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Pojo's VS System Card of the Day

  Secret Six Victorious

Card #DCR-168

Ongoing: At the start of your recruit step, if you control exactly six characters with the printed Secret Six affiliation, you win the game.


Date Reviewed: 07.11.06

Constructed Modern Age Average Rating: 3.2
Constructed Golden Age Average Rating: 2.66
Limited Average Rating: 2.24


Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale
1 being the worst. 3 ... average.
5 is the highest rating.

 
Jason
Bunch
Secret Six Victorious

This week's theme is Secret Six, another request from the increasingly active Pojo forums. Today's we'll be looking at the archetypal card for the team, Secret Six Victorious.

But first, a brief look at alternate win conditions.
Marvel Origins had Xavier's Dream, which Michael Barnes (Of the appropriately named Team Alternate Win
Condition) used to defuse a Sentinel-heavy meta and take 4th place at PC NY. DC Origins gave us Rigged Elections, which Craig Edwards piloted to a 2nd place finish at the inaugural Pro Circuit in Indianapolis.
Alternate win conditions took some time off before returning with a vengeance (note clever pun) in Infinite Crisis, giving us Captain Marvel, Champion of Magic as well as today's card, Secret Six Victorious.

Secret Six Victorious (SSV) triggers at the beginning of your recruit step, and checks to see how many characters you control with the printed Secret Six affiliation. If you have exactly six, you win the game. Easy, right? Well, the key word is "printed".
Only 8 characters have the printed affiliation; Fiddler, Deadshot, Catman, Ragdoll, Parademon, Scandal, Lex Luthor <> Mockingbird, and Cheshire. One character for every drop up to 7, with two characters at the 4 spot. Should be easy, right? The earliest you can win with SSV is turn 5, but since it triggers at the start of the recruit step, that means that you won't be able to recruit a character until after the win condition has been checked. That gives you four turns to bring out as many Secret Six guys as possible. Fiddler, Deadshot, and Parademon all have alternate ways of getting on the field, allowing you to spend your resource points in other ways. Ragdoll can auto-recover at the cost of a discard, allowing you to maintain your fragile board presence going into Turn 5 (and providing the means to bring Parademon into play), and Catman keeps your stunned characters from being KO'd by your opponent. Scandal can jump from your hand to fetch a copy of your win condition, just in case you haven't drawn it yet.

The real All-Star of the team is Lex Luthor <> Mockingbird. You can remove a Mockingbird in your hand from the game in order to put a Secret Six character from your hand into play stunned, but only during the recovery phase. If you don't have any other stunned characters, then you get to recover that character for free, and since putting the character into play happens outside of the recruit step, you can sidestep the uniqueness rule. This allows you to play multiple copies of your smaller Secret Six guys. I recommend Deadshot and Catman, since they can stay concealed and mostly safe from your opponent. There's also It's Not Over Yet, which we're saving for Wednesday. It's not an easy strategy, but with a good plan and a little luck, you can pull it off.

Some things to consider: Death Trap bounces characters back to hand, which means that Catman can't protect them. Watch the Birdie, Relentless Pursuit, and Kate Spencer can all allow your opponent access into your hidden area, allowing them to stun your smaller concealed guys. You'll want to play a lot of defensive pumps in order to avoid that happening.
With many of your early characters concealed, you'll want a little life gain to help ease the early turn pain. House of Secrets is an excellent choice, and that'll be Friday's card. If you don't get the Turn 5 win, Cheshire provides both an excellent defense, and a little bit of lifegain too. Deadshot is dual-affiliated with Secret Society, and Cheshire hangs with Villains United, so don't be afraid to use some of their support cards to help you achieve victory. A Turn 6 or 7 win is still a win, so don't feel like you have to do it by Turn 5.

In Limited, this is a risky strategy of all risky strategies. True story, I was playing in a Infinite Crisis draft, and I decided to try and draft a Secret Six Victorious deck. One problem: I never saw a copy of Secret Victorious come around the table. I had a servicable Secret Six/Villains United deck, but I could have had a much better deck going into any other archetype. The good news, is that Secret Six characters are mostly commons, and thus multiples can be had fairly easily. However, I can not in good faith recommend that you try this at home...unless you see SSV in the first 4 or 5 picks of the first pack.

In Sealed, building an SSV deck is darn near impossible. Just having six Secret Six characters will be a miracle, plus having to have a cpy of SSV, which is a rare. Just don't do it.

As long as there are alternate win conditions, there will be deckbuilders trying to use them. The key is to never fully give up on them. Yesterday's jank strategy may be one card in the next set away from a PC check and admiration from literally dozens of people.

Rating: 3.5/5
 
Unearthed Name Today’s COTD is the key card for secret six. Secret Six Victorious is a 5 threshold cost rare plot twist that gives you the victory if at the start of your recruit phase; you control EXACTLY 6 characters with PRINTED secret six affiliation. In my opinion, this is not a hard thing to do in secret six. Their recursion effect (deadshot), and their team-stamped plot twist is more than capable of maintaining your board position. The drawback of this card however, is the high cost of 5, which is very late considering that the metagame is filled with rush deck that could kill as soon as turn 4 (in golden age anyway), and the requirement of having exactly 6 characters with secret six affiliation. If you got the engine of the deck up and running, then secret six can become a fun card to play with. I’ll give this card a 2.5 out 5 in constructed because of the fun factor playing with it, and 1/5 in limited as you probably won’t have enough secret six characters to fulfill it’s condition.
 
