Welcome to another edition of Clix Bait! I’m happy that you’ve chosen to spend some time with me, and I hope you might like to spend a little more time, and follow this link to the Facebook page, join up, and share your thoughts. I love to hear what’s on your mind – it helps me focus my writing more into what it is that you want to read about. Then I get more readers, you get more of what you want, and everybody wins!
Have you ever had a secret? Man, I know some things that are coming, but I can’t even hint at what they are, as I want to keep getting this kind of information. Hopefully my restraint will be rewarded and I can break some decent news to the Heroclix world, but for now, I can just say that there are some rules changes on the horizon that have me excited. Some folks may not like how often rules are getting changed lately, but I really think it’s a positive. It says that WizKids is actually paying attention to what’s going on in the game, and taking measures to improve it. In the case of what’s allegedly coming, it shows that they are actually listening to the players, as well, and solving problems based on player insight and experience. This is a good thing, and the only reason I mention things I can’t mention!
On a less secretive note, Lake Effect Heroclix recently posted an announcement about the upcoming Avengers 60 release, and more importantly, the play at home kits. And yes, there is an “s” at the end of that – there are going to be multiple play at home kits for the set. I’m not really happy about this, as the completionist in me feels like I’m going to have to spend more money to get everything I want. But the budget-conscious me is missing an important piece of information that will determine how bad this really is. We know each kit will have a different figure and a different legacy card, but will it have a different map, as well? The maps, for me, are the most important part of the kit, so if it’s the same map in every kit, it’s likely that you can get one and move on, as the pieces in the kits have tended to be a little lackluster. If they are the same map, I’m sure a lot of the community will complain about that, but it also means you’ll likely see a lot of maps for cheap on the secondary market. If you want to check out the post for yourself, you can follow this link to Lake Effect’s original post.
I promised I’d talk about our friendly event from Tuesday, and let you know how it went, and I hate to report a bit of disappointment. I know there are players in the area, but I seriously am not sure where I need to go to get their attention, so there were only two of us there on Tuesday. We played a game with our fun teams, but we actually did that AFTER playing a game with our current projected meta teams, since no one else was there. The day wasn’t a total waste, as it told me that my team wasn’t quite enough to really stand up right now, and we spent a little time theorycrafting so I could tweak the original idea and get something that looks more workable. I’ll need to test it, but the foundation is similar to something I’ve seen work before, so I’m optimistic that this will be good. Or at least decent.
OK, so I’m going to spend a good bit of time this week on the Mystery Cards. First, we’ll talk about why you want to consider them for your builds, before I show you my first attempt at a Mystery build, and then I’ll look at my favorite of the cards. I didn’t have any projects I was working on this week, so I decided to take a quick look to see if you can get custom sleeves for your Heroclix cards. Let’s see what I can tell you this week!
Marvel has “What If?”, and now DC has “Why Not?” What makes me say that? Well, as Batman Team-Up hits the meta, we have a new game element that is questionable in its usefulness. There’s going to be a lot of teams that simply can’t take advantage of mysteries, and those that can may have a hard time getting them built up enough to have any impact on the game, so I can understand many people not even bothering with them. But, while their effects aren’t necessarily game winners, and some may be slow either due to high requirements or a low number of characters that can activate them, there’s a pretty solid argument for having them in your build.
They’re FREE!
I mean, honestly, this is probably the simplest argument I’ve ever had to make. The cards are keyword dependent, so not everyone’s going to be able to use them, but if it doesn’t cost you anything to add to your force, and there’s no downside to having it there, then there’s absolutely no reason not to have it. Your game may not last long enough to trigger even one of the effects, but you’re lost absolutely nothing by having that card sit there on the table, so I can’t really see a good reason not to.
With one caveat – the set has just now hit actual release, meaning that prices are unstable, but I can’t imagine that they are going to be terribly expensive. Right now, they look to be hovering between $5 and $15, which isn’t horrible, but may not be worth the investment for your team. On the other hand, if you’ve bought some packs, and happen to pull one or two, then if you have a character on your team that can use it, that doesn’t really effect your team budget, does it?
Just as an example, if I ran my scientist team again (which I won’t…that was a painful experience, but for the sake of argument), then I have Teen Lantern as my taxi. She’s the only one that can take advantage of Murder in the City Enduring, and the condition involved makes it highly unlikely she’ll even get the first benefit from it, but you never can tell. Leadership rolls can help you get there, and it may be the last turn of the game, but if you keep your opponent from using prob on the last shot of the game, the one that gets you the points to win, then that one situation made it all worthwhile.
I complain a lot about the potential cost addition for new game elements, but this one strikes a good balance. It’s not terribly expensive, and since the effects aren’t game-breaking, they’re not going to get popular enough to be really expensive. But they add a little flavor to the game, and can give a savvy player a little advantage at a critical point in the game, so I wouldn’t relegate these to your junk drawer, as it were, and instead, after building your team, see if any of these will fit.
We have another new game element, and it’s probably not that great since so few people have been talking about it, but then that makes it worth looking at as a tool to use in a budget build. I mean, Mystery Cards are going to be free to add to the team, so even if the effect is unlikely to get off, it can’t hurt to have it in the build, right? But I wanted to take it a step further and see if I could build a team around a card, and see where that might get me. The natural choice would be to make a detective build, as so many of them work with detectives, but I felt like a more consistent and synergistic team could be built around Teen Titans. While I didn’t focus on building a budget build for this segment, I will say a brief look at the pieces I expected to be cost-prohibitive turned out that they were reasonably inexpensive (although I did not research the team’s equipment).
