Vs. System 2PCG Preview: Building Decks

Hi everyone, and welcome to our fifth and final preview article! Today we’re going to talk about building your own decks.

Deck the Halls

First let’s get the technical rules out of the way.

A Vs. System 2PCG deck must be exactly 60 cards (Supporting Characters, Plot Twists, and Locations) and must be separately accompanied by one Main Character (both its Level 1 and Level 2 versions), in addition to the deck itself. The Main Character does not go into the deck; the Level 1 version starts the game in play and the Level 2 version is put off to the side to start. So technically, you’ll have 62 cards in front of you when you sit down to play: your 60 card deck, plus one Level 1 Main Character and one Level 2 Main Character.

You can’t have more than four copies of the same card in your deck (this includes Basic Locations).

That’s it. Your deck can be all Characters from one team, or you can mix in Characters from a second, third, or even all four teams. You can run lots of Locations and Characters with Super Powers, or go “Location light” and use the extra space for more Plot Twists and Supporting Characters.

To ease you into the game, the Rule Book includes one simple deck list for each team. You’ll be able to build all four of these decks at the same time with the cards in the box. You can use any Main Character with its team’s list, although some Main Characters are more powerful with a more focused deck build.

We also wanted to give you lots of hooks to build your own deck. For example, you can:

Focus on a single team.

Choose a Main Character first, and then include cards to help it level up quickly and make the best use of its Super Powers.

Find a synergy between two or more cards and build around them.

Marvel Team Up

One of the biggest decisions to make when building your own deck is whether to mix Characters from different teams. There are three main reasons you might want to focus on a single team:

All of your Characters will be able to Team Attack together. It will be easier to play your Team-Affiliated Plot Twists (since you must have a face-up Character of that team in play). Some cards specifically reference teams (such as each team’s Special Location).

Here’s a Main Character that wants you to play as many Avengers as possible, since his Super Powers focus on Team Attacks:

On the other hand there are great reasons to mix in other teams’ cards. Perhaps you’ve built a Thanos ramp deck that needs Nick Fury or Mantis to accelerate your resource production and Ant-Man to buy time. Maybe you’ll run Gambit in your Rocket deck to help empty your hand faster. Perhaps Mandarin is the grease your Storm deck needs to level up. Or maybe you’re building an Avengers deck, but there are some awesome Guardians Plot Twists you want to run so you need to splash several Guardians Characters to be able to use them.

Speaking of which, there are a few cards in the set which facilitate Team Ups:

‘Nuff Said

We hope you’ve enjoyed our Vs. System 2PCG previews and we can’t wait to see what crazy decks you build. Excelsior!