Note: This post is about the VS System Trading Card Game. More information can be found at VSSystem.com, and a wonderful supportive community for the game can be found at VSRealms.com.
The intense demand for Marvel Legends and DC Legends has created a bit of an issue for a lot of players that happen to be strapped for cash. Some of the more popular Rares, your Batmans and Black Mantas for example, are extremely hard to come by. In all honesty, unless you have them they’re going to be incredibly hard to get a hold of, unless you can manage to find a case or two of unopened product.
There is hope, however. I’m here to help you make the most of your non-Manta-level Rares. They may not be tournament level now, but that’s just because we haven’t broken them yet.
For the first installment in this series, I’m going to start with Sunburst. In case you, like the apparent majority of players, didn’t realize this card existed, I’ll lay it out for you here;
(Big shout out to DocX and his search engine. If you don’t have this thing bookmarked yet, you’re hurting yourself when it comes to deckbuilding.)
| Sunburst Plot Twist Cost: 2 To play, exhaust an Injustice Gang character you control. Ongoing: At the start of the recovery phase, each player returns a stunned character he controls to its owner’s hand. |
So, what have we learned? Well, we’re dealing with an Ongoing Plot Twist that’s team-stamped to the Injustice Gang and which has the reciprocal effect of potentially removing one character from each player’s board each turn while simultaneously putting cards in hands all around the table. What does all this mean? Let’s break it down.
Ongoing
The best place to start is probably the fact that it’s an Ongoing Plot Twist. This has a couple of important implications. First, it means that it’s going to take up space in your Resource Row.
Sometimes, this is a downside, like when you’re trying to keep your row tidy for specific effects (like Heroes in Reserve or the various Gotham Knights cards that trigger based multiple same-cost resources) or if you want to get multiple versions online quickly (since they can’t come from the hand).
In other cases, it’s a boon. The Revenge Squad, for example, loves this card in the right team-up deck.
Ongoings are also a lot harder to deal with via negation than are Non-Ongoing Plot Twists, with cards like Pathetic Attempt in the meta to stop most forms of blue-cardboard KO tech.
Lastly, the Ongoing portion of the card means that if you get it out early, it’s going to be going off repeatedly. That kind of staying power is something you just don’t get out of Finishing Move.
Reciprocal Effect
What next? Well, how about the fact that it’s a reciprocal effect, meaning that it goes after both you and your opponent. In general, it’s hard to sell a reciprocal effect to TCG players.
One reason for this is that we tend to think in terms of “to.” We do things “to” others, like damage, forcing discard, KO’ing characters, etc. The idea of playing something that can potentially effect us in the same manner is a little scary, though often worth it.
Another reason reciprocal effects tend not to see play is that they give your opponent something for nothing. Whether it’s shared life gain, card draw or KO tech, it’s somewhat disconcerting to think that they might profit off of something you effectively paid (via raw deckspace, if nothing else) to do.
When done well, though, these types of effects can be gamebreaking. Sunburst is a good example of this, since it’s custom-made to go into an Injustice Gang control deck.
Injustice Gang Stamped
The last thing I’m going to look at right now is the team-stamp. Sunburst requires the exhaust of an Injustice Gang character to play, so in that way at least it’s comparable to a team-stamped Death Trap or Finishing Move; an exhaust to remove a character from the board. That’s really nothing special on it’s own, but when taken with the rest of the tricks available to IG, it’s pretty significant.
One of the first things that jumps out at you when you look at Injustice Gang cards is that they like your opponents to have cards in their hand. KO effects, burn, ATK and DEF pumps, control elements, IG has all sorts of crazy effects that work best when the guy across from you is holding half his deck in his hand. Sunburst helps feed that theme, and does it in one of the most aggravating ways possible, by taking characters off of the board. Before long, a curve player is going to see their hand fill up with character cards that they just can’t get rid of, and all your card-counting effects are going to get stronger and stronger as the game goes on.
Another, somewhat tangential thing that the IG team-stamp has going for it is the huge numbers of low drop concealed characters that you can field in an Injustice Gang deck to pay the exhaust for Sunburst; 3 1 drops (Catwoman, Shade and The Penguin) and 3 2 drops (Barracuda, Superwoman and Johnny Quick). This means they’re always going to have extra bodies around to exhaust to it, so it’s never a dead card. Unless of course you fail to stun any opposing characters, but that’s something we’re going to deal with next time.
And speaking of “next time,” that sounds like a great place to segue out. In our next installment, I’ll present some decklists that I feel do a very good job of making the most out of Sunburst, at least one of which will include no other rares.
Until next time, some indeterminate Bat Time, same Bat Channel.
