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grinninfooleNone of you will understand this, or care, but I just want to take a moment to talk about something that I have spent a lot of my spare time on over the past few years, and that I really enjoy: the collectable card game about superheroes bashing the shit out of each other, OverPower. Marvel put it out in 1995, DC and Image put out sets, and then, because Marvel is a horrendous suck-factory of a company, the game basically died in 1999. It had never been marketed well, and Marvel really screwed up supporting the game and preserving play balance in the various expansion sets. OP caught my interest thanks to my friend Justin (who was in Louisville back then), and it's brought a lot of pleasure to me and a few of my friends over the years, but by 2000, I'd gotten pretty tired of it, because the game had lost most of its variety over the years, the play environment constricting until only about 30 of the 400 or so characters in the game were worth playing. I played the same deck without modification for a year, and had no interest in, or ideas for, building a new one.
All that changed about two years ago, when I got to know an amazing guy named Lee Valentine, who undertook the Herculean task of fixing OverPower. To my delight, he has succeeded. After months of beating his head against the various existing (and conflicting)rule books out there, he managed to reverse engineer the game so that it makes more sense than ever. He has added the new element of Strategy cards to the game, but (and this is a master stroke)since they are not part of one's actual deck, they completely reinvent the play environment without introducing lots of changes to the actual characters in the game. In fact, what he has done is make just about every character (as well as their unique special cards) playable and interesting, even in high-powered tournament play. People who stopped collecting OP cards back in 97 can still make top of the line decks with the right strategies. More to the point for me, there are lots of different sorts of decks out there, which pose different challenges in play, and I have a lot of ideas for decks, more than I can build and play, in fact.
Anyway, I told you all of that (if any of you had the patience to wade through it) because I wanted to burble about the near-completion of an OP-related project of mine. Lee wants to get more people playing OP, and he wants to introduce people to OP his way. I have been helping out a bit as a playtester over the past year or so, and I have been thinking about something he said that he wanted some time ago, namely starter decks to hand to new players and get them going. I have been playing Magic: the Gathering for a few years, buying up their pre-constructed decks and playing those straight out of the box, and I have been trying to do that for OP. I think I have designed four decks to fit the bill. I had a few stipulations that made it harder. First, I didn't want to repeat any characters. Second, I wanted all four decks to use the Avenger's Team Spirit strategy. Third, I wanted them all to be the minimum size (65 cards). Fourth, I wanted them to incorporate all the different kinds of cards in the game, so that by playing around with the set, one would get a sense for the whole game, and perhaps kindle an interest in playing more. So, I think I have managed to do this. Now I just need to test the last one, create the necessary proxies to keep demo copies permanently assembled without depleting the rest of my collection, and writing the strategy guides for each. I'm excited about this, and I'm really looking forward to showing them to Lee. I really hope he likes them. I'd really like to make a contribution to the effort, something beyond simply being one of the best players.
Well, that's it. Anyone interested in trying OP sometime should feel free to contact me. Thanks for reading.
All that changed about two years ago, when I got to know an amazing guy named Lee Valentine, who undertook the Herculean task of fixing OverPower. To my delight, he has succeeded. After months of beating his head against the various existing (and conflicting)rule books out there, he managed to reverse engineer the game so that it makes more sense than ever. He has added the new element of Strategy cards to the game, but (and this is a master stroke)since they are not part of one's actual deck, they completely reinvent the play environment without introducing lots of changes to the actual characters in the game. In fact, what he has done is make just about every character (as well as their unique special cards) playable and interesting, even in high-powered tournament play. People who stopped collecting OP cards back in 97 can still make top of the line decks with the right strategies. More to the point for me, there are lots of different sorts of decks out there, which pose different challenges in play, and I have a lot of ideas for decks, more than I can build and play, in fact.
Anyway, I told you all of that (if any of you had the patience to wade through it) because I wanted to burble about the near-completion of an OP-related project of mine. Lee wants to get more people playing OP, and he wants to introduce people to OP his way. I have been helping out a bit as a playtester over the past year or so, and I have been thinking about something he said that he wanted some time ago, namely starter decks to hand to new players and get them going. I have been playing Magic: the Gathering for a few years, buying up their pre-constructed decks and playing those straight out of the box, and I have been trying to do that for OP. I think I have designed four decks to fit the bill. I had a few stipulations that made it harder. First, I didn't want to repeat any characters. Second, I wanted all four decks to use the Avenger's Team Spirit strategy. Third, I wanted them all to be the minimum size (65 cards). Fourth, I wanted them to incorporate all the different kinds of cards in the game, so that by playing around with the set, one would get a sense for the whole game, and perhaps kindle an interest in playing more. So, I think I have managed to do this. Now I just need to test the last one, create the necessary proxies to keep demo copies permanently assembled without depleting the rest of my collection, and writing the strategy guides for each. I'm excited about this, and I'm really looking forward to showing them to Lee. I really hope he likes them. I'd really like to make a contribution to the effort, something beyond simply being one of the best players.
Well, that's it. Anyone interested in trying OP sometime should feel free to contact me. Thanks for reading.
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Date: 2002-08-21 08:25 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-08-21 03:30 pm (UTC)