I have a big mouth, and it gets me into trouble—a lot!
The truth is that I am quite the joker, and it usually bodes well for me. After all, most people would rather be around a person who likes to have fun rather than someone who is always serious. However, there are times when it’s important to tone down one’s goofy behavior. Unfortunately, I am not always able to make that distinction.
A recent example of this is a joke that I played on my little brother. Now that I live in Dallas, I have access to a variety of things that he doesn’t, since he lives in Tulsa. One of these things is Paciugo gelato. Paciugo is an Italian ice cream (a.k.a., gelato) store that has several locations in the Dallas area. One of his favorite gelato flavors there is mint chocolate chip, and it pains my brother greatly to not have ready access to Paciugo mint chocolate chip gelato. Being the caring and sensitive older brother that I am, I try to make up for his withdrawal by visiting Paciugo at every possible opportunity, then telling my brother about the experience. He really seems to appreciate it.
Anyway, to help celebrate my recent birthday, my parents paid me a visit in Dallas. Of course, we had to visit Paciugo while they were here. And I had to have the mint chocolate chip gelato while we were there. And I had to have my mother take a picture with my camera phone of me consuming the gelato. And I just had to send the picture to my little brother. After all, what are big brothers for?
Later that day, my little brother called me in a near-livid fury. As it happened, one of his managers at the restaurant he works at had up and quit that very day, so he was going to be forced to work from open to close in the restaurant that day, and then come in to open the store the next morning. Compound these long workdays with his recent sleep deprivation due to his roommate’s dog, and my little prank did little to help his mood. While I enjoy a little harmless ribbing, it appears that my efforts at humor backfired in this situation.
Do you ever wish that your life had a rewind button?
Mmmm . . . Mint Chocolate Chip Gelato!
It’s the Same Old Situation
Fortunately for us, the Vs. System does have a rewind button . . . er . . . card, and it belongs to the Spider-Friends. I didn’t see the potential for this card until I attended a PCQ in Austin, Texas, last summer. I felt pretty good about my chances against the Curve Sentinel–filled field with my variant of Force. Although I won each of my matches against the robots rather handily, I had a much tougher time with Michael Wilkes’s Spider-Friends deck. I was already having a rough go of it, as I was missing every activation with Longshot, Rebel Freedom Fighter, but I was still feeling fairly good about my chances since I had hit my team-up and first three drops. On turn 4, I sent Wolverine, Logan into Michael’s Will O’ The Wisp. After a war of Lost City power-ups and Spider Senses, Michael threw me for a complete loop by busting out his mad tech (and our theme card for the day), Sticky Situation!
Sticky Situation, in my opinion, is a deceivingly potent card. When compared side-by-side with a card like Heroic Sacrifice, it is considered inferior, as it doesn’t actually negate an attack—it only resets it. However, if you look at it from a more open perspective, you might find that the card is better than you think. It essentially reads, “Negate one or more non– turn-based attack pumps this attack.” If you’re dealing with a deck that relies heavily on attacking up the curve, such a card can be invaluable for protecting your characters.
However, it recently occurred to me that there are even more possibilities for Sticky Situation than simply negating an attack pump. What if you could negate an attack altogether? Originally, my thinking on this was limited to character cards like Mr. Freeze, which prevented an opposing character from readying for that turn, but further investigation revealed that the Spider-Friends and Sticky Situation have a natural ally in the Masters of Evil. With cards like Adhesive X and Sonic Disruption, we could create combos where our opponents’ most devastating attacks are doomed to fail.
Our challenge today is to create such a Sticky Situation for our opponents’ attackers so that they can conceivably fail to complete their attacks altogether.
The Build
Of course, we’re going to start off with four copies of Sticky Situation. In addition, we mentioned how well Sticky Situation combos with Adhesive X and Sonic Disruption, so we’ll include four copies each of those as well. Wow! One-fifth of our cards already?!? This is too easy!!!
