It’s a year now that we’ve been playing this game, more or less. Less for you, because Marvel Origins came out partway through April of last year. More for me, because I joined the Vs. team in October of ‘03.

A lot can happen in a year, and a lot did. I originally planned to make this article a sort of year in review, looking back on the major highs and lows (mostly highs) of the past year. But you know what they say about plans . . .

Um . . .

Well, they say something, and I’m pretty sure it has to do with plans not always working out. Case in point—next week is Pro Circuit III, and I was told by Toby (the head honcho of Metagame.com) that it would be good for me to talk about (read: hype) the tournament. This is fine with me, because I’m a talky kinda guy. All it means to you is that instead of getting an article that’s fixated on the past, you’re gonna get one that’s fixated on the future, too.

But wait! There’s more. To complete the trifecta, I’m also going to talk about the present. Yes, right now! (At least what’s right now for me, which is 12:19am PST on April 2). So yeah, it’s gonna be a whole Charles Dickens sorta thing, only instead of getting the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, you get me.

About an hour ago, I was in Heaven. Heart racing, pupils dilated, hands covered in butter facsimile, I was two acts into Sin City, and it . . . was . . . good. Mike Hummel on my right, Dave Hewitt on my left, Hartigan up on the big screen gripping his ailing heart (“heart again,” get it?), and in my head I hear my voice (only it’s not my voice, it’s Marv’s) saying, “We have to get the license. We have to get the license. We have to get the license.”

I won’t say too much about the film experience. Just that if you like the comics, you should see the movie. And if you don’t like the comics, well, you’re stupid. No, no, just kidding. It’s Humpherys who’s stupid.

Part 1: Memory

Memory can be a tricky thing. While it’s happening—while you’re living your life—there are so many opportunities to take things for granted. Especially when you’re young and there’s more life in front of you than behind. You move through things at light speed, careless and carefree. You can’t wait to get to the next moment.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re eating a candy bar or a steak or anything else that eats in increments. When you start your meal, you dive right in, ravenous. You inhale the chocolate or meat or whatever. You barely chew. It tastes great, of course, but you’re not really paying attention. You’re watching TV or hanging with friends. The food, good as it tastes, is just background noise. You’re not experiencing it. When you get to the last few bites, one of two things happens:

1. Nothing. That is, you inhale the rest of the food, barely noticing it as you swallow. Are you full? Are you still hungry? Can you tell the difference?

2. You slow down. You realize you’ve been wasteful, not with the food itself, but with your enjoyment. Your appreciation. It’s a shame to eat a Snickers bar full of empty calories if the experience is empty, as well. So you slow down and try to eat with some relish (maybe even literally, if you’re eating a hot dog). If you’re eating steak, maybe you cut those last couple pieces into half-pieces, just to eke out a few more mouthfuls. Of course, you might have been better off slowing down at the beginning instead of at the end.

So, does anything like that ever happen to you? It happens to me all the time.

This isn’t meant to be some preachy, “live in the now” sorta thing. Mostly, it’s just that in looking back at the past year (and even further back in my private ruminations), I realize that memory is a tricky thing. Or maybe that’s too soft of a way to put it. Maybe it’s like Leonard says in Mement “Memory is treachery.”

Some events or people (friends!) I thought were forever locked in my memory have faded to gray or have been erased completely. It would have been bad enough if my memories had just disappeared. But to know they’re gone, to remember having remembered something . . . that’s the killer.

I used to justify it to myself, saying that I was too busy working and planning to stay focused on the now. Too busy to take a potential memory-in-the-making and lock it in. Make it real. Make it last. But “justification” is just a fancy way of saying “sorry.” And I think it’s better to solve the problem than to set it aside. At least that’s what I’d like to believe I think.

So, where am I going with all this? Do I even remember? (If that’s funny, it’s less “funny ha ha” and more “funny uh-oh”.) I guess what I’m saying is that you never know when you’re going to forget something worth remembering. Take that however you want.

Part II: Memories

Way back when, Mike, Matt, and I wrote a bunch of previews for Marvel Origins. At the time, I didn’t know that Metagame.com would want weekly articles. Then, Omeed Dariani, a former president of Uganda, asked me if I wanted to write one, and it took me about half a second to say yes. My only stipulation was that I could make fun of Humpherys in every article. Omeed said that I could only do it 80 percent of the time, but that was good enough for me.

