Today’s preview is brought to you by the co-founders of Super Awesome Games and co-designers of Vs. System® 2PCG®; Danny Mandel and Ben Cichoski.

Welcome back, 2PCGers, to our first preview for the first Issue in the Utopia Battles Arc, chronicling the events of Cyclops’ mutant group vs. Norman Osborn’s H.A.M.M.E.R. organization and Simon Trask’s Humanity Now! Today we will look at how the mutant and anti-mutant themes permeate through the Arc.
First up, we have the man himself, Cyclops, the leader of a new team for the game – the mutant Resistance .

As you can see, Cyclops is very inclusive, welcoming even Brotherhood mutants!
Here’s someone a tad less welcoming. Well, I guess he’s welcoming in a sinister way? As in, “Welcome to H.A.M.M.E.R. Now give me your life force.”

Note: Mutant Energy Absorption’s effect has no duration. So a character that loses and can’t gain powers this way, will remain like that until it leaves play. Addicted to Mutant Energy affects a character as it appears, which means it won’t even trigger any of its powers that occur when it appears. It also has no duration, like its Level 1 counterpart.

So far, we have seen one Main Character from each side. Next up, we have the White Queen herself, a shifty, scheming mutant indeed!

So you could build a deck with just or characters for Emma, or you could mix the teams and choose which way Emma commits during the heat of battle!

As you can see, when Emma choose a side, she also chooses one of her two forms as well.

Note: Keeper of Law allows a character to strike an additional time in a combat. The character can strike different characters (if they’re being team attacked, for example), or they can strike the same character multiple times. Also, Emma can use this any number of times each turn, including multiple times in the same combat. So, a character could even strike three or more times ina single combat!

There is another element is this conflict, that is neither nor .

Note: Proposition X works like this: When an enemy character appears, check each of its team affiliations against each team affiliation on characters on your side. For each affiliation the enemy character has that is NOT shared, Trask gains 1 XP.

Being a human terrorist wasn’t enough for Trask, so he evolved into something…else?

Biosentinel is a keyword power that has no built-in effect. Instead it is referenced by Trask’s other powers.

Besides Emma, there are other characters who either are secretly working against H.A.M.M.E.R. from within or at least have a change of heart about working for Norman.

Sure looks like Norman should have at least seen Cloak’s betrayal coming!

Note: When a character switches side with Shifting Loyalties, they could conceivably gain more than one team affiliation (hence the “and/or”.)

I’ll leave you today with a card that sums up what the mutants are fighting for (with my favorite piece of art in the entire Arc). This card could help them get what they want.

See you next time, when we bang harder on H.A.M.M.E.R.!