I used to like playing in constructed tournaments. Lately, I haven't played in many constructed tournaments with a deck that wants to play Vs. You know, attacking, defending, all that nonsense. Now I have to wait for limited events to play real Vs.

I've spent some time thinking about what cards I would ban to make Vs feel like Vs again. All of these cards are silver legal. My reasoning behind this is that the game is old enough so that there can be a "broken" format, much like type 1 is in Magic. Golden can stay broken, and I'm fine with that.

My list:

Enemy of My Enemy
Straight to the Grave
Mobilize
Ahmed Samsarra
Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose
Frankie Raye <> Nova, Optimistic Youth
Nenora
Haywire, Suicidal Lover
Slaughter Swamp
Soul World
Mr. Mxyptlk, Troublesome Trickster
Quicksilver, Inhuman by Marriage


My reasoning behind these cards are as follows:

All good character search should be teamstamped. I really like what they've done recently by giving many teams multiple search cards, that do different things. Take Lockjaw and The Great Refuge for example, or Connie Webb and Brother I Satellite. I think each team can have a pair of interesting search cards, but 12 is far too many for a monoteam deck. If you teamup, you should be allowed access to all the search effects of both teams. That's the idea. If you play 12 different teams, you should suffer the consequences of having such powerfully individual cards in your deck. Not being able to team attack or reinforce is obviously not enough deterrent, because 12 team decks usually don't care about combat.

You know it's an issue when people play 1 copy of key characters, and Time Thief is the biggest reason they'll miss that character.

Ban Enemy, Straight to the Grave, and Mobilize

As good as being able to pick a character in the format, then recruit that character can be, being able to repeatedly search for your support cards is even better. I see far too many decks with no plot twist support except for search cards and possibly one other plot twist. If the ability to search is good, then the ability to search repeatedly is far too good. In many cases, Poison Ivy's cost of KO'ing a character is actually a benefit. Ahmed, on the other hand, is an engine to himself, with only loyalty-reveal needed to kickstart the engine. Sure, he's vulnerable, but repeated search is far too good.

Ban Ahmed Samsarra, and Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose

Because our support cards don't cost resource points, they have to have other costs or at least have a small enough effect where only the card itself is the cost. A common cost to generate effects is KO'ing a character. Characters cost resource points. Or at least they should. If you've studied the game at all, you'll quickly realize that resource points are the true bottleneck in the game. They are very scarce, and generating extra RPs is extremely difficult. The nature of free characters break a fundamental rule of the game, one that says that resource points -> characters. I think it's perfectly fine for a few free characters to see play, provided they are teamstamped in some form and the team that they're on doesnt have a wealth of return/KO costs. While Frankie Raye is the most egregious, as he does things other than providing a free character, nonstamped free characters are still unhealthy.

Ban Frankie Raye <> Nova, Optimistic Youth, Haywire, Suicidal Lover, and Nenora

The other major costs cards have is discarding cards. This is most commonly seen on search cards, but there are plenty of other ways to discard a card to generate effects. Slaughter Swamp and Soul World effectively negate the cost of discarding character cards, as they are simply a temporary discard. While your hand size does stay down a card with Slaughter Swamp, the decision of what to discard is still taken away. Slaughter Swamp and Soul World effectively provide a second hand of sorts. You can simply keep all of your characters in the Ko'd pile with very little drawback, and recruit them as you need them.

Mr. Mxyptlk, on the other hand, simply negates the first discard you play every turn. While he doesn't snap the game in two, I simply think this is too powerful of an effect for our game, because nearly every deck discards all the time.

I would be perfectly fine with seeing versions of Swamp and Mxy teamstamped to Secret Society. A KO'd pile manipulation team can have access to these cards, and as Calabrese's society deck showed, they can be interesting without being broken if confined to a team.

Ban Slaughter Swamp, Soul World, and Mr Mxyptlk, Troublesome Trickster

Quicksilver, Inhuman by Marriage is an interesting case. I'm not really sure how this one made it through development, as it is way too good, straight up. Multiple teams (YMG, TAWC, 1/2 team Tommy Ashton) brought the most basic Quicksilver deck to a Golden Age PC that threatened to be full of brokenness.

Play Quicksilver, Fate him up, double all of your attack pumps. Kill you on turn 3. This is exceedingly simple to see and to exectue. Granted, you won't die on 3 all the time, but it's absurd to think that a single character can be good for 40-50 points of endurance by turn 3. While it may not be metagame defining, playing with/against this deck is not fun at all. Like Dr. Light, I think the intended use of this card is simply too good. As a side note, I don't think a single "normal" Inhumans deck would ever play this card, and it is a 3/3 for 2 with no abilities in an Avengers deck.

I like playing more than 3 turns, win or lose.

Ban Quicksilver, Inhuman by Marriage

With the exception of Quicksilver(he does not apply to any of the following arguements), all of these cards are engine cards. They are used primarily to kickstart the engines that are currently dominating competitive play. Constructed play has deteriorated into merely setting up and milking your own engine while disrupting your opponents setup as opposed to tactical play. None of these cards are actually going to kill your opponent, they are merely going to setup an overwheming consistency and power that will fuel your strategy of choice. With the exception of Ahmed, none of these cards are teamstamped in anyway, and every team can play them for their intended effect.

