Happy Birthday TOTM!

Hello Dice Masters Fans!  Last night, we celebrated our Site’s Birthday with the February Team of the Month (TOTM).  This month’s challenge was fairly straight forward.  You needed to build a Modern Legal Team with only one restriction:  The total purchase cost of your Team needed to be a multiple of 12.  Each die on your Team (including BAC dice) counted towards this total.  That was it.  If you want to read about the details of the build, you can check out the original article here.

This month was a little different from last month in that I was able to secure some goodies in celebration of our Birthday.  The top 3 finishers players were going to get a copy of each card from the new Super Spies OP Kit.  The big prize was this girl… Black Widow.  This card has two obviously great abilities and should find its way onto lots of competitive Teams.  Damage reduction while being protected from pesky Globals?  I’ll take it.  The assets that this brings to the table are just great. 

As some players already had this card, proxies were allowed if people wanted to play it this evening.  There were a few more competitive Teams on the night since Widows talents were so desirable.  Even with the larger focus on more competitive Teams, it was still a fun night of dice rolling.  We had a great turn-out on the evening.  Here were the Teams that participated:

• Michael I makes his TOTM debut after an online break.
• Josh B comes across the border from the WDA.
• Kim T had one of the more interesting Teams on the night.
• Reg the crafty Leafs Fan (we like him despite that) makes his 2019 debut.
• Stu, our resident Community Artist, braves the time zones to play with us.
• Ben S returns to avenge his percentage points loss from last month.
• Jay, another first timer, shows us some old school Jimmy in a Modern setting.
• TJ keeps the overseas quota up by waking up way too early to roll some dice.
• Laurier, my partner in crime tries to fend off Young Ben.
• Zack P makes his “new” TOTM debut after helping start this Event many moons ago.

The DM-North Intern managed to record some of the matches, but neglected to record the audio.  He has had his Tim Horton’s privileges revoked as a result.  I am working on trying to get some special guest voices for these and will see what comes of that.

Since there was an odd number of players for this Event, I dropped myself out to avoid unnecessary Byes for the players.  I wanted to let the people who took the time to come out to get the maximum number of games in.

As I mentioned earlier, the shot at Black Widow brought out some more competitive type Teams this go around.  We saw a classic Surtur-Range Team (that actually didn’t need the Range in the match I got to watch).  The Can-Nats Gold Dragon is still a viable Team, even though Zack changed 20% of the original build.

The big bad also found her way to the TOTM.  SR Yuan-Ti was present, but came with a new friend.  Ben took out the classic Xandala part of this Team and subbed in Dragonborn Sorceror.  This paired with Thrown Brick was an awesome removal and ramp combination.  Those two together can get around the pesky park of this new Black Widow on 2/3 of her levels.  Not a card I have really given much thought about in the past, but I will definitely be looking at this guy in the future.  Especially since I am a huge fan of the Thrown Brick Basic Action.

This was the other card that caught my eye tonight.  Orbital Strike is one of those “go big or go home” type cards.  Kim decided to pair it with the Wolverine with Regenerate.  This gave her great stats in the Field, with high damage potential if Orbital Strike fired properly.  The Regenerate ability would let her potentially keep these characters around after the barrage.  There is a rumor that a fairly big hit was recorded for posterity and I look forward to watching that one.  Unfortunately, when I got to watch this Team, I didn’t get a chance to see it in action as we learned that Team Up is still incredibly good.

The other match-up I was hoping to see play out fully was the Man of Steel vs Dragons.  Again, the dice gods were at play here and Jimmy Olsen never co-operated on the night, making Superman difficult to get out and fight how he should have.  I would love to see this rematch with better rolls.

I did not get to see all of the Teams in action, so I would love to hear from those who participated on what they saw.  With the exception of the recording issues on our end, I had a blast watching some great games on the night.

Last month I instituted a scoring system, but made one change after the article.  Wins are still worth 3 points, a tie is still worth 1 point.  I upped the participation points to 5 to reward coming out.  This event is about Community, so being an active part of it should count for something.

Tonight’s results are as follows:

Round 1

• Ben S (W) vs Michael I
• Stu (W) vs Jay
• Josh vs Zack (W)
• Kim vs Laurier (W)
• Reg (W) vs TJ

Round 2

• Stu (W) vs Michael I
• Reg (W) vs Josh
• Ben (W) vs Kim
• Zack (W) vs Jay
• Laurier vs TJ (W)

Round 3

• Ben (W) vs Josh
• Zack (W) vs Kim
• Laurier (W) vs Jay
• Stu (W) vs TJ
• Reg (W) vs Michael I

Round 4

• Zack (W) vs TJ
• Stu (W) vs Kim
• Ben (W) vs Reg
• Michael I (W) vs Jay
• Josh vs Laurier (W)

Stu, Ben, and Zack were our Top 3 on the evening and will be getting their Super Spies in the mail (as soon as I get them ready).

The leaderboard looks like this now…

Ben and Laurier are actually tied, but I gave Ben the Gold Star this month since Laurier got it last month.  A huge thank you to everyone who participated. We can’t do these Events without you and it is appreciated.  Looking forward to the next one.

See you at the next TOTM!

– jourdo