Legion of Superheroes Previews

Well, the Sneak Peak is only a week away and the Legion of Superheroes previews are in full swing. So far, I think most of the cards are pretty decent. It seems like the power level of most of the cards is staying about where it has been since MXM. A couple of the cards that really jumped out at me are Time Trapper and Wally West. The Time Trapper is a great card against all the toolboxing in this game right now. With all the Enemy of My Enemy's and soon to be Mobilizes plus Ahmed and Poison Ivy running around all the time, Time Trapper will put the hurting on an overly searchy opponent. Throw in his 5/5 body which is a nice size for a 3 drop and he'll be pretty good in any deck that wants to run him. Given the Future Foes ability to either get an ability or force a discard he could turn most of those abilities into something very nasty.

The other card is Wally West. I think this card is pretty nutty. He has the ability off initiative to always (almost) stun your opponent's 5-drop to prevent any curve-jumping tomfoolery. Throw in the fact that readying him while the ability is on the chain gets you another stun and you're looking at a turn 5 where Wally stuns their 4 and 5 and then you've got all kinds of options. Wally is the new Roy.

The other big card worth mentioning is Mobilize. This was meant as a way to bring mono-team decks back to the forefront, but I think what may end up happening is that a 2-team deck with team-ups will now have access to both Mobilize and Enemy and the consistency of this type of deck will become pretty ridiculous.

That's all I've got for now. I'll have some more thoughts on the new set next week after we've seen all the cards.

No Announcements from UDE

I was a little shocked that there were no Organized Play announcements from UDE at GenCon SoCal over the weekend. This year is almost over and there are a lot of questions that have yet to be answered for their VS. System and World of Warcraft OP heading into the new year.

Starting with VS., there is no date yet for the first PC of next year. Still no updated prize structure for the PC since they said with one less PC the three remaining ones would get bigger prizes. We're still waiting on anything about the $50k's other than that they will be worth $50,000.

With World of Warcraft there is almost nothing to go on other than there will be Regional, National, and World championships and first and 100th place at Worlds will be worth $100,000 and $1,000 respectively. I did read in the GenCon SoCal coverage that WoW Nationals are going to be held at GenCon Indy next year. If this is true I think it's a mistake by UDE as two of their three VS. Pro Circuits will be held the same weekend as the WoW National and World Championships. Unless they arrange some way for players to be able to play in both events, I think this may really impact VS. in a bad way. There were several of the biggest names in pro VS. that played a lot of WoW this weekend including the game's best player Vidi Wijaya and PC Top 8'er Ryan Jones. If players are only given the opportunity to play in one of the premier events at each convention, I think they will all pick WoW. The choice between WoW Nats and GenCon Indy may be a little tougher and would really depend on the prizes for Nats, but at GenCon SoCal where the choices would be PC:LA or WoW Worlds, I think everyone who has the choice will pick WoW with more than double the top prize and $1000 all the way to 100th place. I really think that UDE should re-think this policy of having their premier events for two different games at the same time.

Haven't updated recently

Well, for whatever reason I haven't updated the blog recently. I will get back to regular updates hopefully in the next couple of days. A few things have happened worth noting. First up is GenCon SoCal, which I am not able to attend this year. So far it looks like everyone is having a great time though, and it will take 5 or 6 people to be able to kill off Onyxia in the WoW raid game. Today marks Day 1 of VS. System's PC LA which is Golden Age. We'll see if the recent bannings had the desired effect on the game or whether crafty players will still bust the format open with incredibly fast combo decks. Today is also the first World of Warcraft Regional Championship. I think this will be more important once we get a full idea of what the Premier Level events look like leading up to the World Championship for WoW. The other big WoW event today is the Invitational Qualifier.

Also over at Metagame.com the first previews are up for the next VS. set Legion of Superheroes. Three previews today. They all seem like decent cards but nothing spectacular. Ferro Lad really wants to play in a Faces deck though.

And finally, the early part of the M:tG Grand Prix schedule is starting to come together. There will be GP:Dallas in February which I am really excited about since I only live about two hours away. Also on the schedule right now are Montreal and Columbus.

I think this weekend may see an announcement from UDE about both the VS. System's $50k schedule for next year and the World of Warcraft Regional, National, and World Championships. They have a track record of making big announcements in big places so we'll just have to wait and see.

New banned list for VS

With the recent release of World of Warcraft and all the buzz surrounding it, I've been focusing on it quite a bit lately. I was going to take some time today to right a non game-specific piece about improving your game. But with UDE's announcement about the new bannings I've decided to write about that today. You can read the announcement here.

First of all, I would like to commend UDE for listening to their player base. They initially had decided that nothing was going to be done about some of the recent combo decks to crop up ready to be played at PC:LA in a couple weeks. After a huge outcry from the player base about nothing being done, UDE reevaluated the situation and decided to step in and give five cards the axe. I'm not going to go through all the combos since they should be easy enough to find out with just a little bit of forum searching, but I will talk about where I think some of the problems came from and what I think UDE needs to do to keep them from happening in the future.

In the Beginning.

When the game's early sets were released, UDE hired several professional gamers to help design their game. They knew early what had generally caused cards to be overpowered in other games, and to a certain extent what could cause them to be overpowered in VS. The biggest threats are cards that are cheaper than their effect warrants, resource acceleration, and free cards. With a game that is as combat oriented as VS is, most cards with real costs are defined by the ATK/DEF stats. UDE has done a good job in this regard making most character effects no more powerful than the cost of the character warrants. The very few resource acceleration cards in the game have high prices and are very restrictive in their ability to gain resource points. But that last point about free cards is where this recent rash of bannings comes from. All of the new combos have centered around certain characters ability to be played for free. Free characters have started appearing with more frequency in recent sets as UDE has started to push the envelope in the power of the cards they release. There have been many players who have said that the free characters would become too powerful eventually. It looks like they were right. If UDE wants to continue printing free characters, they need to build in better restrictions. If they can't find a way to balance the free characters they need to just stop printing them.

Another thing I think needs to be done is move to a Golden Age banned list, and a Silver + Modern banned list. All of the bannings so far with the exception of Justice League of Arkham have come about as a result of card interactions in the Golden Age format. I don't think this is necessarily a design flaw or lack of effort on the designers' part. It is just a numbers thing. With every new set, 200+ new cards are added to the Golden Age format. As the format continues to grow, there are going to be degenerate interactions between cards. This is why Golden Age needs its own banned list. In Silver and Modern the format size will always remain the same. When a new set comes in, the oldest goes out. Keeping cards balanced with the other cards that come out over a two-year period isn't nearly as difficult as maintaining balance in a format as large as Golden Age is becoming.

Overall, a great job by UDE recognizing there was indeed a problem and listening to their players to get the situation resolved. This is the stuff that makes UDE a great company for the players. They listen to what we want and do everything in their power to accomodate us. Thanks Upper Deck.