[quote]lack of predictability in the metagame is good.[/QUOTE

Nothing has dominated for long since the Mav set. We have seen tons of decktypes come and go. I'm loving this too.

Regardless of what you may have said in this thread before, the above quote pretty much proves that you lose the thread.

Is EoME too good? Maybe. Is EoME bad for the game? Maybe. Is the ability of EoME to make multi-team decks playable a bad thing? Maybe. Is the current situation worse than the Titans/Sentinels era? Definitely not!

EoME has created a metagame that is healthier and more diverse than any that has ever come before it since the game's inception. Only a person who completely lacks any semblance of common-sense would prefer the age of the purple robots (which most people think of as the "dark age" of VS).

... you are going to make the same argument no matter what the facts are. In other words... you simply want to scream about this even if someone shows another side or another perspective. In other words... you don't know the definition of the phrase "cookie cutter".

Unless you have the Chaos Magick set. You know, the cookie cutters who change their shape every time you press them into the dough?

Yes, Enemy allows toolboxing. No, there are no cookie cutter decks in the past three Top 8s.

I think when people look at a toolbox deck they inherently miss the depth of the deck dismissing it as a bunch of one of's...

I dare someone to play the SS deck like you would attempt to play the Checkmate deck at the last 10k.

If you try to play them "as the same deck", you are missing the power provided, which is provided by each deck's base affiliation and location/plot twists...

:(

Savage Beatdown was only really good because of the combo with Overload. One or two +5 Beatdowns would let you stun just about any attacker from a 5 drop and down with Overload. With Overload gone, Beatdown is just an attack pump with no other utility (yeah, System Failure stops an attack, too, but it isn't as abusive as Overload was).

Someone here already said it. Enemy of My Enemy has enabled the side-deck for VS. Every deck is now a toolbox. That's good in that it makes a lot more decks viable where they weren't before. Now every deck can shore up it's weaknesses or add to its strengths with outside affiliations. Those without team-stamp searches are able to become more consistent. Yay, X-Men finally has a useful character search! They just need to invite a few friends from some other team to use it. Those teams that already have search can become even more consistent by having more than 4 search cards.

There really are a lot more possibilities. But you must have Enemy of My Enemy.

You can substitute and get lucky enough to get by sometimes, but that will always be inferior to EoME. It looks like every deck now starts with 4x Enemy of My Enemy (or sometimes 3x).

Stu - since you're an artist, think of it as an artist would. I equate Enemy of My Enemy to saying every good painting must start with the same color blue background. If you don't have that blue (and it is now very expensive because everyone must have it for their painting to be considered good) you can substitute some other shade of blue, but it will not be as good as the expensive shade. You can use any colors on top of that blue that you want. In fact, you can use more colors now than you could before we discovered this shade of blue, because more colors look better than they did before. Just make sure you start with that blue first.

Is this really more creative?

I consider true creativity to now be decks that don't need Enemy of My Enemy to be competitive. I look forward to BigSpooky's articles without the card.

Maybe it's just a mindset thing. Enemy of My Enemy is everywhere at the moment. The perception is it must be in your deck to compete. Hopefully that will be proven false over time (discounting formats that don't allow it at all).

I don't often disagree with you Keleko, but this time I'll bite :)

Compare this -
http://metagame.com/vs.aspx?tabid=46&ArticleId=6018


To this -
http://metagame.com/vs.aspx?tabid=46&ArticleId=3030

And tell me which one is more creative ;)


(Reason I chose these two events is because they are about a year apart... A perfect example of the changes we've been through)

SB should never have been made; neither should Nasty Surprise. +5 pumps with no drawback or cost are way overpowered and it's those that were the cuase of the overload problem. Again it was easier to ban overload because it wasn't a massively expensive rare people were paying lots of money for. Those cards unfortuantely still exist.

Full curve can't be played? Wasn't the Shadowpact deck from Australia full curve? Isn't CE "technically" full curve? What about Glock? The problem isn't a single card, it's people unwilling to adapt...

If UDE would've banned SB and NS, other cards would've been used to abuse Overload.

I think your problem (and this is based on the other banning threads as well) is that you are encouraging that UDE bans the faciliatator and not the true cause of the abuse.

Banning the facilitator is only a temporary repreive, and only by hitting the true cause can you prevent an ugly combo's head from rearing again.

It is just a mindset thing, and a real artist would just trap a few birds and feed them blueberries until they shat the right color.

But I do understand what you are saying and it is a reality in the game at the moment.

Does this reality have anything to do with the popularity of the game? Does it actually drive people away? The Whining Society seems to still be here, so maybe they will never leave no matter what happens? Is it a good sign that people want this card so badly that they will diminish themselves to bawling babies who dropped their candy in the dirt because of it? Is it a sign that UDE should up their print runs to keep up with demand, and is that not a good thing?

I have no idea, but it sure is a blast to talk about.

Heck no. The Sentinels/Teen Titans domination period was the most uncreative period in VS. Only 2 teams were strong enough to compete at the top levels then. That's the problem with the mono-team - if the team isn't strong enough alone, then it won't be used as a mono-team, and there wasn't any way to reliably play multiple teams.

Now you can't play a mono-team without toolboxing in splahes. Every single deck in the latest top 8 has toolbox splashes. It's become more "haves" vs "have-nots".

I want both equally viable. Instead we've gone from one extreme to the other.

I'm not worried about those cards at all. The last golden event had exactly 3 Savage Beatdowns in the top 8 and 0 Nasty Surprise. All but 1 deck in the top 8 had at least 3x Enemy of My Enemy. (The Shadowpact deck had 3x Secret Origins, and I suspect that was an Enemy substitute.)

VS players are addicted to Enemy of My Enemy at the moment. I'm worried that, like most addictions, this one may prove unhealthy in the long run.

Here I'll solve the EOME problem...DC Modern.

Hopefully it won't have another addiction problem and become the Artifacts Format. I fear it will, though. Last year was "how do you build the best GLEE or beat GLEE". Now it's "how do you build the best Artifacts or beat the Artifacts". The lack of equipment hate is really going to let the Artifacts run rampant.

But, I'll save this whine for a couple of months. Right now I still have hope for DCMA.

Only if you continue to design cards badly. The problem was that SB and NS could target any character. That's the problem. Had they realised this in the first place the whole problem would have been avoided.