Thanks for coming back for more Clix Bait! I have a lot to talk about this week, but if you have a thing or two you’d like to share, I invite you to follow this link and visit the Facebook page and tell us what’s got your attention. I always am looking for ways to improve the blog, so anything you want to tell me, good or bad, is welcome so I can keep this relevant to my readers.

Sorry for the late post of today’s blog, but I’ll be honest, I’ve been pretty lazy today. My Sunday evenings usually have me involved in a game, so I have to work to get things done early, but since my friends had to cancel tonight, I had more time to myself, which means I could stretch out my writing today. My motivation was pretty low, so I’d write a bit, step away for a while, and come back to it. What can I say, we all have days where we just are out of sorts, and today was that day for me.

As you know, yesterday I went to Columbus with a team I had played only once, and my expectations weren’t high, but I walked away with what I would consider a successful failure. I went 0 – 4 for the event, which is horribly disappointing, but a die roll here or there and and I could have been 3 – 1, as I believe my opponents will attest. More importantly, I got a feel for my team and how it actually operates, as opposed to how I THOUGHT it would operate, and it felt good. There’s some room for tweaking, and I talked with several other players to get ideas on how to improve the team, but I feel like it’s close to being where it needs to be.

By the way, I attempted to stream from Columbus, but the internet there still seems to be the bane of my existence. I believe next time I’m just going to record rather than stream, and share those videos later, as the quality should be far superior, and what I saw of the videos I reviewed today I wasn’t terribly happy with. The good news is that I can technically do both – I can stream while I’m recording – but I think everyone might be better served just to wait for the video uploads. If you want to see what I mean, you can follow this link to see the videos from yesterday.

The sad thing is, the weakest link in the team is the piece that I was initially building around. I love Sage. I love global effects that mess with my opponents’ general strategies, but when I really think about it, 50 points is a lot in the current meta for a piece that doesn’t contribute anything outside of being there. Granted, the animal build would hate her, and most teams are mildly annoyed with their probs and Perplexes being limited, but it’s not a big enough effect to warrant the investment, despite her Outwit (which rarely gets used, thanks to working to protect her). Honestly, the new rules hurt her, as I would justify her presence if I could push her to Perplex, which I would use much more often than the Outwit.

Today I saw a post that kind of excited me. You can follow this link to a post by Clix Nexus discussing an upcoming in-store event revolving around the Fantastic Four. Now, I’ve said it before, I’m not really a fan of the Fantastic Four, but I’ve missed the events WizKids used to have, especially since I returned to the game after a long hiatus during the War of Light, and it was that weekly play that really got me excited about the game again. None of the events since have been as great as that was, but on the other hand, all of them have been fun, and encouraged a different style of play for Heroclix. Most importantly, I feel like they were very welcoming to new players, and I loved that aspect of the events. Sadly, I fear that I’m going to have to search for someone hosting the events, but we’ll see.

This week, we’re finishing up on the series of powers by colors, before I talk about Calvin Truvillion’s winning build from Saturday. I want to take this moment to congratulate him…it was my first time meeting him, but he had that personality that you warm up to immediately, and I look forward to running into him again. We’ll talk about online options for custom miniatures, before I review a mechanic that appears to be dead to WizKids. So let’s get this done!

We’re finally here! The last segment updating the powers by color series! And while this section got a lot easier to discuss since the original run, I’m still not going to really talk about the changes, and just focus on how the powers work currently. I will say that this section has become probably the most straightforward of all the colors now, so this shouldn’t be too tricky to get a handle on.

“Running Shot: POWER: Halve speed. Move, then RANGE as FREE.”

So, first off, as with Charge, the half move is a replacement value, so any modifiers will apply to the replaced value, rather than the base Speed. This means if you have a nine speed, and Perplex Speed by one, your movement for a Running Shot will be six (9/2 = 5, rounding up +1 = 6), not five like some people believe.

Since this grants you a RANGE action at the end of the move, there’s not a lot you can’t do with it. All your passive powers, like Ranged Combat Expert and Precision Strike will trigger, and you can choose any RANGE action to use with it, like Pulse Wave and Energy Explosion. But note, you can only use ONE RANGE action with this, so you have to choose Pulse Wave or Energy Explosion – you can’t use both!

