I honestly don't mean to flame you, but that's not even close to being accurate. Did you ever try to play Overpower?

You are correct. It started off as just some light discussion about time-walking but ended up somewhere else.
I agree. Like Tetris and the Rubik's Cube.
This is something that UDE designers have implied (unofficially of course).
I used to think this way. Not so much any more. There is such thing as "too" open.

I guess I should clarify.

You can't even compare WoW to OverPower... so the original statement is not fair. But what I am saying is OverPower didn't even have a small percentage of support that VS did. There are still people on this very board who actually don't think Overpower was that bad... but with no incentive to play and no R&D to support its evolution... it was doomed to fail.

And by the way... most of the good VS players I know (not just Tim and Vidi), do quite well at WoW. In fact... go to any top 8 at our 70+ regionals and you'll see VS players there. The thing that makes WoW more appealing is that not **all** of the top 8 are "pro" card players. Our last regionals one guy went undefeated in Swiss and the single elimination round... and he was just getting into VS before they cut back on the OP so he picked up WoW instead. It's all about easy of entry and easy of success... people like to play a game where they can (or think they can) do well at.

I started out in MTG. I gave up on it for many reasons, but bringing fun decks or not having the money to buy all the money rares didn't seem fun after getting beaten to a pulp week after week.

I stopped ccgs for about 5 years and decided to give VS a try. I like comic books, but I saw how...poor Overpower was, and no one gave it good positive selling points, so I passed on it.

Everything about the game engine, character design and so forth seemed very natural. At once, I was hooked. I started around Spider-man, but got hooked in real deep once GL came out.

The game HAS already changed and evolved over the years. It went from a simple...attack,attack pump, stun game to something so much more. As the game grew, so did the complexity and mechanics. Reservist, Concealed, Vengeance and more. Sure these mechanics have been around, kinda in other games, but this is truly its own engine.

What if though, huh? Well, I am not against WOW, though I do not like the game engine as much though. Simple reason is the luck factors involved. In VS. its less about luck and strategy and uses your available cards carefully. In Wow, it seems like you can blow your load on one attack and still be ok, because if you top deck that one card...you win. I started to loathe magic because of that reason. That false hope. Draw one card, you win. You start praying to false gods, promising strange favors all to see one good card, and tada, its a land. SIGH.

VS is much more about skill and strategy. Sure you can luck out on cards that can win games outright, but not until the game is almost over anyhow. How many times are you sitting there drawing your 2 cards (better already) and hoping for that flying kick. I would rather have my next drop, or search or perhaps some hidden tech. Does that flying kick win you games? Maybe, maybe not. It probably helps, but its not the combo win card auto win, screw you opponent.

What if though....always go back to the question. I think the game has or would have had potential as a WOW engine. A bit of magic, a bit of VS, and all about your HERO or VILLIAN to stand against all odds. Sure, sounds fun actually. But does the engine make or break a game? Sometimes it does. Sometimes its tournament support, bankruptcy, poorly designed and way too powerful cards and so forth. Here is something quote worthy, if you wish...
"Card games succeed or fail for as many reasons as there are people in the world."

Wow is doing well. We can all point to reasons, some obvious, some not so. Changing the engine does not change the popularity though, or maybe it does.

Tell you what, I am a sucker and a guinea pig. You make some fake WOW engine like cards for the comic books using those card editors. Or someone else who has lots of time on their hands. Make em, and I will print them off, sleeve them and show em around. Gauge responses and so forth. For ease of headaches, start with a hero and villian only. A starter set if you would.

Choose someone popular and his/her popular villian. I am not even talking about a full fledged set or deck, just enough to get the idea across.

I am not against the idea of trying something new or change, but I am against changing something for the sake of change.

I completely agree. Actually i tend to go one step further and say that WOW is actually quite difficult to understand unless you've played the online game for at least a little. (thats probably my biggest gripe with the tcg, i dont think there is any way i could get non WOW online people to play it)

I read things like "bear form" and "shadow damage" and had no clue what they were talking about untill after seeing it online. Then it made more sense.

The games are too independent, in VS there was the luxury of a blank slate, in WOW they wanted to mirror the online game.

Man, what are you guys talking about? Overpower had the greatest OP ever! They even kept track of ratings on Geocities for godsake!

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare...op2/id204.html

and

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare...op2/id205.html

If I recall correctly, old pops was once seventh in the nation for a while with that 1730 rating (and as you can see from the results, I owned my dad's face in one of the last tournaments we played in).

