VS System Dies

Well, it's the beginning of the end for VS System, that wacky card game from the minds of Magic players.

They're now in 4th place in the TCG world. Expect that to fall pretty quickly.

Beginnings

Let me tell you my story of VS:

When VS System first came out, I thought it looked really cool. I was enamored with Magic all over again, but the awfulness of the Affinity/Tooth and Nail metagame was killing me. I was actively trying to find something new, and here it was.

I learned the game quickly in a card shop, bought a few cards, tried to find more online. Learned a few things rather quickly:

- The game was in its infancy. Not many fansites back then, barely a blip of content anywhere but UDE official site.

- The game, being so new, was broken. Don't worry, this isn't a knock. They're all broken at first, as they've not been playtested by millions, but rather dozens of developers. This meant that the sky was the limit in terms of doing well competitively.

- But that wasn't quite true at the time. With at least one big tournament already taken place, Savage Beatdown, a card that to this day still commands $20-$25 a piece, was found to be broken. Pretty easy to see, as it was a 4x-of in each deck that came to a tournament.

- Funnier still, and something to learn as a game designer, Savage Beatdown was not, in fact, broken at all. Rather, it was broken in conjunction with Overload, a card that was finally banned a few years into its inception. Sometimes the overbearing cards like Beatdown really overshadow the real culprit, Overload, which took years to find.

Anyway, I tried to get my friends into it, but they'd have none of it.

"They're giving away a ton of money guys," I told them, and they were. But to get started playing competitively in a TCG is literally a $1,000 investment. At least. Yeah, it's not that much for the deck you'll eventually play, but not for the dozens of good uncommons/rares you acquire in the process. Then, of course, there's the travel. But I won't harp on specifics.

The point is, the game was young, dumb, and full of fun. So what happened? How can we learn from this game's death?

Scared Developers Never Attract Gamers

After the release of the first two sets (Marvel Origins and DC Origins, respectively), the developers saw how players knocked kinks in the armor of the game design. This is to be expected, as I mentioned, but their backlash was to drastically lower the power curve on the follow-up sets.

The Spider-Man set (on the Marvel side) and Superman set (on the DC) side sucked. Hard. And I don't mean like "There were some underpowered cards" I mean like "You followed up those first two great expansions with this crap?"

So after buying a few Superman boosters and seeing the dreck of it, I threw my VS cards away. VS has to do better than this.

And they did. They followed up those horrible sets with Marvel Knights and Green Lantern, two expansions that had powerful cards and fun times. I played in both prereleases for these events and thought they were both fun.

Fun enough to play competitively? Hell no! The market had already exploded and the big decks were found thanks to some high profile tournaments. As expected, popular Magic players were doing well and cashing in as a result.

At that point, you could focus on Magic or VS, but not both. Back when I first found the game, had I focused quickly enough and intensely enough, I would've taken the time to travel to the large tournaments. Now it was no longer worth it to me.

Their following sets weren't horrible by any means, and I thought Avengers was pretty damn cool. But a few other things sunk this game, let's take a look:

Banhammers are Dangerous

You want to laugh your ass off? Take these articles by Dave Humphreys:

Banned List Update (11/2/06)

Getting What You Paid For (1/23/07)

Both of these articles ban cards. But what kind of cards? And why do all of these cards look similar?

Every single card banned (except one) in the past six months has been a 1 cost character (or a 1-drop, as they say). Every single one is playable by means other than traditional build points.

This is, at the very least, sad. At the worst it's neglectful. But I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt, having had a HUGE ban-worthy card slip through during the design and development of my Star Chamber expansion Descent that later required errata.

The point is, there was obviously a problem with these guys before it got to these dire straits (LONG before) and why didn't they catch it earlier?

I don't know what else to say here. Either you catch the problems like overpowered 1-drops in development or you don't. I mean, my God, how long did it take UDE to ban Dr. Light, a card that was obviously a problem for months before they finally did so.

