On most preview days, we showcase a splashy new character or a bomb plot twist. But every once in a while, a card comes along that has more subtle features. Cards like these impact the game from behind the scenes without being the best character at a given cost or the biggest +ATK plot twist. Today is such an occasion.
Green Lantern introduced functional version names to non-characters cards, and Avengers continues that trend. Starting in this set, cards that grant your characters team affiliations will have the version “team-up.” Other cards will refer to this version, allowing players to search for team-up cards and gain bonuses for controlling them.
While the utility gained by all team-up cards having the same version name is pretty obvious, the comparison between A Day Unlike Any Other and Marvel Team-Up has some interesting implications. Marvel Team-Up has the added flexibility of teaming up three teams with a second copy and of being fetched by Lacuna. A Day Unlike Any Other sacrifices the ability to team up more than two teams, but gains an all-important line of text:
Pay 3 endurance >>> Turn a Day Unlike Any Other face-down.
Not only does this give you a team-up that cannot be successfully Foiled! or Blasted, it also lets you reset the team-up in scenarios where you have two pairs of different team affiliations at different points in the game (such as in Sealed Deck). For Constructed play, the ability to safely team up without fear of anything more than a pinprick’s worth of endurance far outweighs the reduced value of additional copies. The two-team restriction for A Day Unlike Any Other is a deckbuilding restraint, not an in-game one. Considering that there will be Lacuna-esque effects for team-up cards in Avengers, it’s hard to argue that A Day Unlike Any Other is not simply better than Marvel Team-Up for the majority of decks that team up.
It’s rare that R&D releases a generic card that is strictly better than an existing card. Even in this comparison, Marvel Team-Up gets the infrequent nod over A Day Unlike Any Other for three-team decks. For team-stamped cards, characters or plot twists that are better than other teams’ versions are more common because the context of the team influences the ultimate power level of the cards. For generic cards, that’s not the case. While power creep is always dangerous, sometimes creating newer, more powerful versions of existing cards will reap healthy rewards, and that’s definitely the case for teaming up. Pushing the power level of individual teams necessarily makes it more difficult to justify teaming up. The days of teams with no playable drops at a given cost have long since passed, so the incentive for playing team-ups needs to be increased. The risk of getting your team-up KO’d or replaced, combined with the added inconsistency of team-up decks compared to single-team decks, usually outweighs the rewards for teaming up. Cards like A Day Unlike Any Other help to tilt the scale back to the balance point and give players proper incentive to team up without the traditional risk associated with that type of card. While some players may be unhappy replacing their Marvel Team-Ups, the new team-up decks facilitated by A Day Unlike Any Other will freshen the metagame. 
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