Welcome to the first Breaking Ground of 2007! The Metagame.com writing team has been on a much-needed hiatus over the holidays. While we all enjoy bringing you some of the best Vs. System articles on the internet, we occasionally need a break from our writing deadlines. Suffice to say, we are rested and ready to bring you a whole new year of Vs. System entertainment.
This week is a foray into classic Marvel Vs. System. When I received the writing assignment from my boss (the venerable Toby Wachter), I was a bit confused as to what this entailed. He explained that we could explore beyond the first few Marvel sets, but we should focus on cards and themes from Marvel Origins and Web of Spider-Man. Fair enough. Our topic for our exploration of classic Marvel is . . . my father.
Yeah, I know . . . it makes no sense. But bear with me for a moment.
My father is a very wise man. I consider myself to be a pretty intelligent guy, but anytime I need to be intellectually humbled, all I need to do is get into a philosophical argument with my dad. Recently, we got into a rather heated discussion regarding the future. While I am a fairly staunch conservative, I recognize the need for change as time goes by. My father, however, is about as unbending as an old oak tree. My conservative posture is nothing compared to his. Whoever said “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” must have known my dad pretty well.
Back to the discussion. I unleashed an arsenal of arguments why change is so critical and why we must all adapt to our environments. My father had an equally impressive series of retorts regarding the benefits of “staying the course.” In response to his arguments of the benefits of remaining constant, I cleverly replied, “Dad, even you should know that the only thing constant is change.” With that, I figured that I had trumped any response that he could give.
My old dad, however, is cleverer than I give him credit for. With a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips, he looked at me and said, “Son, even you should know that the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Ooh . . . point to the old man!
BigSpooky’s Pa and Classic Marvel Vs. System
You may all be wondering what my father has to do with classic Marvel Vs. System. Looking back to my father’s words, I realized one thing: with respect to Vs. System, the more things change, the more they really do stay the same. Look at the most recent Pro Circuit. Three of the decks that performed well at Pro Circuit Los Angeles were Reservist New Brotherhood, Crisis Doom, and TDC Stall. All three decks were impressive and innovative, but what really stands out about them is the fact that they are evolutions of successful, classic Marvel Vs. System decks.
Reservist New Brotherhood utilizes the power of the reservist mechanic to control the movement of cards in the player’s resource row. Since reservist character cards can be recruited from the resource row, effects that replace cards in the resource row are effectively free card draws. Putting this into the framework of The New Brotherhood engine, rush players now have a much more reliable way of getting The New Brotherhood into play, and they have an easier time staying at the four resource threshold.
Crisis Doom is a powerful control build that uses Crisis on Infinite Earths to enable a splash of powerful off-team characters that support the various versions of Dr. Doom. Enemy of My Enemy allows for effective search of the character cards in the deck. But before we had Crisis on Infinite Earths or Enemy of My Enemy, we had Common Enemy. This team-up card enabled a powerful fusion of the Doom control framework with the strength of the Fantastic Four. With Signal Flare, team Doom got a reliable character search card. Common Enemy’s balance and strength placed four players in the Top 8 of the inaugural Pro Circuit.
Finally, TDC Stall is quite possibly the most effective board control deck that Vs. System has seen to date. As it has answers for both rush and control decks, most other decks will have a difficult time breaking through the stall. Of course, the key card to the stall is the infamous Puppet Master. This innocent looking 2-drop boasts a power to dominate boards that has no equal, and it has long been an important piece of stall decks in Vs. System. One of the best-known decks to abuse Puppet Master is the predecessor to the TDC Stall, TOGIT’s X-Stall. While the cards may have changed, the goal of the stall deck has not: delay the game until the later turns where the powerful late game cards can take control.
Considering the legacy of revised Marvel Vs. System classics, I decided that it might be fun to retool an old Marvel Vs. System favorite, so I channeled the spirit of Rian Fike and came up with the answer—Wild Vomit.
Multiple Reasons to Love the Purple Robots
Unless you’ve only recently started playing Vs. System, you are probably already familiar with Wild Vomit. This deck was one of the original favorites out of Marvel Origins. The many copies of Wild Sentinel in the deck serve to make each copy of Sentinel Mark IV quite large. With global board pumps and cards like Underground Sentinel Base that allow players to bring extra characters into play for free, Wild Vomit can bring out a swarm of big attackers before an opponent can even get set.
