Pyrahmancy

Another Monday, another preview article. It is DC again and this time it is for a full-sized set. This article is a little bit of a stroll down memory lane for me, I hope you enjoy it.

When I started playing Vs. the first deck I built was Teen Titans. I began with mainly just commons and uncommons from the 10p box in my friendly local gamestore and built up through trades and purchases until I almost had the “best list” (although I didn’t have any Savage Beatdowns till years later when the price came down). Titans was my competitive “tier one” deck I won a number of local events with it, but I also had another pet deck.

My Arkham Inmates deck always felt more like my deck. You could read loads about Titans online, most notably in articles by Adam Prosak and although I did make and evolve the deck myself, before reading the articles, inevitably my deck converged to the established “best deck” list (or at least within a few cards). But Arkham was something the pro’s didn’t really talk about.

With no tutors and limited card drawing effects, my Arkham deck was not the finally tuned machine Teen Titans was. It was plagued by games where it missed drops or didn’t draw the cards it needed but I loved it all the same. In games where it “worked” it could be quite competitive; controlling the board effectively with Charaxes, Poison Ivy and Kidnapping and making good use of nasty surprise to make sure Ivy and Croc could stun back on the defence. As more sets came out the deck improved, Two-Face gave me  a much stronger 7 drop finisher and when the earlier sets rotated out of silver I took advantage of the price drop and got hold of  rares such as Smiles, Everyone! and built a true exhaust deck.

To support and enable the exhaust theme my deck used Puppet Master as it’s two drop. This enabled some early game stalling and often allowed Charaxes to do his thing more reliably. However this Marvel guest star in my Batman Villain deck also acted as something of a breakthrough machine for my opponents, his 0/2 stats and 2 cost basically meaning that one of my opponents characters could attack directly for free. What I really needed was some way to get an on team Puppet Master. When the X-Men set was released I even tried running image inducer in the deck to this end. But it looks like DCN might finally be giving me the card I was looking for.

Now Harley cannot exhaust off initiative as PM could, but for me that was only ever a limited perk anyway. The fact that Harley is on team and can reinforce and be reinforced is a significant improvement over the antisocial F4 villain. And with 2/3 stats Harley can even be of some use in combat if her exhaust ability is not needed.

Another issue that I always struggled with for Arkham was their lack luster 3 drops. Now obviously Charaxes is great in a deck with lots of exhaust support, but all the other DC origins 3 drops each only had total combine stats total of 6! (3/ or 2/4). So my backup three drop (defiantly needed due to the fact there were no available tutors) was Blockbuster; 7/4 was not to shabby but he all to quickly became a 4/4 and usually in combat with a 2 or 3 drop meaning his potential to take down a 4 drop without pumps was hardly ever realised. With the refeature of the Arkham team in Worlds Finest and various legacy cards the quality and stats of Arkham three drops did improve, although not to the point where I was really happy about playing the card. There was nothing really at this drop that was adding to or benefitting from the exhaust theme.

Until now…

Batzarro has Wolverine sized stats, which is basically two 3 drop DC origins Inmates stuck together, with a slightly easier to meet play requirement (characters can be in play as well as in your hand). He also comes packing range. His tie into the exhaust theme though can be a problem though if you have not prepared. Lets say it is turn three and you have just dropped Batzarro following Harley last turn, your opponent recruits his 3 drop and forms up with it protecting his 2 drop. When it come to your attack step what do you do? If Harley uses her power and they exhaust their protected 2 drop that leaves Batzarro unable to declare any legal attacks unless you have another exhaust effect or can give him flight…

It’s not all bad though, on the defence Batzarro’s 6/6 stats mean most other 3 drops are likely to need a boost to take him down and with range he can safely form up in the support row (behind your 4 drop say) ready to lauch the counter attack into your opponents probably exhausted board. Of course with cards like No Man’s Land, or similar support the Inmates are bound to recieve in DCN, Batzarro should be able to launch whatever attack you need him to.

I am certainly brimming with anticipation to see what other goodies the Inmates get when the rest of DCN is released. I’ll need to revist my insanity deck too.Onyx Weapon has previews some more Inmates cards here. Carlos the Dwarf’s BoP preview is here. I’ll update this article with details of where to find the other preview articles this week as they appear.

If you liked last week’s previews then don’t forget you can check out the whole Kingdom Come set here. Note this is a play test release and there are still some rewordings and revisions to be made, if you have any feed back I’m sure Hatman would be grateful to hear it, there is a thread discussing the set here.

Also for the few of you that still haven’t or have old vs. friends that haven’t; go and like/get them to like the Bring Back Vs. Facebook page. UDE have also said that they are going to be giving away Vs promos this week on their Facebook page, why promote a game you are not going to bring back? Tell all you friends!

Until next time, long live Vs!