Welcome to Rules School. A series of articles that focuses on some of the intricacies found within the rules of Dice Masters. Everyone from new players, to long time veterans, can find themselves in a confusing situation when certain game states come up. Our hope with this feature is to clear up some of these situations and help your games go as smoothly as possible.
Do you have a question about how a certain part of the game works? Something you would like to see covered in a future article? We would be happy to help you out. Send your questions to RulesSchool@dm-north.com.
Onto today’s lesson…
Overcrush 201
This lesson comes from a comment from our most recent Keyword Korner video. PeterVDV asked about including some more examples of how blockers could be removed to get the most out of Overcrush. As the point of Keyword Korner is to introduce the Dice Masters Keywords to newer players, I thought this article would be a better spot for the more advanced uses of Overcrush. For those who want to see the original video for reference, please take a look at it below.
So today, we are not looking at your standard vanilla Overcrush. We want to look at some of the ways that you can maximize the benefit that Overcrush can give you. We’ll break things up to shenanigans that can be done with characters with built-in Overcrush, situations where your characters gain Overcrush, as well as sneaky ways to get the damage around the blocking character dice.
Let’s start things off with working with characters with Overcrush built into it.
Chapter 1: Timely Buffs
This is a pretty basic combat trick in Dice Masters, but one that we will mention regardless. You wait until your Opponent has declared their Blockers and choose to assign a combat buff to give you the most damage. The easiest way to accomplish this is with the use of a Global Ability like those found on cards like Raised Shields or Anger Issues.
Example:
Jason has delared his level 1 and 3 Becky Lynch dice. He has enough Fist energy in Reserve to buff the attack if needed by a couple of points.
Justin has two Blockers (and 5 life remaining), a level 3 Blob with 8 defense and a lone Sidekick.
Justin cannot take the 8 damage and uses Blob to negate the level 3 Becky. Not being able to take the full damage from the remaining Becky, Justin throws his Sidekick in front of the Big Red Train. With the remaining fist energy, Jason chooses to buff the smaller Becky which is enough damage now to give Jason the victory over Justin.
This is a common trick done without Overcrush as well. Any time you can force your Opponent to make a choice before you need to assign buffs will almost always be in your favour. A newer Keyword that pairs well with this strategy is Tag Out, where you can buff characters stats after Blockers have been declared.
I guess it would not be a complete lesson without bringing up a certain bit or royalty from the WWE Universe. Think of this like a mega-buff for characters with Overcrush. The Jerry Lawler Global is probably the best buff in Modern for these types of characters to get in huge damage. The trick with this one is to find a way to force your Opponent to block.
If only there was a good way to do that…
Chapter 2: Assigning Overcrush
This almost falls into the same category as above, but I feel it deserves its own section. Mostly because I see this happen with newer players all the time. When using something like Anger Issues or Raised Shields Basic Actions that grant Overcrush to character dice, the timing of the use becomes important. You can use the Basic Action in the Main Step to give your big characters Overcrush… OR… as above, you can wait until your Opponenet has declared Blockers in order for you to get the best bang for your buck.
Example:
François has enough blockers to cover all of these characters. Without Overcrush, no combat damage will occur.
Knowing that he can give two of his characters Overcrush, Doug decided to wait to use Raised Shields and play proceeds to the Attack Step. Doug declares all of his dice as attackers.
François now faces the decision on how to divide up his Blockers. Seeing Becky as the biggest threat, he stacks up 9 defense infront of her. Having only Sidekicks left, François decides to place one blocking both Drax and Doug’s Sidekick.
Doug now decides to use Raised Shields and apply the Overcrush. Since giving the ability to Becky will result in no benefit, Doug decided to apply it to the Sidekick and Drax. Since both of these characters are blocked by Sidekicks, a total of 3 Overcrush damage will do through here.
It is always better to wait and see what your Opponent does in these situations when you are going to give your characters some type of an ability. If you are not a fan of Basic Actions for this purpose, you could head over to the spoiler pages on Britrollersix and DM United to see a certain sinister looking Mister who can accomplish this at Global speed.
Chapter 3: Blocker Manipulation
This is a broad category of shenanigans, but all fall under doing something to take Blockers (or at least your Opponent’s choice of Blockers) out of the equation. This section might be the closest to what Peter was asking on the YouTube comment. We’ll look at a couple different examples of this.
There are many ways to control how your Opponent is able to block. From something as simple as a Force Block Global to an action that allows you to assign Blockers.
Booker T, Ringside Announcer can cover both of these. The built in Global can force one of your Opponent’s characters to block your Overcrush character in order to increase the chances of damage actually going through. More importantly for controlling HOW the Blockers are declared is the actual action itself. With this action, you can assign the Blockers and choose to put the dice with weaker defensive stats in front of your Overcrush character dice.
What if we want to focus on the “removed for other reasons” aspect of Overcrush? We are not talking about the direct combat damage here. We want to somehow remove the character before combat damage occurs.
Example:
Scott swings in with Deadpool and hopes for the best. Unfortunately, Poison Ivy’s ability will prevent all of Deadpool’s damage from going through… even though he has Overcrush. John blocks with Ivy as he cannot take the damage and knows that no Overcrush goes through.
However… Scott held back two fist in order to help him out. He makes use of the Global Ability on Deadpool to deal enough damage to Poison Ivy to knock her out. This removed Ivy from the Attack Zone, but she already blocked Deadpool. This means that Deadpool’s full attack will go through AND Deadpool will remain in the Attack Zone to be able to deal his damage again next turn.
Remember the old adage… Once blocked, always blocked. Even though there was no blocker remaining before the combat damage is sorted out, because there was a Blocker the full Overcrush damage will trigger in this case.
We wre going to dive into the Golden Age of Dice Masters to see the grand daddy of this effect.
Ultron Drone will accomplish the same effect as above but without the need of the Deadpool Global. The only thing you need here is a way to force opposing character to Block. Any character that blocks Ultron Drone is immediately captured and removed from play. Again, they were declared as Blockers and if you can give Ultron Drone Overcrush, all of the damage will go through.
While there is no real Modern equivalent of this card at the moment, there are other ways to make Blockers disappear. If you can time it right, The Collector could bring in something with Intimidate to remove the Blocker (assuming there is a sole Blocker) to allow the Overcrush to fully trigger.
Chapter 4: Surprise Grodd
I had to include this one as it is a personal favourite. This category would cover any situation where you can sneak in something that gives you Overcrush across the board. The plan here is to bring in this type of character at a point where your Opponent is not expecting it.
My personal method of achieving this was to use Rare Knowhere to bring Grodd out after Blockers were declared to turn my innocent attackers into sudden threats. It takes a lot to set up, but it is a great combo to pull off.
If we want to take Grodd into Modern, there is the Martian Manhunter from Justice. Here you are dependant on your Opponent having a Villain.
The newly released Ebony May (and Hela) have Villain maker Globals. This instantly creates Overcrush across the board at Global speed. There are still ways to sneak the Martian onto the Field, but this requires a little more work.
There are a few other combos that result in the same thing. The key to all of them is springing the Overcrush trap when your Opponent is not expecting it.
Summary
While Overcrush is not overly complicated, there are some tricks that make it work better. The key to most of the strategies is to wait until AFTER Blockers are declared before doing what you are going to do.
We hope you found this helpful, and know this is by no means a complete log of all of the shenanigans you can perform with Overcrush. We would love to hear some of your favourite crazy combinations that use Overcrush. Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks for reading!
– jourdo