Thanks for joining me for another edition of Clix Bait! I hope you’ve all had a great week, and I wlecome you to follow the link and join us on the Facebook page! I like to hear what you think of all things Heroclix, and I welcome folks to share their latest Heroclix news…so don’t be shy, let us know what’s on your mind!

It’s been a somewhat decent week for me…I got a little practice time in, and got to go to the Ohio State championships. My 2 and 2 record wasn’t great, but I wasn’t too upset about it, as I learned a lot, and my day could have been a LOT worse. I had fun playing against some folks I don’t see often enough (although I hated having to play Randy Carter in the first round…seems to happen a lot, sadly). My final round ended a bit uncomfortably, I’m afraid. The match-up didn’t leave a lot of room for error for my opponent, and things did not go well for him, so he questioned why he even bothered attending events, and kind of went on a disappointed monologue that left me no room to say much of anything.

First, let me say that I was in no way upset with him expressing his frustration. But there are times when people get worked up, and you fear anything you are likely to say will just make the situation worse, so I opted for silence and let him vent. But I will say to everyone that reads my blog, we all have felt this way at least once when playing this game, and don’t be surprised if it happens again. We all have lows and highs, but the only way to improve is to play the game and take the lessons that each game gives you. And that isn’t easy, as the game is always changing with each new set that is introduced.

To be honest, that was my fatal flaw yesterday – I did not know the pieces as well as I should have to make informed strategic decisions, and therefore faced a lot of challenging situations. In the first round, I hadn’t seen enough of Apache Chief to know precisely how he worked, and that caused me some issues in executing my game plan. In the second round, I should have focused my attention on Valeria Von Doom rather than Franklin Von Doom, and I might have pulled that close game out. In the third round, I was taken off guard by how far the Joker could move, and that his bomb effect could trigger off pushing (though I did win that round). It just goes to show you that what you don’t know CAN hurt you, and while you can look at cards during the game, it truly helps to have at least a passing knowledge of commonly used pieces so that you can streamline your thought process, and use the cards to double-check yourself or give you more definitive information to solidify the strategy.

So, my ignorance kept me from the top eight, but that’s purely on me, and I’m not really upset at how I played outside of my ignorance. It’s strange…maybe I just missed the game, or maybe I feel better about how I’m playing, but ordinarily I’d be a bit upset over how I finished, but I’m not. I had a good time playing clix, and I’m not kicking myself over grievous errors I made. It was a good day, in my mind, and I finished 10^th, so I still walked away with a bit of prize loot.

But enough rambling…let’s give you more of what you came for. You might expect me to go over the winning team from Saturday, but I din’t really see it in action, so I can’t really do a good job of breaking it down. What I can tell you about is a team that I watch and found fascinating – Chad Birdsall’s Soldier Skrulls. As I promised last week, I also want to dig a little deeper into the Founding the New Fantastic Four trait, so we’ll get into that in Strategy Bytes. I’ll continue that Fantastic Four theme in the Fringe, but before that, I’ve got some cool pieces for you to admire in Miniatures Mutations…so let’s get rolling!

Team of the Week – Soldier Skrulls

I like seeing new builds…things that can challenge the status quo. Having said that, I was really pleased to see this team from Chad Birdsall, and the creative and flexible way it worked. I’m not sure about all his equipment choices, but the core of the build is fantastic, and could be something to look out for.

Link: Chad Birdsall – Soldier Skrulls

So the biggest trick is triggering the Skrull General. On the top click, all the Super Skrulls have Shape Change, with combine with the team ability to give them a 50-50 shot at making the roll, and therefore keeping your opponent from being able to target most of the team. Josiah X is an excellent counter to Widows and Captain Marvel, allowing the team to reduce penetrating damage. The four Super Skrulls have access to a lot of interesting capabilities, and keeping them close to Josiah will allow them to swing from four squares away while still enjoying the benefit of his Empower. The General will also allow the team to carry each other around through the Underworld team ability, making it possible to get into position while still leaving part of the team free to act. Finally, Stark Tower is going to give you a Probability Control to make up for your lack of Perplex and Probability Control from other sources.

That, in my mind, is its greatest weakness. The 11 attack from the Super Skrulls and Josiah X are solid, but with as much Perplex as in the game, and the defensive values being what they are, it’s going to be tedious wearing teams down. I like Remaker (for Skrull General) and I like Zero on the team, because a world with Batman requires Barrier in my book. Super Skrull’s dial is pretty shallow at this level, but Josiah help make those few clicks much more robust. I’m not so sure I like Nightbringer on the team…I understand why it’s there, but I think this might be a spot to get more aggressive. I feel like swapping Nightbringer out for Incandescence would give a little more punch to the team, or dropping the map bonus and Nightbringer to add the Reality Gem to give you the Perplex you’re missing as well as TK to help you get people in position.

