Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

“Okay suckers—you’ve taken yer best shot! NOW IT’S MY TURN!”

Those were the words from a snarling Wolverine in the last panel of X-Men #132, as he clutched onto a copper pipe in the sewers under The Hellfire Club. He was hungry for payback, and with Jean Grey as the Black Queen, and Storm, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Colossus in an unconscious heap on the floor upstairs, some payback was in order!

The next scene opened in a sub-basement with Hellfire Club Mercenary soldiers searching for Wolvie’s corpse. Wolverine was hiding up in the rafters, and he pounced down and took out six of them in a short sequence of well-placed claw-swipes.

Upstairs, our four X-Men were manacled, with poor Cyclops stuck in a solid helmet made of ruby quartz! Mastermind had completely mesmerized Jean Grey, who was now seeing nothing but 18^th century colonial ancestry. Jean Grey saw three traitorous soldiers manacled in front of her instead of her former X-friends, and she believed Storm to be a runaway slave! Cyclops focused on the psychic rapport Jean had created between them to keep them together during difficult times, and his concentration was rewarded as he found himself on the psychic plane inside Jean’s psyche. Unfortunately, Mastermind was in Jean’s mind too, and in Jean’s 18^th century delusions, Mastermind ruled.

Wolverine continued to work his way through the house, first hitching a ride on a dumbwaiter, then attempting to cross through a ballroom being used to celebrate Senator Kelly, who was vying for president. After being swarmed by Hellfire Club Initiates, Wolverine had his work cut out for him!

Cyclops fared no better—the rapiers came out, as Mastermind was also a master swordsman. Mastermind ran through Cyclops with little effort, and his real body almost died from the system shock of his astral “death.”

But something else happened when Cyclops fought Mastermind: Somehow, he freed Jean from Mastermind’s control, and she was able to re-establish her psionic rapport with him. So, when Wolverine came pounding through the door, dragging three attacking Hellfire Club Initiates behind him, Jean used the distraction to telekinetically free Cyclops from his helmet. Jean then guided Cyclops’s optic blasts to free the others from their manacles and to send a blast right into Harry Leland, who tumbled through the open doorway and off a balcony into the ballroom below. Wolverine followed in a flying leap, and Leland reacted instinctively with a little altering of density—not a bright move when a few hundred pounds of muscle and adamantium are plummeting toward you.

The tide was turning against the Hellfire Club. Donald Pierce barely escaped Colossus, who had ripped Pierce’s arm clean off, revealing Pierce to be a cyborg! Sebastian Shaw narrowly escaped a Nightcrawler/Storm tag team by grabbing the one-armed Pierce to regroup.

Meanwhile, Mastermind, thinking that he had escaped harm by blending into the wall with his illusory powers, tried to slink away by taking advantage of a power failure brought on by the fuse box Nightcrawler and Wolverine had earlier sabotaged in the sewers. Jean Grey shadowed him, though, and held him telekinetically as she listened to his pleas for mercy while she destroyed his Mindtap Mechanism. She spared his life, instead pouring all of her power and knowledge into his mind, essentially creating a psycho-kinetic feedback which left him in a catatonic stupor. This was cruelty unleashed. As the last mental barrier broke down somewhere between her breaking free of Mastermind’s control and her “punishment” that followed, Jean Grey and Phoenix were no more. After all the trauma Jean’s mind had endured, Dark Phoenix was born, and the Phoenix Force was completely free of any and all restraints placed upon it!

He’s Wolverine, The Best at What He Does. And what is it that he does? Hunt, struggle, and survive. He is a warrior, predator, detective, big brother, and frenzied beast, as well as a posturing tough and gentle soul, all wrapped in one. Overrated by some and underrated by others, Wolverine is arguably one of the most complex characters in comics when written properly—but few have ever been able to write him well.

Part of what is so intriguing about him is the mystery surrounding his life. We’ve received tidbits of information about his past, but every new “WOLVERINE’S ORIGIN REVEALED!!” issue tends to muddy the waters even more than before. That mystery is what makes him so captivating. After all, the most fascinating characters in comics are the ones we just can’t get a handle on or figure out.

Wolverine is also a marketing machine. Marvel has featured him for years, as he appears in title after title, on team after team, and in merchandise everywhere one looks. Ironically, although he fits on just about every second team in the game, he’ll never have a team of his own like his fellow über-popular comic characters Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman. And yet, he ties Spider-Man and Batman for third place in terms of most Vs. System versions: he currently has seven, just behind Superman, who has nine versions, and Kang, with twelve. He’s also currently on two teams (X-Men and Fantastic Four), with one unaffiliated version (Wolverine, Patch), but he can easily fit onto several other current teams. He’s a member of the Avengers and could easily be a Marvel Knight, and he’s had close enough ties with Spider-Man to be on his team. There are also a dozen or so other teams that may or may not grace Vs. System someday, from Alpha Flight (hurry up 2009!!!) and SHIELD to the Ultimates and Team X.

Wolverine runs on instinct and the coda of survival: hunt or be hunted, Kill or be Killed. He’s not averse to violence or bloodshed, and he’s been known to kill when he has to, and sometimes when he doesn’t.

Let’s look at some of his versions. Wolverine, The Best at What He Does is our newest X-Men version of Wolverine. Whereas some previous incarnations of Wolvie have incorporated several elements of his past and several of his abilities and skills, this is more of an overall version, an outline incorporating the full package. We have the crazy high ATK, which reflects the savageness of his frenzied side. We have his healing factor, shown through his auto-evasion. But his ability (he recovers at the beginning of the recovery phase) is also indicative of his sheer strength of will, the will that allowed him to survive Harry Leland’s attack and his subsequent ride through the sewers. His will allows him to overcome great odds and obstacles in order to ensure that he will live not only to fight another day, but also to strike his vengeance down upon those who dared attack him. You can see that grim determination in his snarling face in the image, the slider with Colossus, who has launched him into a Fastball Special—launching him toward a plane, of all things! We also saw it in Astonishing X-Men, when Wolverine thrust his fist in Ord’s mouth and just dared him to disobey and get a sudden SNIKT! from the inside out. As the flavor text says, “. . . but what he does isn’t very pretty.” But nevertheless, he gets it done.

The X-Men starter gives us a reflection of The Best at What He Does. Wolverine, Adamantium Claws shows the other side of his determination. This is not an angry, frenzied, all-out attacker who doesn’t care about the punishment he receives in return. This is someone who will get the job done no matter the effort and is willing to climb a cliff by his claws if he has to. He’s someone who can consciously ask himself, “Do I keep my current strength level, slightly above the average Joe? Or do I go all out and let the beast loose?” The former is a snappy 10 ATK and 9 DEF. The latter is a tiny endurance donation from the player’s pool into Wolvie’s veins, as the rush of adrenaline makes him into an enormous 13 ATK beast, with the low, low DEF of 6. The card’s flavor text is wrong; his adamantium claws are not made of the hardest substance known to man— Wolverine is!

NEXT WEEK: The Dark Phoenix Saga comes to a bloody and tragic close! And we take a look at Wolverine’s fragmented past, connecting it a little more to the Vs. System!

Questions? Queries? Comments? Send ’em along and I’ll try to get them answered in the column! Email me at:

Also known by his screen name Kergillian, Ben Kalman has been involved in the Vs. community since day one. He started the first major online community, the Vs. Listserv, through Yahoo! Groups, and it now boasts well over 1,850 members! For more on the Yahoo! group, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Marvel_DC_TCG.