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Not Everything Floats In The [Dead C(CGs)]
Kelor
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
If you've been playing card games for a while, you've probably gotten into or had friends gotten into another card game that wasn't long for this world. Particularly during the late 90s/00s boom. Overwhelmingly so!
Just look at them all!
This place even has visual databases of quite a few of them.
A few years back I was chatting with a group of friends I'm still close with after 20 something years and most of us met through playing one of these dead card games. The DBZ one specifically.
Most of us sold our collections when we stopped playing or they were lost over the years but I've got a lot of nostalgia for it, despite the problems with staple cards being printed at rarities such you only saw one in every sixteen boxes, or as promos only available packed in with Burger King meals or in packs of cheese slices available in a single country in the southern hemisphere.
But even with all those problems, at it's core the mechanics did work and it had a back and forth that was fun and at a few points in it's existence, even balanced!
I went online and managed to build some decks to play with, roughly balanced around each other. Originally it was supposed to be six decks, one for each style in the game.
As you can see, it didn't stay at six. But we catch up regularly, once or twice a month over the years for some EDH, or boardgames, and now all these decks have joined that rotation as something we have a great deal of fun with.
So I thought I'd make this thread to talk about some of the better ones, and hear from other people about ones they've enjoyed, or excelled at one particular thing or a particular mechanic that made them stand out.
Just look at them all!
This place even has visual databases of quite a few of them.
A few years back I was chatting with a group of friends I'm still close with after 20 something years and most of us met through playing one of these dead card games. The DBZ one specifically.
Most of us sold our collections when we stopped playing or they were lost over the years but I've got a lot of nostalgia for it, despite the problems with staple cards being printed at rarities such you only saw one in every sixteen boxes, or as promos only available packed in with Burger King meals or in packs of cheese slices available in a single country in the southern hemisphere.
But even with all those problems, at it's core the mechanics did work and it had a back and forth that was fun and at a few points in it's existence, even balanced!
I went online and managed to build some decks to play with, roughly balanced around each other. Originally it was supposed to be six decks, one for each style in the game.
As you can see, it didn't stay at six. But we catch up regularly, once or twice a month over the years for some EDH, or boardgames, and now all these decks have joined that rotation as something we have a great deal of fun with.
So I thought I'd make this thread to talk about some of the better ones, and hear from other people about ones they've enjoyed, or excelled at one particular thing or a particular mechanic that made them stand out.
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For a couple of reasons! Wildly for IP rights, it featured both alternating sets from both Marvel and DC, allowing for all those fantasy battles between the Avengers and the Justice League, Spiderman's rogue gallery against Batman's and all of those mashups. It's a lot of fun smashing characters into each other.
Flavourwise its great! Cards had some original art, as well as some ripped directly from comic books. Characters played kind of like you would expect them to; Rogue can steal other character's powers, Dr Doom relies only on himself and a host of powerful cards to control the game, the Hellfire Club hide in the shadows while a single figure draws attention and Teen Titans focus on teamwork.
It always had powerful common and uncommons, and for a dead card game there is little better since you can build complete decks for sub $15-20. On release the game was mostly curve decks, but expanded later to include tempo and off-curve suppport and teams.
Ironically while heavily bankrolled to compete with Magic, with pro-tour circuits, prize pools and designed for both draft and constructed play it missed the upcoming superhero boom by a few years, with the last set being released the same year the first Iron Man movie came out.
Sets were big, with multiple teams being featured and a handful of legacy cards for older teams included to address deficiencies. This meant a lot of deep cuts, and although I never read many comics there has been a number of characters that have cropped up in Marvel over the recent years that my brain had stowed away knowledge of from Vs.
Game mechanics
It's something you keep in mind while building your decks. If you have a particularly powerful play that costs X, then it was common to want initiative on that turn and build your deck accordingly to excel on odd or even turns.
Players begin with what feels like a whopping 50 life, but that will go quick.