It’s been almost exactly a year since I wrote my first Vs. System design article. Back then, the series of articles was called “Design vs. Development” because the plan was to highlight the differences between those two connected but oft-conflicting aspects of game creation. But then, Humpherys ruined everything. After some Metagame.com writer juggling, it was determined that Hump would take over writing about the development end of things, and I would write specifically on design. This led to the changing of my column’s name to “Design vs.,” usually with a word or phrase inserted at the end that was ostensibly ready to battle “Design.”

Of course, like the articles themselves, the titles tend to be whatever random Vs.-related thoughts I felt like putting down. Over the past year, these articles have discussed such varied topics as:

--Basic game creation

--Vs. design stories

--Metagames

--How to break into the game industry

--Rarities

--Reader mail

--Card templates

--How crappy and untalented the rest of the Vs. team is

-- And of course, robots

But then again, you know all this because you’ve been here since the beginning, eh?

Part III: Lessons Learned

I’m not a perfect person. I make as many mistakes as the next guy (though not as many as Humpherys . . . ). But as I always say, “It’s okay to make mistakes. Just don’t make them twice.” (Okay, maybe I’ve never actually said that, but if I were a fictional character*, it would be something that I’d say. I’d also have a magic sword and my own theme music. Man, fictional characters have got it good!)

So yeah, it’s been a year. We’ve made some mistakes. Here’s a set-by-set breakdown of what we’ve learned. And by “we’ve,” I mean “I’ve.”

Marvel Origins: Stamp Collecting

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about overall TCG design, it’s that the first set is the hardest. Before a game has gone to real-world development (when players get their hands on the game and find all sorts of synergies or deck builds we didn’t anticipate), there’s a ton of guesswork going on. The problem is that there are no established parameters. While many of our original test decks resembled what players came up with, there were several areas of development about which we simply weren’t sure.

A good example is the role of teams in actual deck design. As I’ve mentioned before, there are three reasons a player would want to focus on a single team build—reinforcement, team attacks, and team-stamped cards (cards that require a character from a specific team). Unfortunately, way back then we weren’t sure how heavily to push single-team strategies. As reinforcement and team attacks are default qualities built into characters that share a team, the only “knob” we could play with was how heavily to team-stamp (which also included loyalty-style restrictions).

The two ends of the spectrum were either that we’d do too much team stamping and teams would end up mattering too much (only single-team decks would be viable), or we wouldn’t team stamp enough and teams wouldn’t matter at all (everyone would just cherry pick the best cards). In the end, we were more afraid of teams not mattering enough, so we pushed the stamping a bit too far, and that led to a mainly pure-team deck environment**.

As you might recently have realized, we’re no longer as worried about single team decks getting their due. In recent sets, you’ve seen a lesser degree of team stamping and an emphasis on team-up strategies. You can expect the trend to continue with the Green Lantern set and beyond.

DC Origins: Tiers on My Pillow

This set was R&D’s introduction to the world of tier 1 and tier 2 mentalities with regards to designing entire new teams. Because of the compressed scheduling (we didn’t have as much time to design expansions back then), we actually got to see which of the Marvel Origins teams were taking off before we finished developing DC Origins. This meant that we could reasonably assess the power levels of the current tier 1 decks and do some card tweaking to give the DC cards a better shot at cracking the elusive tier 1 status.

As it turned out, we overshot with Teen Titans and undershot with Arkham and the League of Assassins (although the League started poking its head up to tier 1 after a boost from the Superman set). The moral of the story is that the relative power levels of the teams would become an integral part of set development. More on this in the Man of Steel section.

Web of Spider-Man: Two Team or not Two Team?

Early in Spider-Man design, we had to decide how many teams we could fit into the set. Marvel Origins had five full teams (seven total teams counting Negative Zone and Skrulls), but it also had 220 cards, whereas Spidey was only going to get 165. DC Origins had four and half teams (the Fearsome Five didn’t get the full team treatment, which usually entails about ten non-character cards), and that was a tight fit. Plus, the Spidey set needed room for what was going to be our first foray into “legacy” cards: cards for the previous Marvel teams that aren’t featured in the current expansion.

