Red Dragon and Other Monsters

We tried to make it a single affiliation event this week.  Between low turnout and sub-par communication, it didn’t really turn out that way.

What Did You Play?

The Team:  Monsters.

I did bring a single affiliation team, with that affiliation being Monsters.  It is the affiliation with the largest card pool (excepting Villains, which has so many more options than any other affiliation it is pretty much outright banned or heavily restricted in these single affiliation events, as it was here.)

The plan was to base the team around common Yuan-Ti Pureblood, and her ability to become unblockable when I used an action die.

So I decided to go with Holy Avenger and Improvised Weapon as my Basic Actions.

Holy Avenger is a Gear BAC, so it’s useless to anyone who isn’t running D & D characters.  And it’s almost unheard of for players to run D & D non-Monster affiliations (e.g. Harpers, Emerald Enclave) in these single affiliation events.  Improvised Weapon should either let me Prep a die, or increase the damage from an unblockable Yuan-Ti.

For ramp I decided to go old school with Swarm Kobolds.  I alluded above to the unlikelihood of seeing non-Monster D & D affiliations.  That means no Adventurers,  That, in turn, means the Achilles heel of Kobold Swarm – Kobolds must attack if the opponent has an active Adventurer – is unlikely to be an issue.

To make the Swarm more effective, I included the Queen Grabstab that allows you to draw 2 dice rather than 1 when Swarm is triggered.

The plan was to increase Yuan-Ti’s hitting power by including a Wererat that would give her +1A/+1D.  That didn’t quite work out, for reasons I’ll discuss in the Post-Mortem.

The next to last character on the team was Rare Fenthaza.  Attune doesn’t hurt, but the real reason is her buffing all my characters whenever I use an action die.

The actual last character on the team was Red Dragon (Golden Age).  I put him on the team primarily for the global.  I ended up buying the character a lot more than I’d planned to.

So the plan was get Fenthaza and Wererat out, then put a Holy Avenger die on a L2 or L3 Yuan-Ti Pureblood giving it a total 8A.  (3 from the die, 3 from Holy Avenger, 1 from Fenthaza because putting the die on Yuan-Ti (from the Reserve Pool) counts as ‘using’ an Action Die and Wererat would give her +1A.  Do that twice, and throw in a few extra damage points from Attune, other Yuan-Ti dice (without Holy Avenger) going unblocked or using Improvised Weapon, and that’s 20.

Of course, that not how things actually went when we played the games.  And I have nobody to blame for that but myself.

Game 1

This was against our group’s resident youngster, who was running her typical mishmash of a team.  Mindless Ones, Clea, Firestar.  She was running Doom Lance as one of her BACs but wasn’t running any characters that synergized with it.

She put up several Sidekicks early on.  I got a Yuan-Ti out, and put a Holy Avenger on it, intending to send it through unblocked for 6 damage – except that is the point where I noticed I’d brought the wrong Yuan-Ti card.  I’d put out the Uncommon (which can’t be targeted by Action Dice or Global Abilities) instead of the common.

She had only Sidekicks in her Field Zone, so I tried to pivot to Giant Spider, only my Giant Spider dice refused to roll character faces.

She eventually got some beefy characters into her field and after a while she seemed to get bored and decided to launch an impulsive attack.  She has a bit of an unfortunate wont to do that (unfortunate from her perspective, at least).  Her attack allowed me to wipe her field while I was blocking (not the first time I’ve done that in games against her).

I romped through her empty field on my next turn for the win.

1-0

Game 2:

Clayface, Parallax, Golden Age PXG, 1-cost Morphing Jars, Miri Riam and the Intimidate Yellow Power Ring.

He used his globals and his Morphing Jars to ramp like crazy.  He managed to get 7 or 8 non-Sidekick dice into his field.  None of them were very beefy, however, so despite his wall having the advantage in numbers, it wasn’t big enough to get him to lethal, so he never opted to attack.  Then, he bought a Yellow Lantern Ring and my prospects of surviving the next turn dimmed considerably.

I wound up with double digit energy on my next turn, thanks to the Kobold-Queen Grabstab combo.  I bought my single Red Dragon die, Clayfaced it into my Reserve Pool, and then used Parallax (it took two tries) to roll it onto a character face.  Fortunately, it was Level 1, so I still had enough energy to field it.

Since I was running the Uncommon Red Dragon from BFF, I could pay 2 life instead of 2 energy to use his Breath Weapon 2 and I did so – which wiped my opponent’s field.  Attacking with all my characters brought him down to 1 life.

Which might have been frustrating, had I not remembered who my opponent was – the Prince of Bag Burn.  This is a player who ramps as hard as possible whenever he can, and does not hesitate to inflict bag burn on himself in the process.

He’d gone all out on PXG when I passed him priority.  Which meant he only had three dice to draw on his turn, giving me the victory.  (Technically, I could have asked him what he had in his bag while it was still my turn, but since I thought my options of surviving his next turn were negligible if he made it to his Attack Step, I didn’t see the point.)

I won’t lie – it was immensely satisfying to use his globals as the tools of his demise.

2-0

Game 3:

This was against Jourdo’s [REDACTED] team.  He was actually running a mono-affiliation team, although I’m not going to specify which affiliation he was using.  We are going to see if we can actually get a true single affiliation event next week.  Jourdo is considering re-visiting the same team he brought this week, and doesn’t want to give away all his secrets to this week’s no-shows (most of the reason he didn’t post this week).  So I will respect his wishes.

I will just say I won the matchup, and, once again, Red Dragon and Breath Weapon were the main reasons why.

3-0

Post-Mortem:

Well, the big star on the night was Red Dragon.  Somewhat unexpectedly, because it really only went on the team for the global.  But when you forget your intended win con at home, you have to improvise, and Red Dragon proved very useful.

Queen Grabstab and Kobold Swarm was awesome, at least when I went for it early.  Drawing 10 dice on a turn is fantastic.  Of course, the more action dice (and cheap characters) I bought, the longer it took my Swarm dice to cycle.  It might work even better (over the long term) on a team with more beefy, expensive characters to purchase.

Giant Spider didn’t do a whole lot for me on the night, but that was mostly due to my inability to roll character faces with those dice.

The primary intended purpose of the Kobold Traps was to trigger Yuan-Ti’s unblockable effect, so when I brought the wrong Yuan-Ti card, the Kobold Traps became mostly a wasted slot.

Fenthaza was useful, but probably would have been more useful if I’d brought the common Yuan-Ti as intended.  Because of that, I ended up using action dice less often than I’d planned for.

Wererat was another case where I brought the wrong version of the character.  I’d intended to bring the Uncommon, which gives +1A/+1D to Evil character dice of purchase cost 3 or less.  Instead, I brought the Rare which instead discounts the fielding cost of Evil character dice of purchase cost 3 or less.  Fielding costs weren’t a big issue, and I didn’t run into Sage or any or her ilk, so Wererat saw little use on the night.

It’s hard to draw a meaningful conclusion about the team, since it’s not the team I intended to play.  The mix-ups with the Yuan-Ti Pureblood and Wererat cards turned it into something quite different from what I originally had in mind.

I somehow scraped three victories and an undefeated night out of this, but that’s not something I’m going to be able to do consistently with these 10 cards, or any night I mislay my primary win condition.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Rolling!

Son of L