First off, let's look at the stats. A 2/5 with 6 health is not terrible, but not having flight or range makes this card a hard sell. Other aliens that have been spoiled don't have ranged or flying either, so it is staying on theme. I was hoping The Queen would have Grab at the very least but she seems to have an all in strategy. I'm excited to see her level 2 stats to help further evaluate how strong The Queen will be.

They're Coming out of the Walls! - Build [symb=2s]: Reveal the top five cards of your deck. Choose a character with Swarm from among them and any number of other characters with the same name as that card and put them into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your deck.

While we don't have the full spoiler of aliens yet, here are the cards currently released or recently spoiled that have Swarm:

Swarm

VS System 2PCG: Swarm Cards

• Adolescent Xenomorph
• Madame Masque
• Ovomorph
• Ferocious Xenomorph
• Leaping Xenomorph
• Screeching Xenomorph
• Ultron

• Demon Goblin
• Facehugger

This ability is similar to Professor Xavier's Cerebro ability, with the caveat that it is limited to characters with Swarm, but you can get multiples of the same card if you get lucky, which is a good source of card advantage but how likely is it? It depends on what characters you are looking for, how many copies of a specific card you have drawn already, and how many cards are left in your deck. This makes the ability pretty hard to evaluate math wise.

To get two characters out of one activation of "They're Coming out of the Walls!", let's look at the math with Adolescent Xenomorph since it has Legion, allowing 8 copies in your deck. If you drew no copies of a Adolescent Xenomorph in your opening hand, went first, and activated They're Coming out of the Walls! on turn 1, you would have a roughly 15% chance per card to reveal a Adolescent Xenomorph. Those odds go up for each card that you draw that isn't an Adolescent Xenomorph slightly, but go down roughly 1.5% to 2% per each one you draw(And scaling sharply for each copy already drawn). These are independent of other characters with Legion if they exist as we are only looking at the chances to get more than one card out of a single reveal. At a glance without testing, it doesn't seem like too terribly high odds overall, but not impossible. For a character without Legion, those odds will be cut in half, but the likely hood of drawing a second one after the first is twice as hard for each additional copy and at an overall sharper scaling curve.

I am assuming that there will be other characters with Legion in the set as it is a keyword and it would really help push Alien Queen over the top. I haven't checked the set numbers to see if it were possible to have another character with Legion in the set, but even without getting more than 1 character with Swarm, the ability at the core is card filtering which is known to be good in card games in general.

Leveling Up

The ability does play very nicely into her Level Up Power:

They're All Around Us, Man Level Up (3) - When a character with Swarm appears on your side, if you already have a character with that name on your side, the Queen gains an XP.

This is also a hard power to measure as it will depend on how many more spoiled characters will have Swarm or Legion. Overall this doesn't seem too terribly easy to achieve before turn 4 naturally, but Goblin Queen and her tokens, by the current ruling could level her up as early as turn 2 via Pixie (Ryan Roper on Facebook gets credit for pointing this out).

You will need a critical mass of Swarm characters to make The Queen level if you aren't on the Pixie/Goblin Queen plan, but who knows what level 2 has in store? I hope it is a reward worth the risk of being hit by Electro or Yondu before multiple copies have a chance to appear.

Singularity does cause characters to appear again so that may be more central to the Alien strategy than I originally thought. People had talked for a while of a deck that focuses on quick creatures with appear affects alongside Captain America and Singularity before, but in my personal testing I found this not to be worthwhile overall. The deck has to be able to stand alone without Singularity is the problem. Aliens might just be able to do that but only time will tell.

Wrapping up

I want to thank Upper Deck again for publishing such a great game and allowing me to have an exclusive preview. Let me know what you think in the comments below on this website, on the PauperTim facebook page, the shared post in the VS 2PCG Collective Facebook group, or by tweeting at me on twitter.