It was the Unofficial “Everybody Bring Emma Frost and Beast, backstopped by Cyclops and Hope Summers” night for our local scene. Officially, it was Golden Age Constructed.
What Did You Play?
The Team: Emma Frost’s beastly team.
I wound up playing two mirror matches straight out of the gate. The core common cards on the three teams were these:
Jourdo already covered how these pieces are supposed to work in his own Diamond In the Rough article, and I don’t see a lot of point in recovering that ground.
So what pieces did I surround this core with?
First was Rare Bishop. Mostly because last week I got burned to death by Jubilees, got burned to death by Iceman, and narrowly avoided being burned to death by Tsarinas.
Next came Shriek: Sonic Beam. I was surprised to see many players using Beast, but not so much this Emma Frost card. So I wanted a way to neutralize her.
was included as Sage insurance.
With Cyclops and Hope as Cyclops active I could get my Beasts up to 4A, but that’s still not all that impressive. I opted not to use Teamwork, as X-Men teams have been quite popular in our local scene as of late, and I didn’t want to provide it to my opponents. So I went for this combo:
Each Sunfire die I spin up with either the Energy Field action or global, gives all my characters +1/+1. I do have to get him out, but since I can reduce his effective purchase cost to 2, or have Hope channel him, that didn’t seem unmanageable.
For my other BAC, I went with Ready to Rocket! a Golden Age card from the Age of Ultron set. It can buff two character dice who share an affiliation (or, a single character if that’s all you want or are able to manage). Not as impressive as Teamwork, so less likely to appeal to my opponent and end up being used to my detriment.
So how did the actual games turn out for me?
Game 1:
Against Jourdo’s team (there was a link to his own article above).
I originally named his Mimic with my Shriek. We both built up sizeable walls, mostly because with Emma out on both sides, nobody could attack effectively.
I switched my Hope Summers to channeling Sunfire, and with an Energy Field die coming, fielded a second Shriek, changing her target to Emma.
Jourdo pulled a Mimic immediately after a bag refill and punched out my Emma with him, then attacked with a horde of Teamwork buffed X-Men. Somehow I survived that turn, although my wall was turned to rubble.
I rolled a lot of dice on my next turn, but not that many character faces, and Emma wasn’t one of them, which sank what faint hope I had left.
If he’d taken one more turn to draw Mimic, I think I might have had a shot. C’est la vie.
0-1
Game 2:
The second mirror match. His support pieces were Dani Moonstar and the Blink that deals 1 damage and retreats when blocked. He also had Resurrection, Villainous Pact and one of the XMF Professor X’s with the global for ramp.
He went aggressive early, helped by the fact I couldn’t roll any characters in the early game.
Like the first one, this game was something of a slog, and my brain turned to mush somewhere because I neglected to buy Bishop. That allowed his to use burn damage from Blink and Dani to finish me off before I was able to switch my Shriek’s target to Emma, which most likely would have given me the win.
0-2
Game 3:
This was against the group’s resident youngster, who was running an Emma Frost, just not the one everyone else was running – it was the common from the First Class set.
I try not to go full throttle in these games, so while I did buy Emma I didn’t buy any Beasts until late in the game, and that was mostly because Beast was the only character I could afford to buy at those times.
She got a couple of attacks through before I solidified my wall, getting me down to about 10 life. I eventually wound up with 2 Sunfire dice in my field, Level 1 and Level 2, about 5 or 6 other character dice (including 2 or 3 Sidekicks) and 3 masks in my reserve pool. My opponent had at most 3 characters she was able to block with.
I put one of the Sunfire dice on each side of the Energy Field global teeter-totter and fired it off 3 times, giving all my character dice +3/+3. Which easily got me to lethal.
1-2
Post-Mortem:
The sub-title on the featured Emma Frost card is Mental Mistress. One thing I learned this week is that M4’s (Mental Mistress Mirror Matches) can easily degenerate into long tedious slogs.
She can badly spoke the wheels of certain teams offensively, and generally prevents an opponent from using multiple Sidekicks (or even multiple dice of the same very low cost character) to chump block.
She’s still a very useful card.
I never bought Kree Soldier on the night, largely because I didn’t end up playing against Sage. That was a local meta call, and if I run this team again it’s doubtful I will include him.
I like the Sunfire / Energy Field combo. I had problems getting Sunfire out in the M4’s, but it was amazing when I got it to fire in Game 3. It hadn’t been something I was intentionally working towards – I bought both Sunfire dice mostly because I was trying to NOT buy too many Beast dice too quickly, and then I wound up with both of in the field perfectly set up to be spun back and forth and three masks to spend.
There are a lot of cards with good Awaken abilities – so many that not all have seen their day in the limelight yet. Perhaps Sunfire will get its turn at some point.
Do you know of any overlooked cards that don’t get the love they deserve? Tell us about them in the comments!
Thanks for reading, and Happy Rolling
Son of L