“Telekinesis: POWER: Minimum range 6. Place one target friendly single-base character or object within range and line of fire into another square within range and line of fire. That square must be within 6 squares and line of fire from that target’s current square. Characters placed with this power can’t use Telekinesis this turn.”

When using Telekinesis to move a character, there’s a few things to note. When using Telekinesis on a character, it has to be a single-based character, regardless of the size of the character using the power. Also, you have to do something typically referred to as “completing the triangle.” What this means is that you must be able to draw line of fire from the character using Telekinesis to the character being placed, as well as draw line of fire from both the character being placed and the one using Telekinesis to the destination square. Everyone has to be able to see everything! Also, the maximum distance a character can be placed (counting from its origin square, not from the character using Telekinesis) is six squares. You may still place a character away from the character using Telekinesis a maximum distance equal to that character’s range value, just so long as you don’t place it more than six squares away from where it started.

For example, Phoenix has Telekinesis and a range of 10. Magneto is two squares away from her, in column four. Phoenix may use Telekinesis to place Magneto as far as column 10. While her range could reach as far as column 12, that would put Magneto further than six squares away from where he began the action.

When using Telekinesis on objects, the same rules apply as with characters. Just remember that Telekinesis will always require you to complete the triangle, and you’ll be fine. Something that people sometimes don’t realize is that characters standing in a square that is the origin or destination do not prevent you from completing the triangle, so you can move an object from underneath a character or place it in a square occupied by a character, but you could not place it in a square where line of fire completely passes through a character.

“Invulnerability: Reduce damage taken by 2.”

This one is pretty simple. Just remember it does not stop penetrating damage, like damage from Exploit Weakness, nor does it stack with other damage reducing abilities, such as Toughness. So if your character has Invulnerability, and some other game effect gives you Toughness, you need to choose which damage reduction ability to use. You may use Super Senses to evade the attack prior to using damage reduction, so if hit, if you fail a Super Senses roll, you would still be able to reduce the damage taken by two.

“Leadership: For all friendly characters that can use Leadership, Action Total +1 // At the beginning of your turn, you may roll a d6. 5 – 6: Remove an action token from an adjacent friendly characters that’s less points or shares a keyword.”

So first off, a character with this power gives you one extra action at the start of your turn. You only get one extra action, regardless of the number of characters you have that have Leadership. Also, remember that characters that are called into the game after the beginning of the turn, such as Troubalert characters, get their beginning of the turn abilities when they are brought in (NOTE: While this makes it sound like you could use that character to make a Leadership roll when it is placed, and thereby possibly remove the action token from the character that just called it in, this has been ruled to not be the case. While you get the extra action, you cannot make the Leadership roll until the start of your next turn). So when a character is called in with Leadership, if you do not already have a character with Leadership, then you’re going to get an extra action as long as that character is in the game. Also note that you lose that action as soon as Leadership is lost. This is important if you push a character either to KO or off a click that has Leadership in the middle of your turn. Once that happens, that extra action is gone.

Then you have to make your roll – at the beginning of your turn. Since the power states you may roll, if you forget to do it before doing an action, even a FREE action like Sidestep, then that chance is gone. You cannot roll after doing any action. You do, however, get to choose the order of the things you do at the beginning of your turn, so if a call-in has Leadership, then you may roll that prior to removing it from the map. To remove a token from another friendly character, you have to be adjacent, and that character has to be either a lower point value character, or it has to share a keyword. Period. If the characters are the same point value and do not share a keyword, then you cannot remove a token from that character.

So that’s it for this LONG series…I’ll be breaking down some other clever strategies starting next week, and hopefully give you some cool ideas on how to use all this knowledge. I will also take some time to collect this into a single document and post it on the resources page in case you want one handy reference. Again, if you have any questions, comments, or corrections, feel free to send me an email at clixbait@digitaledengames.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

So yeah, Saturday didn’t go the way I wanted it to, but I met some really cool new people – one of them being Calvin Truvillion. Very cool guy, with some different perspectives on Clix than I had heard before, and I think that’s one of the great things about events like this. You get exposed to ideas you hadn’t really considered, and get to bounce them around in your own head for a bit. I was also really happy to see Onslaught take the main stage…a lot of folks, myself included, have felt he’s meta, but couldn’t figure out a team to build around him. Well, Calvin did, and we’re going to talk about it now!

