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Pojo's VS System Card of the Day
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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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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