TOP 10: The most useless VS cards ever printed

VS System has had a very storied history, and since its inception players have clamored to know what cards are the ones to look for. Well not today. Today I give you the 10 WORST cards ever printed for VS System.

Now to try to make this list a bit more concrete, I used a rating system based around scores in several categories. Each of 9 categories could score as low as -5 or as high as +5 depending on relevance. while certain static components were counted in single point increments. (flight and range are each worth 1 point, for example)
Even keywords were rated, some going as low as -2 (Dual Loyalty) and others as high as +2 (Evasion). Remember, every card is playable, guys. But this list certainly will point out some of the suckiest ones to see ink.

For reference, using my chart, my hypothetical WORST POSSIBLE card ever printed (that technically has a function) would score in at a -50 and would look something like this, and of course... it's of Robin:

I left Marvel as the logo because, who cares about Dick.

 See, from the difficulty to play (exactly 10 endurance on a dual loyal character? Only having cosmic if its an insanity build?) the Menial statline for its drop, use-ability in draft, the associated teams and it's ideal support options. (Escrima sticks in play?) it pretty much scores -5's across the board, has all the worst keywords available and no flight or range. I give you king hypothetical shit-piece.

Hopefully that gives you a bit of insight into my methods. Keep in mind a card with a score of "0" would be considered perfectly mediocre as well. (see: not necessarily BAD) And several "bad" cards wound up on that list. (often due to reasonably decent draft scoring). While the great cards were consistently scoring at +20 and up.

But before the main course, the Honorable Mentions:

Escrima Sticks

Easily weighing in as the worst 1 cost equipment in the game, It only missed the top ten cut due to its ACTUAL play-ability in draft.

J. Jonah Jameson

 VS was originally a best-of-three format. If you were skilled enough to end the game with JJJ still face-up, your odds skyrocketed. When the best-of-3 was eliminated outside of finals, his utility went to virtually 0. However, as a 1/1 unaffiliated with essentially no text, he isn't the worst.

Now let's countdown the 10 that made the cut, My list, of the worst cards in VS.

#10 

52

 Scoring in at -13 points The hopeful in you will argue its utility when it comes to negating equipment recruits. well argue on. At threshold 5 it is never going to do anything meaningful for you aside from a gem recruit, or perhaps a fate helm. I truly feel this card's threshold was misprinted on release and never corrected.

#9 

Happiness Home

 Barely squeaking below 52, Happiness Home went to print a bit too thematic, as nobody in their right mind wanted to KO that much of their stuff for a sub-theme Darkseid's Elite has faltered in supporting from the start.

#8 

Deathstroke the Terminator

 A lot of you were probably looking for him and here he is at 8, controlling two unaffiliated characters as a prerequisite to play him, murders his draft viability and is what pushed him far enough down to make the list.

#7

S.T.A.R. Labs

 Three resource points for a cosmic counter? Still one resource point on team superman? This card was actually printed AFTER we already saw Mother Box. Most of the time you want to replenish a cosmic isn't during the recruit phase anyway. #feelsbadman

#6

Dangerous Experiment

Technically useful, but horrifyingly overcosted both in threshold and penalty. Dangerous experiment did find an extremely niche home in a few blind justice jank builds, but it remains to be pretty bad at it's job, granting sometimes horrifying endurance spike damage.

#5

Mekanix

I personally feel this card is too low on the list. I HATE this card. However, technically it has a use, and early thresholds allow it early game playability, bad as it may be. A perfect -5 score in draft performance is rare, but Mekanix scored it like a champ.

#4

Doom Triumphant

 A perfect example of a win-more card. Utterly useless if you are behind, and argueably just as pointless while ahead, Doom triumphant's payoff is seldom worth it, as often, you'll do more damage simply swinging instead of exhausting.

#3

Light Brigade

Haha! You guys forgot about the constructs didn't you? While some were technically useful, it was the fact you still took stun damage that turned most players away from these temporary-at best options. What a horrible topdeck! Who decided they had to be unaffiliated anyway? HORRIBLE.

#2

Decimation

KO everything you have, and then you can KO one thing your opponent controls! This only could be workable in any stretch if you did it before your build. NOPE. Combat phase only.

Only Cable/exiles RFP shenanigans or similar can sort-of survive its use, and even then, why aren't you playing... ANYTHING else? It drafts just as badly as in constructed. Gamma bomb was still legal in modern when this existed... so yeah... color me confused.