A draw step followed by build, combat and recovery phases.
You draw two cards a turn with untap and upkeep mechanics rolled into the start of your turn.
Now we get into some of the neat differences. In Vs. System, any card can be a land. You simply pick a card in your hand and put it face down. It's not possible to get mana screwed in Vs. System, but there are some rewards when you're putting resources down.
Once you've played your resource card, you receive resource points equal to your total amount which you now spend on character cards and equipment in your hand.
Another break from many games, spells (or plot twists in this case) are free. The cost in the upper left corner of Plot Twists and locations is simply the threshold of resources you need to be able to play a plot twist from hand or flip from your resources while locations can only be flipped from your resource row.
Once you have both recruited your characters, you make a formation out of them. This is one of the more important points for the turn, as it's going to dictate how combat goes forward.
This is a pretty typical set up you might see with an Avengers deck before combat. Your characters are arranged into two rows, front and support. Characters with the wings symbol can attack support row characters directly, characters with the target symbol can attack from the support row. In combat, the player with the initiative gets to attack as many times as they can. Afterwards, their opponent does the same. As I mentioned above, you can't attack a support row character while they're protected by someone in front unless you take the front row character out first, or have a flying character.
In Vs, breakthrough damage (trample) is one of the primary ways you'll be doing damage to your opponents. When a character is dealt damage equal to it's health, it is stunned and flips face down and it's owner takes damage to it's cost as well as whatever breakthrough damage left over.
You exhaust (tap) a character to attack, or you can tap multiple characters to team attack, allowing you to potentially trade up against your opponent's new drop and then attack down into a lower cost character for large amounts of breakthrough. Formations come back into play here, when a character would cause you to take breakthrough damage, you can exhaust a support row character adjacent to it to prevent that damage. Stems the flow but prevents them from attacking back later that turn. Once the player with the initiative is done making attacks, the other player is able to swing in with any remaining characters they have.
Once combat is over you move the to the recovery phase, where you select one of your stunned characters to keep. The rest are KO'd and sent to the discard pile and you move onto the next turn.
It's a fun game, with a lot to recommend it while being relatively simple and packed with (some now) iconic characters and quite possible to build a couple of decks on the cheap.
The object was to build a kingdom (six realms arranged in a pyramid) before anyone else. You laid down a realm, put heroes into your available pool, attached items or artifacts to them, played events on people, attacked other realms (which were defended by the heroes of other players), etc. It was a lot of fun, and if you were into D&D the thematic nature was a cool bonus.
The expansions were explicitly world based, at least at first, so you had the Ravenloft expansion, the Dragonlance one, Forgotten Realms, etc. Dark Sun, FR and Greyhawk cards were in the base set as well. It was a CCG, so the dread hand of RNG capitalism was ever-present, but you could put together a reasonable deck for not much. And of course the joy of trading with mates, rifling through their stack of swaps for something you were missing.
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(Unfortunately, my bliss in Vs. is gonna be like a dozen different decks cause I’ll want to screw with several different factions)
Were cards costed? I can see a symbol but it looks more like it is faction related than anything else.
https://www.categoryonegames.com/ and https://shop.cardgamegeek.com/ were the two I found that had a pretty reasonable range.
The Vs. community still appears quite active and is putting out custom sets regularly, so you might be able to get a better deal directly with someone.
You had to have at least X number of realms in your deck, and could only have X levels of heroes in your deck, though the mixture was up to you. So you'd have some 9 heroes in there and some mid-level stuff with good powers and low level dudes with great powers and so forth. Maybe the total level of allies was limited as well, I can't remember. Was there a limit to the number of artifacts (ultra powerful magic items)? Maybe. It's been a while.
Heroes were divided into four types (other types were added later, like the Psionics). Champions, monsters, wizards, clerics. Wizards and clerics could cast wizard and cleric spells (each one a card), monsters and champions were generally just combat focused.
