Out of the Shadows…is a series of articles highlighting fun, helpful cards that aren’t getting a lot of attention. They may or may not be meta-worthy, but are definitely worth looking at for casual play.
Wolf Guard Terminator: Chosen Protector
Wolf Guard Terminator: Chosen Protector is a character from the Space Wolves (SW) team pack. There are three versions of this character, and all are three cost bolt characters.
Our Wolf Guard Terminator has two abilities.
The first is the keyword ability, Infiltrate: When a character die with Infiltrate attacks and is not blocked, you may choose to remove that character die from combat (immediately after blockers are declared, before Action dice or Global Abilities may be used). If you do, that character die deals 1 damage to your opponent, and the die remains in your Field Zone.
The second ability is the one that I find more interesting. Reduce all damage to Wolf Guard Terminator from each source to 1.
If you check out his defensive stats, it means that your opponent will need at least two different sources of damage to KO our Wolf Guard.
Why is this special?
Infiltrate is a fun ability to play around with. This card is a particularly fun one, because if your opponent does not block, you can bring our Wolf Guard Terminator back and do one damage from Infiltrate, and if your opponent does block, our Wolf Guard Terminator won’t be KO’d because the damage is reduced to 1. You’ll be able to chip away at your opponent’s life bar, little paper cuts that can add up over the course of your game. Your opponent might start trying to KO your Wolf Guard Terminator, using up valuable resources and taking the focus off of your win con.
But what I really want to talk about is how special this guy is against Overcrush.
Here’s a quick reminder of how Overcrush works.
Overcrush: When attacking, if this character KOs all of its blockers (or they are removed for other reasons), it deals any remaining damage to your opponent.
Have you ever sat down at your gaming table, looked across at your opponent, and saw this Thanos staring back at you? I have, and I can tell you two things. One, it’s much easier to buy Thanos these days than it used to be, with the Ring of Winter, Kree Captain, and Clayface Global Abilities in play; and two, it does not take long for an opponent to Overcrush you to death with this card.
Our Wolf Guard Terminator reduces all damage from each source to 1. This means that unless your opponent has multiple ways to put damage on our Wolf Guard Terminator, no Overcrush damage is coming at you.
I think that we are going to see more and more Overcrush in the coming months, especially with the recent release of Justice and the accompanying team packs, Mystics and Doom Patrol. These releases have brought us the new keyword Strike.
Strike: On the turn you field this, at the end of the Main Step, if you fielded no other character dice this turn, this character die gets +2A, +2D, and Overcrush.
Here’s just a few cards with Strike so you can see what we might be up against.
I see inexpensive dice to buy, easy fielding costs (especially if you are also running this Kree Soldier), and solid attack and defensive stats.
Then there’s this guy, Clayface: Restless. I ran him on a team a couple of weeks ago, and it was easier than I had expected to get all four energy types, opening up the insane ability on the card. I only had access to one sidekick fixer on the team because of the restrictions of the theme build, but with a cost of just 1 to field on level 3, and then adding +5A and Overcrush – things can go south pretty fast when you’re on the receiving end of this guy, unless you have blockers with big defensive stats…or our Wolf Guard Terminator to protect against Overcrush.
What else can our Wolf Guard do?
Wolf Guard Terminator is a fantastic utility character on many teams. He’s inexpensive, his stats are decent, and he’s very affordable to field. He provides protection from Overcrush and is a fun addition to an Infiltrate team.
He really is the Chosen Protector.
How have you used Wolf Guard Terminator on your teams? We’d love to hear from you, let us know your thoughts or questions in the comments below.
Until next time…
-jbouwme