We’re well into Round 4 of the local Achievement League, but we haven’t yet listed the challenges in use this round. Time to correct that.
win based challenges
- Win a game when you have less than 5 life remaining
- Win a game through non-combat damage only without using any SRs, R Cube or Vicious Struggle
- Win a game using only cards with blank text boxes without using the Team Up BAC
build challenges
- Create a team using only female characters
- Create a team that has only two characters (you may include non-basic actions)
- Create a team from a single set only
- Create a team consisting of only Super Rare cards
- Create a team using only Organized Play cards (alt art cards are permitted)
- Create a team where all of your dice share a single colour
- Create a team with no Modern legal cards
- Create a single affiliation team using only Brotherhood
- Create a team using only unaffiliated characters
- Create a team using only characters with purchase cost of 6 or higher without using (Golden Age) PXG, Collector or Limited Wish
- All cards from the same family of titles (Batman and his Villains, X-men and related characters, etc.)
- No cards that affect your opponent directly (blanking, direct damage, rerolling, KOing, etc.)
- All cards, excepting BACs, have different purchase costs
- No cards with the letter “A” in the title, including Basic Actions
- No cards with more than one vowel in the title. (The vowel may repeat – Batman is OK, Batgirl is not.)
gameplay challenges
- Purchase all of your dice. (Must have a 20 dice team. No fabrication allowed.)
- All 10 cards must have a global ability. You must use each global at least once.
- Gain 20 life in a single game.
- Reduce you opponent to exactly 1 life remaining
- Defeat you opponent without doing any extra damage. (If they have 6 life, you can’t do 7 damage.)
- Purchase no more than one die from each card. All cards must have more than one die.
- Never field a character that is above Level 1.
- Never field any non-Sidekick characters on their Level 1 faces.
- Reroll all dice that roll double energy
- Field no more than one die per turn
- Have three copies of a single character in the field, each on a different level.
- Have 8 different non-Sidekick dice in your Field Zone
- Have all 8 of your Sidekick dice in your field at the same time
character specific challenges
One card from each set was chosen at random. Players get points for using these cards as meaningful parts of their teams. The cards chosen were:
- AvX – Green Goblin: Norman Osborn (R)
- UXM – Spider-Man: Hero for Hire (C)
- AoU – Wonder Man: Simon Williams (C)
- ASM – Gwen Stacy: Public Menace (C)
- Civil War – Venom: Spidery (C)
- Doctor Strange – Doctor Strange: Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth (C)
- Deadpool – Lady Deadpool: Stab With the Pointy End (U)
- Iron Man & War Machine – Hulkbuster Iron Man: Model 36 (C)
- The Defenders – Jessica Jones: Ladies Night (C)
- Maximum Carnage – Doppelganger: Living Fractal (C)
- GOTG – Ricochet: Loner (U)
- XFC – Jubilee: Life on the Streets (C)
- The Mighty Thor – Sif: Fairest of the Fair (R)
- Justice League – Zatanna: Actual Magician (C)
- WoL – Scarecrow: Dr. Jonathan Crane (C)
- World’s Finest – Bizarro: Me Am #1 (R)
- GATF – Amanda Waller: The Wall (U)
- Batman – Batarang: What Goes Around Comes Around (C)
- Superman/Wonder Woman – Jimmy Olsen: Seeing is Believing (C)
- YGO – Sangan: Clawed Fiend (C)
- BFF – Drow Assassin: Lesser Humanoid (C)
- FUS – Clay Golem: Paragon Construct (R)
- ToA – The Soulmonger: Ungodly Necromantic Device (SR)
- TMNT – Mousers: Rat Eradicatar (C)
- HHS – Slash: Never Liked the Name Spike (C)
All of the above challenges are on a sliding scale – the more players who complete them over the course of the round, the fewer points you receive, so you’ll get 10 points for completing a challenge no one else does, and possibly only a single point if nine other players also complete challenge.
Players also receive a flat 10 points for each week they bring a Modern Legal team. Finally, there is the Mr. Fixit challenge – 10 points goes to the player who reaches the highest total attack with Mr. Fixit. (Swapping his attack with an infinite damge Giganta was banned, in case you were wondering.)
