In all of Dice Masters, there has been one card that has puzzled brewers since it was released. Tonight, I decided to end my IRL Dice Masters for 2019 by taking a swing with this card. For better or for worse, I decided to focus on…
That’s right. We are going to see what the Common Kate Bishop, from The Mighty Thor, can really do. Fair warning though… This is not the infamous MOD KBish build. They are right. The world is not ready for that. Instead, we will see how I can avoid death using KBish.
Let’s be upfront with this card. The best thing this card has going for it is that it is a 2-cost, and every Team needs a 2-cost. Her stats are actually pretty good for her cost. Beyond that though… the ability is utter trash. Life loss is infinitely worse than taking damage. At least with taking damage, you can kind of spin that into something positive. With life loss though? Not so much. This will more or less be a build about trying to neutralize KBish so she does not kill me.
What Did You Play?
The Team: Please don’t kill me Kate.
Really, there was no question as to what the only card to pair with KBish would be. It had to Wonder Woman Reflections. She is really the only way to shut down Kate. It seems kind of silly that I need to get a 5-cost in order to make a 2-cost effectively blank. Well… it is… but that is what we are doing tonight.
In order to make Wonder Woman a little more affordable, I decided to include her boy toy Steve “Irwin” Trevor. Steve is great because if I can get him KO’ed, Wonder Woman now costs 2 energy… AND she is prepped. That seems a little better now.
Now I need a way to KO Steve without depending on my Opponent helping me out. His defensive stats are low across the board, so Unstable Canister became to tool to get Wonder Woman on the cheap. It will also serve as a removal tool.
It looks like I am starting to develop a Bolt dependent Team here, so let’s focus on that. If I will need a good source of Bolts, why not grab a Chwinga or two to help that out. I went with the Rare here to pair with Unstable Canister. I could use the Global to ping out my Chwinga and Prep some more dice. I kind of like the idea of leaving that temptation out for my Opponent too.
With that thought, I decided to throw in one of the new Waterdeep cards. This was a bit of an experiment to see if I could get it fire. Maybe I could tempt them to ping off something of mine and get a 6/6 character out of the deal. There was no real way to guarantee this, but I thought I would see what could happen with just the threat of it being there.
Mjolnir was the next tool put into the toolbox, since it was entirely possible I would be lacking that crucial Bolt at the right time. I can guarantee it as long as I have a Sidekick. Also, the hammer itself is pretty good removal.
So, I’ve got KBish and a bunch of stuff… but no real win condition here. Looking at the tools, I have 3 Affiliations in play. This looks like a job for Team Up… and maybe a couple more Affiliations. I didn’t want to go for some of the more obvious choice to pair up here (eg. Venerable Dreadnaught), so I decided to go with something to minimize the odds of Team Up being used against me.
Meteorite was the girl for the job here. On this side of her card, my Opponent can only attack with two characters at most. On her other side, she had two Affiliations. That is a win-win here. Also, on her lower levels she could be a bit of a Unstable Canister temptation to maybe trigger The Great Drunkard. It is worth a shot at least.
For the final spot, I included Thousand Island Thor for his Global. Team Up is a 4-cost, and I like my discounts. He also fits with my Bolt centric theme.
This is by no means the best use of Team Up, but it seems to be one of the better uses of KBish. Let’s see how it ran.
Game 1:
Up against our Edmontonian Invader. He jumped into the Waterdeep stuff and grabbed a mish-mash of cards from Obscure to Dragons, and also lots of Adventurers to benefit from the death of my Chwingas. I bought Chwingas (probably too many in retrospect), then Irwin, then Wonder Women to load up my Field. Kate joined the party, but only after I had my protection. The Drunkard trap was placed, but never triggered. The problem I had in this game was his Dragon continually wiped my Field as I did not have the defensive stats to survive the Breath Weapon. Wonder Woman was the only thing to effectively survive. His Adventurers were also getting a little big for my liking. After multiple hits from the Dragon’s breath and some fairly buffed Obscure characters, I was done.
0-1
Game 2:
Bye! I am not going to lie… I will take any win with this Team that I can get. I did get to watch a really interesting use of Hope Summers in another game during this time. That is one that I will have to see if I can convince the player to share. It wasn’t the usual stuff you see. I was impressed with it.
1-1
Game 3:
This one was against Green Lantern (Fearless) from the Justice Campaign Box. He had lots of actions to buy and the Rare Xavier’s School to ensure things would be in Used when his ability triggers. I unfortunately had Wonder Woman that shut Green Lantern down hard as he is a “when attacks” ability. This meant that once she hit the Field, the game slowed to a crawl. It was then a matter of building the board until Team Up fired. When it finally did hit, we both had wide Fields but I had enough of a buff on my lower end characters for lethal. Thanks to my Opponent for helping me with the maths on that one. I totally missed it.
2-1
Post-Mortem:
If you have read through this entire article, I sincerely thank you. Common Kate Bishop is really a struggle in every possible way. I would love to have the designers of this card explain what the plan was for it. The best use I could come up with was using other cards to make her blank. That is… not exactly good.
I won’t really break down the rest of the Team here, as we are all pretty familiar with how Team Up works. There are much better ways to use that action than what I did with it.
The only card I want to touch upon was The Great Drunkard. I got it out in every game, but it did not trigger once. The temptation that I had available was not good enough I guess. It think this could be a good one to play around with though. You just need the right bait to get your Opponent to take though. It will definitely make your Opponent think twice about using a Global on your turn when the cost will mean giving you a 6/6 character. This will be worth checking out once Waterdeep hits in 2020.
I will say that this was actually a fun way to end 2019 with my local Dice Masters Crew. It was by no means a high end Team, and was just some stupid fun on the night. I am glad that I gave Common KBish a shot… even though it was an overly complicated mess of a Team. Maybe some day, the Ministry of Dice will reveal the true KBish build to the world. Until that day though, this was the best I could come up with.
Let’s hear your thoughts on the Common Kate Bishop. What do you think was the thought process when designing her card? How can you make use of her on a Team? Let us know in the comments below.
To all the Dice Masters Players out there, I hope you have had a great year rolling and I wish you all the best over the upcoming Holiday Season. See you back in 2020 when the God Catchers and Yawning Portals will be free to unleash upon your Opponents.
Thanks for reading!
– jourdo