This was an Unlimited Constructed Event. I decided to try running a few cards from the new team packs.
What Did You Play?
The Team: Kree Captain – Danger Room
I decided to see if I could get any use out of Kree Captain – Lost Purpose.
Supplement him with a few Villains and he should be able to get big fast. If there aren’t enough natural Villains around, there’s Rare Danger Room to make them more plentiful. Since he’s a fist, Kree Captain should work well with Upgrade – Proton Cannon.
Next I threw in Batgirl – Shadow of the Bat and one of the new Songbirds for their Intimidate abilities
The meta seems fairly action dice friendly at the moment, so I opted to include some action dice hate in the form of the new Wasp: Love and Loss :
I added in The Outsider and Hulk: Power of Attorney for their buff globals.
Next, came Atlas. I added him primarily for the global, but he’s a beast on Level 3, and his Amplify ability means just because you didn’t roll him on Level 3, doesn’t mean you can’t get him there.
Once he flips, he’s at least a 4-5 and he gives himself and any Thundebolts teammates Overcrush. Which is why the last card on the team was a low cost Thunderbolt
Game 1:
The big hitter on this team was the Thanos who does double Overcrush damage. It was backed up by Uncommon Collector and Uncommon Gorilla Grodd.
With the help of the Kree Captain global, he bought a Thanos early, and I bought an Atlas. That Atlas came out level 2 the first time I drew it, then infallibly came up Level 3 for the rest of the game.
He would attack with Thanos, I would block with Atlas, he would buff Thanos enough that it would KO Atlas. (While not as consistent as Atlas, his Thanos had a tendency to come out at Level 1 where he’s ‘only’ 5-7). He didn’t get any damage through from Thanos the entire game.
The down side of Atlas coming up Level 3 every damn turn (from my perspective) was having to repeatedly pay the 3 energy fielding cost. He was running Golden Age PXG, which meant I was finding myself in a rut of paying Atlas’s fielding cost, saving 1 or 2 masks or question marks to use for PXG, and very rarely was able to buy more characters or action dice.
I was able to get a Songbird and a Kree Captain into circulation, the latter being very helpful on at least one occasion where his Thanos remembered he had a very beefy side.
The game went to turns, but on my last turn he had only a single Gorilla Grodd die in his field – and I managed to draw and roll a Songbird which I was able to use to Intimidate Grodd out of the way. With his field now empty, I had more than enough for lethal.
(NOTE: I only realized, in writing this article that Songbird can only use Intimidate Character dice with a purchase cost of 4 or less, so she should not have been able to Intimidate Grodd. I completely missed this on the night of the event. I believe I would have won regardless, but my bad.)
1-0
Game 2:
Thunderbolts team. He won the toss and made me go first. He was running Candlekeep, and going second allowed him to buy 2 of the 3 dice on it. That proved important, as he was running the two Thunderbolt characters with Attune.
I got Wasp out early, but he was doing twice as much damage as he was taking with each action die. He tagged me with the Ant-Man that becomes unblockable when spun up, but I managed to do some damage of my own (if partly because he decided maintaining his field was more important that avoiding said damage).
The game was still in doubt – until the turn where I had 3 Character dice to roll (along with 4 Sidekick dice and a Candlekeep) and could only land 1 of them on a character face in my Roll and Re-Roll Step. None of the Sidekicks came up on pawn faces either, so I was unable to rebuild my field as much as I had intended (and needed).
On his subsequent turn, he had more attackers than I could cope with, and while he needed to buff a couple of his unblocked Sidekicks to get to lethal, he had the energy to do it.
1-1
Game 3:
Bye.
2-1
Post-Mortem:
When you receive a bye in a 3-round event, you only end up actually playing 2 games. And that’s really not much of a sample size.
Atlas wound up being the star of the night for me, which was not what I intended (or expected) going in.
Kree Captain can get very big, very fast. Remember that its global allows your opponents (as well as you) to get out their high cost characters a little bit faster. I think my opponents made better use of that on the night than I did. If I use Kree Captain again (any version, as the global is on all of them) I’m going to give some serious thought to including something that taxes my opponent’s global usage.
Do you have a favorite card from the new Team Packs? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Rolling!
-Son of L