Well the old location on the other side of the street next to Wal-Mart could hold 200-300 people easily. I was there in Jan. 04 for the first Yugi regional not on the west coast (also attended the first one period in Oct. 03 in Vegas) with 200-plus Yugi brats/some older players plus Magic also going on and in April 05 for Chicago $10K with 130 players.

Outside of Michael Jacob winning the event with Force after an epic battle with Kyle Dembrinski's Titans I personally remember that event for 3 reasons:

1. Traded my extra Spiderman, Superman, and Marvel Knights set rares to the store for playsets of EA 4-drop Doom and EA The New Brotherhood. Still think I came up better out on that end of it :)

2. Continued a streak of playing in major competitions where I learned what should be a fairly simple rule (once you set a resource and generate the resource points they are still there until after your recruit step even if you destroy one of them) from the head judge after I appealed and looked like an idiot. Hey I'd only played VS for 1 year and my only other CCG experience was Yugi and Yu Yu Hakusho so give me some slack :)

3. You DO NOT LET DR. LIGHT 6-DROP BASED DECKS GET TO TURN 9! If you can't kill them on 9 just get ready to scoop.

I will definately say it was a much more open and fun event to watch/play/judge on Saturday than Sunday just because of the surprising amount of decks that showed and were competitive. Injustice Gang, F4, and the local WF deck dominated the front tables of modern all day long on Sunday, while on Saturday several different decks had the shot of winning the PS3.

I don't see this as much as a problem anymore. With the move to middle of the road between competitive and casual players... there is more variety to what you will play against at a high-level tournament. This also goes to my point of how diverse Silver still is despite perceptions that are contrary.

Did anyone face the same deck 4 times on Saturday? Chances are high in a 9-round tournament but I guess it also depends on who you are playing. I tend to have fun no matter what... winning or losing... whether I've played the same deck every round. The matches are what you make of it... don't blame that as a problem in VS.

Ok, let's look at the cards that ACTUALLY steal characters.

7-Drop Grodd ... he's a 7-drop, little late for the effect [to compare it to Rise]
Monkey See, Monkey Do ... Limited to the attack step, Legend stamped, and you do not have control over who you get. Also, it goes back if you don't KO it.
8-drop Eclipso, 8-drop Ultra-Humanite and 8-drop Psycho Pirate ... 8-drops
Poison Ivy, Kiss of Death ... you must exhaust your 4-drop to get, at best, a 2-drop
Divided We Fall ... again, restricted to attack step, team stamped, and the character goes back
Satanus 6 ... well, he needs to stun a defender to use his ability and he has stats that would be considered bad for a FOUR drop, and he was the 'first' effect of his kind in the set following Rise, he was obviously much worse than Rise.
There are a few other ones, but they mostly involve stealing 1-drops or 2-drops, etc, etc, etc ...

Ultimately, Rise From the Grave has no team stamp, no legend stamp, and since it cost the SAME as Death in the Family ... why have a card that KO's opposing characters when you have a card that can recover your own characters AND KO your opponent's characters.

It was designed as a "mirror" to Death in the Family. It was never intended to be used as a character stealing engine. It doesn't matter if it "would have been fine" if they left it as written ... that's not the card they wanted to make. They forgot to put the words "you control" on it, and thus the card could suddenly do something they never intended OR playtested. It's not a depowering errata ... it's headslap errata saying "of COURSE that's what we meant".

What has come out SINCE then?

Mobilize.

Marvel Team-up and Dual-Loyalty characters, not to mention all the cards that requires all your characters have the same team affiliation.

All those cards would be a joke if a single character was able to render to use any and all of those effects. It's fine and all to have Bizarro World for the course of a single set make all the Legend content usable by a single character ... but making any team stamped effect usable by a single 1-drop wasn't really a good idea in the first place. When he started showing up in the various "Let's abuse Cosmic Radiation" decks, he finally got himself banned.

Have you ever seen Nega Bombs on turns 4 or 5?

Ahmed is doing EXACTLY what he was designed to do ... search for locations every turn. The fate artifacts are doing what they were designed to do ... even when they are on Quicksilver, the idea for the Fate Artifacts involved multiple attacks ... Fate as Spoken and all. Nenora was being used to pull off Nega Bomb on turns 4 and 5 ... which considering the card is basically a "new" Gamma Bomb, is not what they were intending.

That is one of the biggest reasons why some of those cards are not banned ... they are doing exactly what they were designed to do, although arguably, they probably shouldn't have made them in the first place, but it's not exactly unexpected interactions ... it's just that the power level of the EXPECTED interactions are uber powerful.

Golden is ignored for the most part, although they occaisionally get a bone. In general, the "bone" is in similar card effects being reintroduced to modern/silver that add consistency/redundancy to Golden Age. Many of the bannings might not have happened if they were to be done today simply because they were ONLY really a problem in Golden Age.

Any examples? I know that for a few cases, by the time a "solution" comes out, a card is probably out of Modern, or nearly out of Modern ... but to a certain extent, that is a result of the [old] schedule. They are working about 2 sets in the future ... making it a little hard to QUICKLY respond to problems with new cards.