#1

Dr. Tzin-Tzin

At -26 points, many of you saw this coming a mile away. Even a standard 4 drop would only need +1 ATK to just swing over him using this effect. Of course, pre-readied to take out your 3 drop next. No team theme helps him take any advantage of it, and he will often stun from standard 3 drops  anyway. He remains to be a shining example of bad cards. Hail to the king!

And there we have it. Think I missed one? Curious what my rating system was? Let me know!

Until next time!

Deck Doctor 6: IMMORTALITY

This week it was Robert Snyder that piqued my interest with his take on an "Infinite Brick" based around the interaction of Washout, X-Men Assemble and having him teamed up to X-Men.

Even though he gave me a list to tweak, (and I'm sure it is pretty good) Instead of tweaking or troubleshooting his build. I'm going to run away with it instead, lets go for full-on combat IMMORTALITY.

How, you ask?

Literally the original king pimp.

So what we have here is a potential set-up for an infinitely recovering Washout next to an unstunnable kingpin. All we need is a face-up X-Men Assemble and a way for Washout to become an X-Man adjacent to the King. Off the top of my head, we could use Forced Conscription and enable it with a full suite of lowbie X-Men characters. Beyond that, team affiliation just doesn't matter in this build. Instead we need to make Kingpin huge. And considering our entire game-plan is to milk immortality...

...YUP.

We need to take the pressure off of hitting X-Men Assemble. Survival will fit Amazingly while bumping up to 8 counter-generating resources helping us inflate those that stick around. And in fact, will take precedence in this build, since the Kingpin will never benefit from Assemble anyway, and Washout only needs one to stick around indefinately. As a side, Washouts synergy with Iron Man, Mighty Avenger nears the realm of absurd if you assume an opponent can't make him shed all his counters, he will always double up at the end of the turn. (iron man can trigger more than once!)

At this point, I ran a search on all characters that are involved with recovery to flesh out the curve. The preliminary list looks like this:

The Immortal Pimp-Slamp

Locations
    1 [MHG] Soul World
    1 [MOR] Avalon Space Station
    1 [DJL] Slaughter Swamp

Characters
     4 [MVL] Shadowcat, Phase Shifter
     4 [MEV] Blink - Earth-295

    4 [DCR] Deadshot - Dead Aim
    4 [MAA] Bishop, Age of Apocalypse


    4 [MEV] Washout - John Lopez

    4 [MUN] Iron Man, Mighty Avenger

    4 [MEX] Kingpin, Overboss

    1 [EHB] Johann Kraus - Free Spirit
    4 [DCR] Scandal - Savage Spawn

    1 [DCL] Nyssa Raatko, Maiden of Death

Plot Twists
    4 [MAA] X-Men Assemble!, Age of Apocalypse {MAA}
    4 [MAA] Survival of the Fittest, Age of Apocalypse {MAA}
    4 [DCL] Straight to the Grave {DCL}
    4 [MXM] Enemy Of My Enemy {MXM}
    4 [MSM] Forced Allegiance {MSM}
    3 [MOR] Press The Attack


So the notable interactions are: SttG deadshot on 3+ to get access to deadshot through his effect. this sets up your Scandal Ongoing search to land the team-up and other ongoings the deck needs to sustain through the midgame.

At 6 our go-to is right outta the Hellboy set, Johann kraus. Not many people realize that his effect can continuously target himself, making him essentially unkillable without a KO effect applied. While, on 7, Nyssa also can remain as yet another wall of immediate recovery, at the cost of killing off those little hidden X-men characters we started with. I keep these drops as 1-ofs since the 8 pieces of search do well to ensure we'll see them

Honorable mentions that didn't quite make the cut.

Kick - yeah that MEV equip nobody played since it KO'd the equipped character on a stun? Well when you are immortal a free +4 ATK with no negative downside can be pretty damn good at turning kingpin into a monster perpetually swinging up the curve. Unfortunately, press the attack tends to get more work done. But feel free to experiment and test for yourself.

Pathetic Attempt/BPRD Signal Device - With such a glaring weakness into KO abilities, you'd expect to try to cover it more. In fav3or of keeping it tabletop level, I ultimately chose to leave it. The build can easily underdrop and dig into the KO pile to replay lost characters while still ramping up the curve with those hidden characters and kingpin. Feel free to toss a few in if you really want to cover your bad matchups. The ceiling on this build is quite high if you min/max it well.

