From: Anthony [mailto:dNIKNAM619@netscape.net]
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2004 11:47 AM
To: marvelstaff@pojo.com
Subject: Where are the X-Men?-#7

Right now, the metagame is made up of Brotherhood, Fantastic Four, Doom, and some Wild Vomit builds. But why aren't the X-Men up there in the PCQ's? 

    All of the teams in VS. System have a theme.  The Brotherhood have a rush strategy with "The New Brotherhood" to do as much damage in the early game as possible.  They also have "Lost City", where they concentrate on power-ups and then use "Avalon Space Station" to retrieve the cards discarded.

      Fantastic Four concentrate on equipments using multiple "Fantasticars" at one time to beef up their characters. They also have big characters such as Thing where he is above average in attack in all three versions, and plot twists like "It's Clobberin' Time!", resembling a beatdown deck.  There are also combo decks using multiple "Cosmic Radiation" and "Team Tactics" to deal massive amounts of damage.

    Doom concentrates on stalling and stalling.  Dr. Doom shuts down your opponents plot twists.  "Mystical Paralysis" can stop an attack dead in its tracks.  Most Doom players include Apocalypse, Onslaught, or maybe even Dark Phoenix because Doom decks can last up to turn ten.  They also use Sub-Mariner with "The Power Cosmic" when they don't have initiative to catch people off-guard and punish their poor formations.  People also use infinite attack with "Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria" ad "Press the Attack", retrieving the plot twist every time he attacks and using it over and over again.  I prefer to use infinite "Gamma Bombs".  This uses "Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria", "Gamma Bomb", and "Reconstruction Program". 

    Wild Vomit uses a huge swarm of Wild Sentinels to attack.  Most of these decks pack 18 to 25 of these things, with 10-15 Sentinel Mark IV for a huge attack.  They also use Longshot to retrieve these sentinels, always naming Wild Sentinel and Sentinel Mark VI.

    Now the X-Men.  There strategy is to recover more characters than your opponent using cards like "The Children of the Atom", "Muir Island", and Moira MacTaggert.  But this is pointless when most of your characters are lacking in attack.  The X-Men are also known for a great early game.  They have guys like "Wolverine: Logan" but that is the only thing I see astounding about there early game.  Past turn 3, and the X-Men are toast.  Recovering more characters is useless as you are only bringing them back just for them to get stunned again.  All the cards from the X-Men seem to not focus on one strategy.  Together as a team, you have hand-disruption, beatdown, team attacking, stalling, life gaining, equipment, recovering, etc.  Individually, the characters are just bad with an exception of a few. 

    The new booster coming out "Webs of Spider-Man" I think it's called, will feature Spider-friends, Sinister Syndicate, and cards to help out existing teams from Marvel Origins.  Just hope they make X-Men a Pro Circuit worthy team.

-#7

Any comments..? E-mail me at dNIKNAM619@netscape.net