Editor: Paul Van Der Werk. Tuesday 3rd August 2004.
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Editor: Paul Van Der Werk. Tuesday 3rd August 2004.
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 “Your Fate is Sealed!!! or Yet Another Sealed Deck Card Pool” Part 1
So it is with Vs limited. Especially in the early stages of your Vs playing career, there is no better tutor than the Practice Fairy and I hope this article might help you on your way to some extent. Also, I needed another excuse to crack four boosters, so I thought I’d bring you guys another DC Origins sealed deck card pool. As the title suggests, this column will be a little different to normal … it will come in two parts. A second article with my suggested build and other comments will be posted a bit after this one to allow people to post their ideas in the forums and generally discuss the card pool. Before I get to the cards themselves, I will also run through some sealed deck construction basics, which may or may not be of some assistance (more experienced players may wish to skip to the card pool at the end). If you’ve never played sealed deck or limited Vs before, then I hope this proves to be a useful and educational exercise. After diving into DC Origins limited for the first time most players have commented about the obvious improvements on the game’s first release, Marvel Origins. If you’ve drafted or played sealed with Marvel Origins but haven’t done so with DC Origins yet, then there may be a few things you might want to consider before applying your earlier thoughts and strategies when picking up the newer cards. First and foremost, is the prevalence of the loyalty mechanic in DC Origins. If you’re not yet familiar with loyalty, it is a keyword located in the text box of many DC Origins characters that restricts you from recruiting him/her unless you have another character already in play with the same team affiliation as that character. It’s the same effect as that on Wolverine, Logan in Marvel Origins. Whether you like this keyword or not and regardless of whether you think it’s a great thing for the game in general (as I do), you better be on the look out for it when playing limited. As a rule, you generally don’t want to include the four-drop Ra’s al Ghul, Immortal Villain in a deck that has no one, two or three-costed League of Assassins characters, because he has loyalty. Furthermore, if you do have a character with loyalty that you’d like to get into on the appropriate turn, you’ll have to construct your deck with a decent number of characters of the same team at the smaller drops and you’ll have to make sure when you’re playing the game that a single loyalty-enabling character is not KO’ed before you can get the other guy out. Also remember that stunned characters still count for the purposes of loyalty, which could be relevant with the existence of Poison Ivy and Lazarus Pits, which can keep stunned characters around beyond the recovery phase. Ignore loyalty at your peril. You’ve been warned. The other new keyword mechanic is boost, which simply enables you to pay a cost (for now this is a straight resource cost) when you recruit a character to get an added effect. It’s Vs’ equivalent of Magic’s kicker mechanic, which was around during Invasion Block. A typical example of boost is the six-costed Bane, The Man Who Broke The Bat. If you play Bane on turn six, he comes out as a 12/12 with a pretty good ability, but if you play him on turn seven, paying his boost cost of one, then you get an added +2/+2 boost until the end of the turn. Boost is particularly important in DC Origins limited play because it gives you more options in terms of deck construction. Wherein a situation in which you might have had both Mr Freeze and Bane, The Man Who Broke The Bat in hand on turn six and, were it not for Bane’s boost power, would have had to agonise over which would be best to play, now you can make optimal plays on both turns six and seven. This obviously helps in terms of deck construction, where characters with boost can smooth your curve by increasing your options on the relevant turns. Okay, the next thing you’ll want to consider is your recruitment curve. This simply is how many characters you generally want for each recruitment level in your deck. The lack of big, beefy guys in Marvel Origins in the common slot and the basic non-existence of loyalty, meant the curve for limited play has now changed. Specifically, there is much greater emphasis on making earlier drops and more characters are quite acceptable. Whereas Marvel Origins limited decks wanted 15 to 17 characters and plenty of good plot twists in their pile of 30, it is generally accepted that DC Origins limited decks can happily run with as many as 21 or 22 characters. While, I do not think that is ideal (I try to run about 19), it does reflect how the limited game has changed between the two sets. Upperdeck’s Vs guru, Dave Humphreys suggested the following recruitment
curve for DC Origins limited on Metgame.com – I propose the following curve – The old advice that you should try to fill out any gaps with characters that are at an adjacent recruitment cost level still applies. For example, if you don’t have two appropriate seven/eight costed characters then try to include four at the six level, or if you’re short a four-drop, you could maybe add another five costed guy. The next thing to consider is splashing characters. While you want to build a deck that predominantly contains two teams, you should always be on the look out for good splash characters. By splash characters, I mean guys outside your main teams whose stats or powers might compensate for any drawback that might come from not being able to reinforce or team attack with them. The best way to look at this is that in DC Origins, as with Marvel Origins, a lot of the bigger drops don’t have team affiliations anyway. Bigger characters that you might want to splash are really no worse or different than a big unaffiliated guy. Just remember to consider any drawbacks that these guys come with (like loyalty) that might make including them impractical. Also keep an eye on your curve and, if need be, look to the best characters outside of your teams to smooth it out. In a perfect world you’ll never need to do this, but then again … it’s not a perfect world, is it? Finally, defensive plot twists are few and far between in DC Origins, but anything that can allow your biggest character to survive an attack when you don’t have the initiative and set you up for a counter-attack can be highly valuable. This is a bit counter-intuitive for most Magic players, who usually disregard defensive spells out of hand. Enough flapping my jaw … onto the cards. This is a genuine card pool, taken from four random packs. The cards are broken up into teams (including non-character cards, although occasionally these cards will still be useable outside of that team, eg Fear and Confusion still has an effect even if you’re not playing with Arkham Inmates). They are also sorted by their card type (eg character, plot twist) and ranked in terms of recruitment/threshold cost, which is shown in the brackets on the left of the card names. The question is, if you had just sat down for a sealed tournament and cracked open this pile, how would you build your deck? Remember, you need to build a 30 card deck (and it’s not recommended that you run more than 30 cards), meaning you have 26 cards to cut. Arkham Asylum Fearsome Five Gotham Knights League of Assassins Teen Titans Non-Aligned or Non-Team Specific So, this is what you have to work with. I tried to help out by providing recruitment costs and breaking them up into team affiliations, but you’ll probably want to check out a spoiler (which can be found here). Please, above all else, post some of your thoughts in the forums. The community aspect of VS Paradise is the best thing it’s got going for it, so take advantage of it. Add your voice to the din. Catch ya soon.
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