Marvel Origins has been on the shelves for about two months now, and players have gotten used to the five major and two minor teams. Everyone knows that the X-Men are the best at recoveries, the Brotherhood is crazy aggressive, the Fantastic Four are full of weird combos, and Doom is all about control. (I suppose one could say the Sentinels are all about vomit, but I’m not going to). Since the recently released Spider-Man Vs. Doc Ock starters have given players a taste of two of the new teams on the block, and in a few weeks the DC Comics Origins set will introduce several more, it seemed like a good time to talk about what goes into the design of a Vs. System team.

Before I show you what it’s like from design’s perspective, first I want to go over what a character’s team affiliation means to a player. I’m speaking mechanically here (and I don’t mean I’m making my voice sound like a robot’s). The Vs. System’s engine encourages a player to concentrate on a specific team when building his or her deck because only teammates can reinforce or team attack. Similarly many cards are “team-stamped,” either through their costs (to recruit Thing, Heavy Hitter you must already control a Fantastic Four character) or through their effects (you can recruit Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing in any deck, but you’ll only get his “I’m a scary rock-skinned monster and you’re a little 3 drop—get out of here before I give you such a smack!” power unless you’re playing other FF characters).

So there are obvious advantages to building a team-centric deck, but does that mean when a player sits down to build a deck he or she should pick one team and toss aside all the others? Yes. Yes it does. Just kidding! Of course not. Part of the fun in deck building is the whole mad scientist sense of experimentation and exploration. There’s a lot to be gained from mixing across teams. Let’s break it down. Depending on how you look at it, there are about four different ways a player can build a non-pure team deck.

Official Crossover: The Marvel Origins set introduced five “crossover” cards that allow two teams to function as one. Some official crossover decks would be the X-Men/Brotherhood Lost Cities deck that—through the power of Mutant Nation—lets Wolverine get Lost, or the Doom/Fantastic Four Common Enemy decks that go crazy with deck searching like Signal Flaring for Dr. Doom or sending Boris to fetch It’s Clobberin’ Time.

Unofficial Crossover: An unofficial crossover is a deck that uses two different teams because of some natural synergies between them, but since it doesn’t have a huge dependence on team-stamped cards and/or since reinforcement and team attacks are not a top priority, it doesn’t use up slots on the crossover cards. There aren’t a whole lot of decks like this currently, but I have a feeling they’ll start showing up after the DC Comics Origins set comes out.

Special Guest Star: These are almost pure team decks that run one or two off-team characters to support the deck’s strategy. For example, Beast helps put the “turbo” in the Turbo-Gamma Bomb deck, and before the Lost City craze, many The New Brotherhood decks were sporting Darkoth. Perhaps new decks will emerge in the near future that guest star Spider-Friends or Sinister Syndicate characters.

Cherry Pick: These decks don’t pay attention to team affiliations at all, instead preferring to include powerful characters from all over the place either for their overt combat prowess or some natural synergies between the cards’ effects. While I haven’t yet seen anything that resembles a real cherry pick deck, there is the ever-popular Mojo-based unaligned character deck. Then again, in some ways that deck’s really just a pure team deck where the “team” is specifically its lack thereof. Again, as more sets get released, I suspect will start seeing some cherry pick decks.

Keep in mind, while a player could theoretically set out to design one of the above deck types regardless of what the underlying strategy of the deck might be (perhaps he or she wants to make a Sentinel/X-Men deck for the irony factor, or he or she really wishes that Banshee was a member of the Fantastic Four), often a player comes up with a mechanical idea for a deck and it just happens to fall into one of the above categories. For example, a few months ago I was working on a Xavier’s Dream deck, and I ended up running several Doom cards because it helped the deck, not just because I wanted to team up the Doctor and the Professor. (That deck was an example of an unofficial crossover.)

I’ve gone over some of the basic ways team affiliations affect how a player builds a deck or views a card pool. But what does all this have to do with design? I’ll go into more details in a minute, but the main reason is that it’s important for us as designers to understand how players approach the game (and in this case I’m speaking specifically with regard to how team affiliations affect deck design).

 
Design of a Decade (ten points if you get the reference)

We’ve got a long-term game plan for the Vs. System. Just the other day, we pretty much finalized the order of expansion sets for years four and five (and no, I can’t tell you). Planning ahead includes team design as well.

