The beginning of April saw the largest ROC event of the season in Costa Mesa, CA as multiple pro players descended on E Sports Arena to duke it out for the title. Today I’ll be discussing the top 8 teams.

The ROC Limited scene is in full-swing and looks to be running strong until it cycles out at the end of this month. While Jakeem Thunder is still ruling the roost, we did get to see some neat teams scratch top 8, and both the first and second place teams were pretty different than what we’ve seen.

Rather than droning on, let’s jump straight into the results.

8th Place – Roel Sanchez

Mary has been a staple in competitive and LGS play as she’s just downright dumb for her points. She even cost me my only loss in swiss during the Winter WKO! With Roel’s team comp, he has so many ways to throw Mary into the fight and then yank her back with Bat-Mite. There isn’t a lot of moving parts here as Roel’s entire team is based on getting Mary to you and just demolishing your best piece or nuking support. STAR labs gives him some nice utility, able to give Mary Precision Strike to swat pesky spiders and pushing into 14 Defend with Support to heal Mary if he gets into too much trouble. It’s a pretty simple team that can do a lot of damage. I like the addition of the Safehouse on this team; Mary is so quick with huge movement that she can easily get through the corridors and lay down the hurt with little worries of someone hitting back thanks to all the walls.

7th Place – Clay Wood

Clay’s team is a bit like PJ’s team that won a few weeks back with the assist from Uncommon Magneto. He seems to be making a bit of presence in the ROC with his ability to use Running Shot for free once per game to smash walls or dish some extra damage that isn’t expected. It would appear that Clay’s variant of this team is more about locking down the opposition with Bizarro Joker and HAHA Joker while Magneto TK’s Jakeem around and Jakeem does Jakeem things. Overdrive can get his Jokers into place, and can carry his entire team up partially so that he can have a pretty decent alpha strike. One thing to note about Clay’s team is that aside from Magneto, it’s very good against the Shredder Elite and their free penetrating damage. Bizarro Joker will lock them in place and heal up from them the following turn, Overdrive is hidden in his vehicle and requires two Shredders to commit to actual get damage through, and HAHA Joker can easily just heal back up through their damage. Needless to say Jakeem can just take Invincible. The benefit here is that if Shredders ping Magneto, they may knock him into his Pulse Wave click which is bad news bears.

6th Place – Cory Henry

We’ve seen this exact team before because Cory won the Washington ROC with the team, and I even talked about it a few weeks ago. Because there were no changes to the team, I’m going to skip this write-up. If you want to read about it, click that link above and you can learn all you need there!

5th Place – Alyssa McNeil

What’s better than a Jakeem Thunder? How about a Jakeem that can’t be killed with Ranged attacks. That’s exactly what Alyssa played and did quite well with it. Shrinking down Bizarrow with the particles ensures that Jakeem can taxi him around with no reducers to movement and stay safe from all ranged attacks. Mxy does a great job as a dice tinkerer and secondary attacker with his amazing Pulse Wave that locks foes down. The icing on the cake here is the Fast Forces Penguin which ups Alyssa’s Jakeem higher than any other she faces, with a 12 attack and 9 range. That gave her the reach she needed to take out a lot of opposition. I really like the Symbiote on Jakeem as I’ve mentioned before as it gives him a lot more protection and allows you to risk things a little more since you’re not relying on a single defensive power to keep him alive.

4th Place – Kris Flores

Well how about that, a Sinister Syndicate team won 4th place! It makes me smile that two of the OP Kit members from last year made it this high – I love that Mysterio so much! Anyway, Kris’ team has a lot of tools at his disposal even though it doesn’t look like it. Mysterio can generate 11 attack Incap pieces thanks to Kingpin sharing attack values while Doc Oc does his thing and annihilates anything in a single turn. With two Outwits, there’s a good chance they’ll burn through anything. Chameleon is the real star here and all his disguises are great options. Bizarrow can keep his team safe from Nick Fury, Peggy can shut down any defense powers he needs, and Nightwing is a complete Ace in the hole against Krang. If the opponent has the Symbiote equipped, he can also just stick with Chameleon and counteract it, although it would probably be more useful to just go with Peggy in that situation. It might seem like the entire team is riding on Doc Oc, and that might be true, but it’s really great to see something original like this place.

3rd Place – Armando Ramirez

And there’s the Krang! I always expect to see Krang in top-8 as he should usually get there. However, Armando takes the typical Krang build and throws it out the window. Although he sticks with Juston (which why wouldn’t he), he gives up Baxter and any other typical support you’d see in favor of Streaky and a double Night Nurse. The good side here is that he can heal Krang back from death in a single turn, but it does require him to burn actions whereas Baxter is free. That gamble appeared to pay off though as Armando obviously got farther than any other Krang players (if there were any). The Streaky pick is neat; a Hypersonic ranged piece with 3 damage that can stick to you is pretty annoying, and the stealth busting was probably a big deal. Although I don’t really like seeing Krang, it’s neat to see a team that’s so different from what we’re used to.