Cable, dayspring and Deadpool, interminable terminator - with access to invulnerability and yet another auto-recovering character, there is a lot of temptation to turn this build into a Bosom Buddies variant. Unfortunately the card space is really, REALLY hard to justify. This is supposed to be a washout/kingpin build at this point, but they were worth mentioning. Cable could actually be directly swapped for Iron Man if you prefer the idea of an invulnerable washout wall.

Keep in mind.

This is a preliminary list built around a very cool premise. As a weekly article not every build is going to be min-maxxed perfectly in 7 days. But feel free to make your own adjustments and toss them my way! Also, keep those deck ideas coming! I'll See you next week!

Deck Doctor 5: The price of themes

"So my Barbara Gordon attacks your Wolverine with a flying kick for a mutual stun."

Wait... WHAT!?! Did she throw her wheelchair or something?

It can be easy to forget some of the absurdity that applies when it comes to the myriad of interactions in our love-able card games, and VS is no exception, the thought of a wheelchair-striken supporter dishing out savage beatdowns, flying kicks and megablasts can leave some funny moments if you stop and think about them. And I'm not even going to get started on Man Thing.

But this week i wanted to look at a different angle, A deck can be built for synergy, combo, utility, but many, MANY casual players have begun to crave theme builds. Obviously this can be different things for different people.

For example, myself, when it comes to my casual decks, I like sticking to team options in many of my builds even if a non-team option can prove to be superior.

Whether it is sticking to teams, companies, lore, or otherwise, thematic building has affected every one of our approaches when building a deck. Even if all we are doing is trying to stay "pure" to what a build is supposed to DO.

This weekend's deck doctor certainly falls in line with this.

John Chapman asks:
Between Mandarin and the 10 rings, why has nobody ever made a good Mandarin deck? Help! Make him actually USE the ten rings and not lose every game!
P.S. no MEV please!

It just HAS to be hot as hell there right now.

Well, in the past I have made draw-centric builds to focus on Mandarin's stun effect, But it's pretty safe to say I've never once used ten rings in any build... ever.

Lets walk through our options to start.

First off, we are going to start with 4 mandarins and obviously, 10x ten rings, now lets try the path of least resistance and take a look at Crime Lords options. Do we see anything there that can either cater to drawing cards or supporting equipment?

Well, at a glance I see:

Notable equips:
Armed Escort
Death Warrant

Notable cards for Crime Lords
Master Man  
loads of army characters and support
wolverine direct kit is present here

Team up options:
Hail Hydra for forced crime lords affiliation
the rose into made men. (although Made Men only affects characters in play)

As attractive as turning this into a Wolvie direct build might be, it also means I have conflicting drops at 3. And our go-to 3 drop MUST remain to be Mandarin, so unfortunately that's going to be a pass. armed escort could certainly be an option if we toss in some abilities that  could allow for some double equip shenanigans as well. Same goes for Death warrant, but unless Mandarin rallies into it. it can sometimes feel like a dead draw. Especially considering we will also be drawing into 10 rings fairly regularly.

let's take a look at sources we can tap to double equip instead:

Weapons Lab
Pier 4
Black Panther, Vibranium Vogue
Punisher. Guns Blazing

Interesting, both character options are Marvel Knights. The often abused pier 4 will require fan 4, and an often overlooked Weapons Lab will need BPRD. Of the potential teams both marvel Knigts and fantastic Four have some very solid equipment support. While a team-up with BPRD may force tings a bit too much.

Now lastly, lets look at our other non Fan 4 or MK equipment options before we try to make this pile coherent.

Fate Artifacts And tower
Man and Machine
Hank Pym<>Giant Man, Big Brain
Dr. fate, hector Hall (HOLY SHITBALLS) 

 

I DARE you to try not to sing "I wanna Rock" while playing him.

Alright so we may have just found our win condition with Dr. Fate, granting a hypothetical +13 ATK across your board if you can set him up and manage to live the dream. This however, assumes  getting him the core ability to have 2 equipment attached to him. (equip a fate artifact, THEN equip a 10 rings. The equipment's effect will allow you to go beyond 2! this also works when using fate's tower to transfer the equipment since its effect is always moving one at a time)

So now we sort-of have a bit of a problem where thematically we need mandarin and his 10 rings but crossing over Crime Lords, marvel knights and fantastic 4 AND shadowpack just isn't viable, and without a team-up, we are more likely to rally dr. fate straight to the bottom of the deck than we are to see him on 6 with any consistency. That leaves our universal team-ups. Superhuman Registration Act, and Underground Movement, with our consistent rallying, taking iron Man's side of Civil War will cater to setting up favorable mandarin rallies as we can mow through the deck faster. While Underground Movement will allow us to stack the hidden area with potential attackers on our kill turn. For this build, we're going to try SRA.

