Thanos week/month is officially over and it is time that I move on from the Mad Titan. With the loss of my main man from the past few weeks, I needed something that would still tickle my combo bone.
I decided that I wanted to play around with Doom Lance for this one. However, I didn’t want to go with the predictable “Deadly” combination here.
I wanted to try something else. I dipped into my Golden Bag-O-Tricks and remembered that this Cyclops exists. He has a really interesting ability when he gets blocked. Instead of dividing up his attack to his blockers, he sends his WHOLE attack to each of his blockers. This seems like a really good pairing with something like Doom Lance.
Now, just dealing his attack is great and all, but it would be even better if there was a good way to get this damage through potential walls. If only he had Overcrush…
… And there’s the combo. Field MJ while Cyclops is active at the same time that I roll Doom Lance and KA-BLAM! Lots and lots of Overcrush damage going through my Opponent’s wall.
What Did You Play?
The Team: Cy-Lance.
To make Cyclops even more beefy and assuming he was going to be blocked, I kept Cone of Cold (from last week) as my second BAC . The Global would make this likely a OTK when the combo went off. Now to make it work.
Since I was short on Ramp with my BAC options, I went back to Swarm with the good old 1 cost Kobold. To make this even a little faster, I relapsed into Clayface for his Global. Now I should have lots of fist energy to power Cone of Cold as well as ramping up to Cyclops. Check and check.
I put on Billy Club to help me guarantee masks for MJ. Seeing as she was the actual core to the combo, I wanted to make sure I could get her. Now, this also served as my way to remove MJ from the Field. Since she is an Ally, I could spin her down to a single mask after fielding her to make recycling her much easier. No fabrication or KO mechanic needed.
Supreme Intelligence was on the Team for the Global. Early on, it would help get that first Kobold out a little faster. Later on, it would keep MJ moving from the Used to the Prep as needed. This would help time the Doom Lance and MJ pull on the same turn a whole lot easier.
My final additions were a little bit of a cop out. I included Poison Ivy here to take advantage of her Deadly ability and her defense against non-villains. She was my back-up plan if something happened to Cyclops. Now the problem was if I came up against giant Villains with her. I would not be able to make use of her ability. Ra’s al Ghul mitigated that issue with his Global. I could unmake Villains as need, and should never be short of masks to make that happen.
Let’s see how this ran.
Game 1:
Up against a Hush/Catwoman/Manta core Team. Easy Retaliation that I can’t do much about here. Hopefully I can run a little faster (spoiler… I couldn’t). I got my core pieces purchased, but Cyclops was Shrieked right away. I had to resort to Ivy to help get him back on the board. Even though I had my pieces in place, I missed multiple Doom Lance rolls the first time through. I was down to 2 life before they actually showed back up. When they rolled this time, I managed to clear out his Field and hit him for 11 life loss. However, he rolled back everything and outnumbered me for an easy win.
0-1
Game 2:
An interesting R Collector Team that used Solomon Grundy from Justice to KO my characters. Again, I didn’t have much trouble setting things up with my pieces where I needed them. This time, I had the killshot lined up… and he KO’ed Cyclops with a Collector’ed Grundy. I had forgotten about his ability. Dammit. This was going to be a problem… until I looked at Grundy’s card. He needed two other Villains active in order to do that to me. I just happened to have brought the one in a million card that could solve that problem. Ra’s al Ghul. As soon as I realized this, I set my pieces in motion again to line things up. When the next killshot lined up, I used the Ra’s al Ghul Global to remove his Villain Affiliations prior to passing priority. Now Grundy couldn’t hurt me. I buffed Cyclops to 16 or 18 attack (I don’t actually remember) and he hit 7 low defense characters with that Overcrush. He was long dead before counting the Doom Lance life loss.
1-1
Game 3:
Up against one of the young guns in our store. He loves his Zombies and has an amazing ability to always roll them back. I double checked how Zombie worked with Cyclops and the Overcrush machine should still work. I took the foot off the gas in this one and built things up a little slower. I still managed to get my pieces in place without much issue. This time around, I got Cyclops up to 14A. That was plenty to punch into his wall and end the game.
2-1
Post-Mortem:
This was a fun Team to play. I really enjoyed the interactions between Cyclops, Doom Lance, and Mary Jane. Surprisingly, it was not hard to line up the pieces either.
Ramping up to Cyclops was not an issue, so getting him out was the only challenge. Overall, his dice behaved well tonight. I could have easily subbed in Justice (from Civil War), who essentially has the same ability. However, I preferred Cyclops for the better stats and better fielding costs.
Cone of Cold helped make this a OTK Team. Without the extra damage thanks to the buff, it would have taken a few hits to make it work.
The Clayface Global is the Clayface Global. It is good. I don’t think that I need to elaborate on that.
Kobold-Swarm was great ramp here. Really, any fist based Swarm would have worked here. The 1 cost was really the attraction here.
Like I said earlier, Poison Ivy was my cop out card. I didn’t want to do the Doom Lance Deadly thing, but I needed to in my first game. Deadly is still the most predictable thing to use with Doom Lance.
Billy Club was perfection with MJ. I never had an issue getting her out of the Field thanks to that.
Let’s talk a little more about the Supreme Intelligence Global though. With this, I was almost always rolling an MJ dice (once they were in circulation). I didn’t mind the cost to make sure she was where I needed her. This might be one of the most underrated Globals for low cost character cycling. If you are ever running a Team that makes use of low cost characters/actions, really consider putting this card on your Team. At first, the cost might seem high… but the ability to choose the die to move to your Prep Area is just amazing.
Would I play this again? Probably not. It was incredibly fun, and I encourage you to try it out, but it is a one trick pony. But what a pony it is.
What other (non-Deadly) ways have you made use of Doom Lance? We’d love to see some other Teams that you have come up with. Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
– jourdo