I’m back in the saddle again, and this time with a tale to tell. Care to follow along? It’s a good yarn—all I need is an ear to spin it on.

Small Town vs. Big Town is one of the great dichotomies of our gaming generation. If you don’t know what a dichotomy is, you needn’t feel bad—I cheated and looked it up a few moments ago. It was a pleasant surprise to rummage amongst the English language and find so apt a word for what we’re about to discuss . . . not unlike finding one last caramel in a bag I’d long believed to be empty. I guess I have my moments.

The argument is as old as time out of mind. The slickers think the rubes are a bunch of know-nothing, horse n’ buggy yokels, and the rubes think the slickers are arrogant, godless, plastic hucksters. Glass skyway jerks vs. no-account varmints . . . and they’re both right.

It isn’t a dead heat in every department. When you want to play the hero cards, there’s no contest. Gigantic metropolis wins by a smog.

If you’re an early adopter, being a gamer in a smaller urban center is a dry sort of hell. The hobbyist landscape is a minefield of cliques and stubborn boulders that can’t be dislodged from their stodgy old games by anything short of a tactical nuke. Say you’ve got a hankering to play a little Vs. System in a petroleum town of 80,000. What do you do then, hotshot?

The reality check will probably come in a hurry, whatever you decide. If you take a jaunty stroll into the comic and collectible corner store on a promising gaming day, with all of your work behind you and your card slinging ahead, you’ll find yourself in trouble at once—there’s no one there to play with! You’ve just walked in on a gaggle of whey faced brush-chins and stubble-cheeks, boys and men rolling dice and pushing miniatures around. Tomorrow, a different sect will have their faces buried in sourcebooks, lips moving silently in a rosary of combat tables. They won’t even look up unless you have 18 Charisma.

The day after that, the miniatures players come back and eat up more of your table space. You can’t bargain with these guys and you can’t cry for them. They spent infinite on a ten billion point army, and by gum, that army is going to take the field. And if Spidey can’t find a place to swing, isn’t it just too damn bad?

Then Friday comes, and a few stragglers are playing some other TCG, polishing whatever brass is left on the Titanic. You just can’t win. There are only so many gamer brains to go around, and the various properties compete fiercely for their decidedly less-than-consistent attention. You might think to cry out, gentle reader, to raise the voice of reason. Rein it in for now.

Why won’t anyone try your new superhero-filled kid on the block? He’s great! There’s no mana screw. No digging through piles of germ-laden land after you draft. You get to beat down with Wolverine instead of a sexually ambiguous elf. What’s not to like?

It becomes a silent scream that reverberates through the isles, rattling off the old issues of Bazooka Jules and Todd MacFarlane everything. You’re ready to game and you have money in your hand. You want to crack a bunch of booster packs and go heads up. You want to watch Batman throw down with Daredevil like comic pages melted together from your wildest fantasies.

Come on, guys! Give it a chance!

But you get no answer. And no answer. And no answer. You’re shut down, thrown out of the circle by pewter pushers, 20-siders, and cardboard ancients who haven’t tried anything new since 1994.

Well, there’s hope. Here’s what I did.

First of all, find your friends. Grab the ones you enjoy spending time with and leave the sketchy peripheral gamers to their online poker and their “wives” (what sellouts!). You’re going to start a league.

Don’t be skeptical just yet. It’s the only way it’s going to work. You’ll get hours and hours of play in for a minimal cost. Remember, this isn’t Los Angeles, this isn’t San Diego or Seattle or New York. This is Yourtown, U.S.A., where the population can’t support much more than one game at a time. The nightspots are storage shelves for dusty men. There are no museums. The local bookstore does not serve coffee or provide seating.

So, you have to conquer the obstacles the town places in front of your gaming happiness. I started by finding one person to join my league. The rules were simple then, and they haven’t changed much since:

Okay, get this, egghead. And listen up, because maybe we’ll play a little Q & A game later, capiche? It ain’t rocket science. You buy two boosters of Marvel Origins, two boosters of DC Origins, and two boosters of Web of Spider-Man, and you make a 30 card deck. Every week, you get to add a pack. If you lose a game, you ante a card chosen at random (shuffle and cut). Do you dig me? We play until one of us cries uncle, and we have a lot of fun doing it. Whaddaya say?

