Welcome to Maindeck’s first installment into “Foresight: Predicting the Future” where we look ahead in the world of My Hero Academia and try to guess what future characters might look like in the UniVersus system!
While often a kit for a character can range anywhere from just a single character card to multiple foundations, attacks, actions, or assets at a variety of rarities, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll always be designing one character card, one attack, one foundation, and one action or asset. This is just to have a little fun speculating and doesn’t represent what will see print when the character finally makes it into the game!
First up I’ve decided to make Twice, one of the main members of the League of Villains. Now, at first glance, it would be very easy to try and make Twice “just do multiples” like in Standard UVS and call it a day. But I wanted to try going for something a little more creative and on theme.
Twice's Character Card
First off I gave Twice the Order and Chaos symbols to represent his fractured psyche, as well as Water to give him access to cards that like having a lot of things in the card pool. I wanted him to have 22 health for obvious reasons, but also to make using his abilities, which we will see in a bit, require a little more thought to use. So, with only 22 health and abilities that make him lose even more health, it seemed only fair to make him a 7 hander.
His first enhance forms the backbone of his entire kit. By losing two health you can give an attack +1 damage and +1 speed for every card that shares its same name in the cardpool. This encourages playing multiples of the same attack in a turn, but it still can be used on any lone attack to give it +1/+1. Simple, straightforward, and effective.
His Response is where things get a little nuts though. Once per turn after you land two unblocked attacks, you can discard a copy of Twice from your hand to immediately gain back 2 health – then, during your third attack Twice gets to use his Enhance twice during the enhance step instead of once. This means that while a lone third attack would get a meager +2/+2, if you can manage to string two or three of the same attack during that turn, you can end up with a huge +4/+4 or even a massive +6/+6 to that attack! It’s costly to activate, but could prove very effective.
This ability simulates Twice’s quirk to make a clone of himself, and then having that clone make another clone, working around his limit of only being able to make one clone. It works thematically as well though (which, you can tell is important to me) as with each clone Twice makes of himself, he gets a little weaker, and loses a little bit more of his sanity.
Twice's Attack Card
So once you’ve jumped through all these hoops, what attack are you going to be slinging at your opponent so many times? Sad Man’s Parade has 2 difficulty, speed, and damage. As funny as it would have been to give it 2 control as well, that is reserved for extremely powerful cards and would have made the attack not worth running. So, unfortunately the bit doesn’t carry through to that end. However, this attack, at the cost of 2 health, lets you grab another Sad Man’s Parade if it is not blocked. And with only two damage, it leaves your opponent in a very interesting spot.
They can either take the hit (hey, it’s only two damage, right?), but then that begins the setup for Twice to land his second hit and begin his shenanigans. That means your opponent could block it… but that might mean wasting a good block they want to hold onto for a measly two damage. And this isn’t even counting any other attacks you may have. It is a nice “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” effect that I love seeing in card games. Also, a +2 high block is nothing to sneeze at.
Twice is a character with whom you might actually consider letting your attacks discard rather than go to momentum – with just one additional copy of this extremely cheap attack, if you fail to secure a kill on one turn, on the next you could easily string a couple of potent 5-difficulty attacks to bait out blocks, and then throw your last Sad Man’s Parade to start pulling the others out of the discard pile once it’s more likely to hit. And each one will get progressively more powerful as long as Twice can manage to keep using his enhance!
Twice's Foundation and Action Cards
Twice’s foundation, Split Personality, represents his constantly contradictory mental state by giving you two possible responses to any attack, depending on its outcome. If your attack is blocked, you draw a card and hopefully get to attack more, and if the attack hits you gain two health, making the next of Twice’s enhances essentially free. It rewards aggression and encourages slapping down multiple attacks in a turn, which is exactly what Twice wants to do. It gets to stay on theme with a 2 difficulty and 4 control, and those stats feel fairly warranted as this is a foundation that would likely see a lot of play outside of Twice as well with a useful effect no matter what the outcome of your attack is.
Lastly, we have his Action card, Double, named after his Quirk. While it’s only a 2 difficulty, it has a costly 2 control, but despite this it would likely be a strong consideration not just for Twice but for any character stacker, such as Ectoplasm (who happens to share Twice’s exact symbols).
Double has two abilities – an enhance which allows you to search up any Character card that matches the name of your Character, which in Twice will give you exactly what you need to activate his Once Per Turn response – or, if you are holding it on defense and the opponent drops a mid or high must-block, you can enhance just to exchange your low block for your 0-mid-block character card to block with.
Alternatively, the response gives Twice some additional much-needed life support as you will be constantly draining your life. Again, this is triggered on an attack dealing damage, so you need to continue to be aggressive with Twice, but this use of the action, as well as his foundation and the response on his character would allow a player to be a little flexible if they can predict that the opponent is banking on a powerful block like Plus Ultra or Evade and Copy – it’s possible to connect with a second attack and utilize all 3 responses to gain back 6+ health and pass the turn, switching over to being defensive so you can try again for a game-ending aggressive push next turn.
As another cute flavor note, Twice’s whole kit and playstyle of bouncing up and down health pays just a little homage to Toga’s playstyle – and Toga is a character Twice is enamored with in the show.
So, what do you think of Twice? Is he broken? Terrible? Sound off in the comments and our Facebook page! The purpose of this series of articles is to have fun thought exercises. So the more you talk about what you like, don’t like, or even create on your own, is all part of the fun! As I said before, I love theming, and UniVersus has always done a great job with that. Better than every other card game currently on the market as far as I am concerned. I also thought to myself, if DC Comics ever came to the game, this would make a great kit for Two-Face, but I digress…
Let us know what character you would like to see next as we peer into the future of the My Hero Academia card game!
