Ants…. Ants With Bombs: ROC SQ Team for Tulsa, OK

 by Joshua Earnest

Greetings fellow clixers! To my great surprise I’ve been recruited by Patrick to give my thoughts on a team I’ve been preparing for the Tulsa ROC Super Qualifier being hosted by Dice Addictions on 12/5. I hope that I can hold up to the high standard set by my fellow authors.

The Team:

(Scientist Theme)
Iron Monger 2.0 135

-Hammer Industries ATA 5

AoU 201 Hank Pym 50

AoU 003 Ant-Man 50

Weasel 27

Weasel 27  

Sideline: All appropriate “Morph: Many Identities” trait figures

The way that I normally start the team building process is by trying to imagine what some of the most common figures in the field will be on the day of the tournament in question, and then build a team that at least gives me a chance at beating the majority of those figures. Last No Tactics season those figures included Kyle Rayner and Zombie Super Skrull, in this current Limited season I’m anticipating more figures like Mr. Mxyzptlk (Especially after Patrick’s win, I can hear Wizkids revving up the watch-list already!) and SR Nick Fury. I’ve seen the power of ant swarms in modern, and I think that they get even better in the limited format because people will have that many fewer options to be able to deal with them. I was tinkering around with the boxed set figures that generate the ants and noticed the only two keywords they had were Avengers and Scientist. I was driving home from work that same day and Iron Monger 2.0 just clicked in my head as a fellow scientist along with my favorite support character Weasel, and the base for the team was born.

How It Plays

As I said before some of the figures that I built the team to contend with are Mr. Mxy and SR Nick Fury. How do I solve those problems? The title says it all, ants rigged with bombs. If my opponent KOs one of my ant swarms with an attack, opposing characters adjacent to that swarm are each dealt one penetrating damage, courtesy of Iron Monger 2.0’s trait. Combined with how difficult the swarms will be to shake off thanks to 202e Ant-Man’s trait giving them the ability to follow adjacent opposing characters that are moved or placed and you now have 0 point bystanders that are going to be painful to have next to you, and even more painful to KO. All of this doesn’t even account for the threat that Iron Monger 2.0 himself poses to my opponents. Using the special Enhancement power from both Weasel’s I can have a 13-Attack, 6-Damage, 9-Range primary attacker that, thanks to my scientist theme team, can be modified even higher with my ATA (other than Damage, of course).

Ant-Men Selection

A very important factor for any team is adaptability. What do you do when you sit across the table and your opponent isn’t playing something you expected? In the past I’ve used figures like Trinity War Batman, or Engineer to be able to cover my bases and be ready for nearly any situation. Here I’m using the Ant-Men not only for their ability to generate bystanders, but also for the flexibility that they allow for my team. Take the starting two figures for example. For the purpose of generating Ant Swarms, who you start with doesn’t matter, only who you morph into after you move. If I get map choice they could be any two and I’ll bring in the right character for the right situation during my turn, but if I don’t get map choice then I’m going to need to be able to react to my opponent’s opening play without the benefit of immediately having access to the right Ant-Man for the job. Knowing this I went with the two that I think are by far the most useful in any given situation.

003 Ant-Man is there for his sneak attack factor as well as for his Perplex. I think his ability to grant a character with the starburst symbol either tiny size or giant size is just the type of power that my opponent may overlook when faced with such a large number of characters on a team. With the new size rules in effect my now giant Iron Monger 2.0 can ignore any elevation or outdoor blocking in between him and his target potentially allowing for a brutal alpha strike.

201 Hank Pym is there for starting TK, which almost feels like a letdown after all the options I get from his partner but in some situations I can certainly see needing to cross the map ASAP and opening TK being a useful ability to have. The other potentially curious choice is 001 Hank Pym. I decided he deserved a spot on the sideline at the very least for his very niche (but potentially very important) immunity to characters with Ultron in their name, as well as his PC/Outwit power (on click 5) because PC is a power that this team has very limited access to.

Weaknesses

In my opinion, by far the most glaring lack on this team is Probability Control. Yes I have “I thought I fixed that” in the form of Weasel and yes two of the ant-men have it on their second click, but with a dice game like Heroclix there are times that just won’t be enough. If I come up against a team running Nighthawk Prime and a reasonably good defender then my highest attack value is going to be an 11 which means I may need a lot more luck than I’m comfortable with hitting potential 18-20 Defense values. Another important factor this team could have trouble with is zombies. Having as may characters on the board as I do means a lot more potential sources of food tokens for my opponent. On top of that all the zombies also ignore characters, which make them very difficult to nail down in place and bury under a swarm of ants. Any sufficiently mobile team may be able to dodge around the Ant Swarms, because while they are great, they are not terribly fast. And lastly I think I may run into several instances of action starvation. With this many characters, and only one potential source of leadership (206 Wasp who was very nearly on the starting line-up for that very reason), I am going to need to be smart when deciding which characters are going to take which actions. As useless as the Avengers Team ability is in most situations, on this team it would have been absolutely phenomenal.

Conclusion

This is a literal swarm team. I think it is going to be a lot of fun to play, and a lot of fun to play against because both my opponent and I are going to get to roll dice and KO figures. At the end of the day I find that to be more important than how well it does.