Back when she was spoiled, there’s a card that people almost universally agreed to dislike.
Sometimes, a card looks bad, but you know there’s this one way to make it work. One weird, obtuse and clunky way. So of course I had to try it. Let’s try…
Stretching The Limits
Format: Casual Golden Age (Modern recommended)
The Team: For a team based around Elasti-girl, it’s not very flexible…
Ok, at first glance, she’s bad. All she gets is a defensive buff, and it’s “static”, meaning that you can’t use Bizarro’s global to make that defence into a huge attack…but there’s another way.
Field Fenthaza with Elasti-Girl (and a bunch of other characters) active, and all of a sudden, Elasti-Girl’s attack is equal to that huge defensive buff she got. Sweet!
But now, what else do I put into this? It’s pretty clear that I need to focus on Shield-type characters with high defense, to take advantage of Fenthaza. I chose three characters for this purpose.
Now, where I’m going with this should be pretty clear: Blob is a fantastic control piece, Dreadnaught is bonkers removal, and Nick Fury helps me deal with my increasingly painful fielding costs. After all, with everyone running Parasite, there’s no shortage of Villains in my local meta recently.
With everything I have requiring shields, the next piece is pretty obvious: The Bifrost. This time, I wasn’t planning to do my usual crazy shenanigans with it. I just wanted a sidekick fixer.
With me having easier access to shields, though, this also gives me access to this beauty:
Sure, his global doesn’t help Elasti-Girl, but he can help everyone else. At the very least he’s a fantastic secondary strategy.
At this point I realized I was lacking removal. Sure, Dreadnaught can do a fair bit, but I need some way to deal with my opponent shutting him down. Yellow Lantern Ring was the obvious fit here: it can take out any annoying control piece easily so long as I run characters with it. With Yellow Lantern Ring plus Dreadnaught, I should be able to take out everything my opponent has and just swing in for massive damage.
As for my BACs, I just put in some utility globals that use Shields: Resurrection for ramp and bag control, and Splinter’s Teachings in case I run into annoying giant characters (sure, I will let Superman through…and give him my sidekick’s 1A).
With that said, on to the games!
Game 1:
I started off against a team based around R Pepper Potts and OP Iron Man. Those Overcrushing Peppers can get painful. I went for Elasti-Girl and Dreadnaught early, and started setting up. He was taking a while to set up his win con, which is good: mine was taking a while to come together, piece by piece. Elasti-Girl’s defensive buff was actually handy, as I had multiple high-defence dice, ready to block if I had to deal with a rush of Peppers. Eventually, I got both Fenthaza and Yellow Lantern Ring, rolled them together, and between the Ring and Dreadnaught, my opponent’s field was obliterated. I attacked for too much damage (my Elasti-Girl dice were 6A each) and won.
1-0
Game 2:
Next up, I faced off against a Golden Age Black Manta Retaliation team, relying on SR Emma Frost to stop opponents from attacking. This would’ve worked great…if it weren’t for Yellow Lantern Ring. I didn’t have the time to go for Elasti-Girl this time. Just go for Blob, Dreadnaught, Nick Fury… field stuff, intimidate opposing dice and swap stats with Bizarro to deal way too much damage. That turned out to be effective, and rather overwhelming.
2-0
Game 3:
For my next match, time to go up against a Collector + Nobby team, complete with Danger Room, Black Canary, and other crazy shenanigans. I was doing my best to keep my opponent’s Collector from firing off, but he simply had too much to deal with at once, and I did not have enough offence to be the aggressor. While it was close (I was one turn away from running him over), he Nobby’d his way to victory on this one. Well-deserved win on his part.
2-1
Game 4:
Got the bye for the final round. Matchups were messed up otherwise.
3-1
Post-Mortem:
-Ok, that Elasti-Girl is not good without Fenthaza, and even with her, she’s good, but not jaw-dropping. This will likely never become more than a casual/semi-competitive build. But it’s darn fun when it fires off. Still, I’m slightly disappointed; either Elasti-Girl doesn’t get that huge, or she gets huge…when I could already win otherwise.
-On the other hand, teams based around that Bizarro global could have competitive potential. However, it’s missing something. It’s missing that high-defense 3-cost character with a good control ability to help the team flow well (Scarecrow’s decent, but just not quite enough). Keep in mind that I can’t use the 3-cost Blob since the 4-cost is a must.
-Making teams strictly based around one energy type can backfire, even with a sidekick fixer. I had to deal with a couple of annoying turns tonight because of that.
-I didn’t have enough ramp. Sure, I could sort of manage, but it felt really slow to set things up. If I hadn’t had Nick Fury to mitigate fielding costs, I would’ve been in serious trouble.
So overall: yeah, ok, Elasti-Girl’s not that crazy, even with Fenthaza. She hurts, but relying on her to win is not optimal. Still, I had to try at least.