Signal Flare. Bat-Signal. Wild Ride. These are all cards that have made decks tick. Traditionally, one of the big things that allows certain teams to work is the presence of search cards, which ensure that the teams can hit their curves with relative frequency. Since working for Upper Deck, I've been whetting my appetite by helping to design cards for the Justice League set. You see, in R&D, we all have self-designated roles. Danny Mandel is the funny (and weird) guy, Humpherys is the development enforcer, and Yip . . . well, Yip just plain sucks. But my role is the resident DC Comics fan boy. I definitely wanted to see the JLA be a terrific team, so I worked with lead set designer Matt Hyra and gave him a bunch of ideas. One of those ideas became the ally mechanic.

The ally mechanic originated with the idea that the Justice League is full of natural pairs, such as Batman and Superman, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, Fire and Ice, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, and so on. So I wanted to have a mechanic that allowed them to work together, but in a new and novel way. Since the best way to work through ideas is to start simple, I came up with this potential card:

Batman, World’s Finest, 4

7 ATK / 7 DEF, JLA

This card was designed to be more flavorful than powerful, a design paradigm of which I’m very fond. The best part of it is that it clearly represents the fact that Batman occasionally works with Superman. After showing this to Matt, he liked the general idea of the card, but he thought that it really wasn’t exciting enough. I agreed and went to work on a more exciting version.

Batman, World’s Finest, 4

7 ATK / 8 DEF, JLA

(You see, the easiest way to make a character better is to increase its stats.)

Now, this card is clearly more powerful and captures even more strongly the idea that Superman works with Batman, as Supes gives Batman one of the abilities that is usually reserved for himself. While this was a little more exciting, Matt said that it never really went off much and made deckbuilding a little too linear. Linear deckbuilding is when you can make a deck just by following the steps that are marked in the set, and it’s a problem that all designers fear. While designers attempt to give clear handholds for building decks (for example, the X-Statix “loner” strategy and the Squadron Supreme “no hand” strategy), we don’t want to cheapen the deckbuilding experience by building the deck for you. And with this card, it was very clear how to build your deck: step 1, add a cup of JLA Superman; step 2, add a dash of JLA Batman; step 3, mix.

Matt tweaked this mechanic to better incorporate the primary character’s theme (you’ll see this especially on the 6-drop Batman in the JLA team), as well as to make the ability occur with greater frequency—that is, any time a character is powered-up. All these ideas were incorporated to come up with the mechanic you see today, an open-ended mechanic that is very cool and thematic for each of the characters.

I know it may seem like I’ve gotten a little off track, but it’s all important background information for today’s card.

One day, I was complaining to Humpherys (Danny was sick) that it seemed terrible that the JLA team had no specific character search card, when most of the other major curve-based teams had received one. He pointed out that they had plenty of cards that helped smooth their draw, but I was still unsatisfied. I wanted the JLA to have a bona fide character search card. So I said, “What if it were connected with their big mechanic?” Hump thought about this for a second and asked me what I meant. “What if it could search for ally cards?” Hump grunted at this suggestion, but after some discussion between him, Matt Hyra, and me, we decided that being able to search for a power-up was a particularly nice mechanical fit for the team.

On the surface, Hero’s Welcome is a simple card. Like its predecessor, Signal Flare, it escapes having the discard part of the plot twist attached to playing it, which means that even if it's targeted by Fizzle or Kang, Immortus, you won’t lose the two extra cards. Where Hero's Welcome shines is in the ally deck. Being able to fetch a power-up does much more than give your character +1 ATK / +1 DEF; it gives you access to a pseudo–plot twist effect than can often turn the tide in a close match. So, even if you have your entire curve in play, Hero’s Welcome is still able to fetch two power-ups, triggering your ally chain two more times!

One of the best uses for Hero’s Welcome is not in a JLA deck at all. You probably have seen the new dual-affiliated Superman, Avatar of Peace. In the R&D version of the Team Superman deck, we inserted Hero’s Welcome, as it has the cool ability to fetch Superman, Avatar of Peace as well as any version of Superman in the deck. The second card doesn’t have to be another copy of the ally card you searched for—it just has to have the same name. With a deck that predominantly contains characters of the same name, you can imagine that ally triggers will happen with high frequency.