Earlier this week, Jason Grabher-Meyer wrote an article dissecting the character power curve in the Vs. System. For the competitive player, the information he provides throughout his article is more than just something to satisfy intellectual curiosity. Rather, it is a tool one can use to effectively evaluate the different characters in the game. If you’ll recall my last article, the central point I made is that a key skill in TCGs is card evaluation. Well, the chart Jason provides is a stepladder to applying that skill to characters in the Vs. System.

So we know that Wolverine, Logan and Thing, Ben Grimm are ahead of the curve at 3, and that Professor X, Charles Xavier and Cyclops, Scott Summers are behind it at 5. But so what? Team attacking and reinforcement are so important to playing Vs. that you can’t just find every character who’s bigger than average and stick them into the same deck. The biggest characters have team-specific recruit costs, too, like Wolverine, Logan; Sabretooth, Feral Rage; and Thing, Heavy Hitter, so you can’t just splash them into another deck even if you wanted to, at least not without some Marvel Team-Ups or the like. With that in mind, how can the development chart help character evaluation where it really matters: building decks?

Well, one important thing to keep in mind when designing a competitive Vs. deck is what your deck’s overall strategy is. Do you want to try to overwhelm your opponent early? Do you want to try to control the midgame with solid characters and plot twists? Or do you want to try to set up one big late turn in which you destroy your opponent’s entire board position? Each of these overall strategies should employ a particular mix of characters and plot twists specific to its goals.

With this in mind, the information Jason provides can be a valuable tool in determining what teams are best suited for what particular strategies. Take the Brotherhood, for example. Now, The New Brotherhood alone seems to push the team in the direction of a swarm strategy, but take a look at the Brotherhood character roster as well. The biggest standout from the power curve is clearly Sabretooth, Feral Rage, at a whopping 11 ATK/7 DEF for 4. The team has large characters at higher costs as well, but the degree to which the Brotherhood’s low to mid cost creatures push the power curve—particularly when you factor in the impact of the The New Brotherhood plot twist—clearly suggests that the Brotherhood deck is best constructed as a rush strategy.

Now, that’s all well and good, but I’m sure most of you have already reached that conclusion on your own simply from playing around with the cards, if not from doing your own analysis of the numbers. What about the other teams, though? With cards like The New Brotherhood and Savage Land, the Brotherhood clearly leans toward having an aggressive slant, but the characters, locations, and plot twists specific to the other teams aren’t necessarily so clear.

Take, for example, the X-Men. I’m sure all of you who’ve been playing Vs. for a while has tried your hand at constructing an X-Men deck, and if your initial results were anything like mine, I’m sure you quickly became frustrated. After all, you have Nightcrawler and Wolverine, two of the best early creatures in the game, but despite your powerful opening turns and tricks in the form of Children of the Atom and Fastball Special, you always seem to get outclassed in the middle turns of the game. You play Gambit, your opponent plays Sabretooth, Feral Rage. You play Professor X, your opponent plays Thing, Heavy Hitter. Your characters in the middle turns of the game just don’t compete with your opponent’s.

Well, why is that? Let’s take a look. The X-Men characters toward the low end of the development scale are all ahead of the curve. Longshot, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Banshee, and Havok are all above average ATK at least marginally, and when you combine this with Danger Room, you can get significantly ahead of your opponents early on. Once you hit the fourth recruit step, however, your advantages start dropping off. Gambit’s ability is nice, but he’s only 6 ATK/6 DEF. Storm’s power can come in handy in a pinch, but 7 ATK/6 DEF is nothing to write home about. Rogue, Power Absorption and Nightcrawler, Fuzzy Elf are your big guns at 7 ATK/7 DEF each, and compared to the likes of Sabretooth, Blob, Invisible Woman, and Dr. Doom, you’re coming up a bit short. The 5 slot on your curve is even more anemic, with Professor X and Cyclops both not only behind the curve, but significantly so, at a mere 8 ATK/8 DEF apiece. Not only that, but the bonuses given by Danger Room are much less significant for 4 and 5 cost characters than they are for cheaper ones, so your ability to take advantage of the location starts to peter out at this point.

What’s the solution to this problem, then? Well, maybe the X-Men deck is best constructed even more aggressively than the Brotherhood! Sure, you don’t have The New Brotherhood or Savage Land, but you have your share of tricks to take advantage of the swarm strategy. Danger Room is essentially a half-power The New Brotherhood that doesn’t turn off when you break the five resource barrier, and The Blackbird can be even more powerful than The New Brotherhood in some situations if you use it carefully. On top of that, you have a few other powerful tools to help your smaller characters take out your opponent’s big ones.

The first and most obvious of these is Fastball Special. In an X-Men deck that uses a more typical development curve, Fastball Special is a decidedly inefficient plot twist. It’s only effective on the turns in which you have the initiative, and in those turns you’d much rather be using your characters to attack individually than use two of them to take out a single character of your opponent’s, right? In a swarm deck, however, you can simply use two of your low cost characters to take out your opponent’s biggest fellow, then team attack another, then send the rest of your team right to their face for big endurance loss.

Speaking of team attacking, the X-Men are simply the best at it, courtesy of their fearless leader, Cyclops. The 2-cost Cyclops is worth his recruit cost in gold in a swarm deck, as his special ability allows you to take out larger characters with your smaller team with ease. Not only that, but if you manage to stun your opponent’s entire squad, you can do some serious damage with a team attack to your opponent’s face.

There’s another big advantage to playing a swarm deck that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention so far. Considering the power of locations like Danger Room, Savage Land, Cerebro, Doomstadt, and even Four Freedoms Plaza, it seems likely that a large percentage of competitive decks will play with either Ka-Boom! or Relocation to handle them. Not only does playing a swarm deck allow you to effectively use Ka-Boom! to your advantage, cutting off your opponent’s ability to recruit his or her more expensive characters to compete, but it also makes your opponent’s Ka-Boom!s less devastating to your own development. If you can get on the board quickly with a bunch of powerful characters and follow it up with a Ka-Boom!—or, even better, two—almost any opponent will be hard pressed to keep up with your attack.

Last but not least, the X-Men swarm deck has a significant advantage over other swarm strategies courtesy of their other marquee plot twist: Children of the Atom. While many swarm strategies simply roll over and die to Flame Trap shutting down their offense and ultimately KO’ing many of their characters, Children of the Atom allows the X-Men deck to keep up an offensive even in the face of the otherwise devastating plot twist. Not only that, but it allows you to maintain an aggressive stance in other situations in which one or more of your characters would otherwise be KO’d, giving you long term staying power that other swarm decks can’t compete with.

Without further ado, a decklist:

X-Men Beatdown
60 Cards

4 Longshot
4 Forge
3 Dazzler
4 Cyclops, Slim
4 Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner
4 Bishop
3 Archangel
4 Wolverine, Logan
4 Banshee
2 The Blackbird
4 Children of the Atom
4 Danger Room
4 Ka-Boom!
4 Fastball Special
4 Savage Beatdown
4 Flying Kick

If you’ve been trying to get your X-Men to win to no avail, give this take on the team a try. I suspect you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Until next time, good luck and have fun.