A year ago, the closest I’d come to the storied world of comic book superheroes was a brief stint of collecting during the Infinity Gauntlet series. I may still have those comics somewhere, tucked away at my mother’s house in New Hampshire, but Dr. Doom, Wolverine, and Spider-Man were never a big part of my life. Sure, I’d watched the big-screen adaptations and loved them, and I’d seen the cartoons when I was a kid, but I was never big into comic books. When I was young, I indulged my imagination more with novels, and not the graphic variety.

Well, with novels and with games. I love games. I’ve always had an insatiable competitive streak, which led to a fascination with games of all kinds. I faked sick when I was in grade school so I could stay home and play my latest computer game. When staying over at a friend’s house, I set my alarm for the early morning so I could get a jump-start on figuring out new ways to beat him. I had a brief stint as a tournament chess player, but that only lasted until I found a game that has proven to be the challenge of a lifetime.

I picked up my first TCG card back in 1994. In those days, that meant Magic. It didn’t take long before I was hooked by the promise of a game with pieces that constantly change, and strategies that must be conceived, conquered, and rethought. This was a game that would never get stale or boring. My romance with chess was a short one for that very reason—I didn’t want to memorize openings and defenses, and I didn’t want to play the same game over and over again.

My romance with Magic has lasted quite a bit longer. I played in the very first Pro Tour—in the Junior division—and never looked back. With the exception of a period in high school when I stopped playing to focus on wrestling, I’ve played competitive Magic ever since. I won a Grand Prix, similar to a Vs. System $10K event, when I was sixteen, and came back from my self-inflicted sabbatical in 2000 with a Top 4 finish at Pro Tour: Chicago. I’ve been on the Pro Tour ever since.

It should come as no surprise that I was very excited when I first heard about the Vs. System game. A number of players from Team Your Move Games, a very successful group based out of a game store of the same name in Boston, flew out to San Diego to work on the game. I had high hopes that the Vs. System would outshine the other TCGs that have taken a stab at the incredibly flooded market. With Jeff Donais in charge of Organized Play, I knew that the tournament support for the game would be spectacular.

Spectacular, it seems, was an understatement. As soon as I heard that the Vs. System was going to be launched with a $1,000,000 Pro Circuit, I knew I was going to play. You see, since last summer when I graduated from Emory University with my incredibly marketable degree in philosophy and religion, I’ve been a professional gamer. My income has come solely from playing and writing about games, and any chance to bolster it is more than welcome. Even if the game turned out to be terrible, there’s no way I would give up a chance to make that much money playing cards.

Lo and behold, the game ended up being anything but terrible. It was at last year’s Gen Con So Cal that I got my first taste of Vs. System, and what a taste it was. After a brief tutorial at the Upper Deck booth (and rampant abuse of BreaKeys from the same booth), I started to get the gist of the game, and the gist was that it was awesome. I played with Dave Humpherys’s demo decks almost nonstop between rounds of my tournament, and I quickly learned to appreciate the power of The New Brotherhood, although Lost City wasn’t quite as impressive with such a wide array of characters. The next time I saw Dave was at another tournament in California, and this time I got myself a demo deck to keep. I nearly wore it out, taking on all opponents. With my early exit from the tournament, that meant a lot of games.

My newfound personal set of demo decks meant even more games. My pair of gamer roommates and I played Vs. System for a larger percentage of our waking hours than is probably healthy. We waited anxiously for the game’s official release, and every delay was met with curses not fit to print on a family website. When the fateful day finally arrived, we bought as many boxes as we could find and drafted like maniacs. It didn’t matter how many people we had—we’d find a way to play. One on ones, two on twos, and three man round robins went on day and night, and as soon as we had enough cards, our basement table turned into a gauntlet. Brotherhood, Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, even X-Men battled it out, although Xavier’s Dream turned out to be short-lived.

At that point, I’d probably played more Vs. System than anyone who didn’t work on designing the game itself. Ironically, it was when tournaments started up that I began to play less and less. My roommates’ interests turned elsewhere, and without a solid online platform for the game, I wasn’t able to consistently find opponents. All of the $10K events were too far from Atlanta to make traveling to them profitable, so my motivation to test waned along with my opportunities.

All of that changed around the end of July. With a slew of tournaments coming up in August, William “Baby Huey” Jensen invited an army of gamers to his apartment in College Park, Maryland for a month of gaming and good times. I was the first to show up, but Gabriel Nassif was hot on my heels, and Gabe Walls, Neil Reeves, and Richard Hoaen made for a full house, especially when Eric Froehlich decided to crash there. Before I came to Huey’s, my only exposure to DC Origins was the spoiler online, and I hadn’t played a game of Vs. System in months.

There was nonstop gaming in College Park. At first, we had trouble getting DC Origins packs to draft, so we ran Constructed decks into each other. We tried almost everything—Big Brotherhood, New Brotherhood, Fantasticars, Fantasticombo, Teen Titans, Gotham Knights, Sentinels, Arkha