Greg Secret Six victorious
Ongoing: At the start of your recruit step, if you control exactly six characters with the printed Secret Six affiliation, you win the game.
Now this is interesting, by just having 6 secret six characters on your field, instant win.

One problem is that it's effect initiates at the beginning of the recruit step, so if you want to set one down and win with it, you have to wait next turn to do so. Losing secret six to the KO pile is not really an issue, but keeping them out is. If you swarm with low level secret six cards, then this might come off more affective and usable, even end game this might work aswell. If you look at all the secret six cards, this feet woulden't be to hard to accomplish. I like this card.

3.99/5
 
Lupus Okay, here goes...

Secret Six Victorious: Aaah, alternate win conditions. A great way to win a game, especially when you can take your opponent by suprise with it. Unfortunately these things are usually pretty fragile. Not only do you have to fulfil the conditions of the card, but you have to stay alive long enough to do it, and protect your win condition from your opponents machinations. Luckily for constructed play, the whole of the Secret 6 team has been engineered to get you to win with this card. You don't really want to splash other teams/characters in a deck with this, as it will be hard enough to fulfil its condition as it is, the characters do have to have secret 6 as their printed affiliation, so this means you won't be playing this before turn 5. Given that turn 5 is a kill turn for many decks nowadays, at least in golden, then you will probably only have one chance to pull this off. Combined with all the ways that an opponent can either replace the twist, or spoil your win conditions, means that this card will probably be relegated to the casual decks, at least in Golden and Silver ages. Previous Alternate Win Conditions have been able to use teamed up characters, and so had access to Alfreds, Fizzle, Child Named Valeria, and similar cards to protect and enable your win condition to actually allow you to win. Modern Age should give it a chance, but it still has a bad matchup against Shadowpact. For constructed value I would say it is a 2 out of 5 for a serious tournament deck, but more like a 4 out of 5 for a casual, fun deck.

In limited, there is no way you will win games with this card. In sealed, you won't have the support for it, and in draft you would need to get it early in the first pack to even have a chance of getting enough secret 6 to be able to play it. Even then you'll lose before you get a chance to play it. Trust me, it won't work in limited.
 
xstreamzero Secret Six Victorious

Greetings, I'm xstreamzero, CCGamer. I've played a lot of collectible card games, Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, and at one time, Harry Potter (what was I
thinking?.) and I have been selected from a "grueling" process to review some cards for you in the Versus universe. I've been playing since Origins, attended a few tournaments, and made lots of decks, the basic card playing stuff. And now I get to give you all opinions on these cards. How cool is that?

This week, we're focusing on the Secret Six cards and today we have the most

notable one.

Secret Six Victorious
Plot Twist/5
Ongoing: At the start of your recruit step, if you control exactly six characters with the printed Secret Six affiliation, you win the game.

Yeah, you like that don't you? Flip this card and win on turn five?
Ridiculous. However, there hasn't been a single card in the game that has given me more headaches than this one. You actually have a better chance of getting attacked by a shark than pulling a turn five win with this card.
When you try and build a deck around this card like I have, you will realize
that this card is way too restrictive. This is because you not only have to fulfill all of your drops but then play 3 characters on turn four. And they have to have the PRINTED Secret Six affiliation, so even teaming-up is out of the question. You could try to win on turn 6 or 7, but then again, most decks win on those turns anyway, with good old-fashioned attacking.

This card still has one good use. Bluffing. The Secret Six team has many good cards based on keeping characters in play, plot-twist searching (well, ongoing plot twists), and a team-up card that doubles as a pseudo-searcher.
I might be off my rocker, but this team could be the next Marvel Knights.
But should you team up with Secret Six, pack in one SSV and you could get your opponent attacking recklessly thinking it's going to prevent you from winning with SSV. But you know better.

DC Modern: Not enough support, but not many enemies. 2/5
Silver Age: Give yourself a pat on the back if you pull it off. 1/5
Golden Age: O noes! Instant win! 1/5
Overall: 1/5

You can go ahead and try thinking that you'll be that person that will build

SSV deck that work. When you do get it to work, give me a call.

xstreamzero (no, not capitalized. Like e. e. cummings)
 
Ben Jackson Secret Six Victorious -

So Infinite Crisis brings another alternate win condition to the table.
This one requires you to control 6 characters with the printed (which should stop this being the most broken card ever) Secret Six affiliation in order to win the game.

Sounds hard doesn't it? Well that's where the rest of the team come in.
The whole Secret Six team seem to be heavily driven towards helping this card. Between free recruits such as Parademon, Mockingbird, Fiddler and Deadshot, and recovery aids such as Catman, Ragdoll, Dodge the Bullet and another card up for review this week, it should be a piece of cake to drop the 6 onto the board and take the win, in theory.
Someone famous once said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and this is no exception. You'll be losing endurance, overextending your hand with all the discards and praying for a half decent draw (even the deck's "Draw Fixer" only gives you one card out of 6, which could see you burying some much needed character cards.

However, it's easily the best way for a Secret Six deck to win (If I read the card correctly then the characters can be stunned), it's just going to take some time to work it out.

Score -

DCMA - Probably this deck's best bet. Might choke against Good Guys but without a rush heavy meta you could see it go off. 4/5

Silver - Slightly less viable, but there are a few stall tricks here which could see you snatch a victory or two. 3/5

Golden - Not a chance, High Voltage, Titans, Golden Squad and anything using Foiled all break this card in half. 2/5
 

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