Well, I got one fish to bite—the comic store owner. And boy, did we have a grand old time. We went head to head, crashing Joker into Spider-Man, swapping cards back and forth between our decks. And wouldn’t you know it? Another friend of mine came in and saw the fun we were having.

He joined on the spot.

Then another joined, and another. The rules, showing an evolutionary savvy somewhat foreign to gaming stores, eventually morphed into their current form:

1. At league start, each participant buys eight boosters—two from each of the four most recent sets (two Marvel, two DC). Each participant uses these cards to make a 40 card deck. All unused cards are kept in a “sideboard” that stays with the deck at all times.
2. At the beginning of each week, each participant may add one booster. The type of booster added is chosen randomly from the four available sets (just roll a die). For each pack a participant adds in this manner, his or her minimum deck size increases by five cards, up to a maximum of 60.
3. Once a player has reached the maximum deck size of 60, he or she may add a booster at any time if the total size of his or her deck and “sideboard” is less than 168 cards.
4. When a match concludes, the victorious player takes a card from the defeated player. Flip a coin to determine whether the card will be taken from the defeated player’s deck or “sideboard.” If the deck is selected, shuffle and cut to one card—that card is then taken. If the “sideboard” is selected, the victorious player may look through the opposing “sideboard” and select three cards from it. Roll a d3 to randomly determine which card the victor gets to take.
5. Matches between league members may not be played for ante unless a third member of the league is also present to prevent sketchiness or shenanigans. (We just played twenty matches at my house! Whoops, he lost all of his Teen Titans to me, but I won eight Gotham Knights characters from him . . . who’da thunk it?)
6. Ignore rule five if you trust the people you’re playing with. (I do.)
7. If you can’t handle losing a card, don’t join.
8. Have fun.
9. Once it stagnates (after about three to four months, probably), start a new one!

That’s it. From those beautifully simple rules manifested something grand. Suddenly, our dreary weeknights and weekends were filled with laughter again. Packs were busted open, decks were constructed, and diabolical plans were hatched. Until you see joy light across the face of a gamer who has just straight-up jacked an 8-drop Dr. Doom in ante, on a 50-to-1 shuffle and cut shot, you haven’t lived.

Yes, my gaming life was alive again, and it was a welcome feeling. Everywhere, young men pored over deck layouts, deciding on the perfect drops and engaging in endless bull sessions about which cards they’d like to pilfer from the seemingly impenetrable morass of each opposing deck. These were new players, fresh as a daisy, and untainted by exposure to the things that you and I now find mundane.

The first 8-drop in the league was a phenomenon. I opened Apocalypse on the first pack-add day and immediately went into a dervish frenzy, christening my newfound champion “The Shaq Diesel” while I determined how best to alter my deck to accommodate his massive frame. The opposing players learned to fear turn 8. The name of Apocalypse was only whispered in our early league weeks, as if the mere mention of the Diesel would send him crashing onto the board to rule the twilight turns. My eyes were awash in an ecstatic sheen as En Sabah Nur laid down the law in the final moments of each contest, dousing opposing endurance totals in hot purple robot power, dropping life and spewing enough evil

to burn out an abacus on the way down, down, down!

Then the big limited cards began to show themselves, and we all discovered such gems together, in a sort of communal discovery that was a treat to behold and experience. It was quickly decided that playing Killer Croc on turn 5 was almost a punch-worthy trespass, such was the lethality of his scaly assault. Playas trying to cobble together cohesive units were finding curve-filling studs in cards like Super Skrull (ever tried to beat through that guy with a bunch of unaffiliated, underpowered crap?) and Blastaar. Finishing Move was alternatively referred to as “ridiculous” and something else that should not see print. Acrobatic Dodge was the stuff of nightmares—a cancer to the unprepared attacker, the eldritch scroll of doom that but a few worthy combatants did command. The other players huddled and swapped tales of fruitless attacks like cavemen trying to comprehend combustion.

