This week, with Canadian Nationals coming quickly, I continue to experiment with teams at the fringes of the meta, just on the cusp of greatness. Time for Fixit to get a shot…no, not that Fixit.
Join The Club
The Team: Let’s blow this joint.
The core combo has been around for a while, but in case you’ve never seen it: have UC Fixit active, use Hellfire Club, KO everything, and Fixit gets huge. Attack, win.
To take this from fun casual build to serious competitive play, there are two major challenges to address: Scarlet Witch and Static Field/Kate Bishop. To counter the Witch, I decided to use Acererak. To counter Static Field/Kate Bishop, though, it gets a bit more tricky. Wrecker’s the obvious choice, but he gets KO’d by Hellfire Club. Blackbird can shut down Static Field…but my opponent can shut down Blackbird. The solution is to use both. Have Wrecker active, so my opponent can’t shut down Blackbird (since neither player can use it at that point). Then, use Hellfire with Fixit active, KO Wrecker, and use the now-freed Blackbird to shut down Static Field. Not a simple play, but it can work. As an added bonus, Wrecker and Blackbird can help shut down some burn-based win conditions like Iceman and Atom.
The rest of the team is various forms of utility: Kree Captain is there for the discount, Shriek is there for added control, Res is there for ramp and churn, and Haymaker is there so that the global can guarantee that Fixit is the biggest guy around. As for Batiri, he’s there as a cheap fist character to help me get Fixit. The fact that he has Swarm is intended to help with ramp when Wrecker is on the board.
And with that said, on to the games!
Game 1:
I started off my evening against the sidekick rush team from last week. The fact that he relies on having lots of sidekicks on the board helped my strategy. I fended off his Dum Dum Dugans with my Batiris and some sidekicks while setting up Fixit and Hellfire. When Fixit and Hellfire rolled, both sides of the board emptied and Fixit got humongous (28A/27D, I think?). I won.
1-0
Game 2:
I continued against a Yuan-ti+Boom Boom+Parasite+cheap actions build. His team has sneaky damage. As I was setting up my strategy, he brought me down from 17 to 1(!) life in one turn. Thankfully, the Fixit +Hellfire combo rolled for me immediately after, and I won, barely.
2-0
Game 3:
And now, it’s Fixit vs Fixit! In a matchup of big dudes, I had the more flexible strategy, but he had the faster one. He got GDM on the board to stop me from fielding a large number of characters, hoping to slow down my Fixit. Nice try, but what neither of us accounted for is that when I finally rolled Hellfire, I also rolled 2 other characters. So Hellfire KO’d 3 characters on his end, and 2 on my side (Fixit: 16A), and followed that up by fielding 2 characters (Wrecker and Batiri), dealing a total well above 20 damage. I won.
3-0
Game 4:
And now, an interesting Atom build that relies on Boom Boom as a secondary strategy/removal option. This game was unfortunately decided on bad luck for my opponent; he did not get to roll fists…pretty much all game. And those times where he could’ve gotten Atom, he chose to get things to try to slow me down. It didn’t work. Fixit hit the field, and I hit the ground running. This was so weird though; I didn’t actually get to use Hellfire Club this game. Instead, his characters were KO’d one turn, and he could not get a character back on the field, so I ended up with 2 Fixit dice on the field and swung in for too much damage. I won.
4-0
Game 5
Yes, we even got to do 5 games tonight. I finished off the evening against Iceman. This game, I just trolled my opponent hard. 3 words: Turn two Wrecker. It took a bit longer for him to hit the field (which gave me time to buy Fixit). This forced me to use Blackbird to temporarily hold Iceman back. The second Wrecker hit the field, though, he locked my opponent down hard. She tried to get Shriek out to shut down Wrecker, but with no globals to help with ramp and bag fixing, she simply could not get Shriek in time. Hellfire rolled with Fixit on the board, and everything died, making Fixit huge. I won.
5-0
Post-Mortem:
-Fixit and Hellfire is a combo that the current meta is not really prepared for. It hits hard, and can be really sneaky. A level 3 Fixit just needs 6 KO’d characters from Hellfire Club to go up to 20A.
-This team made me a bit more appreciative of the Blackbird (I admit that I have expressed some doubt about its competitive effectiveness in the past). This team probably has the most logical use of it in Modern. And honestly, it’s a good tool to slow down fast burn teams if Wrecker doesn’t roll.
-Batiri was nice to use because it was a cheap fist character, but I rarely dealt damage with him. The Swarm was nice ramp to have with Wrecker active, but that’s all he really did. Could that be a flex spot? Perhaps.
-Because some of the cards can be anti-synergistic, you really have to run this team carefully. Fielding Wrecker at the wrong time can really hurt me. It didn’t tonight, though.
So overall, I am starting to think that UC Fixit might just be better than the common Fixit in this meta. With the increasing importance of global hate, being able to run global hate on a Fixit team without it hurting my strategy (and in fact helping it) means this, surprisingly, could be a dark horse. This, alongside my Boom Boom team from last week, is certainly getting a second look as I finish preparing for Nats.