That is generally the problem ... some people like to paint the picture that the reason people complain about card X is because they don't like losing, but it has more to do with "Negative Play Experience". While some people like to say that losing is an NPE ... it's more than that. Not enjoying the game is an NPE ... and it can involve your opponent's deck, your own deck (there is a deck to beat the "annoying" deck ... but that doesn't mean you enjoy playing THAT deck either, in fact it's worse, because you have to play with that deck the entire tournament) or just playing the same deck over and over again ... it doesn't matter how fun it is, familiarity breeds contempt.

I would like to see Silver Age at Worlds. I think there is a lot of room for new decks, and with Modern I just don't see it as much. My dream would be Day 1 Silver, Day 2 Modern, Day 3 MUN Draft, Then Top 8.

V

Here is my silver age decklist for Saturday. The deck is fun to play, but there could be some changes to it.

4 Connie Web
1 Jacob Lee
4 Black Thorn
4 Ahmed
3 Punisher, Guns Blazing
1 Elimintation Protocol
1 Captain America(5)
1 Annihilation Protocol
1 Huntress(6)
1 Punisher, Angel of Death

1 New Baxtar Building
1 The Alley
4 Brother I Satellite
3 Dr. Fate's Tower
2 Checkmate Safehouse
1 Brother Eye
1 Sewer System

4 Threat Nuetralized
4 Cannibal Tech
4 Enemy of My Enemy
4 Defensive Formation
3 Knightmare Scenarios

4 Laser Watch
1 Amulet of Nabu
1 Cloak of Nabu
1 Helm of Nabu

as said with everyone...id like to point out that there was alot of people running fun decks at this event..and mostly everyone i played was very fun and nice..i highly doubt itll be a punisher, ahmed deadshot field..consedering it felt like nearly every table had skrulls at it all day long.. i think i played 4 of 9 games vs skrulls..the largest percent of anything else i played i never saw ahmed...god i wish i did though...ive never had the beatiful moment of deadshoting a ahmed....if anything for worlds your going to see alot more of three drop captain america esp considering his new shield.

Lots of Skrulls in the Swiss but none in the Top 8... interesting.

I still think Silver is wide open... FateSuit/Ahmed may be bonkers... but at least you'll see them showing up in more than two types of decks... unlike the Sents/Titans era.

I hope someone does a Meta breakdown of the entire field.

People still don't get that I'm not calling anything boring... Until someone one reads my first post again, and finally gets wtf I'm talking about, I'm just going to ignore.

I actually enjoyed playing in the modern age tournament quite a bit, even though I did pretty damn bad. The field was fairly diverse - I played against 2 Family of Four decks, 2 IG-Hidden decks, a Deadpool lock, a Grodd/Deadshot deck, a Random/Punisher/Human Torch deck, a mono JLA deck (by the way, new JLA is pretty brutal in BYOS), and a Revenge Squad ongoing deck. I myself played a Doom Patrol/Defenders deck (as a part of my promise to play either Doom Patrol or Birds of Prey in every legal format), and I saw a Beast Boy legends deck, Teen Titans/Outsiders, Insanity, and many others.

Will Marvel Universe rotate out MXM (silver) and MTU (modern) before worlds, if so we're looking at a meta shift there even if QS/AS/Fate still haunt that age?

Is it ever a surprise when top players do well at vs?

Mickey took 3rd-4th with X-men assemble, there are interesting options in Modern.

Skrulls won what was likely the largest Silver City championships within the bastion of vs's remaining competitive scene. The second place finisher by a nose was WF-JLA (Props Roger), that these decks made it onto the floor at Mega Silver should be no surprise, especialy considering that deck lists, feature match videos, and play-by-play, were all provided by Comic Cult - Chris Imallnoobish - and UDE Billy.

So I reread it... again:
So did you mean that Worlds is going to be putting holes into stuff?

Say what you mean!!!!

I have this little itch in the back of my brain that worlds should be bring your own set.

Everybody loves that format!

You must not have read: "Will it be...?". Not today Reyes. Not today.

There is diversity in MA it just costs a ton of money. If a team decided that JLA was best in format, Do you honestly think a 5 person team could get 5X 40+ DCL rares (10 different playsets + others) and have anyone else in the world actually run the JLA deck? Seriously?

The reason I think that CSA is everywhere is because its literally cheap as hell. On a budget you can run it with 0 rares and it will still perform on a decent level. And to increase its performance you don't need to add DCL rares. Just rares from older, cheaper sets.

I think that the dynamic of modern will change ALOT when the DCX set with Supermecha Bat and the new Crisis replacement comes out. Thats going to tweak the power of WF to rediculous levels with 4-5 invuln soak. (That can be teched by various control oriented options) In addition, the Crisis replacement will probably create some sort of other decks.

You just called 3 of the top tier cards in Silver boring. By extension, isn't that implying that the format will be boring?

So if I say:

"Will it be as opinionated as Rocketgurl's posts?"

That doesn't imply that my perception of Rocketgurl is "opinionated"? I get a pass because I said "Will it be...?".

C'mon... you got caught... fess up... or... were you just kidding?

(Like I said... I think he's kidding... he just wants to ifight some more)