The weeks continued to roll by, and more packs were opened. Discussion was still lively about which decks were strongest and what each player’s goals were. One friend of mine spoke repeatedly of his crackpot desire to create the “Doomed Knights” deck, an unlikely conglomeration of Doom and Gotham Knights cards. Another hopeful was heard bemoaning that Web of Spider-Man packs were “the cheats,” because they only had two teams and thusly allowed you to “focus” more easily. A third participant lamented that he could add packs for a full year and still never come up with a viable Sentinels or League of Assassins deck.

It was Vs. System pandemonium, and things were just getting rolling. One foolish soul, wooed by the large stats of Ubu, threw caution to the wind and loaded his deck full of Thuggees in an attempt to exploit them. He was trounced for his insolence, Ubu rotting in his hand as the ship went down. Players were trying strategies at a fever pace and having a great time as they did. One player, Nick, simply ignored teams entirely and played the largest stats at every drop . . . with surprising success! Many a team-oriented pugilist was sent scrambling for cover in the face of one of his “Thing, Titania, Killer Croc, Super Skrull” curve-outs.

And still more and more was discovered. Bishop had been blowing people out from day one, becoming known as a curve assassin as he left holes in mediocre 3-drops (like Huntress) big enough to watch television through. He was eagerly sought after. Overload gained infamy overnight because of its involvement in the notorious “Combat Reflexes on Killer Croc, Mega-Blast on Killer Croc, Killer Croc attacks Ezekiel” incident of early December.

Oh, how the fun rolled in and the time rolled by. I tried to inconspicuously stock up on Teen Titans characters all the while, and finally made a run at fielding a cohesive “team” deck, a 60 carder made up of X-Men, Teen Titans and Spider Friends (with Ezekiel, 7-drop Spidey, and 8-drop Spidey, how could I ignore them?). It had plenty of team-ups to take advantage of cards like Titans Tower, Fastball Special and Spider Senses. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Hank Hall and Dawn Granger. Roy Harper blew minds, leaving a gibbering, flesh covered organ sack across the table in the wake of each unexpected bit of Machiavellian stunnery. It was my further intention to get my hands on the one Teen Titans Go! in the whole league without making it obvious that the deadly plot twist was my goal. Sadly, I fell short on the die roll each time, and had to content myself with more copies of Red Star than one man should reasonably be allowed.

Frustrated at losing to momentous Dawn N’ Hank openings backed up by a side order of Bart Allen-ation, the other league members went back to their sideboards. One player, J, discovered that he not only had Cardiac languishing in his pile, but also two copies of Flame Trap. He swiftly employed them to engineer my destruction. (He also had two copies of Scarlet Witch in his deck, which wasn’t much fun.) Meanwhile, Apocalypse kept swinging and hitting, 7-drop Spider-Man kept dominating late games, and I was building myself a nice collection.

This brings us to the present day, with Vs. System League still going strong and still as fun as ever. Color this boy a shade of pleasantly surprised. I’ve seen grown men muster a joyous shout at the heavens after yoinking a crucial copy of Sub-Mariner out of an opposing deck. I have seen grown men crumble to the ground in defeat after losing Flying Kick, Unstable Molecules, and Mega-Blast in three straight nail biter antes.

If you are a small-towner, a player from the little city on the block, you’ve got to try this. It’s Vs. System as it was meant to be played—perhaps the purest form of the game. A throwback to the days when one rare could dominate an area code. A few bucks and a few packs, and you’re ready to kick off this small town variation that transcends PCQs and takes my imagination hostage in a way that the higher levels of play—for all their greatness—can’t touch.

I look out and I see games on tables, games on warm pile carpets, titanic clashes on the kitchen counter. Doc Ock and Spidey throwing punches where breakfast was sitting three hours before. A cardboard war overtop the dog water, underneath the magnetic poetry.

If you’re looking for a way to play that has the fun of both Sealed Pack and Constructed, can keep you occupied for months with a moderate investment, and is casual enough for beer and pretzels, this is it. Try it out. Tell a friend. Add your own quirks. Then, come back and spin me a yarn. Maybe something about how the Doomsday on your side had peeps shaking in their boots when turn 8 rolled around. Those are the best kind.

GT

gtait@cogeco.ca