Link – Teen Titans Get a Clue
Teen Titans need to hit to get clue tokens, so I started with a pair of pieces that might help accelerate that. Equipping Donna Troy with the Lasso of Truth will let her get in a free incap attack, on top of her normal attack. Sadly, since the mysteries are worded “hits one or more opposing characters,” this means we can’t overload the card by hitting multiple targets, but two attacks still help us get where we want to be. Deathbringer can hit twice, too, and can place a target in a position for the rest of the team to pile on. It wouldn’t surprise me if your team has Stealth on turn two, meaning you’ll want a map with heavy hindering terrain. Wonder Girl is a solid third attacker, and she brings in Leadership. Her STOP click is nice combined with Jinx giving the team Mystics. Beast Boy is a good taxi for the team, and Raven can not only place your characters where they need to be, she clears an action token while doing it, and has the added bonus of being able to bring back a piece that’s been KOed if you need that extra push to get over the top. Cyborg messes with placed characters, but can also give one of your attackers one of the tools they need to have an impact turn.
All of this really does well to get the tokens on cards, but the team is pretty vulnerable defensively. The values aren’t terribly high, and damage reduction isn’t widespread on the team. It’s good that it only takes three clues to get stealth, because you really need it! Super Hero Summer Camp can add to the defense, as well, but both these are ranged measures, so your moves are going to need to focus on keeping most of your team out of close combat. There’s plenty of Perplex and Probability Control in the build, but there’s Felix Faust, so your mileage may vary.
So is this a really competitive team? I doubt it, but it doesn’t look like it’d be fun to play! And I don’t think it’s FAR off competitively speaking, but it doesn’t need to be far off to make for a long day at the lower tables. Someone else might be able to use this as a springboard to make a really great team, but I just see the defensive liabilities being a bit too much to overcome. I actually kind of hope someone comes along and proves me wrong, though – I really like the idea of this build!
Keeping on theme, here, let’s talk about what I think is the best Mystery Card out there. I’m not going to go into a breakdown of the top five or anything like that – I’m just going to talk about which one I think tops the list. There are a few factors that go into this evaluation, as some effects might be more powerful than others, but some are going to be more useful in the grand scheme of things because it’s easier to get to a key point in the card. For example, Raven’s Spellbook has a great effect, but it requires nine clue tokens, and has not intermediate effect. Titans make it easier to get tokens on than some other cards, but that’s still going to be a slow effect, and therefore reduces its overall usefulness. So what won me over?
It was a pretty simple choice – Stakeout. For one, there are several keywords that can trigger the clue generation for this card, and the condition of hitting with an attack can be manipulated a bit easier than some other cards through Flurry and other similar effects, as well as through free attacks like the Lasso of Truth. On top of that, with just three tokens, you’re getting a pretty solid effect. As in the above example, on a good theme build, you can have your whole team stealthed pretty quickly. The Case Closed effect isn’t much more expensive, and can be keep some of your big players in the game.
I want to give an honorable mention to String of Cat Burglaries. In this age of equipment, getting a +1 to hit is going to be nice, and later stealing equipment is pretty huge. Batman Family has some good potential builds, but not quite as flexible as Titans, and the early effect is easy to get to. What held it back from winning me over is that the clues are harder to get, requiring not only the keyword, but also the condition of being in hindering terrain, and the Cased Closed ability takes more work to get to, both from the number of tokens and the effort to get those tokens.
But as I said, they’re all good, and I would recommend adding them to your teams if they have any of the involved keywords. As a zero-cost team option, you really can’t go wrong!
I’ve written about a variety of accessories that you can get for Heroclix, but I haven’t spoken about one thing that’s gotten more popular in the last year or two, and that’s card sleeves. Most of us try to take care of our minis, but the cards are pretty important, as well, so we should probably take the same care of them, as well. Unfortunately, standard card sleeves cover the back of the card, which means you have to remove the card from the sleeve any time an opponent asks to look at it. So right now, the only game in town is ROC sleeves, and since they are only (to my knowledge) available as prizing for ROC events, we have to make do with what we can get.
Or do we? Several places actually make custom card sleeves, where you can put your own images on the backs of cards. As someone who also plays Magic, I’m familiar with the quality of a variety of sleeve companies, and I have to say I was pleased when I discovered my favorite, Dragon Shield, does custom work.
Going through the process, it was pretty easy, as well. Just download the image, center it as you like, and you’re done. The image here MAY be misleading, however, as there’s one detail to the process that I’m not yet sure about. While the image doesn’t cover the entire back of the card, it may not necessarily mean that the uncovered portion is blank.
Having worked with custom printers before for the card game that I’m publishing, I have seen how companies handle prints that don’t quite fit their normal parameters, and can tell you that there’s a few different things that could happen. They could contact you for clarity, asking how you want it handled, but more often you’re going to get an unclear explanation of the issue, or they will just have a “quick fix” in their back pocket, which likely will be filling in the remaining space with a solid color. I don’t have a definitive answer to the question at this time, although I have sent a message to Dragon Shield to hopefully know how they would handle it. I’ll keep you up to date on what they say, but if you want to check it out, you can follow this link to their website.
Next week, I’ll be attending Ohayocon in Columbus, so the prep work going into the vent (we run the karaoke there) is going to prevent me from having time to write this week, so you’re getting a bit of a break from Clix Bait. But hey, use that time to visit the Facebook page and let me know what you’d like me to write about next. And don’t be afraid to share news and events there, too. The community loves to hear about that stuff!
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