Card Preview - MUN029 Vision: Young Avenger

Hands down the most rewarding thing about doing this blog is recognition from the powers that be. Those of us working hard to promote the game, to express our affection for these small cardboard rectangles for the world to see, do it for free, we ask nothing in return other than the continuation of the game…

… but to actually be taken into UDE’s confidence, to be made a part of the thrill-ride that is Marvel Universe?

I do believe my response to TBS was “Hot Damn!”.

Of course, you didn’t come here to hear me ramble… you came to see a preview card! Well, who am I to deny you? Read on, dear Lost, read on…

Let me spoil you right away by showing you exactly what you came to see.

Finished drooling over the new shiny yet? No? I’ll give you a minute.

…

… Now? No? Too bad. Roll that tongue in, soldier, I’ve got some backstory to give you.

The Vision, or Vizh as he’s known to his drinking buddies, was originally created by Ultron as part of yet another attempt to smite the Avengers. Building on the remains of the original android Human Torch, Ultron cheaped out and, rather than creating his own new sentient A.I., he just patterned Vision’s sentience after the brainwaves of Simon Williams, a.k.a. Wonder Man.

See, though, the thing about patterning the thought processes of your instrument of vengeance think like a hero is that, well, at some point those heroic tendencies are going to come out. Sure enough, in their very first encounter, the Vision jumped ship, sided with the Avengers, and flipped the metaphoric bird at his creator. In your FACE, Ultron!

Vizh then spent many, many moons serving with the Avengers, discovering all of the joys of interacting with comic characters. Falling in love with Scarlet Witch was a pivotal moment in Vision History, though boy did that one backfire down the track.

After having a little… malfunction… and trying to ‘fix’ the world by taking over every nation’s defense systems, Vision was declared Computus-non-mentis-big-threatus and was dismantled by Goverment operatives, and had his hard drive wiped (though how exactly Goverment operatives abduct someone who can go intangible, I just dunno…)

His bits and bobs were recovered, and his grand-daddy Hank Pym put him all back together, though this time Simon Williams refused to provide a brainwave sample. Why? Because he wanted to put the moves on the Scarlet Witch himself… oh brother, my bretrayer!

The end result as a Vision more along the lines of Mr Spock. At least for a while… Vizh eventually got himself a new set of brain patterns and regained the ability to feel emotions, just in time for his ex-wife to go completely loopy, lose control of her powers, and thanks to her reality warping ways, the Avengers were disassembled with a few corpses in the wake.

One of these was the Vision, rent asunder by an out-of-control She-Hulk. Beyond repair, Vizh was placed into storage just like an old toaster, waiting for the kids to be old enough to go to college.

Lo and behold, out come the teenagers in the wake of the Disassembly.

The Young Avengers were put together by Iron Lad, who was committing the ultimate act of rebellion by putting together a team to stop… himself. Well, the adult version of himself.

See, Iron Lad grows up to be Kang.

Retrieving Vision’s remains, Iron Lad/Kang Jr uploaded the Vision’s core programming into his armour. After much biffing and “No! I’ll never grow up to be like you!” and such melodrama, Iron Lad abandoned the armour to flee his future self - at which point the Vision software regained its sentience.

And that, dear people, is how we ended up with Vision: Young Avenger.

Now, it’s pretty much impossible to talk about Vision: Young Avenger as a card in context, considering (a) we’ve seen so little of Marvel Universe so far, and (b) I’m writing this several days ahead of time - I haven’t even had the advantage of seeing all the juicy previews that have come out this week.

So let’s talk in generalisations.

4-drop, visible, single affiliation, 8 ATK, 6 DEF, Flight, Range.

Decent, but nothing to write home about.

“While Vision is team attacking with exactly one other character, team attacks can cause breakthrough.”

Huh buh wha??

One of the biggest challenges of any team-attack deck is not causing breakthrough. This goes hand in hand wasting attack; the net result is that you stun the opposing character, but without causing breakthrough you don’t dent his END as much as he’ll dent yours when he swings into you.

The original Avengers decks had an option to counter this with Playroom causing 4 pts of END burn whenever a team attack successfully stunned a defender, but there’s issues with that anyway - most notably that in the old Avengers deck you generally wanted a row full of Reservist characters, so leaving room for a location became a gamble.

Specifically regarding wasting attack, what about when you team attacked with say, a total of 12 attack into 10 defense, and then your opponent plays an Acrobatic Dodge or Against All Odds. You need one more point to cause the stun, but the only pump you have in hand is a Savage Beatdown.

Suddenly you need to decide whether getting the stun’s worth wasting a Savage Beatdown when you only need one point. Oh the quandary…

… but no such dilemma for our Young Avenger friend! Slap it down, cause four breakthrough, and laugh while doing so! If you’re playing Golden, feel free to get four points of bonus burn with the Playroom while you’re at it!

Regular Lost Contributor Spud had the following to say regarding MUN029 Vision: Young Avenger. Perhaps not susprisingly, we had some of the same ideas.

Naturally, the first thing we did when Gday showed me this was to start trying to break it. “ZOMG”, we thought to ourselves, “this is t3h br0k3s.” Well, not in those exact words. I spoke in perfect iambic pentameter, and Gday yammered something his wallaby.

Two quick mechanical things about Vision before we start:

1. He can cause breakthrough while team attacking, but your opponent can stop it as normal by reinforcing. And then you can re-enable it with a Blind Sided, etc etc etc.

2. If you use a readying effect on Vision– say, Teen Titans Go– that stops him from causing breakthrough, the no-breakthrough bit will stop his portion of the total ATK, even when attacking with characters who can still cause break.

