Defense is perhaps the least understood concept in VS. This is probably on purpose, because VS is an offensive game at heart. You smack the other guy around. That's how you win.

But part of winning consistently is not losing. Curve Sentinels and Teen Titans decks dominate the metagame for a reason - they have defense. Consistently I see people build decks without a single defensive trick in them and then they wonder why their deck doesn't win.

So. What is a good defensive card? The answer is simple:

A good defensive card almost always nullifies an attack. The core of winning VS is minimizing your losses when you don't have the initiative and maximizing your damage when you do. Most players understand the second half of the equation, but rarely do they comprehend the first. A good defensive card isn't pump; it removes an attack while being relatively difficult to counter.

Yes, you can beat Heroic Sacrifice with a carefully times Shadows of the Past. You can stop Bastion's Reconstruction Program capability with a Phantom Zone. But these are singular cards, counters that are rare.

Firstly, let's look at every piece of defensive pump ever. Most defensive pump is terrible by definition, because it's so easily countered. If I attack your 12 DEF 6-drop with my 9 ATK 5-drop, and Savage Beatdown up the curve, your Acrobatic Dodge only gives you a safety margin of one point! A lousy power-up and my attack is successful. What can we conclude from this example? Simply that most defensive pump will not, with any guarantee, nullify an attack - especially when just about every deck will run multiple forms of attack pump, and most players with any skill will attack so that a lousy 3 DEF boost won't help you anyway.

The exception to this sort-of-a-rule is Cover Fire. Cover Fire, used properly, gives a DEF bonus of 4 to 8, which is large enough that your aggressor will have to work overtime to get around it, and potentially overcommit resources, lessening the potential of his other attacks.

Other than defensive pump, what defensive cards are there? The answer is "not many." And most of them are teamstamped. However, there are a few extremely solid defensive cards do exist that just about anybody can use.

ENTANGLE

Bar none, the simplest, most basic defensive card in the game - play it, toss a card, and their second largest attacker (assuming you both hit your curve) becomes a relative non-issue. If your opponent has less than four characters on the board, the only card that can effectively counter it - Press The Attack - doesn't work. I always consider Entangle for just about every deck I build. Frequently, the difference in my opponent having one less attacker on turn 4 or 5 means keeping my entire board intact for far longer.

PUPPET MASTER

A lot of decks that should play Puppet Master don't. Yes, you can't tutor for him - well, shucks, that means you just run four of him and hope you see him, and run an alternate two-drop! (Or, if you're playing a deck with no real tutor, like X-Men or Arkham, you say "I run four of him!" and that's that.) Depending on how you use him, Puppet Master will keep - at the least - their smallest drop out of touch. If you play more cleverly (or if your opponent makes a mistake), you can lock down somebody even bigger.

SYSTEM FAILURE

It's Overload, but it doesn't stun - so what? You cancel their attack! That's great! Plus you can combo it with Savage Beatdown just like you did with Overload! Sign me up - just because it's "great" rather than "completely devastating" doesn't mean you shouldn't play it!

HOME SURGERY / LANTERNS IN LOVE

I include these two together because they're kind of the same thing. Entangle and Puppet Master nullify an attack before it happens; Lanterns In Love and Home Surgery nullify an attack retroactively by recovering the character after they attack. Rise From The Grave and Medical Attention also fit into this category, but the first is dreadfully expensive (seven to eleven endurance?) and the second extremely hard to use (unless you play concealed characters and your opponent doesn't run hidden meta). Recovery tech isn't quite as good as proactive defense tech, because, well, you take damage, which worsens your game position. But it's better than nothing, and for decks that can't run Puppet Master and can't afford the discard for Entangle (or run off-curve and weaken its effectiveness) or the comboness for System Failure, nothing is often what they've got.

BEEFY CHARACTERS

They're all over the place. A lot of the really beefy ones, like Thing, Heavy Hitter or Goldface, are teamstamped, but every so often you find a slab of steak that works for everybody, like Solomon Grundy. Characters with above-the-curve DEF and reasonable ATK (IE, not Malvolio or Fiero, who have above-the-curve DEF and pathetic ATK) make attacking up the curve far more difficult all by themselves. This is a valuable thing.

COAST CITY

With Flight rapidly becoming extremely prevalent, anything that stops characters from using it is good. Thus, Coast City - which forces players to attack more with your preferences than theirs - is a decent defensive card.

Right. That's the non-team-stamped defensive tech. Now, how about the teamstamped tech?

CHARACTERS WITH STUN POWERS THAT CAN BE USED OUTSIDE OF YOUR ATTACK STEP: There are a bunch of these. The Teen Titans naturally have the most - Terra, Arsenal, and Starfire. The X-Men have Gambit and Sunfire. The X-Statix have Zeitgiest and Plazm. The Crime Lords have Hitman. The Avengers have Hawkeye. The Fearsome Five have Dr. Light, of course, and the Spider-Friends have Cardiac and Firestar.