It wasn't amazingly well balanced, and you could have a deck with some utter bullshit in it, like infinitely resurrecting heroes or a set of realms that were incredibly difficult to attack unless you had a bunch of flyers or swimmers. But generally people in our meta just liked to play themed decks so you'd have a game were everyone was playing decks with different D&D world themes and that was pretty cool. Drizzt attacks Barovia and you defend with Lord Soth.
And you could have a bunch of players in the same game, all fighting everyone else and watching out for the sneaky fuck who was quietly building realms while not saying much. Someone gets ahead and bam he ate a couple of Cataclysm events that insta-destroyed a realm oh shit he reversed the event so now your realm is destroyed oh shit you played a Calm on it and now the reversed event is cancelled.
Along with Netrunner it's the only card game I've ever really played a lot and it was a blast. More casual fun than Netrunner, but lots of fun.
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For me, the big gremlin hiding in my basement closet is Blood Wars, the TCG made by TSR based on the Planescape setting. The flavor of the game fucking rules, and the mechanics of it actually support two different avenues of deck building/victory. You can either build a deck and fight militarily, or you can build a deck for diplomacy. Now, this is Planescape, so diplomacy is like Angels and Demons and Devils and whatnot scheming and plotting and doin' shit to mess with the other player's economies. The expansions later got into factions and whatnot from Sigil (the big city of Planescape). Again, this shit rules. And it used so much of the art (basically all of it) from every Planescape sourcebook, and so much of it is DiTerlizzi art, and it's just....yuuuuuuuuus. Catnip for my brain.
I love the game so, so much, but I've only ever gotten to play it a handful of times as a kid before MtG blew up in my circles. I've always had it in my head to take my collection and build a bunch of "precons", then force a big circle of my current-day friends to play it with me. Ah, one can dream.
A game I never played but has stuck with me over the years has been 7th Sea. It was something a lot of regulars of the store I first started playing Magic at were into that were older and could afford to play different games. It's a game about dueling pirate ships and even though its been twenty plus years I still remembered it having just incredible flavour.
I didn't really follow what was going mechanically, but I recall games of players trying to cut each other off from finding treasure, boarding enemy ships, throwing grappling hooks over the side so they couldn't escape, volleys of cannon fire in response, it painted a very vivid picture and had some gorgeous art on the cards, particularly the ship and captain cards.
Recently I looked into it and refreshed myself. The developers had a story running from set to set, and the various factions would have new ships and captains introduced as the story moved along. Recurring characters would receive more expensive experienced versions of themselves, with greater stats and abilities. Some even make the jump from crew to first mate or captain.
Every game is played with a set of five sea cards to represent the world, with players sailing their ship between them as they dig up buried treasure, recruit more crew for their ship or press the attack on their enemies.
On those seas you'll find almost a dozen factions;
The treasure seeking Brotherhood of the Coast. Making their homes throughout the various islands, the Brotherhood excel at questing for treasure to upgrade their crews and . Their leadership changes often, with Reis hunting them across the seas in search of stolen treasure.
The Explorers Society, who seek to plumb the depths of ruins of Thea for superior Syrneth technology. Another strong adventuring faction that can quest for whatever relics it needs to win a fight. Their captain eventually sacrifices a crew member in a ritual to obtain a relic and his crew mutinies, killing him.
The Empire of Montaigne is at war with the Castillians, on the verge of victory when the dashing exploits of a Castillian captain at sea force them to put their plans on hold or risk losing everything. Montaigne have such wealth they can simply hire the best and strongest crew to focus on whatever strategy they prefer, as well as recruiting independent weaker allied ships to aid them. They are comparitively weak at adventuring.
The Corsairs are initially slavers out of the Crescent Empire led by the mysterious Kheired-Din. Din has made some sort of pact drawing power from a mysterious source that sent the only crewman to go with him to obtain it mad. They use captives to row the ship, in a race against the Explorer's Society to uncover a series of switches leading to dormant Syrneth power, but later in the story the captives escape on their own ship, captained by one of their own. They are excellent boarders, and at absorbing damage.