What Did You Play?
The Team: Cap and Falcon
(You don’t really need to click the link. I already have an image of every card used on the team in the article.)
Running a team with the above two cards has been something I’ve wanted to try for a while. If I ran such a team in the Achievement League and didn’t add any other characters I checked the ‘only two characters’ and ‘same family of titles’ boxes and was even able to add the 2-cost Vibranium Shield from Civil War and check the ‘all cards having different purchase costs’ box.
For BACs, I went with The Front Line to make my unblocked Sidekicks more dangerous, and Rally!
And that was it. After Vibranium Shield, there aren’t really any non-basic actions that would fall under the same family of titles umbrella with Cap and Falcon, so I chose to run with a minimalist team.
How did it work?
Game 1:
Bye.
1-0
Game 2:
Mixed bag, mostly because this opponent had gone for the ‘only characters with purchase cost 6 or more’ challenge. He was using a combination of the Candlekeep Basic Action and the Resurrection global to try and get to his characters.
I bought Falcon and The Front Line. He bought Candlekeep and Captain America – Sentinel of Liberty to buff his Sidekicks and make mine more expensive to field. I think he would have preferred to buy his Bahamut with Overcrush and Weapon 3, but a Sidekick die that came up on the character face at the wrong time meant he didn’t have the energy, so he settled on Cap.
He whiffed rolling his Cap the first time it came around while when my Front Line came around, I attacked with Falcon and two Sidekicks. He let Falcon through for a total of 12 damage (it should have been 15, but for some reason, we forgot to include the +3A Falcon should have gotten from The Front Line when my opponent opted to let him through).
Anyhow I got Falcon back out and The Front Line came back around before he got his Cap out, allowing me to hit for lethal.
Also, since the only non-Sidekick I fielded Falcon (I never even bought Cap this game) and it was never on Level 1, that was a gameplay challenge I got to check off.
2-0
Game 3:
Another two character team (C Morphing Jar and SR Multiple Man) with a bunch of actions including R Lantern Ring and C Green Devil Mask. The problem for me was he’d brought Blink – Transmutation as one of his BACs
I wound up with 5 energy on Turn 2. I opted to buy The Front Line at that point, instead of Falcon. Then I couldn’t seem to roll a fist (or wild) for the next half-dozen turns, meaning I couldn’t buy Falcon until much later than I’d intended.
Once I bought Falcon and got him into my bag, three of the first four dice that came out of it were two The Front Line dice and Captain America – not exactly the draw order I was hoping for.
My opponent couldn’t seem to land his Lantern Ring on the action face, so I managed to survive for a few more turns.
We eventually reached a point where I had Falcon and five Sidekicks in the field and had rolled The Front Line. He had one mask in his Reserve Pool, and, to make things interesting, a Green Devil Mask die in his Prep Area.
If I attacked with everything, he could block Falcon and distract one Sidekick, leaving me with only 1 Sidekick and possibly Falcon to block with. I decided to attack with Falcon and only 3 of my 5 Sidekicks.
Maybe I should have attacked with 1 more Sidkick, since it meant I had 3 Sidekicks and Falcon in my field when his Green Devil Mask came out. Somehow Falcon and 2 of the 3 Sidekicks survived the reroll, buying me another turn.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do anything with said turn, and since my opponent had finally managed to get a Lantern Ring out, on his next turn he got all the masks he needed for lethal.
2-1
Post-Mortem:
This was a fun team to play. The global was part of the reason I was using the given Captain America card, but I didn’t end up buying the actual die as much as I’d expected going in. The Front Line, even with its higher purchase cost proved more useful because it gave a bigger buff. Rally! proved to be not such a great choice – If you’re fielding a lot of Sidekicks you’re running a lean bag, and that meant I kept drawing Rally! on bag refill turns, when I had no Sidekick dice in my Used Pile.. If I run this team again, I’ll have to give some thought to replacing it.
What cards would you use to make a two-character team? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for reading, and happy rolling!
-Son of L