I don’t remember exactly how it went down, but it was decided that 165-card sets would only have two teams each, whereas the 220-card sets could probably fit four teams. (Yes, this means that the Superman set was originally planned to include only Team Superman and the Revenge Squad. More on this in a minute.)

Sadly, only introducing two new teams in the Spidey set didn’t go over so well with most players. Some said it made draft less fun, and some said that it meant less potential teams with which to crack tier 1. Whatever the reasons, the fact was clear—two new teams in a set were not enough.

Of course, the debate still rages on today. Some players want more legacy content and fewer new teams. Others want as many new teams as we can fit into a set. As an aside, I’d like to point out that the decision to include four teams in the Man of Steel set occurred before the Spider-Man set hit stores. Essentially, we came to the conclusion that Darkseid should really have his own team. Once we decided that, it only made sense to include the New Gods.

Man of Steel: Hang ’Em High

During Man of Steel development, we had a meeting to determine where we should aim the power levels of the new teams. The thinking was this:

We could aim high. That is, we could try to make the new teams approximately as good as the tier 1 teams that were already out in the real world. The problem here was that real-world development (read: you guys) usually ended up finding stuff we simply couldn’t, because there are only five or six of us and more than five or six of you. Therefore, if we aimed high and missed a bunch of powerful stuff, the new teams might completely dominate the old teams. This is one aspect of that infamous development boogeyman, power creep.

On the other hand, we could aim low. Jeff Donais, the head honcho of pretty much everything, suggested that we aim for about 80–90 percent of the power level of the tier 1 decks. The problem here was that if we didn’t miss anything, then the new teams wouldn’t be as good as the older ones.

So those were our choices—aim high and hope we don’t miss anything, or aim low and assume we will miss stuff. In the end, we decided we were more afraid of power creep than we were of the new teams being a little sub-par, especially considering that we could soup them up with legacy content down the road. As it turned out, we didn’t miss anything too powerful (at least I don’t think we did), and the Man of Steel teams are currently a little outgunned.

I should probably mention that our above philosophy has changed a bit. As we’ve added more and more full-time members to Vs. development, we’ve grown more confident with our development abilities. This means that we’re no longer afraid to aim high, so to speak.

Pro Circuit Wars

Episode III: Revenge of the Squad

Okay, leave me alone. I couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with “Sith.” You gotta go with what you got . . .

Pro Circuit Amsterdam is set to take place this coming week, and I’m supposed to help hype it, so here goes . . . It’s like totally going to rock! For real! Yeah!

Hmm . . . can you tell that my heart just isn’t in it? I have a good reason, though—I’m not going to be there. :(

Yeah, that’s right. I drew the short straw and have to stay home and hold the fort. Now, I realize that upon reading this terrible bit of news, most if not all of you who had planned to make the trip will probably want to cancel your tickets and skip out on the whole thing. I mean, if I’m not there, what’s the point of your being there, right?

Well, I just want to tell you to forget it! That’s right. Don’t even think about trying to cancel your flights. It’s way too close to the travel date and the airline will totally charge you a cancellation fee.

So yeah, me no go. Sadness. But look on the bright side. Wouldn’t it be awesome if Humpherys got his passport revoked while he’s in Amsterdam? Then he’d be stuck there forever and we could make as many broken cards as we want and he’d never be able to stop us! HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Ahem.

In all seriousness, I’m extremely excited about PC III. For months now, I’ve been wondering what crazy Marvel Modern Age decks you guys will come up with, and it’s almost time for the big reveal. Don’t let me down.

Okay, that’s all I got for today. And by “all,” I mean “I’m tired and my fingers hurt from typing and I’m going to bed.” So yeah, goodnight everybody.

Send questions, comments, or Pez to dmandel@metagame.com.

*Like Matt Hyra. Yes, it’s true. Matt Hyra doesn’t really exist. Well, we do have a potted plant at the office named Matt Hyra, but that’s entirely unrelated.

**However, one high profile example of a character whose power wasn’t team-stamped is everyone’s favorite robot-loving mutant, Longshot.

In all honesty, folks, mullet-man is my fault. I take full responsibility. The rest of the team said not to because he’d be too powerful. But I whined and begged. “He’ll never see play,” I told them. “Not unless you do it my way.” And finally, my constant tears wore them down. They relented.

I’d won the day—Longshot would have 2 ATK!