Green Lantern’s Light!

This is a team I’ve been avoiding running for a while, mostly because I wanted to wait for others (running similar teams) to move to something else, and now they have. So say it with me:

In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight, let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power…

Green Lantern’s Light!

Format: Casual Golden Age (Modern recommended)

The Team:  This team is brought to you by the color Green.

With an intro like this, you can imagine who my win condition is. Yep, it’s this guy; Green Lantern, the Lantern Ring on legs. Load up on Justice League characters, load up on energy, and charge in for obscene damage.

For this to work, I need Justice League characters, a bunch of them. I went for Aquaman (to make my characters cheaper), Green Arrow (for removal) and The Question, to have a cheap Justice League character (1-cost with Aquaman!), as well as Gadgeteer shenanigans.

Now, with Gadgeteer available, I decided to throw in a ton of Continuous actions. First up, Target Lock, which I used with The Question previously. Worked pretty well at the time, too. It’s a unique form of control that even gives me a bit of ramp when I’m lucky. I also threw in Green Devil Mask, my least favorite card in Modern, but an undeniably powerful control and removal tool. (plus, with Green Lantern and Green Arrow, why not include another Green card?)

I added a third Continuous action…Bat-signal. Why Bat-Signal? 3 reasons (on top of the fact that it’s Continuous): first, with Aquaman expected to be active more often than not, having extra shields will always be useful for Green Lantern damage. Second, including a 1-cost in your team is always, always good, if only for flexibility. Third, Bat-signal can help me spin up my characters either to make them harder to KO or deal extra combat damage.

As for the rest of the team, I went for globals for utility. First, Clayface; he can help pull dice from Used to get me the energy I need to deal damage or just to ramp to my bigger stuff. Second, Resurrection, for ramp and churn (with Bat-Signal, I shouldn’t have any trouble getting shields, right?).

And last but not least, Kate Bishop. Yep, the new OP. I didn’t care much for using the character, but the global serves for a dirty trick that mask-type Lantern Ring teams used to do. Load up on masks, attack with mask-type characters (here, The Question and Green Lantern), deal damage with Lantern, then I can use some of those masks I saved up to pull my guys back and keep them around for next turn. It’s not a new trick, but it’s still incredibly handy.

With that said, on to the games!

Game 1:

And let’s start off easy…against Dragons + Ring of Winter. Yeesh. My opponent was going for his Gold Dragon ASAP, and due to a bit of a bad luck (lucky for me), he missed out on his Ring of Winter early on. With this bad luck on his end, it gave me the chance to set up copies of The Question, Aquaman, and Green Lantern. My opponent was going all in on dragons, and kept a lean field (which I made leaner by using his Black Widow global; he forgot to save masks to use Kate Bishop). This gave me the chance to set up a big attack where I got exactly 20 damage between Green Lantern’s ability and combat damage. I won.

1-0

Game 2:

I followed that up with a faceoff against a weenie rush of sidekicks, allies, all buffed by my personal favorite Batman (the one that buffs all attacking sidekicks). Unfortunately for him, his team lacked in removal. I started setting up, piece by piece, and thankfully, those pieces became much faster to buy the second Aquaman hit the field. I did discount his Batman though (d’oh!), but thankfully, before his Batman could hit the field, my Lantern did. Between Lantern’s damage, and the masks I’d save to push his stuff back, he couldn’t stop my attacks, and he couldn’t get damage through. It took a little while, but I won.

2-0

Game 3:

Time for…a Green Lantern build? With Aquaman? Oh yes, we’re going there. At first glance, this looked like a mirror match. But my opponent was actually taking a different approach; he used Atlantis: City and Stronghold to keep sending stuff back to his Prep Area. This kept his bag lean and made him roll tons of dice (which is a fantastic idea for this strategy, obviously). This was a clash of philosophies; he had a more aggressive strategy, while I was using control, using Green Devil Mask to force him to keep a lean field, and Target Lock to limit his options. Early on, I even had to attack with Aquaman so that my opponent wouldn’t take advantage of his discount. Eventually, both of us had Aquaman active, which meant 3-cost Green Lanterns with two Clayface globals on the table. Yeah, the game wasn’t going to last long by that point. By the end, I’d worn him down to 13 life, and due to unlucky rolls, he simply didn’t have the chance to set up an attack that would allow him to win. I took my chance on the following turn and swung in for massive Green Lantern damage (4 mask characters, 4 masks in reserve, plus others where I didn’t bother counting because he was already dead). I won.

3-0

Game 4:

For my last game of the night, I went up against a team that mixes Warriors Three and Attune characters. While her team wasn’t super fast, I was doing my best not to be a jerk, so no Green Devil Mask, and limited use of Target Lock (fun fact: attacking with 3 The Question dice, with 2 Target Locks in Used, generally means you’ll get at least one set up, if not both; it’s not a very nice thing to do though). That meant that I took my time, fielded a ton of The Question and Aquaman dice, and eventually got a Green Lantern. The turn he was finally fielded, I had enough characters and energy to charge in for the win.

4-0

Post-Mortem:

-Green Lantern is strong; that should surprise absolutely no one. However, the Justice League affiliation lacks in control cards, forcing me to use outside cards to stop opposing win conditions. Could a build like this one be competitively viable? I think it might be a smidge too slow, and the incoming arrival of a potential 3-cost Bishop (Hope Summers with Bishop on the same team) is going to cause Green Lantern teams some serious headaches. We’ll have to see how the meta evolves.

-Bat-Signal did so much work for me throughout the night. Every single use I could think of was relevant. If you can, always include a 1-cost when running Clayface. Makes the whole team run so much smoother.

-Green Arrow is not bad, but…I dunno, he felt awkward to run. Wrong energy type, bad fielding costs…running Wonder Woman (e.g. Child of Clay) would likely have fit better. I should’ve gone for some action-based removal instead of relying on Green Arrow.

-Was going for The Question ideal for a Green Lantern build? I don’t know. In this kind of build, you definitely want to have a 2-cost JL character (1-cost with Aquaman), and in Modern, that means using either The Question or Hawkgirl. Do you want better stats (Hawkgirl) or Gadgeteer (The Question)? I could see a strong case for both, but put me in The Question’s camp: Gadgeteer was great help tonight.

So overall, I felt dirty running Green Lantern, but I can’t lie; it’s impressive, in that it’s strong but not invincible. It’s a balanced Lantern Ring, and I could see myself going back to this sometime.