Welcome to the first edition of my new Metagame.com column, The Light of Play! I had previously been writing Totally Freakin? Broken, and while some readers really enjoyed that series, I felt that now was a good time for a change. So, from now on, I?ll be writing articles about those cards sitting at the back of your trade binder. If I hit my mark, maybe you?ll dust off a few and give them a shot. In other words, I?m writing about jank. I love undervalued and overlooked cards, and I have the foiled Arkham deck to prove it. Most innovations in Vs. are only partially reliant on new cards?much of the game?s championship level creativity comes from older cards to which only a few of people ever paid attention. Curve Sentinels is a good example of this. Now that Tri-Sentinel has been replaced, the deck only uses a handful of cards from sets printed after Marvel Origins. What about X-Stall? Take out Mimic, Imperiex, Sunfire, Emma Frost, and Pleasant Distraction, and what?s left? That?s right . . . a whole pile of cards that most players once wrote off as house insulation and craft materials.* Read the rest at MetaGame.com

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BUY AROMED VAPORIZER

The Guy with the Coat hits gold. Outstanding transition of titles, perfect card to start with. (Maybe this will inspire me to get a quality article finished myself, I haven't been able to work on that level since X-mas.)

Thanks J.

This is one of the best written articles I have seen in a very long time. One of our team members has been playing with betrayal for a while. It works great against certain decks. And you can chain it to them flipping the team up to stun the character before the team up resolves. What fun.

I'm a relatively new player and i was testing betrayal also, but to my understanding it has Errata. Does that change any of the mentioned ways to use it listed in the article? Maybe i'm just confused, but i understood the card differently.

Here is the errata:

Card Text: ERRATA
Target player stuns a non-stunned character he controls, unless all characters he controls that have team affiliations share a single team affiliation.

The way I read this card, if the target player controls either two or more characters with different team affiliations (x-men and brotherhood, not teamed-up for example) OR two or more characters with MORE THAN ONE team affiliation (like gk and tt TEAMED-UP) then they stun a non-stunned character they control. I also believe that their stunned characters retain their team affiliation.

If that is the Errata, then the card couldn't be used on a character with two loyalty requirements like he said in the article, right? cause the character would share at least one loyalty with the rest of the characters with team affiliations? And doesn't the change from opponent to target player make add much more to the card? can't you use it as a sort of evasion for your own characters (in the sense that if a little character would be killed by a much larger one you and you played 2 different teams, you could stun him to avoid alot of breakthrough)?

The FAQ contains this little nugget about Betrayal.

—Betrayal doesn’t care if all of the target player’s characters share more than one team affiliation. They just have to share at least one team affiliation.

So GK and TT teamed up would be safe, as they would all share at least one team affilitation.

NM...slow post, someone answered already :)

i agree with iLeKtraN. if they want it to work the way Rat describes, the errata should read:

*UNOFFICIAL* Card Text: ERRATA
Target player stuns a non-stunned character he controls, unless all characters he controls that have team affiliations share *AT LEAST ONE* team affiliation.

Actually the on-going text of a team-up does not use the chain. So if they flip say Common Enemy, the 2 are teamed up immediately, the only thing that does on the chain is the card draw.

I used to like using Betrayel against those old Doom decks that splashed Beast.

Ah, memories.

Yeah, the characters must not be sharing team affiliations in order for it to work (otherwise this card would just be like... broken). This doesn't change any of the uses stated in the article, I just didn't mention the errata because it's existed since very, very early in the game.

Glad people liked the article! It was alot more fun to write than TFB. I'm a details guy, but those articles were a bit detail-heavy even for me. o_o

-JD

I'd like to repeat, you *cannot* chain it to a team-up. Once they flip Common Enemy, the 2 teams are teamed up, the only thing on the chain is the card draw.

The exception to this is the generic team-ups, cause I'm pretty sure the naming of the 2 teams is part of the resolution and not the cost but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Noted and edited in my post. Teach me to type before waking up... ;)

:sleep:

i enjoyed the article - i was just nitpicking about the card :p