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.