Next lets really push the equipment theme, so Dr. Fate's Tower and New Baxter building is in.
Black Panther allows our fate endgame turn to really push the upper limits of his effect so he is in for sure as well.

I really struggled trying to decide between Dr. Strange, secret avenger and the original equipment king, Mr, fantastic. While strange could hypothetically offer a bigger payday, the consistency of Mr Fan won the day, and strange became my alternate drop at 2 copies.

For turn 3 Mandarin is king. this also allows us to under-drop a missed mr fan or a doc strange if we miss him and not feel too badly about it.

at 4 it's all about punisher, this is the turn i will typically fate him up. If i managed to hold back on equipping anything up to now, he gets both the fartifacts AND the rings. This deck is all about taking the even initiatives and a flying untargetable auto-koing 4 drop that thinks it is a 6 or 7 drop is certainly useful.

for turn 5 the clincher was Steel's ability to fetch not just equipment in the deck, but the KO pile as well. Making him an auto-include.

Turn 6. our endgame we want dr fate entering play, then using the tower to load him up with all the Punisher's toys allowing for a pretty insane board-wide attack pump. In testing I was consistently seeing at least +8ATK across the board. I don't need to tell you how ridiculous that is.

For our off-initiative 6 or later, I splashed a single copy of Mr, fantastic, Dimensional Explorer. He single-handedly brings Mandarin online for an off-initiative stun on your defensive turn since he enters play and draws you the better part of 10 cards on a standard game anyway. Sometimes, he'll net me even more. Allowing us to live both halves ofthe Mandarin dream, getting that stun, AND getting huge from the rings.

I'll let the list do he rest of the speaking for itself. Without further delay, I humbly present to you,

Mandarin KO

Locations
    3 [DCR] Dr. Fate’s Tower
    3 [MTU] New Baxter Building

Characters
    4 [MEQ] Black Panther, Vibranium Vogue

    4 [MOR] Mr. Fantastic-Reed Richards 
    2 [MUN] Dr. Strange, Secret Avenger

    4 [MUN] Mandarin, Tem Borjigen

    4 [MVL] Punisher, Guns Blazing

    4 [DJL] John Henry Irons <> Steel, Steel-Drivin' Man

    2 [DCR] Dr. Fate - Hector Hall
    1 [MVL] Mr. Fantastic, Dimensional Explorer 

Plot Twists
    2 [MUN] Invasion Plans
    2 [MXM] Teamwork
    4 [DLS] Mobilize
    4 [MUN] Superhuman Registration Act, Team-Up

Equipment
    10 [MEQ] The Ten Rings
    3 [DCR] Helm Of Nabu - Fate Artifact
    2 [DCR] Cloak Of Nabu - Fate Artifact
    2 [DCR] Amulet Of Nabu - Fate Artifact


Are you wondering who didn't make it?

The runners-up

Ape X - a solid 1 drop that gets us on the right foot, she was cut in favor of repeatable card advantage cards like New Baxter.

Blue Beetle - another solid opener, however his discards became a higher and higher price as i was reluctant to drop equipment cards to his search. in testing i found i was only using his effect once or twice anyway.

The Captain - a fantastic combo piece, the deck was unable to actually make space for the pieces that would really push him to the next level. competing for the 4 drop slot against Punisher made it an always sub-optimal play.

Losing the Argument - with the SRA a staple in this build and access to dr. strange's multiple rallies, the interactions with Losing the argument feel pretty synergistic, unfortunately space just wasn't there as Mr. Fantastic is absolutely our favored 2 drop to hit. Too often we had Losing in hand and no Doc Strange available to maximize its use, or worse yet, we did have the doc, but missed the ideal time to play him.

All equipment search - getting the equipment isn't the hard part. the hard part is managing the discards fuelling the build. between teamwork, mobilize and helm of nabu, your hand can get very limited when it comes time to pick discard options. To help with this i filled the final two open spaces with Invasion Plans.

Jerry's Final Thoughts:

This list won't dominate a meta, and of course, for those of you looking to try it, you would do well covering some bases. For example, if your group is very active running Jester, meltdown and other pieces of equipment hate, you may want to consider dropping Invasion Plans for some Pathetic Attempts or tweaking the build a bit. As a rule though, I wouldn't try to remove more than the 2 invasion plans and an amulet and cloak. The build IS stacked pretty tight, after all. Try it out! Let me know what you all think!

And keep those deck ideas coming!