Thursday 13 #2: Cardless Characters: DC edition

Time for another Thursday Thirteen!

First, in honour of valentines day…

 

… and now on with the show.

After the critical acclaim from the last Thursday Thirteen (read: the most comments I’ve had to date, even if a good chunk of them were from Thirteeners expressing confusion as to what the smeg I was talking about), I’m continuing with another list of thirteen characters that are currently lacking cards in UDE’s VS System trading card game.

Again, just a heads up, this is entirely for goofy fun. I’m not a DC expert, nor am I the kind of VS savant who instantly knows the best characters for the list - I just know that these are characters I’d get a kick out of seeing if UDE decided to print them.

The cat’s gone askew on the treadle! On with the list!

Denied! Noooo!

And now for the short Hobby League update yet to appear on the Lost Hemisphere….

We’re in heavy snow storm conditions. Clearly Spud and I are the only ones who TRULY love this game, since we’re the only ones who turned up. I’m looking at YOU Christine (who had a prior engagement), Pablo & Carrie (who would have had to drive over an hour in semi blizzard conditions), and Jeremy (who um… probably had to wash his hair).

Thus I was denied - DENIED! - the chance to put the Ghost Rider deck through its paces. Spud and I played a couple of games, but nothing was decisive in terms of which direction to take the deck.

We then played Settlers of Catan with one of the store staff. While Spud managed to get a stranglehold on ore, I had a settlement surrounded by forests, so frequently got wood. Insert peurile humour here.

Maybe next week I’ll have something more worthwhile to report… feh.

Goofin’ with Ghostie

I’ve been a Fan4 junkie since MOR, but when MVL’s teams and legends were announced it wasn’t Reed & co that got me most excited. True, I’ve had the Family of Four deck rolling since shortly after MVL’s release, but the one legend that had me most excited was the spirit of vengeance…

Much to my own shame, however, I haven’t actually put much effort into building a Ghost Rider legend deck.

Well, with the DCL Build A Legend event just around the corner, and my Darkseid deck needing more testing, what’s the smartest thing I can do this week at hobby league? Why, slap together a completely untested deck and have some goofy fun, of course! Playtesting is for ninnies! … and people who actually want to win I guess…

101 uses for a Black Panther

Well, maybe not 101, but a couple at least.

I’m an equipment junkie. I love equipment cards, and any deck that lets me spam the buggers out makes me a happy chap (that said, while I enjoy the Fartifacts, I refuse to play Quickfate).

Players are always wary of equipment that costs you a resource point, since that translates to one less point worth of characters on the board. Thus, the challenge is figuring out whether  or not the boost or abilities your character will get from the equipment are worth the sacrifice.

Mr Fantastic: Stretch was the first backdoor around this problem, using his brains and budget to reduce the cost of all equipment.  Later, he found a home in my Midnight Toystore deck, which used the Midnight Sons engine to gain whatever team affiliations I needed, to open up the doors to all that team-stamped niftiness out there.

And then came MXM208 Black Panther: King of Wakanda

Thursday 13 #1: Cardless Characters: Marvel

 

Welcome to the inaugural Lost Hemisphere Thursday Thirteen. Wipe your shoes.

Since this blog is primarilly related to the VS System card game, I thought we’d open the gates by listing thirteen Marvel Comics characters notoriously absent from the game. By notoriously, of course, I simply mean that I’d get a geeky sense of satisfaction if they came to light. Heh.

Now, UDE does a pretty solid job of catching all the cool characters from Marvel, but it’s inevitable that some will slip through the cracks. B-Listers, forgotten heroes and villians, or maybe just characters that give the Design Team headaches trying to work out where to squeeze them into the sets.

Enough! On with the in-no-particular-order thirteen!!!

Mutant Hobby League!

Every time I go to the Hobby Kingdom to play VS I thank God that I play with a bunch of guys who play for the fun of the game, rather than being uber competitive.  

After last week’s Hobby League I posted the wackiness we were going to endure this week. Everyone brought whatever they felt like playing, so the decks were:

• Gdaybloke: Darkseid’s Elite
• CaptainSpud: Hellfire/Birds of Prey
• Gamerette: New Brotherhood
• Pablo: Underworld/Hellfire
• Carrie: Hidden Injustice Gang
• Jeremy: Juggernaut Legend

and if you check the link above (the one to the wackiness) you’ll see the global effects we were going to endure each turn…

What movie featured Jennifer the Viking?

I was chuffed a few weeks back to see Erik the Viking on DVD in a store, and giggled like a fiend as I smuggled it home…

It strikes me that there’s so many lines from movies, so many scenes that stick in the mind, but over time they become disassociated with their roots.

Seriously, for years now the line “Scary, Scary, Don’t we look mean!” has been in my head and I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it came from.

 Ah, God bless you, Tim Robbins.

Watching the credits I’m given even more chuckles.

• Ulf the Unmemorable
• Unn-the-thrown-at
• Thorkatla the Indiscreet
• Horribly Slain Warrior
• Even More Horribly Slain Warrior
• And of course, the aforementioned Jennifer the Viking

It strikes me that many of us could well do with our own epithets.

Gdaybloke the whimsical? The folically-challenged? Who knows!

Come up with your own epithet, and demand someone refer to you by it! You know you want to…  I hear it’s what all the cool kids are doing…

Double D’s

What happens when you get two casual players chatting away in IM’s about random crap? Random decks!

Alright, it’s not totally random…

As I posted a while back, I’ve been thinking of using Darkseid for the DC Legends Build-A-Legend event, if only so I’ll be playing something other than my ever-lovin’ Family of Four deck or a Torch/Punisher variant.

The optimal Ghost Rider Legend build still eludes me, and I’m missing key Grodd rares, but Darkseid… Darkseid was a legend before DCL was released, thanks to DLS having a full suite from 4 to 8 of Darkseids, two cards that made him non-unique, and a bunch of other goodies. DCL just added a little more fuel to the fire, with two more Darkseids, Desaad, and a couple of plot twists to round it out.

So Darkseid…  in discussions with my minty-fresh pal Aaron, we nattered about what could be done to make the most of the “get X bonus for each face-down resource your opponent controls” them that runs through much of the DLS Darkseid stuff, and my big hunky green-garbed blue-skinned finger-pointer came up…

Dirty Tricks: Tricky, or just Dirt?

After listening to yet another sterling episode of The Ring Has Chosen (link to the episode), the premiere VS podcast, now available in fresh pine scent, it strikes me that there’s a use for everything, whether it’s immediately evident or not.

Cliff and Squire do a fantastic job entertaining us for a couple of hours each week with their ramblings on decks (deck of the week ftw), events (and why they can’t attend), card art (and Cliff’s love for Suydam and Sayger), etc, but arguably the most anticipated part of their podcast is their set review.

Each time a new expansion comes out for VS, these two podcasting pioneers waste no time in assaulting our eardrums (in a good way, I assure you) with their opinions and impressions of the expansion. This is an invaluable resource to those of us who aren’t able to spend as much time perusing docx’s magnificent search engine, as the TRHC lads espouse pros and cons and dispense nuggets of wisdom for us to gobble up like hungry chooks.

As ever, though, the reviews are their opinions, and there’s always the chance that they’re wrong.

Listening to the review of the generica from DC Legends, they both panned Dirty Tricks and Judgement Day. Now, it’s probably just the Australian in me (we constantly root for the underdog - and by root I’m meaning cheer and support, not the native Aussie meaning of root that I mentioned last week), but it immediately made me think “Hang on, they’re not all THAT bad…”

Cliff and Squire may be largely correct, but dammit, I refuse to write off any card.