We interviewed Scott Gaeta, Upper Deck Product Manager--Vs. System and talked about the releases for 2007 and beyond (what major Marvel event will be reflected in a 2008 release?), why it's tough to put current continuity into the game, and how the game and its organized play are changing this year.

What's going on with the Vs. System this year?

Well, for the rest of the year, we have three more booster releases, and then we have two other non-booster products coming out in the fall.  The next booster product is World's Finest.  Then the booster product after that will be Marvel Legends, which comes out August 22nd.  That's going to be a new base set, all focused on the biggest and most popular Marvel characters.

Does that have anything to do with the toy line?

No.  The Legends game also has gameplay elements in the sense of we're focusing more on single-hero teams.  Feedback that we've gotten from our players is that they want to build a Captain America deck or Spider-Man deck as opposed to say Avengers as a team or the Spider-Man family.  So they're going to be able to focus more on individual heroes.

So Cap's not dead yet in the game (laughs)?

You know, the game takes place at many different points in time, so we're not very linear.

He'll probably be back anyway.

Yeah, I'm sure he will. In the fall we follow that up with a DC Legends version, another base set giving the same treatment to all of the DC heroes -- focusing on all the main heroes in the universe.  Again, it's a jumping on point, it's a base set focusing on single hero type decks.  Just kind of giving people a fresh start.

In late October is Giant Size Vs. System. Remember the old giant sized comics?

Absolutely.

This is similar to what we've done with World of Warcraft in the Raid Deck multi-player style. Giant Size Vs. System is basically taking a big threat -- you know, taking the big epic crossover events from comic books where multiple teams have to come together to defeat the big bad guy -- and taking it and putting it into our game.  In October, Galactus will be the big threat, and you'll buy your box set and it will have the Galactus oversize cards and the Galactus deck.  Two to four players have to get together with their Vs. decks and try to keep Galactus from reaching Earth and destroying the world.

It takes the game from the one-on-one competitive play and turns it into a more social, interactive environment.  It's still serious, and it still has the same level of gameplay that Vs. has, but now it makes it a little more social because it's multiplayer.  It's two to four guys against another guy.  They have to work together as a team, they have to coordinate, they have to make decisions together -- it's not every man for himself to see who can defeat Galactus.  If they don't work together as a team, they're probably going to get beat. 

That's October, then in December, we're going to do the Vs. Gallery Packs, which we did last year.  They were very well received. There will be Marvel and DC versions where it's Vs. art all on extended template cards, on extended art cards.  Really, the only complaint we had from 2006 on those was that we didn't make enough, they sold out, and people were frustrated that they couldn't get reorders.

When we did our last market reports for the ICv2 Guide, Vs. seemed to have slipped a little bit vs. some of its competition, is that something you've observed?

We're going into our fourth year; we follow a typical TCG lifecycle.  We've reached this comfortable level now where we have this core player base, and we still bring in new players.

What is Versus' non-hobby distribution like?

We're primarily a hobby game at this point.

We are working to strengthen our support in hobby.  A lot of our focus this year is that we've cut back on our pro tour, our pro circuit events.  Our Pro Circuit in Indy will have $100,000 in prizes.  That's a little less than what we've done in the past, and we're diverting that time and attention to hobby retailers, where we've beefed up the hobby league kits.  The same hobby league kit that they were purchasing for $20 has all the same support they were getting, and now it has a special marquee event in every kit.  So the month a new product releases, in addition to their hobby league support in that kit, there's support for a release celebration in that kit, which has a totally separate prize pool and different play mats.  Things like the play mats were items that were previously only available at higher level events and now we've come down into the hobby level.

We've also given them higher level events that help qualify people for the pro circuit events.  The month after a release in the cycle are city championships.  So this is bringing a championship level event into a hobby store, so they have something that's a little more of a marquee event.

It drives a wider variety of players into the hobby stores.  In the past you had a split between casual guys in the hobby shop and the more serious players participating in the higher level events and traveling.  Now we've given those guys a reason to funnel down into the hobby shops as well and not just travel to the big events at conventions that are held at hotels.

It had seemed like Marvel and DC are not really allowing you to tie into their movies directly.  I mean there's no Spider-Man set, there's no Fantastic Four set this summer.

Part of that is that the game is comic book focused and the movies happen outside of the comic book world.  Some of that is not necessarily that they're not allowing us to tie in, it's timing on our part as far as where we have to cycle characters out of the game.  We don't want to have to put Spider-Man into every set; that would get kind of boring.

Coming up next year, some of our sets will tie into comic continuity.  Our first set of 2008 for Marvel will be Civil War-based.  It's hard to tie it directly into comic book continuity, they don't want to always give us the advance information, we work so far in advance as far as putting our sets together -- we're eight months out. 

And then things change, like we had an experience with Infinite Crisis where they were giving us advance information, and we were designing our cards with certain storyline elements in there, and then at the last minute some information leaked out on Ain't It Cool, so they changed the ending.  It wasn't a disaster, but it didn't translate as well as it could have if things didn't change.  It's tricky, you have to be careful.

So is it about a year between when something happens in the comics and when it can be reflected in the game?

Maybe less than that.  The nice thing is that Civil War will be a theme, but it won't be the overall focus.  We'll also be able to integrate things that have happened post-Civil War in that set.  So you'll get Civil War, and you might get multiple versions of Spider-Man, depending on which side of the fence he was on at any given time in the story.  We might be able to do Captain America, up until his death.  If they come out with a new version of Captain America in that time, we might be able to do work him in as well.  So, we just have to play it by ear and see what they do, see what we can work in.