In case you missed it, we’ve announced the banning of the fourth card in Vs. System. This banning takes effect when the Heralds of Galactus set becomes legal on September 23, 2006. At that time, our banned list will look like this:

Banned Cards

Overload

Justice League of Arkham

Antarctic Research Base

Gone But Not Forgotten

We decided to ban this card when it became apparent there were at least two decks capable of abusing it reliably beginning around turn 5. Both of them were exploiting the fact that Gone But Not Forgotten was an open-ended source of endurance gain. Many of the costs in our game are limited via endurance payments as a cost. When we have such powers that can be used an unlimited number of times a turn, we run into problems when a card like Gone But Not Forgotten can regenerate the endurance needed to pay those costs. In particular, it could be used to draw your entire deck in one turn with Zatanna, Showstopper and to create an infinite loop with Mr. Fantastic, Stretch in another deck. It certainly didn’t help the situation that players could have multiple copies of Gone But Not Forgotten, allowing loops to be completed with payment powers greater than 2 endurance.

The first of these decks was featured at $10K Boston a couple of months ago. To get an idea of how the deck is played and how complicated the turns can become, take a look at the coverage of round 9 in this event. Once the novelty of a cool, new deck like this wears off, we feel confident in saying that the experience of playing with this deck and against it is something our players don’t want to see in our organized play events. With Alfred Pennyworth and Scandal, the deck could reliably fill a resource row with several Gone But Not Forgottens. We also felt that once this deck was further tuned it would be particularly challenging to beat. In and of itself the metagame may have been able to handle this deck with cards like Political Pressure, but the other deck I will get to in a moment created its own set of challenges to overcome. Since this deck can reliably draw its entire contents on turn 6, or turn 5 with Conjuration, there were probably any number of other ways to finish the game besides Captain Marvel, Champion of Magic. For example, I’ve seen some players comment on using Blind Sided and enough copies of Surrounded to end the game on the first turn they have the initiative and Zatanna, Showstopper.

The other deck we were concerned about has only been posted on a number of fan sites. It required having Mr. Fantastic, Stretch and Moloids in play. You equipped the Moloids with Decoy Program and exhausted it to return a different Moloids from your KO’d pile to play. You then used Stretch to transfer the Decoy Program to the new, ready Moloids. You then KO’d the exhausted Moloids to Devil’s Due, putting a +1 ATK / +1 DEF counter on any other Doom character you control, including Mr. Fantastic, Stretch if you have a team-up. Then you use the newly equipped Moloids to get back the other Moloids, and repeat. With one Gone But Not Forgotten you can repeat this infinitely for any number of counters since it offsets Stretch’s cost, and with another copy of Gone But Not Forgotten you conveniently gain limitless endurance.

Gone But Not Forgotten was the one card that both of these new combo decks shared in common. It has also been a constant constraint on our ability to design new cards, so we decided it was the card we should take action on. For the general reasons on why we choose to ban a card or issue errata, I’ll refer you back to my most recent article on this topic. Simply put, in the case of Gone But Not Forgotten, we didn’t feel that there was an erratum that would keep it working as intended and have the card function in the same way as the original wording in most situations. For players looking for endurance gain, hopefully the Heralds of Galactus team will offer some good solutions. There is also a good generic endurance gain card arriving in the Legion of Super Heroes set. While we are on this topic, a card for those missing Antarctic Research Base is locked into the Marvel Team-Up set.

What We Won’t Ban

As we now reach four banned cards, I want to reiterate that we don’t take banning cards lightly. If you take a look back at all of the cards that have caused some controversy, you’ll see we do not take knee-jerk reactions to many cards by banning them. We are only likely to ban cards that are generating loops or are not playing as intended, and only then when there isn’t an erratum that would allow the card to play properly in the vast majority of cases.

Appearing in a lot of decks or doing something very powerful once or twice a game is rarely going to be a case for banning a card. Overload is the closest to this category of card and was banned primarily because it wasn’t actually working as intended, since it allowed you to pump your opponent’s characters. Certainly we will miss some interactions, and many of our older cards like Gone But Not Forgotten were designed and tested before many other cards and mechanics had even been envisioned.

As you’ve seen, we’ll act quickly on cards that produce combos that are hard to interact with and create very negative play experiences, rather than let them hurt our formats. In general, however, I want you to feel secure in knowing that Savage Beatdown, Enemy of My Enemy, and most other cards in our game will probably never be banned, because these cards aren’t actually capable of producing a loop or an unintended interaction. That isn’t to say that a card won’t ever be banned for its raw power level, but it would only come at the demand of our player base and after considerable demonstration of its power.