Off-curve and cosmic have traditionally gone together like nuts and gum. Off-curve decks rely on having numerous interchangeable characters, and if some happen to get stunned, no big deal—there are always more to pick up the slack. Cosmic characters, on the other hand, care very much about getting stunned. The theoretical off-initiative turns of a cosmic off-curve deck would be a nightmare as the best cosmic characters lost their counters in a barrage of precision attacks. At least, this was my opinion going into Legion of Super Heroes development. We had never really made a concerted effort to make a cosmic off-curve team, but in theory I felt it was impossible. So when lead designer Ben Seck (hereafter referred to as TBS) proposed making Legionnaires a cosmic off-curve team, I simply shook my head and chuckled, chalking up his ridiculous proposal to his affinity for the most famous of Australian delicacies, nuts and gum.

Of course, being the master that he is, TBS already had a solution for the obvious problems. Instead of tying the specific powers to the specific characters, why not create a team full of characters that simply required you to remove a cosmic counter from anyone to pay for their powers? Not only would this alleviate the major problem I envisioned (that your best cosmic characters would lose their counters too quickly), it would also actually encourage you to play off curve (the more characters you add to your team, the more diverse the range of effects you would be able to access). Furthermore, this style of cosmic would actually work well with recovery effects (since a character's power is largely tied to its text rather than to if it has a cosmic counter or not) as opposed to traditional cosmic, which works pretty poorly with recovery. And off-curve decks love themselves some recovery. . .  

With the mechanics firmly in place, all that was left was the simple task of actually making a team’s worth of cards. While a good number of these cards work according to the normal interaction points of the game, a few of these characters have less than traditional abilities. Dream Girl is one of those cards.

 

Dream Girl is a pretty obvious descendant of Null Time Zone with a couple of notable differences. The first of these is that you can nail locations. While that might not come up very often, you just might hit The Great Refuge on your initiative before your opponent has laid a resource, which would be pretty sweet. The more noteworthy difference is that you can use her turn after turn. Any deck that leans too heavily on a certain defensive tech card (say, a Mental deck with the intent to reuse the same plot twist) will find Dream Girl a very frustrating experience. You can even lock out a Reign of Terror if you know your opponent is planning on recruiting Doom (in the build phase, before he or she recruits). Overall, this card's effect is very versatile and powerful, and much like Null Time Zone it rewards a player who has done his or her homework on the expected metagame.

Even if you aren’t getting cute with a huge squad of cosmic characters, Dream Girl has cosmic—surge, meaning that if you are able to protect or recover her (and Legionnaires are equipped to do just that) she can keep herself going for as long as you’d like. Alternatively, you can use her to fuel your other cosmic-hungry buddies. Dream Girl is also a 2 ATK / 1 DEF 1-drop with flight, so even if her power isn’t exciting in a given matchup, her body doesn’t disappoint. Lastly, TBS will be very, very disappointed if you don’t like her, so just try to keep that in mind.