One major hindrance to this cause, though, is the issue of hand size. Trying to recruit multiple characters each turn can be difficult when you are limited to two cards each turn. How does Wild Vomit get around this problem? By using the equally infamous “Mulletman,” Longshot, Rebel Freedom Fighter! Since two-thirds of the deck is comprised of only two different cards, Longshot can net the player a few extra cards almost every turn. This solves the hand size issue and usually gives the Sentinels player a few extra cards in the bargain.
This simple, yet remarkably powerful engine made Wild Vomit a favorite of TCG pros in the early days of Vs. System. The transition to Vs. System was made easier by a deck with a limited number of characters and mechanics. Despite this simplicity, though, Wild Vomit was capable of competing with any deck in the metagame.
Wild Vomit did have a few underlying problems, however. First and foremost, the deck was completely reliant on drawing into Longshot. Even with a mulligan, there is only a 54% chance of hitting the non-mutant X-Man in the first ten cards. Without Longshot, the deck tends to fold rather quickly through hand size issues.
Secondly, Wild Vomit suffers greatly against heavy disruption. Against combat-based decks like The New Brotherhood, Wild Vomit can hold its own and often emerge victorious. Against a deck like Common Enemy, however, Wild Vomit could fold rather quickly to a single copy of Reign of Terror or Flame Trap. Anything that could impair Wild Vomit’s board presence tended to dominate the swarm deck.
As Vs. System grew, so did the breadth and complexity of the decks. Players interested in swarms were given more versatile and consistent options with decks like Faces of Evil and Kree. In addition, the pool of disruption effects expanded. Cards like Roy Harper ◊ Speedy could put the brakes on Wild Vomit before it even got started by KO’ing Longshot early. As the card pool grew, Wild Vomit faded somewhat into the annals of Vs. System lore.
Wild Redux
With this new writing assignment, I began to consider the Wild Vomit deck of old. One major problem that could be solved was the consistency of hitting Longshot. With the introduction of generic search cards like Enemy of My Enemy, Mulletman can be found quite easily by turn 3. Although the deck prefers to have Longshot in play from the first turn, having options to get him into play even as late as turn 3 are certainly welcome.
Still, the issue of disruption was one for consideration. Wild Vomit would have a very difficult time standing up to cards like Mikado and Mosha that can snipe Wild Sentinels outside of combat. Considering that the power of the Sentinel Mark IV is predicated on having other non-stunned characters in play, this makes success a difficult proposition.
When pondering this dilemma, I stumbled across another of Rian Fike’s true loves: Multiple Man ◊ Jamie Madrox. Talk about board advantage . . . Multiple Man provides a swarm effect that no other card in Vs. System can even come close to matching. Much like Mr. Madrox in the comics, Multiple Man in Vs. System can literally multiply before your eyes.
Multiple Man is a strong response to effects that would stun small characters. Cards like Flame Trap and Mikado and Mosha can be effectively negated with Multiple Man, or can even become a source of board advantage if a player has enough copies of Multiple Man in his hand. Given the hand advantage that the Longshot engine provides, Multiple Man seems like a perfect fit for a retooling of Wild Vomit.
From a flavor perspective, it may seem odd for the X-Men and their fellow mutants to be providing help to the mutant hunters. From a gameplay perspective, however, Longshot and Multiple Man are the perfect recruits to the Sentinel ranks. Let’s see what Multiple Man can add to the classic build of Wild Vomit.
The Build
Talk about short build discussions . . . there’re only eight different cards in the deck! Obviously, we’ll need a healthy compliment of Multiple Man—24 copies should do. For our second “Mulletman target,” we have 14 copies of Sentinel Mark IV. Much like a one-two punch, Multiple Man is the setup swing, while Sentinel Mark IV is the knockout punch. Of course, we can’t leave Longshot out of the mix. If we want to build up our hand, we need to have Longshot in play to gain us extra cards.
Our final character is a splash card in honor of the lover of “Shiny Purple” himself, Rian Fike. Rian’s build of Wild Vomit from PC: Indy 2004 was exceptional because it contained four copies of Senator Kelly for extra burn damage. Since we’ll have search available to our build, we’re going to cut back to two copies of Senator Kelly. The anti-mutant advocate is a great play for us in the final turn of the game to push through extra burn damage.
