Hello everyone out there in Internet land, and welcome to my first of what will eventually be many forays into the strategy behind the Vs. System. Unlike most of the others who have written for this site so far, I had nothing to do with the design or development of the Vs. System or the Marvel Origins expansion, so in a lot of ways I’m looking at the game from the same perspective as all of you. Of course, I’ve been playing the demo decks almost religiously since I first saw them at Gen Con: SoCal, my copy of the X-Men vs. Brotherhood preconstructed decks is already nearly worn out, and I’ve already gone through boxes of product drafting the Origins set. While I may not have worked on the game itself, it’s possible that I’ve played it more than anyone else who didn’t, so while I can’t offer a look into the inner workings of the Vs. System, hopefully I can give you ideas on how to play it.

The first step on that journey is card evaluation. TCGs are unique among most strategy games in that there’s an important level of decision-making that goes on even before you sit down at the table. Unlike other games like chess or bridge, TCGs like the Vs. System have an element of customizability. It’s this customizability, I think, that attracted me to TCGs in the first place. I’ve been a fan of strategy games as long as I can remember, and those that particularly appealed to me were the ones with the most potential for customization. Some players enjoy having so many choices because it allows them to be creative and try to do things no one’s thought of or done before. Me? I like having more ways to gain an advantage over my opponent, even before we start to play.

Imagine if you could choose your pieces in chess. Any savvy player would clearly play with all queens if given the opportunity. Why? Because the queen is strictly superior to every other piece in the game. Thankfully, the Vs. System isn’t so simple, and we have our work cut out for us in trying to determine the optimal configuration of cards. The system of progressive resource development—and the fine job done by the developers of the game—prevents any card from being the “queen” of the game and rendering the others obsolete. The advantages and disadvantages of the various cards in the Vs. System are much more subtle, and evaluating them is much more difficult than ranking chess pieces.

Consider, for example, Wolverine, Logan. Is he a good card? Well, he’s a 6/6 creature for 3, but that alone doesn’t really tell us anything. Card evaluation cannot happen in a vacuum. Going back to the chess example, we only know that we’d want to play all queens because we know what all the other pieces do and we realize that the queen can do all they can and more (except for knights, who are tricky little fellows that I hate for ruining my analogy). In any case, how good Wolverine, Logan is depends on a huge number of factors, including how powerful he is compared to similarly costed creatures, how much of a benefit or drawback being an X-Man turns out to be, and how big of an impact a creature of his size makes at various stages of the game.

See what I mean about being more complicated? In fact, to fully evaluate Wolverine compared to other cards in the set in any sort of mathematical sense, you’d have to assign values for so many characteristics that you’d need some kind of supercomputer to do all the computation. Seeing as my degree is in Philosophy and Religion, I prefer to keep things a bit more abstract. So bear with me if my evaluations don’t seem to be made with mathematical precision. They’re based on theory and practice rather than formula, which in my mind is far more effective.

The Vs. System is, at its core, a game of tactical resource management, which is a fancy way of saying it’s about making the most of what you have available. Both players follow the same basic rules. You draw two cards a turn, play one resource per turn, recruit once per turn, attack with each character once per turn, and recover one character per turn. As in any battle of resources bound by rules, cards that break the rules or push them to their limits tend to be very powerful. The designers of the Vs. System were clearly quite aware of this, as there are few cards that allow you to break the most important of these rules—resource development and card drawing—and those that do exist are extremely limited.

The rule that is the most strictly enforced in the Vs. System is that of resource development, and it only takes a few games to understand why. The curve in the game is extremely steep, and any effect that would allow one player to either accelerate his or her own development or stunt the opponent’s would be absurdly powerful. The only effects that can destroy resources are both narrow and symmetrical—Ka-Boom! and Foiled—and yet both are still very powerful cards simply because of the hiccup in development that you can plan for and your opponent cannot. The only accelerants are the Fantastic Four one-drops, which are exceedingly fragile and narrow, and yet the allure of playing a turn two 3-cost Thing is strong enough that Alicia Masters just might see play in competitive decks, or at least scare people enough that they play enough 1-drops to keep her in line.

