Character
Character cards are very important in VS System, as combat with characters is the main way of reducing your opponent's endurance total. Characters represent individuals within the comic universes that are fighting against each other within the game. You recruit these characters to fight against your opponent's characters and reduce their endurance total to 0 before they do the same to you.
Character cards can be identified by the red or black card background and the affiliations printed either on the left side of the card, or in the type line. Character cards are also the only card type that can have ATK, DEF, willpower, identity, and affiliations.
Recruiting Characters[]
Character cards have a number in the top-left corner of the card, called their "recruit cost". This number indicates how many resource points must be spent in order to recruit the character into play. During your Recruit step, you can pay resource points to recruit characters from your hand into play. During your Formation step, you can rearrange your characters in your Front and Support rows for a better tactical advantage in the Combat Phase.
Character cards are "unique"; this means that if you recruit a character with the same name as one you already have in play, the one already in play will go to your KO'd pile as a part of recruiting the new one. This will still occur even if the two character cards have a different version, but the same name; uniqueness only cares about the name of the card. If a character card has the version "Army", then this rule is ignored; you can have as many characters in play with the same name as you want if their version is "Army".
Combat with Characters[]
Characters are your main way of reducing your opponent's endurance total, and the way you do this is through combat. In VS System, characters attack other characters directly; characters must be in the front row to attack, unless they have the Range characteristic, in which case they can attack from either row. Characters can only attack unprotected characters, unless they have the Flight characteristic, in which case they can attack protected characters (characters are protected when they are in the support row with another character in front of them). The range symbol is a crosshair, and the flight symbol is a pair of wings.
The ATK and DEF of characters is denoted on the bottom of the card; the ATK is denoted by a lightning symbol, while the DEF is denoted by a shield symbol.
The affiliations of characters is important for combat; characters must share a team affiliation in order to team attack together or reinforce one another. Some characters have two printed affiliations; they both count for team attacking and reinforcement.
Recovering Characters[]
Text on stunned characters and text on equipment attached to stunned characters is considered inactive. This is true even thogugh the character is still considered in play (and you are still considered to control the stunned character). Counters (with the exception of cosmic counters) remain on characters when they become stunned.