Palatinus' OverPower Forum

@CoS
5 times in a row? I guess I wouldn't blame your friend for the trick!

I started playing OP in 1995, before PowerSurge release. I used to buy packs in two different Comic shops, but it took a while until I could find another player, so I had a hard time trying to complete my collection.
I think someone told me that a small group of players were gathering in another Comic shop and then I started showing up there every weekend. I guess there was about 15 players who used to show up there, but only one of them was aware of the OP Alliance trading list. This boy had every card, including promos like Galactus and the Hillshire Farm set. But he was a real prick, who liked to take advantage from trades, specially from the newbies. Since we live in Brazil, and not everyone understands english, it was not difficult to hide the source of his cards. I eventually found about OP Alliance by myself and started telling about it to everyone I knew.

By the time IQ was released, I guess we had about fourty people playing and hold at least 3 tournaments with more than 20 players.
We used to play straight by the rules most of times, but we declared the "Draw 3 cards Special" one-per-deck before the official errata came out. We also banned the FF Plaza Homebase much earlier than the rule was officially changed. I guess it was very positive, because people had to use a lot of creativity to make a good playing deck.

When Monumental set came out, the Any Character Specials went to reserve. Probably the Power Leech target restriction has some guilty in that issue. Everyone used to play with Battlesites.

I had a team with Onslaught, X-Babies, Beast and Professor X in Reserve. It worked pretty well, with teamworks from 3 different power types, and a couple negates. I played Cannon Fodder (believe me, this word doesn't sound good in portuguese!) on X-Babies and most of the times the opponent had a hard time trying to KO my team. I remember at least one game in which the opponent lost because all his power cards went to X-Babies permanent record. The team finally went obsolete with the dead is dead rule. People also started to play with a bunch of teamwork cards, turning "two negate-character teams" very vulnerable.

From 32 Classic characters, only Captain Mar-Vell, Heroes for Hire, IW: Malice and Reyes increased the front line of the game-winners teams. I also had a team with Captain America, Superpatriot, Beast: TB and Sabretooth in reserve, but it was only possible after X-Men release. But Classic was responsible for my favorite trick: playing Dazzler's Absorb Sound from Outback Battlesite. I don't have an idea of how many dozens of cards my opponents had to discard because of this card!
In my most memorable game I was almost beaten by a guy who played a draw 3 cards and a draw 4 cards in the same battle that he've ventured for the winning. This guy couldn't hold his joy while I was with the loser face! I looked at his hand full of cards and I had only 3 in hand, plus 4 or 5 placed. I had a Dazzler activator in hand, but he had a negates placed. So I tried a desperate move, discarding a Sentinels activator to play Mutant Countermeasures against the character with negates. In my next turn I played Absorb Sound and it absorbed almost everything he had, including placed ones. The game totally turned to my side and I was able to win some battles later.

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Post Merge: July 10, 2011, 09:34:15 PM

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Part II - The Image set brought Spawn to the game, the character that have been used in 4 from 5 game-winning decks. Despite this one, no Image character became usual. I saw a couple Zealot teams, one or another player tried Violator or the Darkness and that was all. I remember some people playing with Grunge before the errata for his inherent and also Malebolgia in those crazy bet all decks. I guess that the game designers were trying to weaken the power of the negating, as if people would stop playing with the characters who had it. The set has pretty interesting offensive cards, but the lack of defensive specials reduces the usability. Monumental for example is probably the best set, with a good balance between offense and defense.

And the last one, X-Men came out. It was a really good set, bringing the Any Characters back to the game with DoW. It also helped to balance the power mix with characters like Beast: TB, Donald Pierce and Bastion. Deathbird inherent was an interesting idea, allowing to mix power types in the same deck. X-Man and Xaos became very popular, specially X-Man. The Aspect cards idea was almost good, but it was very shy and not enough to make most of the homebases playable at once.
I guess that the worse homebase weakness is that most teams don't match. You cannot use the same power cards or universe cards with different characters and the HB inherent ability or the Aspect doesn't help much in most cases. It is sad that they never got it fixed, because it would be great to play with the Avengers or with a X-Men team.

After a long time waiting OP return from the dead, I decided to start making homemade cards. At first I thought like most homemakers, trying to fulfill the missing cards (like the Marvels set or unreleased characters from location cards). But then I realized that I could make better. If the game could be released once again, it would make no sense to continue from where it stopped. It would be necessary to restart it again. And it would make no sense to repeat the same mistakes from the first version. I mean, anyone really wanted to play with the Starjammers or with the Marauders? Or they did because Spider-Man, Batman and Wolverine sucked?
So my homemade "second edition" came as a second chance for the most popular comic book characters. It also brought unreleased characters like Loki, Mr. Hyde, M.O.D.O.K., Thanos, Sentry, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Woman – Jessica Drew.     
I've been working with homemades for a couple years and we have a small group of players who supports that initiative.