I understand that many people play with these cards in a very fair way. I play fair with many of these cards as well. This does not mean they are fair. When I am recommending that these cards be banned, I mean from tournament play. I play with many currently banned cards in Big Deck currently. In tournaments, people aren't going to play fair. Tournament players should find the most broken use of the cards available to them. It is UDE's goal to give the players a set of cards where many different strategies are available, and true to the game itself. W

While my opinion might be in the minority, I firmly believe banning these cards will help the health of our game. This is a list I've been working on for quite some time now, it is not a spur of the moment response to these threads.

Adam Prosak

Ban ordinary rules. Switch to bigdeck.

What? Why would anybody buy Legions if they do that?

Methinks Mr. Prosak is out to kill the secondary card market in the name of fun gaming.

Can't we just all wait for Silver Age to rotate out all the stuff?

I don't know, TDB, asking people to be patient? That sounds a bit unreasonable.

if you ban EOE then you have to ban Straight to the Grave also. Banning, in my opinion, is just a way of UDE saying "Oops, we didn't playtest this card well enough so please don't use it." How about R&D doing a better job and getting it right the first time.

Then again maybe I'm wrong, I've only been playing Raw Deal for the past 4 years. in which there is not a single banned card, zip, zero, zilch. There are powerful combos in that game also, but there is an answer for everything, and its usually easy to come by.

i wouldn't mind harper being ban

my list would probably be:

The Phantom Stranger
Cosmic Radiation
Quicksilver, Inhuman By Marriage
Unmasked (Kang cripples power ups, and is more balanced...)

And a Team stamping on Poison Ivy wouldn't hurt either.

The only card in this whole thread that truely deserves the Mjolinr is Frankie Raye.

The only cards that need to be banned are cards that main parts of degenerate combo decks.

One particular deck:

It was a swarmy army deck that keyed off of attack pumps for all characters. It was DC Modern, which means it was the JLI team attack bonuses mostly. The deck needed a way to get back it's board and ultimately, with only Slaughter Swarmp and that one card for the Injustice Gang ... it was easier to go with a Kooey for a copy of this card and be able to get all the army guys back and refill the board.

Great example? No ... but it still has some non-abusive example. I still think the "any character going to the KO'd pile gets removed" errata could be the solution for it ... it's questionable whether that errata would still keep in flavor, but at the very least, it would prevent the abuse of the card by limiting it to cards that are already in the KO pile when it's played. Perhaps even word it like Witching Hour [target the characters in the KO'd pile that you want to recruit]

In the case of Valeria ... it had much less to do with her being free than with her cycling effect. Considering they also banned Talia for having the same effect. Now ... most people would play Valeria over Talia because she's free ... but that's confusing which part made her good. Similarly, Frankie is good because she's free ... but the broken part is the cycling effect [especially attached to a free character, for Frankie it's a combo].

Haywire is arguable, what with the seemingly inadvertent interactions with cards like Secret Sanctuary, Ring Has Chosen, etc ...

Nenora though ... her 'power' isn't anything amazing. It's hard to divorce the power of certain free characters from free characters in general. Before IC/HoG ... free characters were nothing much. Now, MOST of the free characters from that set seem to be going onto the banned list. However it has less to do with their being free as what they also do. Losing Dr. Light, Detective Chimp and Frankie ... they wouldn't be anywhere as 'bad' as they currently are.

Free characters that are pretty much only there to be free characters ... are not a problem. It's the free characters that ALSO give you great bonuses. It's like Dr. Light ... if he only gave you 'free characters' that would be fine ... but characters you want to play over and over again ... that's when he became a huge problem.

Still ... Frankie is definately a problem. I'm sure that Enemy is one of those things that will, if it's ever banned, will do so kicking and screaming ala Dr. Light ... It's removal would drastically alter the metagame. I think it's much better to ban specific problem cards while pushing the mono team stuff like Mobilize and the "mono-team" Acro Dodge and stuff like that.

As a playtester/rules manager for said game ... it's hard to compare the two.

Arguably, the best feature of Raw Deal is diversity. The 'best' deck at any given time will still see limited play simply because only one of each character can make the cut. Also, the ammount of tutoring available for bullets is so strong that it becomes nearly impossible to require a card to be banned when a bullet can be put in its place.

Reversals are also a big issue ... ultimately, the ammout of 'counter-spells/fizzles' in Raw Deal means that nothing, except those reversals, can ever be a problem in the long run, as you can simply just make reversals to counter anything that proves problematic. One of the main problems with degenerate decks in Vs. is the "there is nothing I can do" experience that they cause. You basically need to be packing specific 'hate' cards and somehow draw into them in time to stop what your opponent is doing.

It would be nice to just "cow" your opponent the third time they go to loop Frankie ... but that's not an option. On that subject ... the lack of a side-deck [not sideboard to change cards, but to have access to during the game, like the Backlash deck] means that you can't just have easily accessible bullets.

So, Vs. is not Raw Deal. Raw Deal is designed in a way where it can go without banning. Vs., on the other hand, cannot.

HOLY CRAP! HERALD OF GALACTUS AND A NORSE GOD?

Wait? When was she able to lift the hammer? Does she somehow gain the identity of THOR? Is there a new plot twist that i missed?:grin: :grin:

Dude, if she got mjolnir then she'd totally be broke phi broke.

haywires a blank card.


Ivy if anything should be xed.

Gah! Leave my beautiful Poison Ivy ALONE! :eek:

Hehe. Seriously though, I really don't think she's busted. Dangerous? Yes, busted? No. While the Dr. Light banning didn't seriously wound Frankie Raye, I think it DID curb a lot of Ivy's over-reaching potential, settling her down into a nice and fair niche of being awesome.

-Mike