Still, as is, it’s a tough out if you run into it, because it’s just a slippery build. The best way to survive a hit is not to get hit, and the best way to avoid getting hit is to not be targeted in the first place, so this can cause some headaches. The question will be if the team still works switching out one or two Super Skrulls for Spider-Man 1776 when he rolls around. The answer is probably yes.

Strategy Bytes

I typically keep things pretty bite-sized as far as my discussions here are concerned, but I kind of feel like this week’s topic is pretty deep, and has enough layers for me to get a bit more mileage out of it, so be warned that this is going to be rather long. As I mentioned last week, I felt that the “Form the New Fantastic Four” trait deserved a bit more attention than I was willing to spare last week, so let’s really dig into the trait and see what all it can do!

“FORM THE NEW FANTASTIC FOUR: At the beginning of the game, you may replace up to 4 friendly characters with the same number of characters from your sideline on their starting clicks. All replacement and replaced characters must have the Fantastic Four keyword and different names. the total points of the replacement characters can’t exceed the total points of the replaced characters.”

So first, I want to point out that in order to use this trait, your starting force will need to include one of four characters – one of the three Invisible Woman pieces in the set, or the chase Sue Storm. All of them have some good and bad to them, but just know that in order to build with this, you’re going to need one of these on your team. This is not necessarily a huge sacrifice, as you could choose to build with the 40 point common Invisible Woman with every intention of typically switching her out with the 30 point Valeria Von Doom, and essentially dropping 10 points just to add flexibility to your team.

I’ve had a teammate point out, as I’m sure many others have, that this would allow you to very nearly have two different teams at the table, ready to switch out after you see what your opponent is playing. In theory, this is really nice, and it might look something like this in practice:

Link: Fantastic Forces

But let’s examine this idea a little deeper. First off, you’re going to be building two teams with the restriction of being Fantastic Four theme teams. There are a lot of great pieces out there that came out with the set, but are they strong enough to be at least tier two quality and therefore strong enough to be competitive with the top teams being played? I’m not sure on that note…it’s just something to think about. Even if they are strong enough, you have to be prepared to play either team, which means you have to split your practice and preparation time between the two teams, each of which may play very differently. In the above example, the primary team is built to exploit placement shenannigans, combining Sue Storm’s ability to use TK from her Barrier markers with Dawn Greenwood’s ability to place Silver Surfer, while the secondary build is an alpha strike team, making use of the “New Fantastic Four” trait having Human Torch equipped with the Space Gem to make him a better taxi (and one that does penetrating damage).

But then, that leads to the second potential problem with the concept of a full team swap – equipment. Many team designs require equipment to fill in gaps for a reasonable point cost, but with this philosophy, you will have to have the equipment needed by both teams, even if a piece of equipment may not do much for one of the teams. Again, in the example above, the Space Gem is pretty necessary for the secondary build to operate, but it’s of limited usefulness to the primary team. It’s not USELESS…equipping Valeria with the Space Gem to let her help move Franklin and Sue isn’t a bad thing to do, but it’s not necessarily a great use of points, either.

This makes it sound like I really don’t like the trait, and that’s far from the truth…I’m always a fan of options, and this is pretty big on the options scale. Keep in mind that while it states you can swap up to four characters, you don’t necessarily HAVE to swap all four. This could allow you to possibly have a utility slot built into your team. For example, if you’re running a Fantastic Four theme team, you may like Invisible Woman’s (#018) special Barrier to keep your team safe in a lot of situations, but it definitely wouldn’t be good against a Tri-Sentinel, so you might have Black Leopard on the sideline for people who use a lot of Perplex, the Hulk (#056) if you think you need Outwit and the ability to tear down Barriers and walls, and maybe Ghost Rider (#053) in case you face a heavy ranged team. There are probably better examples of how to do this, but I think it illustrates the point. And while you can switch only a maximum of four characters on your team, this does not mean you are limited to four pieces on the sideline for this purpose.

Also consider that if you’re using more limited piece swaps, you don’t have to build a Fantastic Four theme team – you could actually build a completely different theme and only have to worry about the Fantastic Four keyword for pieces that you potentially want to swap. For example, you could use Invisible Woman (F4 #034) in an Avengers theme team, and any pieces on the the team with the Fantastic Four keyword could still be swapped out. The most interesting aspect of building like this is that any piece swapped in would not need the Avengers keyword, and yet would not break your theme, as the swap occurs after team construction. If the character brought in did NOT have the Avengers keyword, then it wouldn’t be able to use theme team probs, but it wouldn’t prevent other characters on the team from doing so.

Just remember, you switches from the sideline have to be equal or less points than the TOTAL number of points you’re switching out. This does not mean that each piece has to match up unless you switch out a single piece. So in the example build I shared above, you could switch out Sue Storm and Franklin Richards for the Human Torch and the Hulk even though both the Hulk’s and Human Torch’s point values are higher the Franklin’s – the combination of Sue and Franklin is still more points than the other two combined, so you’re OK. Again, not a switch that you’re necessarily going to want to make, but laid out for illustration purposes!

