Though Legion of Super Heroes is the first lead design I’ve done for Vs. System, I feel as if I’ve been designing games all my life. From the global domination board games I played with my brother to the million and one chess variants I devised, I sought to look at different aspects of games and highlight them in new and interesting ways. With Vs. System’s twelfth expansion, I took the same approach from two different directions.

Historically, characters in Vs. System didn’t have much purpose beyond their usage in play. Apart from powering-up and a few specific discard costs, once you passed the drop point or drew extra copies of a character at a certain cost, you more or less had a dead card. As off-curve strategies flourished, characters saw more usage beyond their requisite resource turn, but the curve decks didn’t have such a luxury. Armed with that information, I sought to make sure that character cards became more relevant in games of Vs. at all points on the curve. I attempted to do this with each featured team.

A Legion of Characters

The Legionnaires originally had a new game mechanic called “teamwork” that was present in early incarnations of the Legion card file and was meant to make their characters more relevant. I’ll get into the details of that mechanic in later articles, but teamwork sought to make sure that each and every character on the board increased the effectiveness of the team as a whole. The keyword complicated matters too much though, so we ditched it in favor of a more intuitive and interesting use of the cosmic keyword.

Now, each character increases the diversity and power of effects by being a battery of some sort; they come into play fully charged or with the power to recharge (in the form of cosmic—surge). In-house, I termed this team-based version of cosmic “cosmic buddies”—much to the chagrin of the R&D team. It allowed a very natural reason for the Legionnaires to become an off-curve team while not forcing many of the traditional swarm effects into their arsenal (such as mass ATK increases).

Dis-card and Dat-card

The Future Foes were originally framed as a “grief” team, a term that anyone familiar with multiplayer computer games knows refers to a player or strategy that seeks to have its fun by preventing other players from doing the things they want to do. Hand discard was the ultimate way to achieve this, and while there have been quite a few cards in Vs. that have alluded to this aspect of the game (X-Men and Arkham Inmates have a few cards that highlight this strategy), it has never really been promoted. The reason for this is that discard is usually too devastating for curve decks, which cannot afford to lose crucial drops or have unspent resource points in a turn. There was a lot of concern within R&D that while this strategy would be fun for the Future Foes player, it would be pretty miserable to play against. To mitigate the negative nature of the discard we ultimately gave the choice to the other player, which made it both interesting and challenging. Getting back to the “character cards matter” aspect of the design, Future Foes was designed to make sure that an opponent’s extra character cards were made useful and represented a resource. You can often tell how well a Future Foes player is doing just by counting the number of cards in his or her opponent’s hand!

There’s No Substitute

This brings us to the new mechanic of the set, substitute. Substitute had its beginnings in the Justice League of America expansion, where lead designer Matt Hyra wanted to represent mind-control abilities (such as those possessed by the villains Gorilla Grodd and Ultra-Humanite). That mechanic was similar to what substitute became, but was then called transplant and involved characters being put under other ones. It  ultimately proved too messy for implementation, but the idea was sound and was tabled for a future time when a theme bigger than smart monkeys could be exploited. (You damn, dirty ape!)

Prior to getting substitute, Darkseid’s Elite had a mechanic called teleport, which was meant to represent two aspects from the comics. The first was the power to “Boom Tube” to any place in the DC Universe, and the second was the ability of Darkseid to transport versions of himself to any time period. The very first design document I sent out had this:

Teleport (When this card is stunned, remove it from the game. At the start of your recruit step, you may pay 5 endurance. If you do, return this character to play in the front row of your hidden area.)

Acting as a pseudo-recovery effect as well as a way to re-trigger come-into-play effects (something that I wanted to promote in Darkseid’s Elite), this mechanic proved not only too complicated, but also not terribly useful. With terraform being such a hit in Heralds of Galactus, I remembered Matt’s transplant idea (which is basically a terraform for characters) and simplified it; it became the mechanic that you are familiar with today.

As you can see, substitute definitely increases the life cycle of a character card well beyond its drop point, and in some instances, substitute cards mimic plot twist effects. The intention of this is to entice players to play more characters in a deck, which in turn will decrease their reliance on search effects to hit a curve. This brings us to an important point that many players may overlook when they examine a set: often, there is an overarching theme toward which the designer is trying to push the game, and this often goes well beyond the interactions between individual cards. Something that was previously as fundamental as the number of characters in a deck can change drastically, and that makes you rethink what previous conceptions you may have had. There is no spoon, Vs. players!

Remember the Teen Titans

The fourth team in the Legion of Super Heroes quartet is the Teen Titans, and it presented a unique challenge for what many people (myself included) think is the most powerful mono-team deck ever to grace the formation step. Early on, I felt that the most important goal was to maintain the feel of the Golden Age version of the team while still bringing a new look to the table. I literally threw dozens of mechanics into the initial Titans design, but many were too disparate from their original strategy. Ultimately, I went back to what everyone saw as the Titans’ most important strategy, team attacking, but there were other issues to consider. The reason that the Teen Titans were chosen to be re-featured in this set was their connection to the main team in the set, the Legionnaires. There had been a recent crossover, and it tied in to my desire to have thematic continuity (the future of the DC universe). The crossover had resulted in the Titans meeting future versions of themselves in a post-apocalyptic Earth that had left all of the adult heroes (such as Batman and Superman) dead. To capture this evolution of the Titans, I decided that they should share substitute (the “time travel” mechanic) with Darkseid. There was a necessary storyline team-up that needed to be made with the Legionnaires, and fortuitously, substitute allowed for an interesting exploration of the cosmic keyword. Characters with cosmic usually have their powers limited to specific points in the game and have issues keeping their counter relevant, but substitute gives a new coat of paint to cosmic characters and provides them with a very natural way of “re-growing” their cosmic counters without having specific powers that do so.

One aspect of the Titans that is often overlooked is their ability to change initiatives effectively. For instance, Terra, Tara Markov is powerful off initiative, but Red Star is really only potent when he is attacking (especially with Tim Drake). I tried to take this a step further with substitute by making sure that many of the characters were particularly initiative-dependent while being powerful. Substitute really shines when you can make sure that each character is optimized for the initiative you have. It allows Rose Wilson ◊ The Ravager to take down your opponent’s weenies on your opponent’s initiative, while Vic Stone ◊ Cyborg is able to blow your opponent away on your initiative.

Tempus Fugit (When You Are Having Fun)

It’s time to wrap up the first Legion of Super Heroes design article, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the first look behind the scenes. Join us next week, when I’ll delve into some of the processes of creating a set and why Matter-Eater Lad missed the cut (Andrew Yip ate him). If you have questions about the set, please email me at thebenseck@gmail.com, and I’ll try to include them in a future design article.

Until then,

Long Live the Legion!