I have a deckbuilding problem... my desire to play the game is directly at odds with my compulsion to keep the cards all nicely organized in boxes. It's all very OCD. With Doomtown, especially - having five digits worth of cards - it is a logistical nightmare. Because I have so many extra common cards, I pulled those out early on. I kept up to five of each card in the main 3000 count box (which grew to two) and put any amount over five in the extra 5000 count box (which also grew to two.) Sounds reasonable. I mean, there are some commons of which I have almost a hundred copies.

But the trouble quickly manifested: now I have four massive boxes to sort through to build decks, if I want to keep the sacred split going. And then there's putting cards back if they come out of a deck. The end result was that I fell off the deckbuilding train, lost under the neatfreakiness of it all.

Scott once made the offhand comment that I was more of a collector of cards than he was... his intended point being more about his own card-buying habits than mine. At first I felt minorly impugned - "I'm a gamer!" and all that - but he was right.

Mike's solution to card storage is the standard baseball card binder. For Doomtown, he has them all separated by suit/value and thus can quickly leaf through the pages when he needs a 2 of diamonds or 6 of spades, or more likely, additional 8s of clubs. I did the binder thing with OverPower and Magic, and I was never comfortable with it... although I liked the visual display value (and in the end, that's all OverPower was good for) the stupid sleeves would tear, and if you jammed more than 4 cards in a pocket, it would lose its snap and never hold less than 4 cards again. I crave a solution halfway between the easy access of a binder and the satisfying simplicity of a box. I've often looked at those multi-compartment nail-and-nut storage units with the little doors and gone all wistful.

So, to restate, I built a Green Lantern deck. I only have about a thousand and a half Marvel/DC Vs. cards, which is well under the stress threshold for organization that I've hit with Doomtown, Pokemon, 7th Sea, etc. 50 card deck: 27 characters, 5 equipment, 13 twists, 5 locations. I have no idea if that's a good ratio or not, but it's about what I run in the other Vs. decks I've built. What I like about the Lanterns is that every damn one has Flight and Range! I used entirely cards from the Green Lantern Corps set, because I wanted to play with the light construct cards and the willpower stat.

Willpower is this expansion's new big trick, but it's an easy one, unlike that obnoxious concealed/hidden zone introduced in the Marvel Knights set. The problem with Vs. is that they don't do starters for each new expansion, so when cards start showing up with all new abilities and never-before-seen keywords, you're on your own, laddie. Their website absolutely blows; Upper Deck hasn't updated either the Marvel or DC half since the launch set for each. If you want to find new rulings, you have to dig into their stark legal database where they keep the official wording for tournament use. What should be happening is both sites should have a list of all the expansions, buoyed by the usual marketing speak, but also delineating the new damn rules. What's cosmic or evasion do? What is a construct? How does the hidden zone change your attack phase? To find that out, you have to find the fansites on your own. Absurd. UDE has managed to push gamers away from their own website.

Another issue I have with Vs. is that each set introduces four new factions. For instance, the GL set contains the Manhunters, Anti-Matter, Emerald Enemies and the Lanterns themselves. If you want to make a GL deck, that's only 25% of the cardpool, meaning you'd have to buy a crapton of boosters to get the raw material to work with. And if you're an X-Men kind of guy, forget it, you're never buying this set ever. Since the game punishes you for mixing faction characters, it seems like each set further paces people out of the game. Magic has five colors. I, even having not bought a Magic pack in years, can still walk into my comic store and pick up a booster from the latest release... and will still see cards I could splash into my age-old collegiate decks. Those colors reach across the expansions, across the years. If I have a Gotham Knights deck that I'm working on, what possible reason would I have to buy from the GL set? To hunt down that one rare out of 200 cards that has the Gotham affiliation?

Thankfully, we have singles sites for that. Which is where I sent $50 of my money getting every Green Lantern card I wanted, rather than dollar after dollar lost chasing booster boxes and getting loser Anti-Matter dorko cards. The Crime Syndicate! No self-respecting comics fan likes those guys... they're a writer's crutch, a plot device, a holdover from the non-continuity '60s that should have stayed dead in the Crisis.

That whole team affiliation rule is something they're going to have to address, or else lap back around to the characters that people like again. If they keep putting out sets with b-grade factions like the Marvel Knights (Brother Voodoo?!), the Qwardians (a suckload of generic soldiers who are regularly mopped up by even the lamest of Lanterns), X-Statix (should have been a subset of the X-Men faction), and the Fearsome Five (a nothing team of nobody villains)... well, people are just going to walk away from it. Sure, you'll keep the hardcore who see the underlying game rather than the IP dross and are out there crafting new strategies for making a Revenge Squad deck... but no game can subsist for long on purely the hardcore.

Although I would forgive all their trespasses if they would do a Zoo Crew team.