Where the grass is green and the dice are pretty.

Is the song stuck in your head now? Me too!

Enough fun and games… it is time to talk about some fun and games. Tonight was about playing around with the new stuff and trying out the number one combo I have been wanting to play with since I first saw this card.

You know him, you love him, you probably don’t have enough dice for him. This combo was centered around our man Maxwell Jensen… aka Parasite.

You know the ability, but in case you are not aware… instead of attacking, you can add his attack and defence values to another attacking character to buff their stats.

If only there was a good way to make use of this ability. Hmmm…. Parasite has two Affiliations.

This looks like a job for Team Up! Multiple Affiliations means multiple A & D buffs, which means gigantic buffs when Parasite sends his stats to another character. Now I just need a character to make good use of this combo.

Yeah… I went there.

Pretty obvious addition actually. Play Team Up. Yuan-Ti is unblockable. Yuan-Ti gets Parasites boosted stats. Yuan-Ti punches my Opponent in the face. Have multiple of any of these pieces out and it can get crazy.

What Did You Play?

The Team: Parasite City.

The core was set with Parasite, Yuan-Ti, and Team Up. All of the other pieces were there to complement this core. The good news with Team Up is you are just looking for a nice mix of things with different Affiliations. This should not be too difficult.

I started this build by adding in the other drug I am currently addicted to, Clayface and his amazing Global. This was my ramp engine. Now, I needed to maximize my use of this with the Team.

I decided to stick to cheap things with as many Affiliations as I could find. Poxwalker was an excellent first addition due to its cost. I could buy one, use the CFG to get the two fists out and buy more things. Plus, two more Affiliations.

Sticking with the Warhammer theme, I put in the Deadly Grey Hunter. Again, the double Affiliation helps the Team out incredibly well and the core ability is pretty good at dealing with annoyances. To make Deadly more effective for this Team, I made the choice of adding in Doom Lance as my second BAC. If I saw something across the board that was causing me grief, I could just use Doom Lance with Grey Hunter to remove all of the things! Pretty good removal actually.

So, I have my ramp, my removal, and my win condition. Now, I need a little protection from some other potential issues. Enter Black Widow. Again, two Affiliations! She also deals with the annoying ping damage from character abilities. No Attune, no Range… did I mention two Affiliations?

Switch was there for two main reasons. If someone had the horrible idea of using my own Team Up’s against me, I was going to make them harder to use. Also, the Green Devil Mask is still a thing here. I hate that card.

With only one slot left, I wanted to maintain my cheap purchase curve. Thousand Island Thor was put in for his Global. That way, Team Up will only cost me 3 energy instead of the usual 4.

Let’s see if the Parasite Team Up monstrosity can work.

Game 1:

Up against out resident youngster in the first round. She brought a nice little Justice League Team. I tried to keep the foot off the gas, but the CFG just speeds this up. On my first turn, going first, I managed to buy two Poxwalkers and a Parasite. That is stupid. I built up to where I had a nice mix of things in the Field, but the core was two Yuan-Ti’s with two Parasites and a Team Up. I think I had 7 Affiliations on the Field when this hit. More than enough for lethal.

I felt a little bad here, but did try and help her out a little after the match. She brought the discounting Aquaman, but didn’t buy him. She brought Investigation, but didn’t buy it. I told her, that these should be her first purchases. Aquaman helps her get the rest of her Team cheaper. Hopefully, she did.

1-0

Game 2:

This one ranks up as one of my all time favourite Dice Masters games. It was against Gord’s ridiculous Awaken Team (I’ll let him fill in the details of the build). Basically, it was built for massive amounts of damage in a very short period of time. Oh… and we both had CFG, so this was going to get out of hand fast.

I got hit early (T4 or 5) for 18 damage, and figured it was over. I had went for an early Widow, but due to some bag clog she came out after the damage was done.

I had purchased a Doom Lance and had Grey Hunter out in the Field when it rolled. I figured I would try and make him reroll his monstrosity on the next turn and maybe he whiffs. He did. There is all of a sudden a small sparkle at the end of that tunnel.

This gave me some time to get more pieces in place, but I needed to wait for Team Up to cycle through the bag. I took some small hits with Attune and Yuan-Ti when I could, but did not have the big blow in position yet.

He bought his secondary win condition and managed to draw it the next turn. I begged him not to pull the blue Atom die. He did. He whiffed. It is getting brighter.

