by Aaron Cantu
Hello readers!
I know it has been a while since you have heard from me. I took a break from Heroclix to focus on some other things, but now I am back from hiatus and have a team build article you may be interested in.
In case you have been living under a rock and have not heard of it, the Majestix Open Series is in full effect. I decided last minute to take a trip down to Paladins Game Castle in Bakersfield, CA to participate in their trial event. Although I missed out on the top cut, it was not by much and I played (what I think) is a unique team and Patrick asked me to tell you all about it. So here we go.
The Idea
Ever since X-Men: The Animated Series: The Dark Phoenix Saga pre-release I have been fascinated by one figure in particular, Nimrod.
Nimrod is not the most powerful figure in the world, but he has a fantastic trait that makes him very difficult to hit. He can essentially roll off vs opposing attack rolls and if he ties or beats them, he evades the attack and deals the attackers printed damage to them. He also has Shape Change top dial (at each point value) and a large amount of damage reducers throughout his entire dial. If Nimrod happens to take 2 or more damage form an attack you can give him a Structural Damage token, which you can remove as a FREE to heal him one click.
Nimrod isn’t all defense, though, he can pick a standard attack power at the beginning of each turn which he can utilize, and he also has a top dial 12-Attack with 8-Range and Giant Reach: 3. He can even pick Steal Energy to basically never take damage from his Colossal Stamina ability as long as his attacks land.
Shortly after winning prerelease with Nimrod and even taking out a Juggernaut without ever really attacking, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be sweet if you could reroll his defensive trait? Well, with Power Batteries available, you can! Queue the Blue Lantern Corps!
I decided to play the Power Battery (Blue Lantern Corps) because its emotional spectrum lets me re-roll one of my rolls during my opponents turns. This couples very nicely with the comparative evaluation roll. Further, the Blue Lantern Ring adds to my team a positive only perplex for each character that has a construct attached to it.
So now I have my basic strategy, roll defensively with Nimrod and I have my chance to re-roll it. From here I needed to figure out my weaknesses and ways to shore them up. The first and most obvious one is that Nimrod can be Outwitted. There are quite a few ways in modern age and even more in bronze age to give a figure PROTECTED: Outwit, but many of them only work with standard characters. After a short time of reflection, I recalled a relic from the Guardians of the Galaxy set giving characters Power Cosmic, so I slapped it on the team. Enter the Cosmic Control Rod.
Nothing fancy, but if I can pick up the Rod early enough, it covers a huge gap in my team’s defenses. And it is just bad enough that my opponents are not likely to want to rush over into my kill zone to steal it from me.
Another weakness of Nimrod is Pulse Wave. Pulse Wave is the catch-all solution to a lot of problems for a lot of players and in Bronze Age it is even more rampant. I considered playing Superman Blue, who ignores Pulse Wave damage and allows adjacent friendlies to ignore it as well, but he is a bit soft, so I decided instead to utilize Bizarro Green Arrow.
Bizarro Green Arrow (or BGA) doesn’t ignore Pulse Wave nor does he allow Nimrod to, but he does prevent Nimrod from being single target Pulse Waved, which is all I really care about. He will absorb the Pulse Wave and he has two STOP clicks to help keep him alive. If the opponent is desperate to put damage on Nimrod, they’ll have to settle for a multi-target Pulse Wave (assuming I position correctly).
So now that my main defenses are secure, I have to figure out the rest of my team. Originally, I settled on Mud-Man and some ID cards, but after some thought, I decided to add Splitlip to my team instead of Mud-Man.
Splitlip lets me use a FREE to pick up Relics instead of a POWER, so now I can move my first turn while carrying BGA to my Cosmic Control Rod AND attempt to pick it up. I also get a +1 to my Relic rolls, so that means that by my turn 2 I should pick up my Control Rod in most scenarios. Splitlip also adds a little damage modification to my team via Enhancement.
So far, I am at this team:
XDPSG003R Nimrod 175
JW066 Bizarro Green Arrow 50
FI301 Splitlip 20
WOLR107 Power Battery (Blue Lantern Corps) 2
WOLR307 Blue Lantern Ring 4
I need to add constructs to my battery to bring it up to the correct point value, as well as to make sure I can get to some of my more useful powers on the battery dial. Easily my favorite construct is the Bulldozer, so that is a must. I have won games at previous events by almost exclusively using Force Blast via the Bulldozer, so it holds a special place in my heart. It also is a good way to add some extra damage on a team with a low number of attackers. Decoy is a must because the team’s goal is to not lose figures, so keeping Splitlip alive is kind of important. It is also good to have in case Nimrod falls off top click and BGA happens to bite the dust. Stop Sign is a completely underrated construct and super important in matchups against things like Shredders or teams that rely heavily on tying you up. So now I have enough constructs for each figure to have one, which would net me three Perplexes on my team. So, my values should be nice and high when I am ready to attack.
One thing this team is sorely lacking is Probability Control. If I pay attention, I can make sure I have an offensive Prob from my Power Battery, but it can be hard to have one for when my opponent attacks me. I need to have a way to get out of critical hits because they cannot be evaded, and I also don’t want too many doubles rolled as I need BGA next to my Nimrod to be effective. The cheapest way I can think of to re-roll my opponent’s attacks is the new WWE Wrestling Ring. It lets me re-roll ranged attacks made by opposing figures who are not in the ring. Chances are, between the Stop Sign and Nimrod’s scary numbers, my opponents won’t want to come that close to me in order to attack, so I figured this would do well enough. Also, it serves a secondary purpose of allowing me to choose from the WWE PAC when choosing powers for Nimrod’s trait.
Looking for some extra firepower, I add the Gamma Bomb to my team. The Gamma Bomb, in my opinion, is a must play in the Bronze Age format. It blows up after 10 turns and deals 3 damage to every character within 8 squares of it, as well as destroys all blocking terrain and objects in the same area. I easily scored over 100 points just from the Gamma Bomb blowing up on the day of the Bakersfield trial.
With just 13 points left to build with, I wrestled with whether to play 3 ID cards or add another construct or two. In the end, I settled on playing the Nurse construct, which let’s my figures use Regeneration to heal up any damage they happen to take, and the Iceman ID card. Iceman gives me some Running Shot and Pulse Wave capability that I can pump stats as many as 5 times and also leaves behind a bystander which I can use to attack without risking any points scored if he is KO’d. So, in final, the team looks like this:
The Result
I didn’t have much time to prepare for the event, so I lazily added Amok Time and Underground Caverns to my map list and headed down to play. I finished the day 2-1 and in fifth place. My only loss was to Steve DiCarlo who eventually won the event. I learned during the event that the team needs to be played a little more aggressively than what I expected and after some narrow margins in my first two games, I was able to pilot a little better and won my last game at 300-0. Ironically, I never once got to roll for Nimrod’s defensive trait all day and I won my first game 87-78 without ever making an attack roll. I think with some small tweaks this force can be quite competitive in the Bronze Age format and I welcome anyone who wants to give it a shot to do so and let me know their thoughts.
That’s all for today. Thanks for sticking with this long read til the end, and I hope you enjoy.