The reason Vision is exciting is that he gets to benefit from a class of pumps that have generally been allowed to be above-average for very little cost. The design team has had the luxury of being able to make “team attacking into a character” pumps as big as they want, for the most part, because there was never any chance of these causing more than stun damage. With Vision, you can take advantage of them by using them in a way for which they were never intended– using these “plenty enough to stun a character” pumps to cause breakthrough.

Unfortunately, when we ran through the various possibilities for getting a huge team attack going, we were a little disappointed that almost all of the huge bonuses are Golden-only, or require more than two attackers. For example:

• Catherine Cobert from the JLI gives you an easy board-wide pump– +1 for every location in your row, for each attacker. Send your 3 (4ATK) and Vision (8ATK) with +4 each, and you’re looking at a healthy 20ATK into the target of your choice. JLI also gives you Justice League Task Force for more board-wide pump, and Kimiyo Hoshi <> Dr. Light (the 4-drop) on 6 for an additional +3/+3 to your attackers. With six +1 resources (Task Forces, or locations to feed Catherine), Kimiyo and Vision together can swing in at 32 combined ATK. Basically, if you take evens, Vision on 4 with your 3, and then Vision+Kimiyo on 6, will kill your opponent with two attacks– if you can dodge reinforcement.
• X-Statix presents a nice pump in Grandstanding. Put Vision and two other attackers into an opponent, stun the smallest to Grandstanding, and get a hefty +7/+7 pump on Vision for your trouble. In fact, you can play as many of those as you want– put five attackers in, stun three of them for three copies of Grandstanding, and get +21/+21.

In Silver, the options are less exciting, but still interesting:

• Legion of Super-Pets gives an easy +5ATK to a Legionnaire (so you can play these ones, AND Savage Beatdown, more or less guaranteeing you a copy or two by turn 4)
• Battle Tactics gives each X-Men attacker +3ATK for an attack, which is +6 total in a Vision attack. Not much bigger than Beatdown, but hey. A point is a point.
• There’s an interesting interaction with All Too Easy– traditionally, if you wanted to swing with a large beater and play a hefty All Too Easy for break, you’d have to accept a stun on your attacker. With Vision, you can play the pump on the person attacking alongside Vision, so you can swing into a 1-, 2-, or 3-drop and still get lots of breakthrough without exposing Vision’s butt.

Unfortunately, pumps like Battle Tactics and Infestation that get crazy-big with multiple attackers don’t work with Vision. Which is probably a good thing. Vision + 6 1-drops + Battle Tactics = 32 points of DEATH with very little work. A second copy of BT makes it 53 ATK, for a one-shot kill. Similarly, Vision + those same 6 1-drops + Infestation = 56ATK.

So, yeah. Let’s be glad he’s limited the way he is.

The other way to try to abuse Vision is with readying effects, but once again Silver shakes its Fist of Balance at us, because most silver-legal ways to ready Vision stop him from causing breakthrough. The only two I can think of off the top of my head that don’t have that stipulation are To Me My X-Men, and Samantha Parrington. Oh, and Living Legacy + Full Throttle, but that one’s a bit too combotastic to be reliable.

Ultimately, unless you decide to build your entire deck around him, Vision is going to do two things for you. First of all, he’s going to act like a non-broken Team Tactics, letting you get the size bonus of a team attack without sacrificing breakthrough. Secondly, he’s going to help offset the common problem of any team-attack deck: the lack of damage outside of plain stun damage. The old Avengers build used Playroom to dodge this, but having one of your team attacks cause breakthrough each turn is almost as good.

That’s all all I’ve got for today.

So, how will you be breaking Vision?

Just to clarify on Spud’s second “mechanical thing”; We hit up TBS for clarification on how team attacks would work should one of the team attackers be hampered by a “can’t cause breakthrough” effect, while the other was free and clear. Lo and behold, we have a “new” rule. We’ll no doubt see it in the MUN FAQ when it’s released, but for now, here’s how it works, direct from TBS’s own keyboard:

You apply each ATK individually and in order, so any modifiers depend on which ATK you apply first.

Example:

Vision has readied via Teen Titans Go! (So he can’t cause breakthrough) and he’s now attacking with a Garth <> Tempest (9/9) that can cause breakthrough. They are attacking 3 cost Thing (5/5) that doesn’t have reinforcement. So we apply the ATK individually in any order we want- there are two ways this can go.

1. You first choose to use Vision’s ATK before Garth’s. So that means that Vision uses 5 of his ATK to stun Thing, then his “extra” 3 ATK tries to breakthrough but can’t be applied because he has been “Teen Titans Go! -ed”. Now we apply Garth’s ATK, and since we have already applied enough ATK to stun Thing, his ATK is all considered breakthrough, and so causes 9 endurance loss to your opponent. End result = Opponent loses 12 endurance (9 breakthrough and 3 stun)
2. You first choose to use Garth’s ATK before Vision. So Garth now uses 5 of his 9 ATK to stun Thing, then breakthoughs for 4 endurance. Now Vision tries to breakthrough, but TTG stops him. End result = Opponent loses 7 endurance (4 breakthrough and 3 stun).

So, in most cases you should apply the “non-breakthrough” character ATK first. Each character that has a trigger or a replacement for its breakthrough, only gets it if it is applied to the breakthrough part of the assignment, not if its part of the stun part.

I thought TBS should have a green font, since it’s the colour of Victoria Bitter. Look it up.

So… even outside of what he can do with his own team affiliation, how long is it going to take before someone slaps this little bugger into an Outsiders deck? Teen Titans? Fans of swarm decks and team attacks should be quite happy indeed.