1st & 2nd Place – PJ Bolin and Easton Brock

Woah, I’m mentioning them both at once? What gives? Well, PJ and Easton had virtually the same build except for their single equipment choice, so I figured I would save space and put them together. In case you’re wondering, PJ took 1st.

Both PJ and Easton opted for the king of modern that is Jakeem, so there’s no point talking about that. What is worth talking about is their secondary attacker. Both pros opted for the new Bat-Knight as Juston Seyferts Sentinel. I’ve heard a few of the pros talking about this setup before the event started and I had a feeling that Majestix would be the first place it would pop up. This combination is very strong and gets a lot of the benefits of Krang but without that 170 point cost. Bat-Knight has killer combat values as he’s a KC piece, along with the Batman Ally team ability for Stealth. Juston allows him to move 9 squares and take a giant reach swipe for 3, and once he’s done, the Knight can use it’s ram ability which uses it’s printed damage value so DDM doesn’t come into play. This allows Bat-Knight to deal an unbelievable amount of damage, and can virtually swallow up a support line in two actions. If the Knight takes more than 2 damage, it’s not on Plasticity making it impossible for the people it ran over to get away. Also, the Knight can carry Jean into position so she can TK Jakeem up in the same turn, making the third action of their turn the one that mops up their team. This is a very deadly strategy and I suspect we’ll be seeing this build copied through the rest of the Limited season.

The only difference was the equipment. I tend to like Easton’s a little better as the Symbiote can give Jakeem +1 to stats if you’re lucky and just seems to add more benefit than the Torso does. While a constant reducer is great, most pieces in the format can get penetrating damage or have it natively, so it seems like Shape Change is the stronger ability in my book to bring. The plasticity doesn’t hurt either. Still, I can see the Torso being nice in that PJ really doesn’t have to worry about picking defensive powers and can go ham every turn.

So What Can We Learn?

The biggest takeaway from this event is that Jakeem is still the big boss, and there’s nothing we’ve seen that is going to stop him. Half of top-8 ran him, and he took both 1st and 2nd place. It’s safe to say that Jakeem is a problem and until someone finds the silver bullet to deal with him, or Wiz Kids releases something that can defeat him, we’re going to keep seeing him win events. It’s tough to come to grasp with that, but the fact of the matter is that if you’re going to a tournament, your odds are just better if you’re running the Super Rare Prime. The new rules will absolutely help though with Outwit being a serious counter to him.

Virtually every team here is a aggro team, in that they get up in your face as soon as possible and take you down in one-to-three glorious turns. It seems range has take a bit of a back seat with pieces like Nick Fury no longer making a presence. Fighting fire with fire seems to be the way to go. With the current environment, I would expect to see Bizarro Joker to come up in play a bit more.

Deadpool & X-Force was completely passed in top-8, which is really sad for me personally. Either the set hasn’t found it’s roots in competitive yet, Limited isn’t the format for the set, or there’s just nothing that viable. I’m hoping it’s one of the former two. I know my buddy Aaron Cantu from Two Clicks From KO ran a Deadpool Shifting Focus team with Doop at lower points and managed to get into top 16, so there’s a little hope for someone like me right now.

Juston is starting to see other Robots on his way out. Bat-Knight is going to be a serious problem with the pair only taking 100 points of your build and dishing a lot more damage than they seem like they should be able to. Although the Bat-Knight is tough to get ahold of right now, I would expect to see Juston used in interesting ways before he rotates out in June. I’ve heard about Fuitiod from TMNT 2: Turtles in a Half Shell being a good pick as it provides you with a double movement super taxi for Scientists. That’s a great way to get Doc Oc in and out in a single turn.

Green Lantern fell off somewhat with a showing on just one team of the top-8. From the look of things, it seemed like he was an auto-play if you had 35 points open. It’s surprising to me that this incredibly efficient piece wasn’t a bigger deal during this event. I’m sure we haven’t seen the end of him yet.

That will wrap up this look into the Majestix Regional event. What are your thoughts on the winning teams? How about that Bat-Knight? Did you attend? If so, how did you do? I’ve been talking with Pat a little bit and I’m aiming to keep my schedule open in early August for the next Majestix event as my goal is to be there no matter what.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you guys tomorrow when I pick back up on the Deadpool Chase series!