Now I am developing a server based online game that allows players to build decks using the original cards or the homemades. I hope we can assemble the remaining OP players with this new program.

Bios
Comics addicted
OverPower refugee

Quote from: Bios on April 30, 2010, 01:54:42 AM
I also had a team with Captain America, Superpatriot, Beast: TB and Sabretooth in reserve

This is a dope deck. Also, they had Overpower in Brazil? That's amazing, I was always very interested about the prevalence of OP in other countries. I know they started making Japanese Overpower cards for Image (somewhere out there is a cool promo sheet advertising the first ever Japanese Overpower tournament in the Tokyo Dome or something like that). I would kill for some Japanese Overpower cards...but don't know if they made anything outside of Image. I need a Japanese Spawn hero card....

QuoteAlso, they had Overpower in Brazil? That's amazing, I was always very interested about the prevalence of OP in other countries. I know they started making Japanese Overpower cards for Image (somewhere out there is a cool promo sheet advertising the first ever Japanese Overpower tournament in the Tokyo Dome or something like that). I would kill for some Japanese Overpower cards...but don't know if they made anything outside of Image. I need a Japanese Spawn hero card....

I guess we have a legion of comic book fans around here, as a result there are a couple brazilian pencilers working in the comic book industry (Mike Deodato, Joe Bennett, Ed Benes, Ivan Reis  and others).
Unfortunately OverPower wasn't very popular and you could only find cards printed in english. Other card games like Magic or Pokemon can be found in portuguese, since they were licensed for a local dealer.

As far as I know, there were no japanese OP cards. The starter decks sold in Japan were printed in english, just the rulebook was printed in japanese.

I uploaded some pictures from an old tournament we hold.  I really miss that scene...
http://overpower.shutterfly.com/

Quote from: Bios on May 03, 2010, 10:13:00 PM
http://overpower.shutterfly.com

Yes! I love pictures like this. I go CSI on them and zoom in to see what everyone was using, that kind of stuff is just sooooo interesting to me. Like I said in the original post of this thread, I try to chronicle everything possible for OP since it seems like more and more websites that had old info die off each year. I have tons of old tournament reports, strategy articles, decklists, and so on somewhere on my old computer. As far as pictures I only mostly have original art, I kick myself when I think about how many tournament photos I've seen over the years that I should have saved.

Edit: Ok from those pictures I can see...
-A Cable deck
-A Silver Surfer deck
-Iceman/Scarlet Witch deck
-Inhumans, Onslaught, X-Babies frontline

Cool stuff! Sometimes I think about how amazing Inhumans woulda been if Marvels had been released...I mean they are already an twenty-one point 8 stat (arguably the most important thing to base a deck around in the game) with 4 good OPD specials, adding a team defense card to that woulda been nuts. With Phoenix's new Marvels card I would honestly prefer her over X-Man in any deck where you already had the 8 stat requirement filled, so a good start to a Marvels deck would be Inhumans, Phoenix, (Negate Char), then Silver Sable or Spider-Woman in reserve. I guess Scarlet Witch is the safe choice there but I think I'd take the Reavers for added teamwork power.

I just wanted to pop in here and say that this thread gets my vote for "Best Thread of the Year," if not ever! What a FUN trip down OP Memory Lane!

Great job, Onslaught! Welcome and please do keep posting!

I agree with the post above. Wish I would of faced Onslaught in the Regionals..... If only we both didn't lose in top 8.

Onslaught (or anyone else who may remember for that matter), I had a quick question on the Strength deck you posted as Cherie Briggs' winning deck from the first Nationals.

It seems to me that I recall, and I freely admit my memory could be a bit fuzzy, it WAS a LONG time ago, that Briggs' deck contained NO Basic Universe or Training cards, and that was what clued most of the rest of us in as to their uselessness. I'm sure it was Briggs who first cut them completely from decks, but maybe it was AFTER the first Nationals?

Just curious if you recall.

Quote from: Onslaught on May 04, 2010, 12:12:05 PM

Quote from: Bios on May 03, 2010, 10:13:00 PM
http://overpower.shutterfly.com

Yes! I love pictures like this. I go CSI on them and zoom in to see what everyone was using, that kind of stuff is just sooooo interesting to me. Like I said in the original post of this thread, I try to chronicle everything possible for OP since it seems like more and more websites that had old info die off each year. I have tons of old tournament reports, strategy articles, decklists, and so on somewhere on my old computer. As far as pictures I only mostly have original art, I kick myself when I think about how many tournament photos I've seen over the years that I should have saved.

