How Big Is Yours?

Of course we are talking about Breath Weapon here.  This build was inspired by my most recent opponent in the online Golden Age Two Team Takedown Tournament.  Thank you Blake for reminding me of this little combo.  The idea behind this Team is pretty basic.  Use Cosmic Cube to make Breath Weapon attacks bigger and nastier than they normally are.  So, the core pieces are these guys:

Cosmic Cube is the fuel for the damage.  Red Dragon gives me a big starting Breath Weapon, but the ability gives me an extra use of a Cube.  So up to 5 Cubes for the price of 4.  Not a bad option.  Let’s check out the rest of the build.

What Did You Play?

The Team:  Ultimate Breath Weapon 2.0.

Getting an extra Cube is not bad, but why do this once… when you can do it every single time?

Have you met Doctor Strange?  He has been around with a similar ability in other sets (and I actually used the other version in a different iteration of this build).  This one interested me for a couple of reasons:  1.  He doubles every action used (both yours and your opponents), and 2.  He is not limited to once per turn like the Red Dragon.  The Doctor is key to this working.  Every Cube used now equals 2 Cubes, plus the one extra I can get from Red Dragon.  This has the potential for a OTK if the dice roll correctly.

If I am going with a Dragon-centric Team, of course I am going to include the Ring of Winter.  This was more for the Global than the Ring this time, but the action is still useful.

I decided to focus on some disruption for the next choice:  Wonder Woman – Ambassador of Peace.  PXG has been making a comeback in my local scene and having her out would make that useless for my opponent if they brought it.  It also would put a stop to other character based Globals.  As I chose to go with this, I had to exclude my next choice of the Kree Captain as I wanted to use him for his Global (*KCG) to double up with Ring.  However, the Amazon would prevent this from working for me.

I chose to go with Billy Club and Mjolnir for their fixing Globals and they would not be affected by Wonder Woman.  Having only one slot left, I went for Enchantress to tax actions and Globals further.

For Ramp, I went with Thrown Brick.  I am loving this card, and on this build I can get the benefit from the action as long as Doctor Strange is out no matter who uses it.  My final add was Create Food and Water mostly to use the Global to help move dice through the bag.

With all the pieces in place, let’s see how big I can make it.

Game 1:

This was against a Kree Captain/Villain Team.  Awesome!  I will get to use the Kree Captain Global (*Kijiji Global) in this one.  I bought an early Wonder Woman using the Kree Captain Global (*Captain’s Coupon) to hopefully cause some disruption on his side of the board.  The Ring of Winter combined with the Kree Captain Global (*Cappy McGlobal) got me a Doctor Strange, Enchantress, and Red Dragon.  I had all the pieces in place.  However… I did not roll a single character (including Sidekicks) or action the entire game.  I bought everything I needed… I just did not get a chance to use any of it.  The dice gods were mad at me for some reason today.  Maybe I should not have kicked that puppy on the way in.  Easy win for my opponent as I never got anything in the Field.

0-1

Game 2:

Bye!  I think someone felt bad for me based on my cursed rolls in the first game.

1-1

Game 3:

Red Lanterns… with Kyle to help make them cheaper.  Supergirl was going to be the big beatstick here.  I went for one of his Candlekeeps early and then loaded up on Bricks.  It took a bit of time, but I managed to get Strange and a Dragon out in this game.  I used their abilities to make both Candlekeep and Thrown Brick crazy effective with ramp.  On my opponent’s turn he used two Candlekeeps and a Thrown Brick, so I had all but 3 dice prepped.  This meant on my next turn, I would be drawing all 4 of my Cubes with more energy than I knew what to do with.  Unfortunately, I only managed to roll 2 of them on their action face.  I threw a suped up brick at his Spectre and Doctor Strange magically made another one ping out Kyle.  With the 5 Cubes now in effect (2 rolled, 1 Red Dragon, 2 Doctor Strange), the best I could do with Breath Weapon was 13.

2-1

Post-Mortem:

Let’s pretend Game 1 never happened here.  I have never rolled that bad in my life.  Statistically, I should have gotten at least 1 thing… but no.

When the combo hit… it was great!  This is one of those Teams that makes Cube fun for me.  I love, love, love this Doctor Strange.  The 7 cost will hurt him in seeing a lot of use but with things like the Ring of Winter Global and Kree Captain Global (*Zack Says I Need A Cool Name Global), maybe he will see more play than I expect.

Red Dragon was a good fit for the combo because of the doubling ability.  Really any Dragon could work here though.

Wonder Woman and Enchantress proved unnecessary tonight.  I actually wanted to encourage action use, so the tax was a little counterproductive.  I would drop them out of future versions of this build.  I am not sure how critical control is on this Team.

The energy fixers helped with getting the right energy at the right time.  I would keep them on the Team for sure.

Thrown Brick is still amazing.  It turned into a viable removal option once the ramp was not necessary.  I really like the flexibility of this card.  Candlekeep was actually really good when I had the chance to use it.  I would definitely try this on a future build.  The Red Dragon Global makes getting to it much easier than normal.

I really hate to say this… but this Team could have used Parallax.  That last turn when I missed two Cubes could have been much different with this.  I had more energy than I could spend.  A few hits of the Paracrack would have been good here.  It would also have given some protection against that nasty Switch.

This is one of those “one trick pony” Teams.  It is super fun to run but not very fast.  It has holes in this version, but could be tweaked to something a little more competitive if you wanted to go that route.  Tonight was about the combo though.

In the end, I managed to pull off a Breath Weapon 13 tonight.  I know it can do better though.  Have you run an Ultimate Breath Weapon Team?  What were your pieces?  How big was yours?  Let us know in the comments below!

Thanks for reading!

– jourdo