters. About a year ago, I joined a TCG website, but it wasn’t meeting my needs, so I decided to start up a mailing list.” Today, said list is up to 900 active members, but that’s only his smaller audience.

Ben heard at last year’s Gen Con that Vs. System was almost ready to go. He began pestering Montreal’s card shop owners, and when the game failed to materialize, Upper Deck’s employees felt his wrath. He found out that with Jeff Donais’s addition to Upper Deck, the game had been pushed back three months, at which point he started causing problems by guessing correctly at spoilers and providing the public with “information” the company didn’t want to leak out.

Kalman’s contact with the community increased when he started working for vsrealms.com, the largest community on the web. After writing around fifteen articles for the site, he was offered a regular column on metagame.com. Ben maintained his work on vsrealms.com while taking on this additional responsibility. The man loves the game.

Ben’s making a living working for Montreal’s equivalent for Ticketmaster (‘I don’t make much money…they take it all back for tickets’) while finishing up his Masters, specializing in the Romantics. He also maintains a small press which ‘maintains itself’ financially [www.mercutiopress.com]. This is a man who knows how to utilize his time. He hopes that his next such utilization will be in Upper Deck’s employ: he’d like to do contract work, creating flavor text for cards and doing the little things that make a community strong. Really, I can’t see them saying no. He’ll just push and prod and poke. Nothing can stop him. The man’s elemental. He just keeps going, and going and going . . .

What percentage of the game is made up of skill, luck, and knowledge/preparation?