There are a lot of good 5-cost cards out there. So even when the format restricts you to only 5-costs you aren’t exactly starved for choice. So to add to the challenge, we decided to limit ourselves to only 5 character* slots as well. (*or non-basic action).
What Did You Play?
The Team: Characters: Five, Warriors Three.
There were a lot of options I considered – for example, I maintain there actually is one good Heroic card in the game – the Rare Captain America – and as it’s a 5-cost, I nearly went there.
But I kept coming back to a well known meta team where the core pieces are all 5-costs: the Warriors Three.
Get all three active and each is +4/+4 with Overcrush. And the Intimidate is great for removing troublesome characters from the opposing Field Zone – at least for long enough to get some good licks in.
Next I added uncommon Barry Allen because I wanted a crossover character. This was so I had a defense in case someone brought Rare Merlyn. I wasn’t overly impressed with the abilities on any of the 5-cost crossover characters but at least this Barry Allen would give my fist (Hogun) and bolt (Fandral) characters a slight buff if I actually resorted to buying him.
For my final character slot, I brought Foetid Bloat-Drone for the ramp. I hadn’t used it before, but I needed some ramp. Which was the same reason Resurrection was one of my BACs, the other being Cone of Cold.
Game 1:
Up against an X-Men team. I won the roll-off, which meant I wound up buying two of his three Investigation dice. The Hogun and Volstagg dice I bought really seemed to want to come out of the bag together this game. Which didn’t leave me with any energy for anything but fielding costs on those turns, but I could live with that. The first time it happened I sent them through my opponent’s empty field for 11 damage.
Since my opponent was having a bit of difficulty rolling character faces, he wound up with a thin field. Which meant the second time the Hogun-Volstagg pairing came out of my bag I had more than enough for lethal.
1-0
Game 2:
Mr. Freeze who would hit one of my character with a Stun token when fielded, plus Amber Golems so he could keep KOing and re-fielding his Mr. Freeze dice.
The Stun tokens were an annoyance, but not an unmanageable one. Given the format there were only Basic Action Dice to buy at a cost of less than 5. We were both running Resurrection and neither of us were interested in buying those dice, at least at that cost (4). His other BAC was Momentum (1-cost) and those were cleaned out by the time we’d both taken our first turns.
There were several turns where the 2 energy I spent removing a Stun token would have gone to waste otherwise, because I had nowhere else to spend it.
I had some difficulty rolling character faces this game – it was about the fourth pass through my bag before Volstagg finally rolled a character face. I’d managed to get Hogun and Fandral in the field before that, and with all three of them attacking (and his pesky Emma Frost SR) intimidated, he couldn’t find enough D to survive.
2-0
Game 3:
Batman: Plays Too Rough and Commissioner Gordon: Bat Signal. Batman is buffed by Sidekicks, and Commissioner Gordon allowed him to field a Batman from his Used Pile at Level 3 whenever he took damage. He also had Luke Cage with the pay a fist to deal one damage to each player global.
I got too obsessed with buying his Candlekeep dice for ramp, and neglected to field any blockers. A buffed Level 3 Batman came rampaging through my field, demonstrating why that had been a mistake.
Even seeing the need, I couldn’t manage to draw and roll and characters, or even roll a Sidekick before Bats came around again and finished me off.
2-1
Post-Mortem:
The Warriors Three are a scary team, and very difficult for opponents to deal with. That’s not exactly news.
Nobody brought Merlyn, so I never bought Barry Allen. I didn’t really need the slot anyway.
Bloat-Drone was useful, but not essential. It’s a peculiar form of ramp – sometimes useful but generally awkward.
I don’t think I actually used the Cone of Cold global all night. I’ll probably leave it out if I run any Warriors Three teams in the future, but I don’t actually see myself doing that anytime soon.
I’ve played against Warriors Three teams plenty in the past, but if I’m not mistaken this was only the second time I’ve actually run one myself. And honestly, now that I’ve actually done it, I find it’s much more interesting to play against this team than to run it myself.
The steps you need to take to succeed with a Warriors Three team are fairly straightforward. Which, in a way, make it a bit of a boring team to run.
What teams do you think are the most fun to pilot? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Rolling!
Son of L