Upper Deck nerfs Thanos in Vs System 2PCG, announces Marvel Legacy expansion

Vs System 2PCG publisher Upper Deck has announced some changes to the card-battling title to balance overpowered characters, while also revealing its line-up of expansions for 2017.

The balancing changes centre on the Thanos main character cards introduced in the Marvel Battles core set, which have raised ire among fans for their powerful in-game abilities.

“For a while now the Mad Titan has been dominating the metagame and warping the way players have to prepare for tournaments,” explained lead designer Danny Mandel on the Upper Deck blog. “Further, games with Thanos typically involve a couple of player experiences the design team is unhappy with. First, leveling up Thanos often involves purposefully KOing your own characters by running them into larger enemies. Second, the discard component of The Infinity Gauntlet is devastating and too negative of a play experience.

“Our philosophy on errata is that it should only be used to clarify or fix the wording on a card. It should not be used as method to change the power level of a card. We feel that if a card is problematic it needs to be removed (i.e. banned from tournaments). Fortunately, since Vs System 2PCG’s sets come with fixed content, as opposed to the blind purchase of booster packs, we have an efficient method to bring back a problematic card in a newly re-balanced form. We want to keep some version of Thanos in the game because he’s such a popular character.

“So our policy going forward will be to ‘Ban + Replace’ problematic cards. The ban will be effective immediately, and the replacement card will be part of the next applicable expansion. The new version of Thanos will be printed in the next Marvel expansion.”

The revised edition of Thanos swaps the need to KO your own characters to gaining XP when enemy characters are KO’d. Meanwhile, The Infinity Gauntlet’s ability to force an opponent to discard has been dampened to result in the discard of a single random card.

Upper Deck also revealed the next expansion for Vs System 2PCG, which will bolster the Marvel card line-up. 

Vs System 2PCG: Legacy will include 200 cards, expanding every Marvel team available for the game so far with a main character and multiple supporting characters, including Captain Britain, Psylocke, Mister Sinister, Taskmaster, Squirrel Girl and Elektra.

Legacy is due out in March 2017 and will be followed by two unannounced Marvel expansions, including a 400-card set.

There is also a fourth Vs System 2PCG expansion on the way in 2017, simply described as being ‘from another licence’.