Another week, another Golden Age Constructed tournament, and another overly complicated team that’s probably going to turn out to be a little bit too slow to be truly effective.
What Did You Play?
The Team: Reality Gem – Danger Room.
The core piece of this week’s build was supposed to be Thanos – Reality Gem. Return two villains to their card(s), buy a Thanos die for a mask and one other energy.
The cheaper the villains, the better this works, of course. So I decided to add an extra wrinkle to it. Since there are no 1-cost villains, I decided to include R Danger Room and several 1-cost characters in my build. After I use the action, I will have 1-cost villains that can be returned to their cards.
First came common Chwinga and blank Poxwalker. Then came common Pseudodragon and Uncommon Yuan-Ti Pureblood as a pair. The first was because I was trying to keep the build Modern legal. There are no true 1-cost mask characters in Modern, but C Pseudodragon comes close.
Yuan-Ti Pureblood is the cheapest Attune character in the game. With an Attune character active Pseudodragon’s purchase cost drops from 2 to 1. I went with the Uncommon Yuan-Ti because her ability prevents my opponent from using the global on the Rare Danger Room card to ping her out when I use that action to turn all active character dice into Villains.
I added Supreme Intelligence for the global – Pay 2 generic, once per turn move a die with purchase cost 2 or less from Used Pile to Prep Area.
Now, while my plan involved buying cheap characters early, it also involved returning those character dice to their cards. So a very high percentage of the (non-Sidekick) dice I’d have in circulation would be 8-cost Thanos dice. That made Scorching Ray seem an option worth considering. After including Scorching Ray, I chose to include Atlantis: Vast Kingdom. If I can pull the two of them on the same turn, I can use Atlantis to clear my bag of Sidekick dice, which guarantees at least some damage with Scorching Ray.
For my other BAC, I used Create Food and Water, mostly so I could use the global to help manage by bag.
How did it work?
Well, midway through game 1 my opponent pointed out to me I wasn’t using Poxwalker dice – when I was putting the dice for this team into my Team Box, I mistakenly grabbed Noxious Blightbringer dice in place of them. Because I had the card and dice for him, I used R Bishop to replace Poxwalker in the following games, but that meant it wasn’t really the team I’d intended to run.
As for how the games went otherwise –
Game 1:
Seething Corruption, Dreadnaught, Sage, Shriek. Except for his bringing Seething Corruption himself (instead of my providing it for him) this looked a whole lot like this player’s team from the week before – the one I swore he said he was going to put on the shelf.
He Shrieked Thanos, then used the Dreadnaught-Seething Corruption combo to wipe my field and come through for the win.
0-1
Game 2:
Hope Summers – Thunderbird buy tons of Golems gimmick team. Once you get the pieces set up, it’s fast. He was KO’ing Doop to capture my characters and buff his Ork Nob. Since I didn’t have a shield and a fist to pay for the Atlantis global to put a Sidekick out, he send his gigantic Ork Nob through my empty field for the win.
0-2
Game 3:
Buffing Parasite and Martian Manhunter who grants Overcrush if the opponent has any Villains.
I pretty much used the Atlantis global and bought one cheap character on each of the first three turns. Partly from the rolls I was dealing with, and partly from the results of the first two games, I pretty much just played straight aggro this game.
He bought a couple of Parasite dice and eventually a Manhunter die. I kept poking him with Sidekicks and the occasional Yuan-Ti , and hitting him with a bit of Attune damage since I had bought a Danger Room and a Cake.
He did manage to hit me for about 4 damage, wiping out most of my field, since he was attacking with a single Parasite-buffed Overcrushing Martian Manhunter.
My choice about which version of Yuan-Ti to use proved fortuitous this game, because when I had only Yuan-Tis in my field he couldn’t use his Villain-maker global on either of them to get the Overcrush from Martian Manhunter.
With him down to 8 life I sent my Yuan-Tis (both at 3A) to attack. He declined to block, as he didn’t want his Parasite dice to be KO’d, which took him down to 2.
As I was still at 16 life, he couldn’t get to lethal on my next turn, despite my thin field.
It was a bag refill turn for me, so I managed to get a Yuan-Ti refielded, allowing me to deal 1 point of Attune damage. I’d actually drawn a second action die on the turn, but couldn’t get the action face.
It didn’t matter though, because my opponent was only able to draw 3 dice during his Clear and Draw step, and the 1 life point that cost him, was the last one he had.
1-2
Game 4:
‘Unofficial’ game against the only adult in the field I hadn’t already been paired up with.
Hope Summer channeling the Rare Professor X from AvX which makes the opponent have to pay 2 life to be able to field any characters. Plus Staff of the Forgotten One, and the Jubilee who does 1 damage to all opposing characters when spun up.
I completely bungled this one. Once he got Hope out (or even before) I should have gone heavy on my bolt dice (Chwinga, Danger Room, and Yuan-Ti). I use the action on Danger Room to make everyone (including Hope) a Villain, then ping her off with a couple of bolt using the global on Danger Room. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me at the time.
So I tried to field characters in bunches to minimize the impact of the life tax, so he couldn’t just walk through my empty field. So, basically, I made sure he had to actually make use of the Staff – Jubilee combo.
It worked.
1-3
Post-Mortem:
When I play this team again – and I’m thinking, it’s more more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’ – the first thing I’m going to do is to make sure I bring the correct dice. I suspected from the beginning this team would be a little to slow to be truly practical, and while nothing I saw on the night really changed that opinion, I can’t quite be sure having those cheap fists available would have made a difference.
The other thing I’ll take into account is that Rare Danger Room provides its own form of limited removal with the included global. Once you’ve used the action, you effectively have the Magic Missile global at your disposal. I’ve always paid more attention to the converse (i.e. so does my opponent) when using Danger Room in the past. But two or three bolts can sometimes be enough to get some nuisances out of one’s way, at least momentarily.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Rolling!