Not all characters with activating stun powers are created equal. Terra and Gambit have the same effect, but Terra replaces a location in your resource row (relatively cheap) whereas Gambit costs a character discard (fairly expensive) - and of course Terra has 1 more DEF as well as range, which Gambit lacks. Hawkeye's stun effect is underpowered, whereas Firestar's is extremely specific in use.

The usefulness of a stun power that can be used before your attack step on off-initiative turns is obvious - you worry about one less attacker. Simple, effective, and brutal.

Overall, the best activate-> stun effects are the various Titans (big surprise) and Dr. Light. Dr. Light's effect is arguably the best in the game, but requires a teamup in most cases to actually work.

BROTHERHOOD: Avalon Space Station/Lost City. Yes, it's defensive pump rather than attack negation, but it fits into the Cover Fire model - a lot of defensive pump out of one card isn't half bad. And given that with Avalon and Lost City, you can get +6/+6 out of one lousy character card (power up, recover with Avalon, do it again), it's no wonder Big Brotherhood was one of the first decks that actually threatened - and with Overload gone, it again works well as defensive tech.

Furthermore, there are at least three characters who can get multiples of themselves into play (Spider-Man, Superman, and Kang), further increasing the redundancy value of this combo set - and that's before I mention Army characters.

DOOM: Reign of Terror and Mystical Paralysis. These two cards are so fantastic whenever a new set comes out my first question is "how well does each faction team up with Doom?" Mystical Paralysis is Entangle on steroids and Reign flat out removes character presence! Only the weenies, but even so! Plus, you get to play Dr. Doom as your primary 4-drop, and he's fantastic anyway, so it's a win-win situation.

SENTINELS: Bastion. By himself, not really that fantastic- although turning characters into powerups is slick, don't get me wrong, but not guaranteed defense - until you add in the Reconstruction Programs to provide redundancy and additional resources. And sprinkle with other defensive tech, like, oh, Cover Fire. (Or Entangle. It works just fine in Sentinels.)

TITANS: Heroic Sacrifice. Stun a weenie, save your big'un. Cruel math, maybe, but it's the math you have to do: when they've expended resources to take out your bigger drops, they'll be harder-pressed to do it after you make those resources moot.

GOTHAM KNIGHTS: Jason Todd <> Robin. Heroic Sacrifice, except potentially reusable. (With recovery tech like Home Surgery or Lanterns In Love, easily reusable.) I have yet to understand why every Gotham deck doesn't just run four of him.

SPIDER-FRIENDS: One of those teams supposedly with hordes of defensive options, but realistically there are only two worthy of consideration. Sticky Situation is decent because it can be played after your opponent expends resources to attack up the curve to nullify that attack, which is not bad. (Not insanely powerful, mind you, but not bad.) More impressively, Amazing Spider-Man gives you almost unparalleled exhaustion tech and usually almost-total initiative theft on the most important turn of the game (and thus makes a strong argument for playing even initiatives so you can swing on seven and eight).

KANG: Kang actually has a few defensive options available to him/them. Not The Time Keepers, which is ass, but Ultimate Kang on 5 is a portable Heroic Sacrifice (yeah, I'll stun a Rama-Tut to stay alive) and Kang, The Conqueror is a nifty stall engine on either turn 5 or 6. Furthermore, although it will cost you a lot of endurance in the process, Earth-Mesozoic-24 disappearing for a turn and then showing up again on the next turn (when, presumably, you have initative) is really quite fantastic.

FANTASTIC FOUR: The F4 only have one teamstamped defensive trick worth mentioning, but it's a doozy - A Child Named Valeria keeps your board completely intact when you play a weenie deck. Clever deckbuilders have used this in conjunction with GCPD Officer or Catcher's Mitt to ensure that opposing players, on their attack, will do no damage in a given turn. Which is slick.

LEAGUE OF ASSASSINS: It's only marginally a defensive card (as it doesn't do jack against a regular attacker with a Savage Beatdown), but Tower of Babel can severely screw up a lot of decks' attacks, which is worthy of mention. Also, the 3-drop Ubu's Loyalty might be a pain, but his ridiculously good defensive ability - a built-in Coast City - works excellently in tandem with recovery tech to keep your board as intact as possible.

GREEN LANTERNS: Sinestro's defensive stuns (which trump even cards like Legendary Battles and Bamf!) are of course legendary, but also consider Kyle Rayner at both his 4-drop (with a universal Coast City effect) and his boosted 6 (which flatly buys you a turn to win the game on 9). All of these effects are very solid defensive options.

DARKSEID'S ELITE: Yes, I said 'Darkseid's Elite'. They have one decent defensive trick: Virmin Vundabar's ability, which - combined with Darkseid's resource-row disruption tech - will usually give you a free Entangle every turn.

Next time: using your defensive tricks to fullest ability.

I always passed off Entangle to be slightly above "useless". Now after some consideration (thanks to you), I've decided to give 'em a shot in my AI/F5 deck.

