Format: Legacy League
Week 2 of our legacy league. Week 1 resulted in Ring of Winter and a bunch of dragons getting the ban hammer. I could’ve re-used my team, but decided against it. Why not go back to an old favorite? Time to get my opponents to…
Confront Jocasta
The Team: This team’s no Joke(asta)
The core of this team relies on SR Jocasta; if she takes damage, my opponent gets hurt instead. She’s a classic, and one that I used to have a lot of fun with.
To make the most of her, though, she needs to be hurt my something. As a damage source, I decided to use Confront The Mighty; I can hurt my opponent and do some nasty removal all at once. Which meant I just had to put another card in for laughs…
Yeah, I guess they ran out of art there.
How do I make Giant Man fit in this strategy though? His attack stats are pretty good at higher levels. If I give those stats to my opponent, then using Confront The Mighty can deal some big damage. Enter Transfer Power’s global (also found on Splinter’s Teachings), which gives me just what I need. Swap Giant Man’s attack with an opposing character, use Confront to have Jocasta attack whoever has Giant Man’s stats, and deal a truckload of pain.
But come on, I’m dealing 7 to my opponent at most with this strategy. Can’t I make this more crazy somehow? Well, I decided to take a page out of jourdo’s book and add SP//DR. Jocasta taking double damage and redirecting that to my opponent? Yes please!
As for the rest of the team, I added Giganta in order to get Giant Man to his level 3 side more reliably. Constantine returns as my main control piece, and Chalkboard and Blue-Eyes serve for ramp.
This led me to add Beholder as a secondary win condition (just field and attack attack attack) and ramp engine. Field Beholder, do Blue-Eyes + Chalkboard for free, buy a 4-cost for 2 energy (Beholder, Jocasta or SP//DR) and put it in Prep immediately. If you’ve never tried that, it gets out of control pretty quick; it’s not the first time I’ve tried this, and it’s served me well before. Plus, Beholder’s stats and his fielding costs are fantastic.
With that said, on to the games!
Game 1:
I started off against an interesting X-men team relying on C Jubilee and Staff of the Forgotten One to clear all of my characters. This game, I got lucky; he had Bishop, which could’ve ruined my strategy, but he couldn’t get the energy needed to purchase him. It took a bit of time to set up, and SP//DR never hit the board, so I had to rely on multiple smaller hits. Beholder helped quite a bit, both as a ramp tool and a battering ram, forcing my opponent to keep re-fielding his X-men. I wore down my opponent by attacking with Beholder and using Confront The Mighty with Jocasta, and I won fairly quickly by relying on both sources of damage.
1-0
Game 2:
I went up against a Warriors Three team for this one. Madame Masque was around, so Beholder was not really an option. Seeing as my opponent relied on more expensive characters, I had ample time to get Jocasta and SP//DR…and then my second Jocasta…and then neither of them would roll, so I bought my Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Yes, seriously. I would’ve gotten run over against a faster team, but I did get to roll a Jocasta along with Confront the Mighty, with SP//DR active, and then I managed to deal 18(!) damage with the combo, after which I attacked with all of my characters to deal the remaining damage.
2-0
Game 3:
For the final match of the night, I went up against action craziness: Boom Boom, Morph, Wasp, Thrown Brick, Raised Shields…yeesh, this can get out of control in a hurry. Or rather, it would’ve. This is where Control The Mighty earned its keep as a removal tool. I used Confront to get threats off the field, and Constantine to neutralize these threats on the following turns. While my opponent had Shriek, it was not easy to decide what to blank: do you go after Jocasta and neutralize my damage? Or do you blank Constantine and deal with my control? Or Beholder and stop my ramp? Tough choices all around. It was also hard to choose what I should blank with Hellblazer, but he purchased so many Morph dice that choosing anything else would’ve been silly at this point. In the end, a couple of big Jocasta hits wore him down pretty bad, and he was stuck in a no-win situation (he could blank Jocasta and just face losing the next turn due to me rolling 2 Confronts, or he could blank my Hellblazer to free Morph, and then not deal enough damage to win…and lose next turn anyway). I won. Fascinating game though.
3-0
Post-Mortem:
-Jocasta with Confront is awesome, especially with the Transfer Power global. Getting to SP//DR was generally not a very effective strategy though. It only worked when the pace slowed down to a crawl.
-Beholder, as expected, was an awesome secondary strategy, a great source of ramp, and a terrific battering ram.
-Giant Man was unnecessary; Beholder had almost as much attack, and far more utility. It was worth it for the laughs though.
This is definitely a build that could be revisited, if only to add more control (Shriek and/or Dwiz would’ve helped, especially to deal with SWitch, who could’ve been a real pain). I’m glad that I won, but sad that I got so many awesome cards banned in one go. Back to the drawing board!