Warriors of Wrecking

Format: Rainbow Draft (The Mighty Thor) with a gravity feed

So this week, our store gave us a special treat: a rainbow draft of The Mighty Thor! (For those who don’t know: in our area, we’ve had some shortage issues with Dice Masters stuff, especially for Tomb of Annihilation and The Mighty Thor. This was the first time in months we had either set available anywhere in our area)

Now, we were drafting out of gravity feeds, not draft packs. This means that all Modern BACs were available. If you’ve ever tried drafting Thor in this format, there’s one obvious win condition: C Hulk. Use her with Magic Missile, and she wins a Thor gravity feed draft, pretty much every time. (I used that strategy before; click here for how that turned out)

This time, however, there wasn’t a Hulk available for me to draft. Two players hogged every Hulk die in the entire draft. Thankfully, I had a secret weapon. Enter the…

Warriors of Wrecking

The Team:  The Warriors of Wrecking

So the main win condition in this team is The Warriors Three; I was lucky enough to get the best versions of each of them, that mutually buff each other. The strategy is simple: get them all in the field, intimidate stuff out, attack with massive Overcrushing bodies (don’t care much for Deadly in this scenario, but at least the buff is nice!). Look at those stats; with the buffs, all of these will be 7 to 10 attack per die, with Overcrush. The amount of damage you can deal is crazy.

But none of these cards was my first pick. I didn’t have access to Hulk, so I needed a counter. Thankfully, R Wrecker was in my pile (foil!). Shutting down globals is essential against C Hulk; no Magic Missile global means much slower damage, and also slowing down my opponents’ ramp and churn. This made him a clear first pick.

With him in mind, and seeing as my win condition is made of 5-costs, I need non-global ramp options. I went for Pepper Potts and Samantha Wilson for that reason. Both act as great ramp and churn that’s easy to set up.

I also included global-based ramp, in the form of Heimdall and Resurrection, as well as Cake for churn. This was to be able to rush for my win condition in matchups where I wouldn’t need Wrecker (I saw him as a strictly anti-Hulk mechanic).

Thor was meant as a bit of an X-factor, a control piece I could have out if ever I happen upon a ton of energy with Wrecker out (since I can’t use globals with him out, I anticipated having extra energy). Redirecting damage to him is fantastic, and in a world with no blankers, he’s crazily oppressive. Plus, I ended up with 4 of his dice for whatever reason, so I might as well use them!

Game 1:

I started off against a mirror match of the Warriors Three. Both of us had the same idea, but my added Pepper Potts ramp was quite helpful. Both of us were a bit nervous because we could buff our opponents’ characters (see the text on the Warriors Three; it doesn’t specify that it only buffs your characters! EDIT: However, this was a mistake. See below). So I’d buy one guy, she’d buy the same, and so on. Side-note: between her ramp and mine, we were going through our whole bag pretty much every turn. It was crazy. Back to the game, I saved Volstagg for last, and this meant that with the way we were playing, she never had him on the field until I did, and when I had him active, I had the board state to swing in for lethal. Win for me.

1-0

EDIT: As has been pointed out in the comments and as others have told me privately, we actually misplayed The Warriors Three. Per the rulebook, page 20, “Card text that names a character only considers your characters for its effect. Your card’s text doesn’t trigger because your opponent has the same character, nor do your dice get a bonus from your opponent’s cards of the same name.” So if you and your opponent both have The Warriors Three, your Hogun doesn’t buff their Fandral or Volstagg, etc. Important to keep in mind for future games. My apologies for this mistake. I’ll strive to do better.

Game 2:

This game, I was up against Hulk + Fixit + Magic Missile. Plus, he had U Kate Bishop for the global. Needless to say, I bought Wrecker turn 1. Because I did this, my opponent went hard after some control pieces (he had R Billy Club), but he never got his win condition out because thanks to Wrecker, no Res, no Heimdall, no Cake…pretty much no ramp on his end. I slowly set up (thanks for the ramp Pepper!), while he tried removing Wrecker out with Billy Club, to no avail. He got Kate on the field, so I’d Intimidate her out thanks to Hogun (so Wrecker could stop her global) and swing in with my Warriors Three. I kept doing that bit by bit until Volstagg hit the field and I hit with a giant jackhammer of an attack. I won.

2-0

Game 3:

And here’s another game against Hulk, Fixit and Magic Missile. He heard about my previous game and decided to buy Hulk, set up a field, and hurt me as much as possible. Not a bad play in theory, but something funny happened: my characters wouldn’t roll. This gave me enough energy to go for Thor. So Thor and Wrecker hit the field before Hulk, and this essentially destroyed his strategy. He had no way of removing Thor outright, and because Wrecker was active, he couldn’t do enough damage to me in one turn to KO Thor. I ended up buying his Magic Missile dice and whittling him down while setting up the Warriors Three, and once all three were in the field, there was simply more damage than he could handle. I won.

3-0

Post-Mortem:

-R Wrecker is a fantastic counter against C Hulk teams in this format. I was very lucky to get him. He’s surprisingly oppressive against ramp in general and forces you to rethink how you play the game. Definitely a cool card to play around.

-I had seen other people run The Warriors Three before, but I’d never used this strategy myself. It’s very satisfying when it fires off! Too bad it takes so long to set up, or it could be genuinely competitive.

-Pepper Potts was handy to have, but her ramp is annoying: it’s not optional, and if you pull that awesome character you need, you have to save it for a turn. It actually stalled me on a couple of occasions (game 2, I pulled Volstagg with her ability when I was ready to swing in). Still, she helped a lot more than she hurt, so I’m glad to have used her.

-That Thor was and remains insane. If you can get him out, he’s so hard to deal with in draft (unless you run into a Warriors Three team that can Intimidate him out).

Overall, that was a really fun draft, and it opened my eyes on just how good R Wrecker can be in the right build. Should I consider him for Can Nats? We’ll see.