The first thing you'll notice in the VS System is that there are three main kinds of cards - Characters, Plot Twists, and Locations. There are also Equipment cards, but that's a matter for later discussion and won't be covered in this course.

Characters, Plot Twists, and Locations all have a number in their upper left hand corners. For Plot Twists and Locations, this number is called a Threshold Cost - the number of resources you must have on the field before you can play them. On your first turn, you can place a resource face down and then flip it face up if it has a Threshold Cost of one, since you would have one resource down.

For Characters, this number is their Resource Cost - with Resource Costs, you actually have to pay a number of Resource Points to play the Character. Unlike Threshold Costs, which only require you have a minimum number of Resources in play, Resource Costs require that you spend a number of points equal to the number of resources you have down. This Resource Cost is extremely important in the VS System, which you'll see in just a moment.

Now that we've been through the main types of cards and how to play them, we'll cover the field. In the VS System, each player's field consists of three rows: the resource row, the support row, and the front row. If two players were facing off in a game, their rows would look like this:

Player 1 Resource Row
Player 1 Support Row
Player 1 Front Row
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Player 2 Front Row
Player 2 Support Row
Player 2 Resource Row

Characters located in the Support Row can be protected by a Character directly in front of them in the Front Row. That means that if I have my Shadowcat in the Support Row and Wolverine in the Front Row, my opponent would have to go through Wolverine before he could attack Shadowcat.

The final things to learn before the mechanics of a turn are the positions of cards on the field. Characters have three positions: standard, exhausted, and stunned. Characters in standard position are vertical and face-up on the field, ready to attack or activate their effects. Character that are exhausted are face up horizontal on the field, which happens after they have attacked or activated their effects. Both standard and exhausted Characters can be attacked. The final position is stunned, where a Character is face down horizontal on the field.

A Character is stunned when it battles another Character whose attack is higher than its defense. For example, my Wolverine has 8/5 ATK/DEF and is attacked by your Magneto, who is 16/7. In this battle, your Magneto's 16 ATK would battle my 5 DEF, and my 8 ATK would battle your 7 DEF. Since you've attacked, you do Breakthrough damage to me - meaning that the difference in your ATK and my DEF is subtracted from my endurance points. Since I was attacked, my ATK battles your DEF but does no Breakthrough damage.

This is where Stunning comes into play, and where you'll see the value of that Resource Cost. Since both of our ATK values were higher than each other's DEF values, both Characters are stunned. Magneto and Wolverine flip face down after I've subtracted 11 points from my endurance for the Breakthrough damage, and then we both take further damage equal to the Resource Cost of our Characters. Wolverine is a 3, so in addition to 11 Breakthrough I take 3 more endurance loss. Magneto is a 5, so even though you take no Breakthrough, he's stunned and you take 5 damage.

Now, do you feel confident enough to play a turn? It may seem like a lot to read through, but the best part of the VS System is that the mechanics are so easy to learn. We'll go over the mechanics of a turn, and then you can try your hand at a game.

In this game, both players share a turn. Each turn looks like this:

Player 1 has Initiative

- Player 1 Build Step
- Player 2 Build Step
- Player 1 Combat Step
- Player 2 Combat Step
- Recovery Step

Now, to explain each step. During the Build Step, the player first plays one Resource in their Resource row, face up or face down. They then have the chance to spend their Resource Points, which are equal to the number of Resources they have on the field, to recruit Characters. For example, I have six Resources on the field. I can either recruit a Character with a Resource Cost of six, two Characters with costs of three, three with a cost of two, or six with a cost of one. As you can imagine, the higher the cost the more powerful the Character, so I'd probably opt to recruit one big character instead of a bunch of smaller ones.

In the combat step, the player with initiative (the player currently operating their cards) has the chance to exhaust their characters to attack their opponent's. They can also use several Characters of the same team affiliation (say, "X-Men" or "The Brotherhood") to team attack one Character of their opponent's. In this situation, a team attack could stun a huge Character (for example, Onslaught, who has 21/21 ATK/DEF), but would not be able to do Breakthrough damage. This is still very useful, however, because even stunning Onslaught would do massive damage to his controller - he has a Resource Cost of nine, which means that just stunning him would do nine damage to his controller and, late in the game, could end it.

In the Recovery Step, each player chooses one stunned Character to recover and the rest are removed from the field and placed in the KO pile. All exhausted Characters are recovered to normal position as well.