King Of The Ring

As I mentioned in my article last week, we were starting a Legacy League this week, with Golden Age as a starting point. This led me to try a combo that jourdo and I had been discussing for quite a while. What happens when you give Hal Jordan a Lantern Ring? I guess that makes him the…

King Of The Ring

The Team:  This team might be Lantern-ing heads…I’ll see myself out.

Format: Legacy League (starting from Golden Age)

The core combo is pretty straightforward: Use Green Lantern and Lantern Ring together. Both of these result in damage dealt based on the amount of energy in your Reserve Pool. Each card gives your characters a separate ability, so with both active, you deal damage twice per character (so long as you attack with JL characters). Enter The Question. Not only does he work with Green Lantern, but he can also field the Lantern Ring with Gadgeteer! And of course, he’s a Mask-type, the same type as Green Lantern himself. It’s as shenanigan-y as it sounds.

To illustrate how insane this can get: if I have 1 Question, 1 Green Lantern, and Lantern Ring active, with 5 masks in Reserve…I deal 20 damage with 2 characters. Straight up.

So with this strategy, I need masks, by the truckload. With Golden Age being allowed, this meant that I decided to combine Clayface with PXG. This…gets really crazy. You can, with a 2-cost mask, roll 8 dice on turn 2, and from here, getting full ramp is extremely easy. Especially since I also put Billy Club.

The rest of the team is utility: Prismatic Spray is there to deal with pretty much any form of control, Red Dragon’s discount helps me get Lantern Ring and Prismatic Spray more easily. Static Field and Turtle Van both serve to counter any aggro teams (not to mention that Static Field helps me pull my own attackers back after they deal their Lantern Ring/Green Lantern damage).

And with that said, on to the games!

Game 1:

I started off against a Dragons team based around the SR Red Dragon. This was a weird one; for the longest time, neither of us could roll anything. But in my case, I had the setup to recover more easily, with all of the ways I could generate masks. So despite repeated turns of…nothing, I eventually managed to get Lantern Ring on the board. By then, Green Lantern was blanked, but I didn’t need him; just the good old Lantern Ring was sufficient to deal lethal.

1-0

Game 2:

I followed this up with a matchup against Iceman and a bunch of control pieces. Seeing my burn, he focused squarely on his control pieces (SWitch, Shriek, etc). Unfortunately, he had a really hard time rolling masks, meaning he could hardly use PXG. This gave me the opening I needed. He did blank Green Lantern to stop me from combining the two sources of damage, but his Scarlet Witch could not stop my Lantern Ring (thanks to Gadgeteer, it was on the field before he could stop it). So all I needed was to roll a ton of masks. I did, and I won.

2-0

Game 3:

Next up, I was up against a team combining the old unblockable Thanos with Avengers ID Card and Nick Fury Patch (make Thanos an Avenger so he deals double damage). That…could’ve hurt. But for once, my team rolled, with no hiccups. By T4, I had Green Lantern and the Ring, alongside The Question, with 6 masks in my Reserve Pool. I dealt 24 damage with only two character dice and won. Ouch!

3-0

Game 4:

I took a bye here to avoid messing up matchups.

4-0

Game 5:

With everyone running some pretty aggressive teams, we actually did a fifth round tonight. I went up against Fixit. This was another quick one: I got my setup going, with Lantern Ring out T3 (thanks to The Question). By T4, I had Green Lantern too, along with enough energy to deal 16 damage. Thanks to early T3 damage, that was enough for the win.

5-0

Post-Mortem:

-What is there to say? I used Lantern damage on top of Lantern damage, and it is busted. Hilarious, but busted.

-You may wonder: why the UC Red Dragon? Well, I didn’t want to have the SR banned just yet. I wanted to save that for later. Especially if I run my spammy Beholder garbage like some of my locals asked.

-I got pretty lucky overall. While most of my opponents had Scarlet Witch, I either managed to get Lantern Ring through Gadgeteer, or she wouldn’t roll.

-It helped that my opponents also had slightly slower win cons, so I was generally the aggressor. Had I faced faster teams, I might’ve had more trouble.

Overall, this was a good team to play for laughs, but…yeah, don’t do that to your friends. Ok, just once, to troll them. But you may want to wear body armor to your games.