Also, while not as useful as coverfire, you should mention something about Men of Steel and Helping Hand (maybe even Pest Control).

Besides the deck help I get, that was probably the most informative thing I've ever read. Thanks.

not to mention that he is a 5/6 on 3. he's a freakin beast.

Good stuff. :)

Dude, you forgot to put Glorious Godfrey under 'Darkseid's Elite.' Although he may be smaller than all the other 5 drops, his ability does help on the defensive or even the offensive end, when running a burn deck.

I also want to add nasty Surprise in there. Although it doesn't nullify an attack like other defensive cards do, Nasty Surprise ruins a well planned attack by an opponent through stun back. IMO, a good attack is when you attack up the curve with your small dudes, then attack down with your big one. If your opponent manages to do this to you in a game, the odds will surely stack up on his favor. Stunning back prevents your opponent from maximizing his initiative by giving a mutual stun when he attacks down the curve.

You also left out Crime Lords. Face the Master, Rough House and Kingpin 3 drop can all combine to give a reinforced defender +7 defense. Just playing a Rough House with Kingpin out is a +4 for everyone reinforced, and reinforcement is pretty easy to come by for them. That makes it difficult to even attack down the curve because you need a pump. That doesn't even count Sniper and Cover Fire, if that's the way the deck is built.

You could probably include Heat Vision for the same reason. The extra damage done back can cause your opponent to take more damage than you do.

Great post, very informative

yes this is a great post, well thought out and written. and it just reinforces my opinion of x-men.

they have alot of defensive tech-

off-stunning with gambit/sunfire, if you get lucky, power nexus.

locking attacking with dazzler, professor X: WMPT, using rogue: PA to copy anything handy. and phoenix force for an awesome defensive end game.

as you said retroactively nullifying an attack with their great recovery cards.

big beefy drops in logan and proudstar. not to mention the brick wall that is james howlett.

plus the unstunning ability on the attack, makes their defensive options more numerous as they will have a bigger field ans be able to use effects, while dwindling the opponet each turn.

Another means of achieving the end Entangle accomplishes is to go even more offensive. One of my favorite Syndicate tricks was to run nearly a dozen cards that KO'd opposing stunned characters. What this accomplished was to make it so when I stunned their field, every single character was wiped off said field. Then, when we went to the next turn, my opponent only had a single character to attack with; this meant without some sort of PT assistance, you couldn't lose anyone. With some of your own PT support, you'd take them out again, leaving a single character for when you got to attack the following turn.

Entangle and exhaustion effects in general are great for late-game bomb decks. Early-game win decks should opt for KO'ing and counter-stunning as means of keeping even pace and setting the clock forward, so to speak.

On purpose. This is because the Crime Lords' defensive tricks are ass.

Yes, they have a lot of defense pumps - which are conditional, and not big enough that they're worth playing anyway. Movement and de-reinforcement tricks - which have become much more common with the last few sets - completely hose any Crime Lords player on the defensive.

They also have crappy redirection powers, which uniformly are pretty weak. Jaime Ortiz is the best of a bad lot in that regard and he still has weak stats. Mr. Fear's ability is, bluntly, garbage - it's so easy to play around I have to wonder why they bothered printing him, and on top of that he has terrible stats as a bonus.

Jamie Ortiz is actually pretty horrible. Mr. Fear is okay (essentially forces your opponents to attack everything else first). Personally Nuke w/Armed Escort is extremly awsome (and not all that hard on to do).
Fight to the Finish works extremly well with CL's ability to cause stun backs (Face the master/Marked for Death/Hand Dojo/NS).

CL isn't that bad, I've taken out CS before with them (in a no rare build, I might add)

Mr. Fear is ass. If he was a 9/9 he'd be playable, but an 8/8 can be taken out by half the four-drops in the game on raw stats alone. So you redirect my 5-drop, big deal, I'll just take out Fear with my 4-drop. (Remember also that a redirect has to be to a legal target and that the Crime Lords have a lot of hidden characters, which you opponent can't attack.)

Ortiz, in comparison, turns their first attack into an attack on your 6-drop, no matter what. That's a lot simpler and usually a lot more effective than redirecting away from an already-crap defender. This isn't to say that Ortiz is good - he's not, he's just mediocre - but he's more effective than Fear is.

Armed Escort is the best defense trick the Crime Lords have, and I should have mentioned it in the initial post - but it's equipment, and therefore rather troublesome to play with because it's more easily metaed against.

Consistently? I rather doubt it.

Funny, I always find Mr Fear to be quite useful. Ortiz essentially just got replace by a PT in avengers.

So what if Armed Escort is an equipment? You can tutor for it with tech upgrade.

Actually, yea it has. I may not have always been behind the wheel but it wreaks their attack pattern when most of their stuff is getting KO'd on their attack or getting redirected.

Of course it just rolls over and dies when it faces Titans.