Now we need to give some serious consideration to our team-ups. On one hand, we could conceivably attempt to use Clone Saga to make everyone Spider-Friends. This, of course, would make using Sticky Situation on any of our characters a snap. However, to achieve the utility brought to the deck by Adhesive X and Sonic Disruption, we will also need our characters to have the Masters of Evil affiliation. Unfortunately, Clone Saga can’t do that, so we’re instead required to play several team-ups to accommodate the variety of characters that we would like to play. Our first and obvious choice is Millennium. Drawing a card is usually good (unless you’re playing against Injustice Gang), and since we’ll be playing a defensive deck, we shouldn’t have any trouble finding a character to exhaust. Our backup team-up will be three copies of Two Worlds. We have several choices of generic team-ups with the “Team-Up” version, so we will just go with the first one to be released.
Speaking of defensive decks, let’s also play four copies of Spider Senses. No matter how badly we might want to, we won’t always be able to use Sticky Situation to save our characters, so we’ll need another good defensive card to help us out.
Our final plot twist choice will not be a big surprise to anyone who has read my column over the past few weeks. We tend to build a lot of multiple-team decks on Breaking Ground, and there are few cards better for multiple-team decks than Enemy of My Enemy. I fear that I may be wearing the card out, but it is even more suited for this deck than any of our prior creations since we will be playing a wide variety of teams in this concoction.*
As far as locations go, a little recursion never hurt anyone. Let’s include one copy each of Avalon Space Station and Slaughter Swamp. We may not need to fetch any characters back from our KO’d pile, but having a couple of cards that can enable us to do so certainly wouldn’t hurt matters.
Now, on to the character selections. Even though we have a good search card in Enemy of My Enemy, one of our choice teams for the deck, Masters of Evil, has two choice character-searchers built into characters. And, oh boy, are we going to use them! First, we want four copies of Yellowjacket, Rita DeMara. She’s not much good to us on turn 1, but after that, we can boost her out to fetch any 1- or 2-drop Masters of Evil character, and we even get the resource point back! In addition, we need four copies of Beetle, Armorsmith. If Yellowjacket is the queen of weenie searchers, then Beetle is definitely the king, allowing us to search out any affiliated 1- or 2-drop. Did you say, “That’s insane”? Well, you are correct!
In addition to these characters, we have a few other inclusions to our build. One of our choices will be a copy of Rocket Racer. While cheap reinforcement is handy to have, Rocket Racer serves a dual purpose in this deck. In the past, I have noticed that players will invariably attack Rocket Racer with one of their big characters in an effort to get him to evade, preventing him from reinforcing other characters. Imagine your opponent’s surprise when the following happens:
1) Opponent attacks our poor, defenseless Rocket Racer with big, nasty Xallarap;
2) We accept the attack;
3) We play Adhesive X/Sonic Disruption, targeting Xallarap (assuming that Rocket Racer is teamed-up with Masters of Evil, of course);
4) Rocket Racer evades!
5) Xallarap is left scratching his head, wondering where that little twerp went. Unfortunately, he’s too exhausted to attack again!
Yes, it’s true, ladies and gentlemen—we can effectively shut down attacks with Adhesive X and Sonic Disruption without having to play Sticky Situation! It’s just that easy!
Our other choices at 1 and 2 deal with the control side of the equation. While our defensive countermeasures should be enough to stop any pure attack deck dead in its tracks, we might have some trouble with weenie hate like Flame Trap or Reign of Terror. Luckily, both Masters of Evil and Spider-Friends have characters that can assist us in the disruption of these disruptive cards. On the Masters of Evil side, we have Paul Ebersol ◊ Fixer. He is certainly a “problem solver” when it comes to stopping plot twists that might stun our characters. When he’s on the board, they can’t stun us! As a companion to Fixer, we’ll toss in a couple of copies of Black Cat, Master Thief. If Fixer fails to make an appearance, then Black Cat should hold off our opponents’ plans well enough on her own.
Given our build thus far, we probably won’t be playing a 3-drop on turn 3 too often. Rather, we’ll usually reserve that spot for Yellowjacket or Beetle to help us build some board advantage with our smaller characters. However, the time might arise when we’d rather have a 3-drop on the board. In that situation, we’ll have a single copy of Moonglow for backup. Not only does Moonglow have decent stats, but she can also be really great for helping us find those extra team-ups that we may need in later turns.
At 4, we’ll put in a single copy of Spider-Man, Peter Parker. If we run afoul of a deck that puts heavy emphasis on board control (which could be bad news for us, indeed, given our deck’s theme), then he can bail us out by preventing our characters from departing play too soon. However, he will not be our primary choice at 4. Rather, we would really like to see one of our four copies of Medusa, Medusalith Amaquelin. She is the first of two characters in our deck to combo directly with Sticky Situation. As long as she has the Spider-Friends affiliation, any attack on Medusa can be effectively negated with a single copy of our theme card.
