First of all, let me get this out of the way: Nextwave – WTF?
As much as I like the direction VS has been heading in recently, aiming more for the casual than the competitive player, this is a step too far IMHO. When I saw the original previews I, like many others, naturally assumed they were an April Fools’ joke and, although I got upset at UDE wasting time on it when they could have been posting better content, left it at that. Did they really have to be part of a main set rather than participation and prize cards for Hobby League? Geez, there’s no Jessica Jones card (again!) and this crap takes up 5 slots in the set!?
Rant over.
Other than that, OMFG! People have posted long and hard on teh interwebs in recent months about the power creep that has occurred over the past few VS sets, well forget about that – Marvel Universe is all about power surge! If this set had been printed two years ago then there are about a dozen cards in the set that would end up on the banned list and the only reason they probably won’t be banned in the current environment is that the entire set is turned up to 11!
For me, the highlight is the Warbound affiliation. Other than reading the 5 issue mini-series I know nothing about Planet Hulk/World War Hulk and, aside from collecting a run of the Incredible Hulk during the mid-90s, Hulk isn’t a character I have any fondness for. In terms of sheer power and playability though, this is the MUN affiliation for me. Every affiliated and team-stamped card is playable in constructed and there are several generic plot twists that slot right into a Warbound deck – I don’t think the use of the Hulk on the artwork for Trouble With Dinosaurs is a coincidence…
Crime Lords is an affiliation that looks to have massive potential as well, and my first thought was to team them up with Marvel Knights or Injustice Gang. My second thought was just pick the best hidden characters in each slot from all three affiliations, fill out the deck with the beefiest blue attack pumps in the environment and don’t bother with the team ups. Watch this space.
On a more general note, other than the overall power level of the set going through the roof, I have to applaud the development team for how they’ve handled team-up cards. Underground Movement and Superhuman Registration Act add a lot of flexibility when it comes to deckbuilding in all formats (probably a little too much flexibility in Golden Age…) and are the appropriate rarity to not imbalance limited play, whereas almost all of the other team-up cards avoid the standard ‘play only if X and Y are affiliations among characters you control’ to actually do something creative with team ups.
Now that I’ve had a few hours to digest the spoiler, here are my initial top 5 cards from the expansion.
5: The Beyonder • Inhuman – 2 cards to recover anybody, whenever you like seems like a good trade-off to me, even if it is a one-time deal. And in a parallel universe somewhere, you’ll actually get to turn 10 and play him.
4: Wolverine • Agent of Shield HYDRA – A lot of words have already been expended online about how nuts Wolvie’s ability is with all of the legend support that already exists for him. Throw in some of the support cards from this set – *ahem* Cold Storage – and he’s an archetype waiting to happen.
3: Superhuman Registration Act – It teams up everybody on your side of the table, even unaffiliated, and effectively makes your hand bigger by one card. It’s threshold is one higher than your common or garden team-up but how often do you really need to team up before turn 3?
2: Grudge Match – Curve decks just got scary again. +3 to either ATK or DEF would have made this playable, +3 to both renders this card stupid.
1: Life Model Decoy • More Human Than Human – It’s very easy to make an argument that playing a LMD will almost always be the correct play when it hits the table. There’s enough search in the environment to go and hunt him down and, because it only gains the text of the opposing character after it’s entered play, it gets around any nasty come into play penalties. I’d certainly think twice about playing Fin Fang Foom if I knew my opponent was running four of these bad boys. Even Loyalty seems a small price to pay for this amount of flexibility.
There were plenty of contenders for this list but these are the 5 that I thought stood well in isolation and didn’t rely on team stamping, combos or building your deck a certain way. Once I’ve had time to digest the set properly, I’ll be back with my top 10.
