I doubt today’s news will come as a huge surprise to anyone. While there are certainly some people who will be lamenting this decision, we expect many more to be rejoicing. What is this news?

Dr. Light, Master of Holograms will be taking a long break from the competitive scene. That’s right—after eighteen months of action, Dr. Light will have the infamy of joining the other cards on the banned list. How has he survived for so long and yet only now receives this treatment? It is certainly not a simple issue, and one which I’ll delve into now. I still owe you all some reasons regarding the choice of bannings made before the last Pro Circuit, and I’ll touch more on those as well.

This Dr. Light banning does not stem from a single interaction or “broken” deck, but rather from an accumulation of problems related to power level, design constraints, and game play.

Power Level

Is Dr. Light the most powerful card not banned in our game? Maybe. Maybe not. It is important to understand that it is not being banned merely on the basis of power level; however, power level is an important part of the equation.

One good indicator of a card’s power level is how often it appears in the best-performing decklists at our premier events. Based on that criterion, Dr. Light has certainly been making a name for himself. This is true even after the erratum limiting his power to once a turn eliminated infinite loops. There are certainly cards appearing as frequently or more frequently, but I think it is hard to argue that Dr. Light is not an extremely powerful card. As much as anyone, I like to think that spending 3 resource points for a 3 ATK / 4 DEF character that won’t be attacking much should be a liability in both an aggressive rush deck or a more controlling deck, especially when that character is dependent on you filling your KO’d pile. The evidence from our events, however, would suggest quite the contrary. The return on the initial investment a player makes on turn 3 (or later) hugely outweighs the drawbacks of this card. This has held especially true as we have tried to increase the power level of 2-drop characters somewhat since the inception of the game. I’ll elaborate more on this later in the article.

It is difficult or even impossible to gauge the power level of a card without the context of interacting cards. It is equally important to consider the current metagame. Dr. Light may have been okay when Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern was his most desirable target, but once cards like Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose entered the card pool he might not have been. And even with a card like Ivy, he may have been okay until the existence of a certain collection of available locations. There could also certainly exist metagames where a card like Dr. Light wouldn’t be popular. If everyone were playing with extremely powerful anti-weenie cards in decks that were competitive against a wide array of decks, Dr. Light could more reasonably co-exist.

As it stands though, Dr. Light was enabling far too much. By allowing you to avoid paying resource points for characters turn after turn, he was doing something few other cards could do. And he was interacting too well with many of the other most powerful cards that have emerged in our game. For example, it should prove interesting to see if the likes of The Phantom Stranger, Wandering Hero and Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose are anywhere near as popular following the banning, when it isn’t so easy to get “free” characters into play to support them.

Design Constraints

As I alluded to earlier, at some point in our game’s history there wasn’t quite enough justification for players to put a lot of 2-drop characters in most of their decks. As designers and developers, there are a number of angles we could approach from to fix this. The most obvious approach is to make 2-drop characters better. Alternatively, there are more specific solutions, like making it easier to get them into play. The thematics of Dr. Light, Master of Holograms are very appropriate, but thematic issues aside, Dr. Light was almost certainly designed as a card that would help the “problem” of making 2-drop characters more playable. Fortunately, Dr. Light gave us a splashy card that accomplished its goal: people started putting more 2-drop characters in their decks. The problem is that we didn’t want players to only play 2-drops because of this one card, we wanted them to be played because they were a good investment of a player’s 2 resource points.

In many ways, Dr. Light was at odds with our initial goal. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve designed a card and said, “Argh. We can’t make that because of Dr. Light. Let’s put that power on a 3-drop character instead,” or, “We need to team stamp that 2-drop character because of Dr. Light.”

Both of the above statements impose their own awkward design constraints on us. At their most basic, they reduce the power level of our top tier of 2-drop characters—and we want to keep making exciting 2-drops. Eliminating Dr. Light from the card pool should open the floodgates for our designers to make clever 2-drop characters.

There can be many reasons for not wanting to move a power to a different cost. Usually, it is tied thematically to a character and it can interfere with the rest of the roster to move that character. Sometimes moving it to a cost of three is also not appropriate to the power level of that character in the comic.

As for team stamping, Dr. Light circumvents one of our most frequently used team stamps (loyalty and loyalty—reveal), and it is not always easy to come up with alternative wordings that don’t significantly lengthen a card’s text. While a card like Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose could have said “KO another Arkham Inmates or Injustice Gang character you control. . . ” other cards aren’t so easy to stamp without the addition of a sentence like: “Use this power only if you control an Arkham Inmates or Injustice Gang character.” This is a lot of text to add to our cards unless we feel strongly justified in doing so. It is certainly at odds with one of our own internal goals, which is to keep card text length as short as reasonably possible.

Game Play

Beyond the above issues, there is the bigger picture. Perhaps the highest priority in making a game is to make it fun, and while what is fun for one player is not necessarily what is fun for another player, we believe the vast majority of our players did not enjoy the play experiences enabled by Dr. Light. When he was working well, he added a character to the board that would otherwise not be there—and this happened each turn. When coupled with decks that were also normally recruiting more that one character a turn, this led to overly complicated board states. And this doesn’t even touch upon the fact that he was in practice used to return characters that enabled deck searching or manipulation effects. This led to longer and more complicated games than most of our player base enjoyed.