Gosses' Gentlemen are a wealthy group of retired pirates living lives of luxury on their own hidden island. The call of adventure lures them out of retirement, and their oppulently fitted ship and experienced crew allows them to shine in any field they wish. The death of Gosses' son by the Black Freighter draws them into a series of deadly clashes.
The Black Freighter sails the seas of Thea, guided by the undead hands of it's captain and crew. Black Freighter crew are either cheap disposable bodies that return in various ways to the ship shortly after, or those long dead with experience far beyond mortal sailors. They can either be used for boarding or cannoning as well as summoning giant sea monsters from the depths to attack other boats.
The Vesten Raiders are from the Vestenmannavnjarfollow peoples of the north, following strong traditions that forgo cannons for boarding and are strong adventurers. They use weather magic to summon sheets of rain, hail, frost and lightning to soften up ships before spreading sails to board their opponents. Betrayal rocks this group several times, turning their devastating power inwards.
And what would a game about pirates be without daring feats and buried treasure?!
Adventure cards give you ways to increase your crew's attributes. Cannons are the amount of damage they do when tacking (tapping) to fire cannons. Sails are what you need to use to push your boat around, each ship has a number in the upper right showing how much sailing is needed to move it from one sea to the next. Skull and Bones is their adventuring, needed to complete the adventure cards we're talking about right now! Crown is how much influence the card has, needed for recruiting more crew for your ship. And finally the swords, representing swashbuckling. Crew both deal damage equal to this value and tack to absorb that much.
Adventure cards must be placed however many seas away as they describe. If you manage to play them to their preferred sea then they will be easier to complete. This also forces you to move between seas and potentially blocking off opponents from chasing theirs.
Beyond just normal loot and plunder are truly unique treasure, requiring even mightier acts to complete.
And while we're talking about flavour, it's absolutely oozing from every card. Pirates on the high seas gives a ton of design space. Took a bad hit? That's okay, your crewman now has a peg leg.
Cutting off your opponent's sails, guiding them to reefs when they attempt board you or lobbing out some grappling hooks? All fair play!
And what sort of pirate ship doesn't have it's share of pets, femme fatales and galleys?
But of course, to have all these things, you're going to need a trusty first mate and hardy crew to see you through things. First mates generally have stats almost as high as captains, while crew can range quite a bit depending on their cost.
Crew, attachments and action cards all have varying costs which are paid for by tacking the appropriate amount of cost from among your crew. At the start of the game you have influence to spend equal to the value in your captain card's value in the upper left corner. A card with a yellow and red cost means an oppponent may cancel it by paying the red cost.
And that's pretty much the game! You win the game when your opponent is forced to sink his captain to absorb damage either from card effects or combat. When a player fires a cannon, the other player takes damage then has the opportunity to tack a character to fire a cannon volley back in return or sail away. Boarding an enemy ship is harder, you have to keep tacking crew to move your ship up to theirs, and they can simply do the same to keep their distance, however once boarded it is far harder to end.
You might have noticed all the cards that go into your deck have boxed letters on the lower left of the card. Once a boarding attack starts though it is far harder to end. The attacking player plays a card from hand and chooses a crewmember to attack. You play a card from hand, and to reverse the attack you must play a card that matches one of the two letters in the smaller boxes of their card.
The other victory condition is achieved by establishing control of the seas with Control cards at each sea, all of which cost 10-15 of each of the attributes in the game. This requires a lot of adventuring to do and your opponent can attempt to interfere afterwards by destroying them.
A tremendously flavourful game, and the community appears to have reestablished just prior to Covid and is relatively active online along with tournaments at Gencon each year. They've also put together a really fantastic entry guide to playing, which covers game mechanics, a bit of lore and full decklists for every faction that only require common and uncommon cards to build which is a really fantastic idea.