Hopefully, everyone had a great time at the X-Men Sneak Preview events this weekend. People’s thoughts are no doubt buzzing with deck ideas, and players are frantically reviewing new and old cards in search of game-winning tech. What’s your plan? Are you going to focus on the Morlocks or Hellfire Club, are you looking to combine X-Men and Brotherhood cards from the Origins and X-Men sets, or will you trail blaze a new build with a team-up or “trait-up” deck?

This is one of the most exciting times for deckbuilding—when the field opens up and no one is quite sure what the next big deck is going to be. Sure, people have their suspicions about which builds will have strong showings at the next big event, but there’s always the chance that a new “named” deck will break the tournament scene wide open. Will you be the one who discovers that build and creates the next deck name that’s added to the game speak of the Vs. System? 

While you’re busy daydreaming about holding that oversized $40,000 check and trophy from winning the Atlanta PC, let me distract you with some design tales from the first X-Men R&D meeting. Before we started thinking about what would eventually become the Mutant traits, we first needed to discuss what it meant bringing the X-Men and Brotherhood teams back for a second showing. 

There were a number of questions that needed to be addressed. The teams had to be robust enough to live on their own in the Silver and Modern Age formats, but we also needed to ensure that we didn’t disrupt the balance in Golden Age, as we were effectively giving 2 teams out of 34 twice as many cards. 

We talked about reprinting cards from Marvel Origins. Reprinting would have solved some of the problems. It would have reduced the number of new cards that the X-Men and Brotherhood received for Golden Age, while at the same time, ensuring that they had enough foundation cards to function in Silver and Modern. Reprinting was nothing new. We reprinted Marvel Team-Up in Marvel Knights, and repeat generic plot twists are common in our starter decks. However, those reprints focused on common workhorse cards that most players already had in abundance.

Reprinting also came with some potential problems. It could have had a serious impact on the trading and resale values of the reprinted Origins singles if we were to re-release cards such as Sabretooth, Feral Rage. It also meant that players who had been in the game from the beginning would be getting less bang for their buck. A lot of the excitement generated from a new set comes from playing with the new cards. Reducing the number of new cards would reduce all the joys of deckbuilding that I talked about before. Reprinting could also have interfered with our ability to further flesh out the team themes that we introduced in the Origins set. So, while reprinting might be an acceptable answer in certain cases, such as for commons in starters, it wasn’t the correct direction for this booster set.       

With that decision finalized, we started looking at what it would mean if we gave certain decks more characters. At this stage, we weren’t even concerned about the game effects. We were asking questions like, “What would happen if The New Brotherhood decks received two additional characters at costs 1 through 4?” Questions like that kept the developers busy for months testing and balancing the new cards.

We also talked about the balancing act of having the X-Men and Brotherhood teams use their Origins counterpart strategies, X-Men recovery and Brotherhood rush. At the same time, we wanted to have a natural link to the other teams and keywords (like reservist and leader) found in the Avengers set, for maximum Modern Age integration.

Ultimately, we created a blend of both directions. The X-Men team expands on their recovery, off-curve, and stall themes from Origins while using leaders and Mutant traits to allow for natural team-ups with other Modern Age affiliations. The Brotherhood pushes their aggressive theme by rewarding breakthrough, and they play into both new and old builds with the reservist mechanic. Have you noticed how nicely reservist characters let you drop down to four resources in a TNB build? Remember, reservist replacement from the resource row is optional. (Try saying that five times fast.)

So, do you have it yet? Have you created the next Modern Age winning deck in your head? Now that I think about it, you get to have all the fun. I’m not allowed to play professionally, so I’ll never be the champ who comes up with the next winning deck name. I did get to design the Avengers and X-Men sets, though, so I guess I’ll have to settle for naming the next PC “Mike’s Marvel Modern Age.” 

Hmmm . . . Maybe I should stick to designing cards.