And For My Next Trick...
by Scott Gerhardt

I can't lie.  I am far more excited about this card than I was last week's.  Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely thrilled that UDE would give me any number of cards to review, regardless of how good a review I can write over them.  This one, though, I think I can do a bit more in detail that last week, or at least I hope.  How about we give it a shot.

I'm gonna start by issuing the standard apology.  Growing up, I was not a big comic book guy.  Yeah, I read a few and have a decent ability for knowledge retention, so I know about most of the majors.  Most.  On top of that, I was more of a Marvel guy than D.C.  No slam on D.C. at all - it was just what I read.  So, I look at this card and say, "I think I know this guy" when in reality, I kinda don't. 

He's on Team New Gods.  Now I'm sure there are a bunch of you out there that have to be excited about the New Gods coming into the mix.  Me personally, I have no idea who they are, so I'm not all that excited.  At any rate, we have New Gods, and this is one of their rare guys.  Yes, that's right - Scott gets a rare. :)

Now if you visit Pojo's bulletin boards, then you may already know what card this is.  That's because I spoiled the name last week.  No abilities, just the name. :)  If you don't visit the boards, then first of all you should, but second of all, you're getting the name of this card for the first time. 

Without me rambling much longer I give you, Scott Free:

So what do we have here?  What exactly is this little pile of ridiculiousness?  Well, for one, it's a solid 8/9 for 5.  It will be able to stand up to most of the things in the same cost category as him.   So the first thing I thought of was, "Well, it's a good reason to let them have the initiative."  That seems to be true.  Playing this on turn 5 virtually guarentees you a turn on defense you'll be able to stand up to.  Team attacking doesn't seem to work real well here.  If they try to gang up on it, you simply remove the counter and bam - attack not so good.  Alternately, if they throw the big guy at him, he just shrugs him aside.  Yeah, once he uses the ability he can't counterswing, but it's a small price to pay for holding off the attack for the turn.  There are many times I wish I could just stay even on an opponent's initiative any turn after 4.  Scott Free makes that quite possible.

Writing this, I just realized that some of you may not know what Cosmic is yet.  A quick definition.  A cosmic counter comes into play on a character with cosmic.  When the character becomes stunned, it loses it's cosmic counter.  If the counter is not there, any abilities after Cosmic are turned off.

So yeah, he's got that silly loyalty thing.  This of course is a problem, because he naturally has to go in a New Gods heavy deck.  For that reason, I couldn't give you a decklist even if I wanted to since we don't know all the cards yet, and certainly not enough to make a deck.  So, for the purposes of this article, we have to assume New Gods are at least somewhat good and viable.  If they're not, then Scott is going to end up a lonely existence in the crap rare box.

He evades.  That is quite nice, especially late in the game.  We got evasion introduced with Spider-Man, and while a not frequently used mechanic in tournament play, the ability to make him disappear and come back when he's most useful and less of a liability is good.  While it might be very useful on defense turn 5, it could prove quite the liability on turn 7.  Taking 5 to self-stun and let your fatties do battle seems quite sensible if you're looking at large amounts of breakthrough.

This is another card that might work extremely well in the slower, Doom-style control decks.  Being able to hold off decks like this can prove incredibly useful in getting to a late game situation of playing some more monster cards like Onslaught, Apocalypse, Gamma Bomb, or even God forbid, Dark Phoenix.  Just because he's loyal to the Gods doesn't mean he doesn't play well with others.

This card makes me very excited to see some of the new cards that are going to be coming out.  From what I have seen of the set (yeah, as a media guy, I get to see a little more that you guys do), I can tell you it looks awesome.  Some really cool new cards that are going to have a real impact on the game.  I'm looking forward to seeing the So Cal 10k event to see which really is more powerful:  Marvel or D.C.  I would have thought Marvel before, but after some of the things I have seen, you should definitely NOT count out the power of D.C. 

Remember boys and girls, the release event for this is this weekend.  Go find your local T.O. and support them.  They're they guys who bust their butts to make sure you get to see the cards early and put in countless hours to make tournaments run smoothly.  Upper Deck has a list of tournaments this weekend.  Go find one and play!

For all your Vs. System needs, including soon to be presales of Superman, be sure to check out www.ShuffleAndCut.com.  We just slashed all sorts of prices, so a number of prices are at just stupid low levels. 

Until next time, keep playing!