The event was Golden Age Constructed.
What Did You Play?
The Team: Boom Boom – Ping – Hope.
I ran a pretty simple team this week. Or, at least, a team with a pretty simple core. Take these 3 cards:
,)So the plan is to buy and field Boom Boom, buy and field Hope Summers, using her as a second copy of Boom Boom, use a Ping die to deal five points of damage to my opponent and maybe have it come back next turn (given the Boomerang on the */** faces) to do it again. And, of course, the only thing that would prevent me from buying multiple Ping dice is my opponent buying them first.
One of the biggest potential problems for any burn damage team is Rare Bishop. I decided to include a form of potential removal for Bishop. Bishop only protects the opponent from burn damage, not characters. The extra damage Boom Boom grants action dice can be dealt to characters or players, so I can just deal it to Bishop.
However, that’s only 4 damage and Bishop’s D is 5/6/6. So I’ll need to do 1 or 2 more damage on top of that.
So I included the new 3-cost Forge with Attune as one option. Yuan-Ti Pureblood is the only Attune character who costs less, and Forge has the X-Men affiliation which will help with one of my backup strategies.
For another option I decided to include
I decided to include Namor so I’d have an alternate offensive strategy available. It’s fairly easy to trigger his unblockable ability, and since I was already running so many X-Men team I figured I’d include Teamwork as my second BAC to potentially give him extra punch. That would also give Hope Summers a decent punch if I opted to use her as a copy of Namor.
I threw in the OP Wolverine: Xavier’s School card for the ability to reduce the fielding cost of X-Men character dice by 2.
And finally, I decided to round things out with a couple of the new cards from the X-Force Team Pack:
Psylocke should allow me to field some Sidekicks and thin out my bag to some degree. The Dani Moonstar can potentially allow me to get in a small amount of chip damage on a more or less regular basis.
On to the games.
Game 1:
Infiltrate team with SR Angela, and Cable from the X-Force Team Pack. The first makes his Infiltrate characters unblockable, and when Cable uses Infiltrate he deals an extra damage for each other non-Sidekick that attacked with him. He was also running Hope Summers, which he mostly used as a second Cable.
I got Boom Boom out early, and got a couple of Ping dice into circulation. I mostly used the extra damage from Boom Boom to KO his characters, but he kept rerolling and refielding them.
When he had Angela, Hope and Cable out together that was 7 damage/turn I couldn’t do anything to stop.
0-1
Game 2:
This was against Jourdo’s team where he used Sage to try and make the Corrupt keyword work.
I just stuck with my basic plan – buy Boom Boom and Ping, add Hope Summers as effectively a second copy of Boom Boom, and burn away. I even got a Forge die out to add some Attune damage into the mix.
Jourdo’s team was slower than mine, so this turned out to be a fairly easy win for me.
1-1
Game 3:
This opponent was so rude as to bring both the action dice hating Scarlet Witch AND Rare Bishop to the table. I did manage to get in 4 points of burn damage before his Scarlet Witch made a somewhat belated appearance. He also got out a Hope Summers who was channeling his Bishop at about the same time.
So I tried to switch to Namor, but that proved far too slow. His big offensive weapon was a Doom Lance – Dani Moonstar which wiped my field and did me 12 damage. I wasn’t able to re-roll any characters (admittedly 5 of the 6 dice he KO’d with the combo were Sidekicks) and wasn’t able to re-establish any kind of a field.
Two turns later he was able to send more attackers than I could deal with to finsh me off.
1-2.
Post-Mortem:
Despite the losing record on the night I still think Ping, Boom Boom and Hope Summers can be the core of a very effective team.
But it is a team that needs an alternate win condition as there’s always the possibility of running into a Scarlet Witch or a Rare Bishop (or both). And, it’s fairly clear to me that the one I brought isn’t good enough.
Still, there’s 7 slots (including 1 BAC) available to be used as part of any Plan B, because none of the other 7 cards I included on the team are truly essential. Several of them I only included because I wanted to experiment with them.
Dani Moonstar: Special Arrows is an interesting card with a decent ability, but I think Empathic Illusion Casting is probably a better fit on most teams.
She’s really the only card I can comment on, because the other ones I had been hoping/planning to experiment with I never ended buying any of their dice on the night.
Still, I clearly to have to give some more thought to what the backup plan for this team should be.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rolling!
Son of L