Format: Casual Golden Age (Modern recommended)
As you are all aware, we now have Warhammer stuff, finally. With the Legacy League over, and me getting that silly Orbital Strike team done last week , I wanted to take a week to assess the actual meta pieces emanating from the set. And thus…
1, 2, 3, 4, I declare an Instant War!
The Team: This might as well be called, Bad Stuff: The Team.
Alright, there are a lot of different interactions to go over. First, the ramp engine: The Spot + Foetid Bloat-Drone. Have Spot active, use the Drone’s global, draw and roll four dice. It’s like using Investigation without having to buy any dice for it. It will likely become one of the best ramp engines in Modern now.
Next up, the Sidekicks strategy: SR Jubilee, used alongside Instant War, means I get to field sidekicks and instantly hurt my opponent with them. Plus, this new glut of sidekicks means Batman gets to hit like a truck.
This brings me to the third main component: The Venerable Dreadnaught. He makes all of my characters, sidekicks included, into Range-fueled removal. When another part of the team is all about fielding tons of sidekicks, yeah, that hurts. And just in case my opponent runs Dreadnaught too, I brought in Dum Dum Dugan (this version is massively underrated) to protect my sidekicks.
As for the rest of the team, Scarlet Witch serves for some control against action-based teams, Resurrection serves for ramp and churn (especially to set up a T3 Spot for some crazy ramp). Finally, Professor X is there for the global, and helps so many things. He helps me have sidekicks to help with Jubilee and Dreadnaught, or even to sacrifice in using the Spot + Bloat Drone combo. He’s the glue that holds this team together.
And with that said, on to the games!
Game 1:
To start off, I went up against a Golden Age team based around the new Stompa that sends stuff back to the card. I didn’t give her the chance to get to the big guy. Instead, I went for Jubilee, Spot, did tons of ramp, and used Dreadnaught for removal. As I had a fair amount of luck with sidekicks, the damage was fast and furious.
1-0
Game 2:
Sidekick vs sidekick. Jubilee vs Jubilee, Instant War vs Instant War, it’s on! Our builds had some differences though; I was using Dreadnaught, he went for Malekith to buff sidekicks, and Poison Ivy to do 2 damage per sidekick (1 with Jubilee, 1 with Ivy). This was a close one (his burn is deceptively quick!), but with Dreadnaught for crazy removal, and Dugan to protect my own sidekicks, I ended up with a gigantic amount of characters. Add to that the fact that my Scarlet Witch made it so he couldn’t use Instant War as reliably, and I just ended up outpacing him. I had all 8 sidekicks fielded by the end! With all of those, and Dreadnaught, I wiped his whole board and swung in for the win.
2-0
Game 3:
Well, this isn’t a nightmare at all; an Orks team! With a Battlewagon that hits for more damage because I have Range, and an Ork that could stop my Range from hitting his Orks, he could’ve wrecked me…but his Battlewagon didn’t roll, ever. Spot + Bloat-Drone really helped me this time. I also bought one Investigation off my opponent. This allowed me to go through my whole bag pretty much every turn, and buy so much darn stuff. I bought both Batman dice, plus the rest of my stuff, and because of Range, I kept up the pressure so that he could hardly keep anything alive. Between his bad luck and my crazy ramp+churn, he simply couldn’t keep up. I won with a 28-damage attack into an empty board (with both Batman dice, buffed by my sidekicks).
3-0
Game 4:
For my final match,time to face off against Hulk + Immortals. He went for Green Devil Mask early (smart), but for the rest of the game, he could hardly buy or field any characters whatsoever. He was very unlucky. I took advantage. Even with a limited number of characters, I used my Dreadnaught to get his sidekicks off the board and hit from 3 to 5 damage per attack. I wore him down pretty quick considering, and he never had the time to buy his big bruisers. I won.
4-0
Post-Mortem:
-The Spot + Bloat-Drone combo gives me some serious ramp and churn. Having this on hand can completely change how you strategize, and allows you to “jump” ahead in how quickly you can set things up (or it can crash and burn seeing as you don’t get a reroll this ramp). All you need is to purchase a 2-cost and field some sidekicks to get it started. Watch out for Tabaxi Rogue though!
-One difficulty with the team is that I had too much ramp and churn; I would run out of dice to roll, or to use with Instant War. It’s a good problem to have, but maybe I won’t use this ramp engine when using Instant War in the future.
-The Dreadnaught is disgustingly good, but making good use of him means making your team vulnerable to Green Devil Mask. Be aware of the threat of that darn mask if you’re planning on making good use of this guy.
-To be clear: this team is not “optimized” to be the most evil it can be. You could make Instant War worse if you have Green Devil Mask active and reroll your opponent’s board thanks to their newly added sidekicks. I wanted people to still be friends with me after the evening, though, so I held off on that. Maybe I will tackle this idea in a more competitive context.
Overall, this isn’t a team I would repeat as is. But I fully expect parts of this team will inspire many, many other teams in the future.