The rule of card drawing in terms of numbers can only be truly broken by Genosha, Antarctic Research Base, Baxter Building, Mr. Fantastic, and Faces of Doom, but there are many cards that can bend the rule. Assuming the average game lasts six to eight turns, you’ll naturally draw a bit less than a third of your deck over the course of a game. If you want to ensure consistency, there are a number of effects that don’t actually allow you to draw extra cards, but provide card selectivity, which is in many ways even more important. Remember, the Vs. System is about resource management, which means making the most of what you have available. A player who plays a plot twist or location face down for every resource and plays a 1-drop, 2-drop, 3-drop, and so on, on the appropriate turns is going to be far ahead of a player who is forced to play characters face down and who misses key points in the development curve. This makes cards like Cerebro, Doom’s Throne Room, and Signal Flare quite useful, as well as Tech Upgrade if equipment cards like The Blackbird turn out to be powerful.

The recruitment rule is another without any easy ways to break it, but it’s the one that sees the most bending. Identifying the most efficient characters at each cost is extremely important, since playing only the best characters in your deck gives you a natural advantage in resource management over your opponents before you even sit down at the table. Remember when we looked at Wolverine, Logan earlier? Well, if you go through the rest of the 3-cost characters in the game, you won’t find a single one of them who’s bigger. In fact, Wolverine is on par size-wise with even some of the 4-cost characters. If you play Wolverine on turn three and your opponent plays Robot Seeker, and then on turn four he or she plays Robot Enforcer, you’re already far, far ahead. Your opponent has spent the fourth turn essentially doing the same thing you did on your third turn—if that’s not superior resource management, I don’t know what is. The next biggest guy on the block is Thing at 5/5 followed by Darkoth at 4/5. These evaluations don’t take special abilities into account, which clearly results in selling a lot of the other characters short, but sheer size goes a long way in winning fights.

That’s what this game is about, right? Winning fights? It’s for this reason that plot twists that affect characters’ statistics in combat are worth their weight in gold, and generally speaking, the bigger the better. I’d be shocked to see any competitive deck without four copies of Savage Beatdown simply because of how big of a swing value the card has. Not only can it allow one of your smaller characters to defeat a larger character of your opponent’s, but it can also cause a significant amount of breakthrough endurance loss. Endurance is a fairly important resource in this game, considering that if you run out of it before your opponent does, you lose. Similarly, effects that can throw a wrench into opposing attacks are quite powerful, like Acrobatic Dodge or Nasty Surprise. It’s Clobbering Time looks especially promising, since it can both save your attacker and take out their defender at the same time, but it’s restricted to Fantastic Four characters only—yet another factor to take into consideration when evaluating the many characters in the game. Similarly, Micro-Size makes having Dr. Doom in play all that much more exciting, and Savage Land and New Brotherhood make even the smallest Brotherhood characters start to look scary.

Once these fights are over, sometimes someone has to get taken out. Chances are that it won’t be one of the X-Men, whose Children of the Atom plot twist is certainly among the best in the game. Other teams have to rely on Medical Attention or fight back with Finishing Move, but while Children of the Atom needs only the discard of an X-Men character, both of these require a ready character to exhaust, and once the fight gets nasty, ready characters can be scarce. KO'ing your opponent's characters is a crucial way of getting ahead in the battle of resources, however, as is saving your own, so all three of these cards—along with Muir Island and Moria MacTaggert—are likely to see competitive play.

See what I mean about things being complicated? In the Vs. System, there’s always a lot to consider—and as I hope I’ve shown, a lot of that happens before you sit down at the table. I know many of you might think that most of the cards I’ve mentioned are the ones that are obviously good, and hey, you might be right. What I most wanted to accomplish here, though, wasn’t just to give a list of what characters and plot twists are the best, but rather to offer the perspective that the Vs. System is a game of tactical resource management with certain rules, and that it is this structure and these rules that determine what cards are good. I hope I’ve at least given you something to think about. In any case, until next time, good luck and have fun.