When we first get ready to design a team, we take several things into account. We look at the team in the context of other teams. For example, let’s say we want to give the Sinister Syndicate some direct endurance loss. We need to decide early on whether or not they’ll have less, more, or about the same amount as the Brotherhood. If the Spider-Friends are going to get lots of defensive elements, we have to decide how they’ll stack up against Doom’s control cards. Optimally the comparison between two teams’ relative power levels with regard to a specific part of the game would not be quantitative (as in which team is strictly better), but situationally qualitative (that is, which team is better comes down to the specific situation).

We also look at the team in the context of the set in which it will be premiering. While the Marvel and DC Comics Origins sets are intended to introduce players to the game and therefore are not focused on a specific theme, many future Vs. System sets will push the game in new directions. As such, the major teams in each of those sets will reflect the concept being pushed. Then again, often the concept itself will influence which new teams are chosen to be in the set in the first place.

Another consideration is the Vs. environment . Teams don’t exist in a vacuum; their strengths and weaknesses are only relative to those of other teams. Therefore, when we create a new team, we know its power level is tied into how it will fit into and/or affect the metagame. Of course, affecting the metagame can be a slow process in that we work several sets ahead, so it can take some months for our metagame adjustments start showing up in card pools.

Once we’ve examined the external factors relevant to the team’s design, we decide how we want the team to feel mechanically. In some ways, this involves a bit of top down thinking. Generally bad guy teams tend to be meaner and more aggressive while their goody two-shoes counterparts are more defensive and protective in nature. Of course there are many different ways to mechanically represent these facets. The trick is to make sure each team we add to the mix has its own identity—that it feels different from each other team we’ve done before.

For example, the Brotherhood and X-Men are both aggressive teams (I know I just said aggression is more of a bad guy trait, but go with me on this one). While the Brotherhood’s aggression involves lots ATK bonuses and hitting as hard as possible, sometimes at the expense of its own characters, the X-Men’s aggression is built around keeping their own characters unharmed while attacking or boosting the whole team’s ATK and DEF.

Once we have the basics of what a team should feel like (and note, I keep saying “feel”—it’s a more a intuitive process than a formulaic one) we start coming up with mechanics for each individual character on that team (I skipped the part about how we decide which characters make it onto which teams because I figure there’ll be a lot of “Why did so and so make the cut and so and so didn’t?” in the next few weeks, and it’ll make for a good article down the road.)

As I mentioned a while back, there are two approaches to designing an individual character—top down or bottom up. To summarize, often we try to come up with a character’s power that is mechanically appropriate to its team while at the same time thematically apropos (top down design). Sometimes there’s a mechanic we really want to squeeze into the set (or the team) or there’s a character with a really generic power (like super strength) or a power that’s difficult to adequately represent in the Vs. engine (such as wall-crawling). In these cases, we often just come up with a good mechanic that isn’t diametrically opposed to the character’s theme, and we let players’ imaginations fill in the blanks.

Sometimes a mechanic that feels really good on a certain character might not jive with the team’s themes. Times like this, we tend to play fast and loose with our own rules. For example, there’s no reason the Spider-Friends team should have access to a Finishing Move–style effect, but it just felt so good on the Punisher we let it slide. There’s also an additional benefit to letting a few characters stray from the rest of their teams.

This is when I sync up the part of the article about team design with the first part about what team affiliations mean to a player. Up until this point, I’ve been working under the assumption that a player will be building a pure team deck. While I’m pretty happy with the variety among the pure team decks in the Marvel Origins set (and I’m equally excited about that aspect of the DC Comics release) I really get a kick out of team-up decks (both official and unofficial). It’s easy to pick a team affiliation and try to build the best deck you can out of it. It’s much tougher to look at a set or the environment in total and make connections across the board. As more and more sets (and teams) get introduced deckbuilding will get exponentially more interesting. Instead of choosing two teams out or five, it’ll be two teams out of twenty, each with their own individual strengths. Will you be playing Arkham Inmates/X-Men or Spider-Friends/League of Assassins? Perhaps some Bizarro combination like Fearsome Five/Skrull?

Wow, this article is starting to feel like an advertisement. And I guess in some ways it is. Speaking of which, tune in soon for some detective work. Send questions or comments to dmandel@metagame.com.