Welcome to the Week in Review. This is the first of a series of columns that will—somewhat predictably—clue you in to what’s happened in the past week, both on Metagame.com and elsewhere in the Vs. System community. You may have noticed that the winter months have been slow ones for Vs. System. The post-PC lull extended through the holidays, but things are about to pick up in a big way. This past weekend was the first domestic $10K Championship of the new year, and American players used it as an opportunity to tighten up their rusty games and get back into the spirit of competition. I’ll talk more about that later, because for all its innovation, $10K San Francisco isn’t the big story of the week. The only thing on most players’ minds is, and continues to be, the upcoming X-Men expansion. Sneak Preview events will be held this coming weekend at literally hundreds of locations worldwide; you can find out more about them here.
As you might expect, Metagame.com has gotten in on X-Men fever. Until the Sneak Preview, official Metagame.com previews are the only way to check out cards from the new set. Because X-Men contains spectacular new cards from some extremely popular teams, everyone’s got preview fever. Even the superstars of Vs. are excited! Because the X-Men set represents half of the Modern Age format that will be featured at PC Atlanta, each and every preview card gives a little bit of help to the professional players who will be scrambling to prepare for the event. If you haven’t checked out these previews yet, I strongly suggest you do so. Here’s a rundown:
On Monday, Ben Seck previewed the card Phoenix Rising. This new plot twist for the X-Men team works in a similar fashion to the Golden Age mainstay Children of the Atom. Rather than take a card from your hand, though, this plot twist removes a card from the usually less-than-significant KO’d pile. Ben—a member of the Vs. System R&D team—provides a succinct analysis of this new card’s strengths.
On Tuesday, another member of R&D, the illustrious Patrick Sullivan, previewed one of the most exciting cards to come out of a new expansion in the past year. Amelia Voght is the first character in the game that can be recruited for free, with no resource point or discard cost whatsoever (not counting the decidedly sub-par Mr. Mxyzpltk, of course). With no requirement to recruit her other than the possession of a few face-down reservists, she’s sure to be splashed in any number of archetypes.
On Wednesday, Rian Fike showed off Morlock Justice, a card that’s strictly better than Blind Sided—assuming you control a Morlocks character, of course. What are the Morlocks, you ask? Rian provided a little bit of a rundown, as well as his take on this extraordinarily powerful plot twist.
On Thursday, Andrew Yip, another representative of Vs. R&D, gave everyone their first taste of the Hellfire Club. The new Firestar he introduced, while not exceptionally powerful, is thematically representative of this brand-new team. Andrew provided a synopsis of what the Hellfire Club is all about that proved both interesting and insightful.
On Friday, Paul Ross previewed Absorbing Man. Will this new character give Masters of Evil yet one extra push towards becoming a dominant force in the metagame? Our resident judge guru from down under looks at all the angles.
On Saturday, Ben Kalman presented a flavorful preview of the newest member of the Doom team—another incarnation of Kristoff von Doom. As you might expect, Ben spiced it up with a bit of Doom-related history which is certainly worth a read.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, this wasn’t all that happened this week. Over the weekend was $10K San Francisco, the first major domestic tournament of the year. There were two pieces of big news from that event. First, Teen Titans and Anti-Green Lantern rush were firmly established as the two dominant aggressive decks to beat. Second, Josh Wiitanen finally earned a first-place trophy after a number of near-misses. It was a very interesting tournament, and I highly recommend you check out the feature matches, especially Josh's semifinal match against Patrick Yapjoco.
Looking ahead on the tournament scene, X-Men Sneak Previews are happening this weekend, followed in short order by the official release of the set. After that, there’s a bit of a lull, broken in a big way by $10K Los Angeles on March 18 and the long-awaited PC Atlanta on March 25. As always, stick around for coverage of these events right here at Metagame.com. I’ll be back to talk about the Sneak Preview next Monday in a new Week in Review. Until then . . .