Regrettably, in hindsight Dr. Light should have read: “. . . Put target Emerald Enemies character. . . ” or; “. . . Put target character card with willpower 1 or greater. . .” Then again, maybe Dr. Light would never have made the splash he did or opened up the deckbuilding possibilities that at least some players undoubtedly did enjoy for some time. This is always the risk we take when making new and exciting cards. I’ll take this opportunity to mention again that we will rarely, if ever, make an erratum that will cause a card not to play out the way it actually reads in roughly 90% of “normal” scenarios. This is why Dr. Light is not being given further errata. I’ll refer you back to my previous articles on this topic for anyone confused about why we don’t simply place errata on cards more often instead of banning them.

The Pre-Gen Con So Cal Bannings

Now for a quick rundown of our reasons for choosing of cards that were banned before the last Pro Circuit.

Go Down Fighting was problematic because of the following scenario. This is not an easy combo to follow, so read on carefully. You need Senyaka and a stunned character in play during your recruit step so you can recruit Tommy for free (a character with evasion is ideal for achieving the stunned requirement). You need to team-up Brotherhood and Morlocks so you can then reveal Go Down Fighting; you can then evade Tommy and put him into your resource row. At this point you want to recruit Tommy again. To do this, you need Pressed into Service teaming-up Kree and Morlocks so that he is a reservist. When you recruit him for free your opponent loses 2 endurance from Senyaka. At this point you already have some powerful action going on. The problem is that each time you recruit Tommy as a reservist you want to be putting a card into your resource row. So how do we get around this problem? It takes another team coming into the mix—the Manhunters! By making Tommy a Manhunter with another Team-Up or a card like Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee, you gain access to Plans Within Plans. You need access to two copies of Plans Within Plans to maximize this combo. Now, whenever you recruit Tommy in the above scenario but before you evade him, you exhaust him and replace Plans Within Plans to get another card into your hand. Once there’s a copy of Plans Within Plans in your’ KO’d pile (for example, by replacing the first copy), you then get that copy back each time. Now whenever you recruit Tommy you are always able to put one of these Plans Within Plans into your resource row, and so you can do 2 endurance to your opponent (and 1 endurance to yourself from the evasion stun) for each card in your deck (since at some point you run out of cards to replace into). It may not sound easy, but it was surprisingly effective with all of the cards available pre-banning.

Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria was largely problematic because of her interaction with A Day Unlike Any Other. This two-card interaction alone let you filter through cards for the price of 3 endurance, which is actually a small price to pay when it means getting to combos that outright win you the game. It can make all the difference in getting to enough Cosmic Radiations to win with Rigged Elections, or getting to all of the cards in the combo I listed above for Go Down Fighting. You can also reduce the cost of this filtering with cards like Spoiler, Stephanie Brown, who you can even get out multiple copies of with a card like Changeling. This filtering also worked extremely well with free characters of all different team affiliations that could then be played from the KO’d pile with Attend or Die! (in large part because of Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee). It was a difficult decision to decide whether to ban Valeria or A Day Unlike Any Other. In the end, we felt that many of the problematic scenarios in our game were arising from our “free” characters, and that she did far too much for one of these characters. There was also the complication that Marked for Death created a similar interaction.

Talia, LexCorp CEO was the parallel to Valeria on the location side of things; she had a similar pairing with Punisher's Armory. Having made the decision to choose Valeria for banning, we felt it made more sense to choose Talia rather than Punisher’s Armory. While Talia required a bit more work, we wanted to make sure that these combo engines didn’t just switch to using her.

Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee was selected because he was too powerful an enabler. He was at odds with too many of our design objectives and could too easily circumvent the team stamping we’d intentionally put on cards so that not just any deck could play them. This was especially true because he could take any number of characters of any number of different affiliations and give them all the same affiliation—even if you didn’t have a single character of that affiliation. If we didn’t remove him from the equation, there’s a good chance we would have needed to ban cards like Attend or Die! and Cosmic Radiation.

Fiddler, Isaac Bowin had an interaction that was too powerful when combined with another copy of himself in the KO’d pile. For each card in hand, you could recruit a character, exhaust a character to pay a cost, or trigger a leaves play or goes to the KO’d pile effect. This put far too great a constraint on cards that referenced these events. We realize this is a big hit to the themes of the Secret Six, and have included a 1-drop Mad Hatter for them in the upcoming DC World’s Finest set.

The above overview only scratches the surface of the many discussions we encountered while deciding which cards to ban and why. In the end, we were pleased with the outcome of these bannings at the last Pro Circuit. We appreciate all of the players who have provided their own insights and decklists in helping us reach these decisions. Further comments are welcome at DHumpherys@metagame.com.

Here is an updated list of our banned cards.

Banned Cards

Antarctic Research Base

Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee

Dr. Light, Master of Holograms (effective January 19, 2007)

Fiddler, Isaac Bowin

Go Down Fighting

Gone But Not Forgotten