Our lone location is Underground Sentinel Base. Consider the recent history of cards that break the resource rule: Kree decks have become more and more prominent in Silver Age tournaments around the globe, Frankie Raye ◊ Nova, Optimistic Youth was an integral part of several of the Top 8 decks at the last Pro Circuit, and, of course, the ban hammer was recently brought down hard on Dr. Light, Master of Holograms. All of these are strong examples of why free characters are so good, but one of the first and best ways to get a free character in play was Underground Sentinel Base. The exchange created by this card is fairly basic: a player sacrifices his resources for board advantage. In the early turns of the game, this is probably not a good idea. However, Underground Sentinel Base has a threshold cost of 5, so we won’t ever be using it before our fifth turn. Considering that our aim would be to win on turn 5 or 6, Underground Sentinel Base comes into play at just about the right time.
We’ve already talked a bit about our first plot twist. To make our deck competitive for the current environment, we need to have a reliable method of search to find Longshot. Thus, we’re going to be playing four copies of Enemy of My Enemy.* If you look at the text of Enemy of My Enemy, you’ll see that you can search for any affiliated character that doesn’t share a team affiliation with a character that you discard. Hence, if we were to discard a copy of Multiple Man (who has no printed affiliation), we can search for any affiliated character in our deck, which allows for a great deal of versatility. We can use Enemy of My Enemy to improve our chances of hitting Longshot by turn 3. In the late game, we can find copies of Senator Kelly to burn our opponent for some significant damage.
One of the standards of the Wild Vomit decks of old was Combat Protocols. This card is a very potent global attack pump for Sentinel characters, even though it is dependent on our opponent’s characters sharing a single team affiliation (which is certainly not a good proposition in the current Golden Age metagame). Still, Combat Protocols is a decent attack pump even if used for a single attack. Beyond that, there is always the potential that other characters we control may benefit from Combat Protocols. If we take the view that Combat Protocols is an attack pump that can only get better for us based on the number of characters that share a team affiliation on our opponent’s side of the board, then it’s a win-win proposition for us.
Finally, we’re going to play four copies of Search and Destroy. I have always thought that this card was one of the most powerful plot twists in the game. In our deck, it might as well read, “Pay 1 endurance à Stun target character with a cost of 3 or less. You may put up to two Army characters with a cost of 1 or less into play.” In essence, Multiple Man + Search and Destroy = BROKEN! Sure, we usually won’t be able to use Search and Destroy until turn 4, when we get our first copy of Sentinel Mark IV into play (thereby giving our Multiple Men the Sentinel team affiliation), but the sacrifice of a replaceable 1-drop to stun an opposing 3-drop is absolutely amazing. With a few copies of Search and Destroy on turns 4 and 5, we can potentially wreck our opponent’s board beyond repair.
That does it for our wild update. Let’s check out our revisions on the Sentinel classic:
Multiple Vomit (60 cards)
Characters (44)
4 Longshot, Rebel Freedom Fighter
24 Multiple Man ◊ Jamie Madrox, Army
2 Senator Kelly, Anti-Mutant Advocate
14 Sentinel Mark IV, Army
Plot Twists (12)
4 Combat Protocols
4 Enemy of My Enemy
4 Search and Destroy
Locations (4)
4 Underground Sentinel Base
The goal of the deck is to swarm the board with enough characters to end the game on turn 5 or 6. Odd initiatives are probably preferred, but the deck can operate well on either. Obviously, the mulligan is for Longshot. Enemy of My Enemy is pretty much a backup to find Mulletman if you fail to draw into him by turn 3.
That concludes the first of what will (hopefully) be many fun issues of Breaking Ground in 2007. Enjoy Classic Marvel Vs. System week. I’ll be back on Metagame.com soon with a preview from the upcoming Marvel Team-Up set.
*Since this was a classic Marvel Vs. System build, I tried to make sure that all of the cards in the deck were from Marvel sets. However, it bears mentioning that our primary search targets are going to be Longshot and Senator Kelly. Since we will usually be discarding Multiple Man for the search effect, we could replace Enemy of My Enemy with Vicarious Living in this build. Both cards serve essentially the same function in this deck, but Vicarious Living might be a better option for players out there who don’t have access to four copies of Enemy of My Enemy.
Michael Barnes (a.k.a. BigSpooky) is an avid Vs. System player who is a founding member of Team Alternate Win Condition (TAWC). When he isn’t concocting crazy deck ideas that no sane person would think of, he occupies his spare time working as an accountant in Dallas, TX. Any questions, comments, suggestions, or classic considerations that you might have for Michael can be sent to him at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com.