Link – Calvin Truvillion – Onslaught Show-stealer

I think there are times we over-complicate things. Trying to get that perfect synergy, or struggling to contain a build within a theme, or trying to make sure we have answers to EVERYTHING. Well, the truth is, if you have good pieces that work pretty well together, and you know how to use them, you can win games. I mean, we all knew Onslaught was potent and versatile, but I had never considered adding Harry Leland to make him more troublesome to take down. It prevents characters from being placed in Onslaught’s bubble, and gives serious penalties to characters making a move and attack (like Charge and Running Shot). If you do get in there, then Dr. Doom can mess with your rolls, although he can just as easily switch out to mess with your overall strategy (Lord Doom vs Maggot, anyone?). And while you’re figuring out what to do about Onslaught, Sky Tyrant is wrecking your team and getting TKed back out (if even necessary) by Onslaught. All in all, it’s pretty rude.

If you stay with Dr. Doom, he’s going to rely on Onslaught to get him in position to make his attacks, but since he has a FREE TK, that’s not a big deal. From a defensive standpoint, Leland is great, especially on this team, but he doesn’t contribute much offensively. It’s probably not necessary, but it’s worth pointing out. Since there’s no theme, you’re going to need to take full advantage of Onslaught’s prob and Dr. Doom’s trait to tilt the odds in your favor, and I feel like it might want a little Perplex, but then, it won the event, so it’s probably not a strong need.

Overall, this team just has a good survivability, and is difficult to approach with an alpha strike. That protection from the alpha really allows it to breathe enough to establish itself, and therefore make its presence known. A lot of games are decided on who gets the first good hit, and this build just makes it difficult to get that solid first strike against it. Once the teams are engaged, it’s just a matter of choosing the right targets and hoping the dice roll your way, so in my evaluation, this isn’t a team meant to dominate the opposition, but rather a team that makes sure you get to fight your fight, and see if your opponent built for more than the first swing. It’s a different approach to the game that I find very refreshing!

While searching for some cool minis to share with you this week, I ran across this awesome custom Bakugo miniature, and when I did some digging, I found out how it was made. Not all of us can afford a 3D printer, and there’s only so much you can do with repaints and mods (dependent on your skill level and the time you have to devote to the project), but there are other ways to get custom minis, as mrpancake (reddit name) informed a reader who had asked about how the mini was made. It seems he had Bakugo made from Hero Forge, and while I’ve used them for other game minis, I had not considered them for Heroclix. They’re also not the only company out there that does this, so I thought I’d share what little I know with you in case you were looking for a piece that you just couldn’t seem to get right!

We might as well start with Hero Forge, since that’s where our spotlight mini came from, and I’m most familiar with the service. The design tools are stocked with a wide variety of poses, gear, and other options to help you create not just fantasy minis, but pretty much whatever you want. They’re moderately priced for $20 for an unpainted miniature, which is cheap compared to what you would pay an artist to make a custom for. The price starts climbing as you add features like improved materials and painting, with a fully-painted standard-size mini running $50 and a full $100 for a bronze mini. Still, the unpainted stuff is made of a material meant to be painted, and while there is a limit to the customization, the bar is set pretty high. The process from order to delivery took me around four weeks, so it’s not an overnight turn-around. If you want to know more, here’s a link to the Hero Forge web site.

Eldritch Foundry has very comparable tools to Hero Forge, so it’s very easy to put together a custom piece, but their base price is higher than Hero Forge, at $29 for the miniature. There are no options (that I could find) for adding color, but the options for the features on the piece are every bit as nice as Hero Forge, and there’s an option to buy the file for your 3D printer (Hero Forge had this too, by the way), in case you do have a printer and want to save a LOT of money. The digital download is $3.99. I have never ordered from EF before, but their FAQ lists that it takes four weeks to get your minis, so they’re comparable to Hero Forge in that aspect, as well. Here’s the link to Eldritch Foundry if you want to know more.

The last service I encountered in my search is Anvl. And again I have never used them before. What I found most interesting about Anvl is the range of materials you could get your miniature made in. Resin is the base, with a cost of $19.97, putting them on par with Hero Forge, but at the top end, you can spend close to $250 for a silver mini. Not sure why I would want it made of silver, but it is apparently an option. I don’t like their creator system as well as Hero Forge…I feel they have less customization options available, and their interface isn’t as polished to my eye. Still, they do have DIFFERENT options from the other two sites, which means if you can’t find the pose or the gear you’re looking for, there is always this option to look at. If their FAQ is to be believed, they are going to be the fastest of the services, asking you to allow two weeks for production and shipping. To learn more about Anvl, you can follow this link.