Ping where I can. Doom Lance where I can. Try and keep his Field manageable. Team Up has to eventually show up.

Gord has all of what he needs in the bag. All he needs to do is draw a Pyro, and I am probably dead. His calculation was that he had an 80% chance of drawing one of his Pyro’s. He didn’t. He also whiffed his Parasite roll that could have ended me. Time to take out the sunglasses as things are getting even brighter.

Team Up shows up. It rolls. I have the magic 7 Affiliations out there. He has enough blockers and masks to keep back 7 of them. I have enough excess Sidekicks going through, that it doesn’t matter. I actually had to use Parasite as an Attacker in this game to make the numbers work.

I come back from a 20-2 deficit. Gord, had some terrible luck with his rolls in this game… but it made it way more interesting that I thought it was going to be. Definitely a highlight game for me.

2-0

Game 3:

Patch/Avengers ID Card with Larfleeze and Insect Plague to make Sidekicks a pain. Making them Avengers makes them an even bigger pain. I worked on building my Field and swung in with an early Yuan-Ti or two for some minor damage. He hit me with I think 14 or 15 damage with a single unblockable Avenging Sidekick. Enough to get me close to dead, but not dead yet. As we saw from above, I may have crammed a horseshoe somewhere on my person.

Shortly after the punch to the face, Team Up hit. This time, I only had 5 Affiliations on the board, but Parasite was there. I pumped Yuan-Ti with Parasite, and used his Insect Plague Global to get another of my Sidekicks through unblocked. That was the difference in the game as that was enough damage for lethal.

3-0

Game 4:

Our travelling Edmontonian was in town for tonights games. We decided to have a “for fun” game after the official ones were done. He was playing around with the new Phantom Stranger along with some other toys. He also had the same Parasite as mine (fun fact, there were at least 3 of these Parasites floating around tonight).

He was using that annoying Black Widow Global for force my Parasite through, and doing some Stranger damage at the same time. I returned the favour by forcing The Stranger to come at me.

I had managed to grab all of my Team Ups in this game. In the final turn, I drew a double Team Up and it rolled. That with Yuan-Ti buffed with Parasite was more than enough to do him in.

4-0

Post-Mortem:

We already know how good Team Up is. We already know how good Yuan-Ti is. Now mix that peanut butter with the chocolatly goodness of Parasite and you have a peanut butter cup of destructive deliciousness. The damage output was unreal when sending Yuan-Ti through.

The cheap multi-affiliated characters make this easy to pull off. Poxwalker is just great to get this engine started and should almost be on any version of a Team Up Team. Using it with the CFG is just icing on the cake.

Grey Hunter/Doom Lance was a fairly potent way to remove problems. It really only got used in the one game, but Grey Hunter came out a lot to fuel the Team Up engine. I feel there is something with this core combo that could be used on a Team by itself. It is too good not to be. I will have to play around with this at a later date.

Switch was not needed tonight, but she is definitely something I like to keep on a Team Up Team. If things had gone south, she would have been helpful.

Thor is another one of those adds that I would keep. 4 cost characters/actions are ok to get to, but 3 costs are much better. That one energy difference makes Team Up that much better and easier to run.

Widow, like Switch, had a similar fate tonight. I did need her at one time, but by the time she showed up it didn’t matter. The defensive ability plus the two Affiliations make her an easy add to this type of a Team though.

Let’s talk about the the drugs now. Parasite and Clayface are something that I have realized I need to step away from already. They are just so, so good. Parasite is one of the best combat driven characters ever. He is a buff that just sits on the Field for when you need him. Now, I teased about the dice count on him earlier in the article. I never bought more than two of him, so the amount you get in the Campaign Box is probably enough to work with. However, having the OPTION to buy more was nice to have.

Clayface. He has been discussed a few times on this site already. Nothing has changed. His Global is just plain crazy. This is the new PXG. Maybe Andy can make CXG a thing? I like that larger cost characters can be bought easier now. It definitely opens up the game options.

This Team was an absolute blast to play with. I have wanted to try out Team Up with Parasite since I first saw Parasite spoiled. These two are a match made in heaven.

Have you had a chance to play with the Parasite? What other fun uses have you found for old Max? Let us know in the comments below.

Thank you for reading!

– jourdo

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