Turn 5 gives us a chance to branch out. We’re going to try out a single copy of Klaw at 5. Not only does his 9 ATK/10 DEF frame mean that he will often be able to attack laterally without stunning, but he also has a neat little KO effect that works in unison with his size. Our other choice is his Spider-Friends brother in stats, White Tiger. When our characters start getting up in size, evading with them becomes a costly proposition. With White Tiger, however, we have the possibility of pulling off the aforementioned Rocket Racer combo when our opponent’s character won’t ready, then evading at no cost to us (assuming that he’s being attacked by a single character). We’ll use three copies of Siegfried and Roy’s favorite card.
Turn 6 is here, and it’s getting mighty chilly! That’s because turn 6 is the turn when our cold-blooded buddy Mr. Freeze comes out to play. Much like Medusa, Mr. Freeze combos directly with our theme card to effectively negate attacks. However, Mr. Freeze is also rather effective on offense as well, since he can prevent a defending character from readying for the next turn. As many people who have played against my Arkham City deck will attest, losing a potential attacker during your initiative can be game-breaking.
At 7, we hold a spot for none other than Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man. While there may be bigger 6-drops out there, there are few that are more effective. As I just said, losing a potential attacker during your initiative can be game-breaking (exact words and all!). Well, Spider-Man can make your opponent lose every attacker. He is one of the best board control cards in the game, and a perfect choice for our deck.
Finally, we’re going to partake in some goofiness on 8 and give Mikhail Rasputin a go. While we may have used one of the best board control cards in the game at 7 with Spider-Man, Spidey’s only effective as long as we have cards in our hand. Mikhail Rasputin, on the other hand, can accomplish the same basic task utilizing our characters on the board. If we have characters with evasion, then we can simply evade, exhausting an opponent’s character. Otherwise, we can attack into our opponent’s characters without worrying too much about stunning back, since we’ll get certain benefits out of our characters stunning. Of course, Mikhail’s massive 20 ATK/20 DEF stats don’t hurt, either!
Well, that’s enough building. Time to see what kind of mess we have created this week:
Life’s Little Rewind Button (60 cards)
Characters (31)
1 Paul Ebersol ◊ Fixer, Problem Solver
1 Rocket Racer, Robert Farrell
4 Yellowjacket, Rita DeMara
4 Beetle, Armorsmith
2 Black Cat, Master Thief
1 Moonglow, Melissa Hanover
4 Medusa, Medusalith Amaquelin
1 Spider-Man, Peter Parker
1 Klaw, Ulysses Klaw
3 White Tiger, Hector Ayala
4 Mr. Freeze, Dr. Victor Fries
4 Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man
1 Mikhail Rasputin, Morlock Messiah
Plot Twists (27)
4 Adhesive X
3 Two Worlds, Team-Up
4 Enemy Of My Enemy
4 Millennium
4 Sonic Disruption
4 Spider Senses
4 Sticky Situation
Locations (2)
1 Avalon Space Station
1 Slaughter Swamp
With Spider-Man at 7, this deck screams even initiatives. Your mulligan will generally be for a copy of Beetle or Yellowjacket, as either one can get the character search up and running.
We didn’t manage to fit any attack pumps into the deck, which could hurt its effectiveness, and it’s possible that we may have a little overkill with Adhesive X and Sonic Disruption. A little playtesting should reveal if we can find any cards to cut so that we can toss in a Flying Kick or two (since there is very little flight in the deck!).
And thus concludes another episode of Breaking Ground, everyone’s favorite resource for jank craziness and Aqualad humor! Please feel free to send me your thoughts, suggestions, and links to cool eBay auctions at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com. I’ve received a bunch of great letters from a bunch of great readers, and I appreciate everything that you have to contribute.
Until next week, here’s hoping that you don’t find the need for your own “rewind button!”
* I hereby promise that I will not use Enemy of My Enemy in my deck for next week’s column. I love the card, but I understand that seeing it too often can be a bit of a bore. Besides, next week’s deck is another mono-team deck, so it would be somewhat pointless!