There are some options for getting pieces made that don’t require contracting an artist, or meticulously modding your own pieces. The prices as higher than I like for my general purposes – making bystanders – but if you have that special piece you’re looking to have made, this might be a possible option for you. If you know of more sites, feel free to email me at clixbait@digitaledengames.com and tell me about them. I’ll be sure to pass the information along.

Hindsight is 20-20, they say, but sometimes I feel like things are worth a second look to see why they don’t work, or to see if another perspective might make the idea more feasible. I spent a great deal of time looking at Sidekicks, which was a mechanic that appears to have been dropped despite WizKids planning on making mechanics appear for multiple sets, but I didn’t look at an equally cast aside mechanic – Mission Points. There was a bit of excitement when we looked at Uatu, but after a clarification in the rules, we looked at all the pieces that used the mechanic and said, “meh.” So what went wrong, and what went right?

The overall concept was pretty cool…give players an alternate win condition. We’ll offer a variety of methods to score these points and potentially win games with shrewd planning and game play. And it wasn’t locked to one particular trigger. Uatu was, of course, tied to use of Probability Control to change the result of an action, while Ares was tied to KOing soldiers he generated. In fact, this led to a rather clever combo (from my perspective, anyway) to use Batman prime to mind control characters to take out these bystanders that Ares gave to the opponent. Combine that with Uatu’s use of prob, and Maxwell Lord’s trigger with Mind Control, and the foundation sounds pretty solid.

Unfortunately, the clock works against any Mission Point build. Most teams, even when well-designed, were getting at most three mission points per turn, and when games seems to hover around five to six turns, you really have to work hard to get the points you need to win. Opponents never really felt pressure to stop your point engine, as it wasn’t moving fast enough to have any real impact on the game. Ares had the best potential, as his tokens allowed him to trigger scoring Mission Points every turn, meaning he would compound his gains every turn, but even that wasn’t enough to make it work, especially since he had to make a Leadership roll to begin with to get the necessary pieces on the board to get his tokens.

It may sound like I’m down on WizKids for the execution of the idea, but that’s not really what I’m aiming for. I recognize that it is VERY difficult to balance an alternate win condition within the confines of a pre-established game. You can’t have the mechanic be so powerful that it overruns the normal flow of your game, but if you tone it down too much, you get what we ended up getting. Playtesting reveals the issue, but given the expansiveness of Heroclix, it’s hard to test it in a wide enough variety of scenarios, especially when your focus is playtesting an entire set, rather than just one aspect of it. My disappointment is that it appears they have given up on the mechanic rather than taking the data produced by events after release of the mechanic to tweak and tune it to something that becomes a strategy that is viable, but not dominating. Again, not an easy thing to do, but we try things to tune until we get where we want to be.

I spoke to PJ Bolin about this mechanic this weekend, and the speed of accruing the points seems to be the only real fault to the system. Maybe if they cut the number of Mission Points required to win to a smaller number, while also introducing pieces that could disrupt point generation, that balance could have been achieved. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever get the answer to that question, as it feels very much like WizKids has moved on, and now we’ll see how long they stay with Rally Dice.

So, the laziest edition of Clix Bait is done. I really have no idea what I’m going to talk about next week, outside of preparing for Origins. While I’ve not seen anything about big events being run by WizKids, I know Jay plans to run an event during Origins at Heroes and Games, so I definitely plan to be there. I should have the system set for recording matches rather than streaming at that point, too, so you can expect next day coverage. And full coverage, too, as I will be sticking around for the final rounds since I will be staying for the con and not having to worry about the drive home!

But I’m open to suggestions for things you want me to talk about. I’m always looking for creations to share in Work in Progress, and I know there are a lot of modders out there I’ve not had contact with, so feel free to introduce me if you know someone that you think needs to have their creativity showcased. I’ve always felt the mod/painting community has been under-represented and under appreciated, so I like to bring them to the forefront whenever I can. Anyway, until next week, be good to each other!