Do note that Magic players pay attention to other games, particularly when they ban things. Banning multiple cards, particularly those with exact traits, is indicative of a few things:

- Know your power level. That many powerful 1 drops, with every single one alternately playable by doing other actions, is just negligence to the power level of cards in your game. There's the idea of, like Magic, keeping broken cards in for the sake of a broken environment (called Vintage there and Golden Age in VS System), but damn.

- Not acting soon enough. Hell, until fans squabbled, they were going to let six soon-to-be-banned cards playable at a huge money tournament.

Confidence Lost

The bannings, the underpowered sets, the lackluster reponse to the game from Magic pros, the failed StarCityVS.com...it's sad, but that ailing confidence that arose from all of these events just makes me (and I'm guessing, others) not want to play.

Not Newbie Friendly

I don't care how many times I have to say this, or how many VS junkies roll their eyes in defiance, but the lack of reminder text helped kill this game.

Let me say that again: The lack of Reminder Text helped kill this game.

You can print it, quote me on it, slap it on a bumper sticker. The lack of Reminder Text was a masterstroke in stupidity.

Why stupid? Because it was so easy to do, yet they didn't do it. They did try, as the years went on, to throw in some Reminder Text, but largely they ignored it. Instead, they left it to Comprehensive Rulebooks and Googling.

Guess what UDE, you screwed that up. And badly. And I begged, and pleaded, and posted on popular VS messageboards, and no one would listen.

Whenever I tried to teach the game, there was such keyword soup (Boost, Evasion, Flight, Range, Reservist, Willpower, etc) that new players became lost. They couldn't understand what all of the powers did, so they would ask endless repeating questions that Reminder Text would fix.

But UDE complained that Reminder Text filled too much of the frame. To which I say: Tough. Fix it. Make it work. Trim some rules text.

The other side will say it's a small thing. Stupid. Cosmetic at best.

And it's these same people who are going to mourn this game because it has no new players.

Little Originality

Now I'll happily admit that the World of Warcraft TCG is very guilty of this same thing, as it meshed two winning formulas--VS' lack of "Lands" and Magic's versatility--but VS blatantly copied a whole host of Magic cards, and had little to zero of their own impressive rares.

Platinum Angel reads "You can't lose the game and your opponent's can't win the game."

VS System in their next set immediately put out Mephisto which said "You cannot lose the game."

Which they immediately had to errata to say "You cannot lose the game and your opponent's cannot win the game."

Yeah, real nice one there. If you're going to copy it, at least copy all of it.

Another problem relating to this was that they would design really amazing 8 and 9 drop characters. The only problem with that is you'd never actually make it to an 8th turn in any competitive environment (or, if you did, it was what your whole deck's goal was). So a lot of these awesome looking guys just wouldn't and couldn't see play.

Meh.

Errata City, USA

VS System has to be the king of errata. Now I know Magic has a virtual shit ton of errata, but that's quite different: The days of power level errata is gone. Now it's back to making everything work the way it supposed to.

And worse, VS developers would many times hide themselves behind the idea that what they were doing was restoring the card "to its intent" when they were subtly fixing cards.

Take a look at this page. Scroll down and note all of the massive errata changes this game has made.

Now, imagine yourself at a kitchen table. You play a card the way it says...then you're stopped by some guy bitching about it being errata'd. Now this is a kitchen table, but those are the official comprehensive rules.

Who wins? Worse, why is this such a huge part of the game? It's a little ridiculous and another reason I had a hard time taking the game seriously.

A Goodbye

It was nice knowing you, VS System. You've got a few more sets to come out, a few more promised tournaments where you give away hundreds of thousands of dollars that the game didn't make, but look on the bright side: You've still got Yu-Gi-Oh and you've still got World of Warcraft.

Let VS die peacefully after the Marvel Legends and DC Legends sets. It will do all of us some good, and spare this cool little game a lot of dignity.

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me
but you won't let those robots eat me