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Megaman

A Journey’s First Steps
by Sith Dragon
August 30, 2005

So now you should know what type of player you are.

If you are new to the gaming world and still don’t, its okay. You will soon discover it after a few months of playing. I was going to start with deck building this week, but after receiving an email from a reader I decided to insert one more article. In the letter this reader asked if he should buy this other guy’s collection of mostly Marvel Origins or if he should start with the newer sets, so I decided this would be a good point to talk about it as some of you are trying to get started.

If you have a favorite team I always suggest you start there. There are many powerful decks, but even a mediocre deck (called tier II decks) can do well. If you are playing a team you love then you are going to do everything you can to make it work. I’ll warn you right now, not all teams are competitive, but most are if you adjust your focus.

Aside from your favorite team I strongly suggest you local hobby store or where ever tourneys are held and see what’s being played. For newer players, there are two formats at the tournaments. Golden Age tourneys allow any card from any set to be played. This can be kind of hard to start in as most of these players have a great reservoir of cards to pull from. Not to mention these will be the toughest decks to face (teen titans, gamma bomb and sentinels). The second type is called the Modern age. These tourneys are limited to cards from the last two sets, which would be Marvel Knights/Avengers and Superman/Green Lantern. This is a bit easier tourney to start in as everybody’s card pool is about the same. This tourney allows you to focus on one set and make a pretty good deck from it.

If the local tournaments are predominately Modern, buying Origins cards are not going to do you a lot of good as you will never get to play them. Around here we generally leave it as Golden Age, so pretty much anything goes, which is pretty good for me as I favor Gotham Knights and Brotherhood.

For those that have Golden Age tourneys, you still have to decide where to start, and either way it’s going to cost you some money. Most playable collections people sell are going to be $300+ and to play something like the newly released Avengers you will need to buy at least 2 boxes to have enough cards to make a working deck. Yet even then you will be missing some rares that can run up to $20-$30 a card.
The final decision is obviously yours. One format is no better than the others, other than Modern eliminates some of the more powerful teams from the Origins sets.

A faster and less expensive way, I think, to start is to check out the starter sets. For $60 you can buy 2-3 starters and make a working deck. Holes can then be filled by getting boosters for that team from the appropriate boosters. This can get you up and running if you don’t have the $200+ for boxes or collection buying, and while you will be missing very good cards for that team, your deck should be playable enough to at least get out there and learn what the game is about and how to play. The starter decks cover a wide enough range of teams you should be able to find a team for you. Upperdeck used the starter decks to get the game launched, but I don’t think they are planning to do much with them anymore, most card games don’t once the game is established. I think the only starters we are going to see from here on are going to be movie tie-ins, yet with the movies coming out in the next year or two, we could see some more fun starters next summer.

Hopefully this will help those of you that are new figure out where to start when buying your first cards. Word of warning: Those of you who want to play modern Superman it will be dropping out of the modern circle in a couple months with the release of Justice League, so don’t waste your money on Modern Superman (Golden Superman is still fine). Questions, comments, rants, and raves can be sent to Sithdragon13@yahoo.com. I love hearing from readers.
Next week I will start on deck building itself by discussing building for the curve. Until then BATTLE ON!