Just wanted to add I think those pics are great too.  I was searching on youtube the other day hoping to see if anyone had ever uploaded any videos of themselves actually playing overpower.  Unfortunately, all I saw were magic tournament videos, but it was nice to have a little hope... 

Quote from: CCTelander on July 05, 2010, 05:29:57 PM
Onslaught (or anyone else who may remember for that matter), I had a quick question on the Strength deck you posted as Cherie Briggs' winning deck from the first Nationals.

It seems to me that I recall, and I freely admit my memory could be a bit fuzzy, it WAS a LONG time ago, that Briggs' deck contained NO Basic Universe or Training cards, and that was what clued most of the rest of us in as to their uselessness. I'm sure it was Briggs who first cut them completely from decks, but maybe it was AFTER the first Nationals?

Just curious if you recall.

I'm sure she just used them as filler since it was hard to get to 51 card deck minimum in the original set.

Quote from: CCTelander on July 05, 2010, 05:29:57 PM
Onslaught (or anyone else who may remember for that matter), I had a quick question on the Strength deck you posted as Cherie Briggs' winning deck from the first Nationals.

It seems to me that I recall, and I freely admit my memory could be a bit fuzzy, it WAS a LONG time ago, that Briggs' deck contained NO Basic Universe or Training cards, and that was what clued most of the rest of us in as to their uselessness. I'm sure it was Briggs who first cut them completely from decks, but maybe it was AFTER the first Nationals?

Just curious if you recall.

Yup, you are correct. For the record here's the actual deck (from an old newsgroup post). Notice the high number of level 8 power cards, no savage land any hero, and the event card.
John

________________________________________________________________________Heros:
Hulk  w/ Power Leap, Enraged
Juggernaut  w/ Battering Ram, Head Butt, Raze
Namor  w/ Atlantis Attacks, Imperious Rex, Land/Sea/Air

Reserve Hero:    Thing  w/ Clobbering Time

Any Hero Specials:
Death From Above, Guardian Angel, Gamma Terror, Web-headed Wizard,
Confusion

Teamworks:
6S,6S,7S,7S,8S,8S

Power Cards:
Energy:  1,1,1,1, 2
Multi:  2,2,2, 3,3,3,3
Fighting:  4,4,4,4
Strength:  5,5,5,5, 6,6,6,6, 7,7,7,7,7, 8,8,8,8,8,8

Mission:  Infinity Gauntlet
Event:  Silver Tongued Devil (No fighting power cards may be played)
________________________________________________________________________
I used this event because I found that the greatest single threat
(apart from an identical deck) was an anti-strength fighting deck
of the type proposed by MSFell (which I didn't come up against; the
only time that I used the card against a fighting team they didn't
happen to have any fighting cards anyway).  Only my 4's were fighting,
so the maximum that I could lose from it was 1 card.  I thought that
other strength decks might have a wider variety of fighting cards, so I
could catch them with more than 1. 

I actually noticed that error recently myself too, the list in the original post with personal avoids and basic universes is actually the list of Aaron Schantz (the second place finisher that year).

Somewhere, I have all of his old news clippings posted from his old blue/orange college website.

JohnL, Hello Again!

This is Deryl, from the latter part of the Bay-Area monthly tournaments. Just wanted to say thank you for teaching me so much about this game, and being so nice, and supportive of me back then. Next time you speak with Cherie, please express my 'thanks' to her also. I hope you are both doing well.

Welcome to this message board.

Quote from: drdeath25 on February 02, 2011, 07:18:03 PM
JohnL, Hello Again!

This is Deryl, from the latter part of the Bay-Area monthly tournaments. Just wanted to say thank you for teaching me so much about this game, and being so nice, and supportive of me back then. Next time you speak with Cherie, please express my 'thanks' to her also. I hope you are both doing well.

Welcome to this message board.

Hi Deryl, shoot me an e-mail I'd love to hear what you've been up to. I think you know my name, and I'm at UCSB so that should make my e-mail address easy to find!

Richie has reawakened my interest in OP so I'll try to dig up some info to make some posts here about the history of Overpower. I wish I'd made some notes before I forgot everything. Anyway, for a start, I'm going to try to piece together what I know about the pre-release history of Overpower. The Power Players game , the beta decks etc. I have scans for many of these cards which should be of interest to, oh maybe half a dozen people....