One last thing to point out that will limit the flexibility of the power just a little bit more – you can’t switch a character in that shares a name with a character being switched out. So one Invisible Woman can’t be switched out for another…not that you’d want to do that, just an example. On the other hand, even if it’s essentially the representation of the same character, but has a different name, then that’s fair play. So you could switch out your Franklin Von Doom for Franklin Richards without an issue. Just keep in mind that the switch is made as a group, so you couldn’t have any character in the group switched out if it shares the name of something on the board. So if you have Hulk (F4 #024) and Spider-Man (F4 #009) on the team, you could not switch them out for Spider-Man (FFF4 #001) and Wolverine (FFF4 #003), even though the points match up. Since it’s not a piece for piece swap, you can’t claim Spider-Man is replacing Hulk and Wolverine is replacing Spider-Man – you have to look at the swap as a whole, and for that reason, this would not be a legal switch.

So, I hope this gives you some ideas on how best to use the trait, and clarifies any questions you might have with how it works. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to let me know in the Facebook group, or email me at Clixbait@digitaledengames.com.

Miniatures Mutations

I’ve talked about using pieces you don’t need to create interesting mods, but while searching for cool stuff to share with you this week, I stumbled upon an idea I hadn’t considered…team bases! Maybe they were a bit problematic in play, but they were always great showcases for your favorite teams. The only problem is, not every team out there got its own team base, so some of us were left hoping that they would come back just so we could get that Runaways (or whatever) team base. But people like PlagueWyrm on HCRealms decided to make it happen on their own, and so we get pieces like this custom X-Force team base!

The cool thing is, the team bases are pretty easy to get cheap right now (at least some of them). I mean, a quick eBay search shows me you could get an empty Gen 13 team base for just under $7 with free shipping, and the base itself is visually very interesting. For example, asmartfellow from HCRealms used the team base for this classic X-Men team, and it turned out amazing! You can get the AvX team bases for even cheaper, but for purposes of madding, I find those bases less interesting visually, and technically more problematic due to their switch clix slot placement.

But then, you’re not committed to making existing teams. HCRealms user theangelofredemption decided to put together a team that (I could be wrong) no one has ever seen before. This has gotten even easier with the release of newer pieces on switch clix bases. You could make a Jean Grey School for Gifted Youngsters team just by picking up some Regenesis pieces, touching up the bases to match the slot on the team base, and calling it a day. While it might not be the coolest mod ever, it’s cheap, easy, and makes for a cool conversation piece to put with your Heroclix collection. I mean, with no touch-up work at all, using stuff that I happened to have lying around, this team I threw together while writing these looks pretty cool!

So, experiment! Share with me your results! You can either share them on the Facebook page, or send me an email at clixbait@digitaledengames.com, and I’ll probably feature it in one of my blogs. I love spotlighting reader works!

View From the Fringe

Since I spent so much time talking about the trait, I felt the need to go a bit further and discuss why you might want to use one of them. Since there are only four choices that you could possibly use, that narrows the field, but while Sue Storm is probably the top choice, I feel like you shouldn’t necessarily dismiss the uncommon from the set, Invisible Woman (F4 #018).

I love the defense of 19, and at 50 points, there’s a lot of options to switch her with using her trait if you’re just looking for a utility piece for piece swap. Barrier is important with Batman in the meta mix, and she has TK to help with your positioning. While it’s a bit inconsistent, she also has the potential to drop free Barriers, and since you’ll know at the start of your turn who you can attach the Barrier to, you could potentially use her TK in combination with the free Barrier for some placement flexibility. Of course, being a fan of Pauper, I like that she’s uncommon, too!

Since most of the time you’ll want her for a Fantastic Four theme team, having a lack of keywords isn’t necessarily a huge issue, but if you’re using her for support swaps, then it could be a bit more of a problem. She is unfortunately not terribly mobile, so she’ll need help getting her into position to do you the most good, especially with her rather limited range. That also pairs poorly with her late dial Pulse Wave, and I’m not sure I really care for Quake in her mid-dial. I’m rather sad she loses TK one her first click. Her lack of Indomitable or Willpower (at least until her late dial) will limit how often she can be of use to you, as well.

I feel better about her in Pauper, though I haven’t looked to see if the Fantastic Four build is viable in Pauper yet. Maybe that will be my team exercise next week, just to see what it might look like. Between the common and uncommon variants of the character, I think the uncommon edges out the common, despite the STOP click on the common. But you can try it yourself and see what you think!

Thanks again for reading the blog today! I hope you enjoyed it and share it with your friends! I do want to give you a heads up – as I am working to improve upon the current format, this month we are doing a test run on what the new Clix Bait might look like, and you can expect to see that sample either at the end of this month, or early the next. I hope you like the changes you’re going to see, and I’m anxious to get it all together for you. Until next time…