IMO, Overpower would have performed alot better with more reasonable OP support, but the main problem with the game was too many dead cards. There were only about 15 or so tournament playable characters with over 100 or so in existence. Each character had about 5 or more cards that they could only use (up to about 12 for popular characters like Spider-man). Thus, if the character was unplayable (like Spiderman), all of their supporting cards were unplayable too. If I recall correctly, the best characters in the game were The Mauraders, The X-Babies, Onlsaught, Professor X, Braniac, The Ray, Heroes for Hire, Holocaust(Nemesis), Scarlet Witch, Dark Beast/Beast, Spawn, and Zealot. When you built a deck, you had to choose four different characters to form your team. The Fantastic Four had some synergies and often sported teams of Mr Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Namor and Thing, but aside from that there were very few decks built from a thematic perspective. The DC characters all sucked royally (especially Superman and Batman), but The Ray was one of the most abusable characters in the game until they restricted one of his cards.

In a 'good' player perspective VS is the best game ever.

But you think it's too open because of the Lack of...smart people. In all honestly the total amount of people that play VS because of comics and actually go to...urg, went to PCQ events was a incredibly small percentage.

The fact that its "too" open is bad because there are lazy people that like playing attacking and not thinking. (ygo)

But in our perspective "open" means I get to out play you, and feel good about it.

It would be simpler, but would less accurately reflect what the game is trying to do. Instead of being a comic book hobby game it would be a dumbed-down MTG with comic skins.

It wouldn't show enough of the essential part of vs; the comic characters and their powers.

There is skill in WoW. Good players still do well. It's definitely not as bad as Yugi, and certainly the better player can win close to 70% of the time with the right deck (at least, in my experience.)

All the Vs. players in my area do well in Regionals. The basics of tcg applies to all games with strategy, so if a man is well-versed in Sniper Shooting, I'm sure he can tackle a simulator no problem.

If Alex Brown can still talk about raw numbers and technical numeral crunching, then the system isn't too bad.


btw, I'm an exception. I never played the WoW game ever anywhere, and I think the flavor is funny.

"Are we there, Yeti?"

Im going to have to agree with you here. And I'm also going to go on with what I said above before some Anti Troll flames me.

If you play YGO or a simplistic game of the sort you arn't "dumb" and perhaps not "lazy" but...narrow minded? Human? someone give me a proper term of the difference of wanting to do well in a skill / "meta" based game as opposed to top decking FTW. And sure you can Top deck in Magic and even in WOW. But at least the mechanics of the game force you to think.

The biggest hurdle with VS I've found is teaching new players. 'Cause face it, the base game is awful. Even in the Hellboy EC, which was quite fun, a lot boils down to miss a 4-drop, lose the game.

You have to teach a new player so much before they realize how good the engine is and that it's not just play your biggest drop, swing, pump. We played VS exactly like that for the first year, if you recall, and it was pretty mind-numbing.

I liken it to an anime series that doesn't get good until 50 episodes in. Most people don't have the patience.

WoW on the other hand is immediately rewarding to most new players I've seen. VS would be better off today if it borrowed a few elements from the WoW engine (not all, certainly).

So basically a shonen series. Just do this: main character good, then suck, mega powerup, good again, repeat. Skip episode 68, continue at 103.

In general:

If a character doesn't have at LEAST a 7 ... preferably an 8, in one stat ... they are useless. X-Babies were the exception because at 15 points they could help 'pay' for expensive characters and there are the artifacts that can bump them up to 7 in which ever stat(s) the decks are built around. Prof X and Braniac are solid with 8 energy and 7 intellect each, and not very expensive at that. There were tournaments in my area, and the turnout was arguably as good as Vs. and Raw Deal are doing in the same area today. The only prize support was store credit.

However, that could just be an effect of the time [there weren't many other options at the time, etc].

If that's a stealth flame. ( I don't think it is because it was directed right at you after a quote by you) What's this?

Yea this is in no way a stealth flame, to all the people who haven't even had the chance to disagee with you yet. But hey that's your opinion.

I examined your post as you encouraged and posted my own ideas. Sorry we don't agree it's not personal.

I agree with you 100% it's your opinion. I know it is because I have read it over and over again.

(See that's a stealth flame:)

I wasn't trying to be mean or attack you, I was just pointing out my opinion of your opinion.

A flame is "U R so Dmb, I wld pwn U'r Stpid WOw engine."

If me directly quoting you and letting you know how your post makes me feel, or how I percieve your points as misleading isn't what you wanted, why did you post in the first place?

5 years ago there were store credit tournys in ATL for almost every game. For some reason though that died off. I remember going in and seeing 100 gamers playing everything Magic, Pokemon, the Showdowns and Mage Knight. Between rounds people individuals would be playing fun games of something else. That type of attendance just kind of dissappeared. Even if a tourny wasn't going on there were always people lurking around to play a game with. Now there are maybe the kids who work in the gaming stores on their hours off. I'm sure people are just staying at home playing 360 or WOW or somethign for those social hours, but man those were pretty good times for a gamer.