I’m doing something a little different today. Rather than building a team, or breaking down results, or reviewing something out there, I want to just have a chat about a recent announcement from WizKids.

I’m in a funk lately, both with my normal life and Heroclix, but mostly with Heroclix. My venue that I judge at has seen record lows with just 1 person showing up to an event in September, a lack of support from people, and a general fatigue in the game with the only friends I have who play. With the work I’ve been putting into Dungeons and Dragons to prepare for a wonderful new campaign, Heroclix has taken a back burner, so I figured today would be a good day to just talk.

At WizKids Open House the other week, they announced that due to licensing rights, we won’t be seeing The Fantastic Four for at least a year, possibly two. I want to talk about what this means both to us as players and what it means to me as a Marvel fan and a clix player/content creator.

What This Means Immediately

More important than anything else is Battleworld. You might have noticed that my cover image on the home page features one Victor Von Doom. If you didn’t read Secret Wars a few years back, Doom was the main player. He was referred to as God Emperor Doom, and the entire story revolved around him. He was the master of Battleworld, imprisoned Johnny Storm as the Sun, made The Thing the wall that separated the rest of Battleworld from the Zombies and Ultron armies, and twisted reality to make Sue his wife with Val and Franklin his kids. It was a trip and a wonderful read.

I think it’s obvious to figure out why I’m bringing this up. Why in the world are we getting a Battleworld set if we can’t include Doctor Doom, or any of the other Fantastic Four? It simply doesn’t make any sense. WizKids should have shelved this set and waited until the FF were okay to use again. It would have been the perfect return of Doctor Doom for the game. What better way to bring back perhaps the best villain in the Marvel U than to use his most powerful incarnation? We also would have gotten the most unique versions of Sue, Ben, and Johnny ever. How cool would a Ben Grimm map be where he’s the wall and has an effect? It could have been the Marvel equivalent to the Batman: The Animated Series maps where Battleworld figures got a bonus or something along those lines.

What This Means In The Long Run

I know not many people care that much about the Fantastic Four themselves in the game even if Sue is usually very strong, but look at all the other characters we lose out on. Galactus can’t be remade and he could use a new dial and design in this new world of clix. I already mentioned the Doom issue. Tons of characters are classified as “Fantastic Four” properties that it feels like an entire portion of the Marvel U can’t be used.

This leads to basically the same two things happening over and over again with Marvel Heroclix; Avengers and X-Men. Seriously, what’s the last Marvel set we got that wasn’t tied to either of these franchises? What If…? That doesn’t count because they couldn’t use the damn FF which most What If… stories are from! I would argue the last Marvel set not tied to either of these groups was Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Even though we had Avengers in the set, it was about a distinct section of Marvel. The Mighty Thor comes close, but Thor is pretty heavily tied to The Avengers, so I have to give it a no-go, but it gets some points.

What am I stabbing at here? The point of all this is it means another 1-2 years at least of the same damn Marvel characters over and over again. We already have another Avengers set early next year (Earth X), and then another X-Men set which, if I’m honest I’m thrilled about (X-Men Adventures), and then we’ll probably get another DC set? Who knows. But I can almost guarantee we’ll get another Avengers set after X-Men. As much as I’m an advocate that the big names from the movies sells characters, there’s an argument to be made that we’re getting overloaded with the same characters literally every set. It’s exhausting, and the news that we have to wait another 1-2 years to get some new characters bums me out. EDIT: We did get Superior Foes of Spider-Man 2 years ago, and I feel like WizKids won’t let Modern exist without a Spidey set, so my money is on that being the set after the next DC set.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget that we can’t get a true Illuminati team without a new Reed Richards. That’s crap.

Don’t think DC is off the hook here either; they’re guilty of the same sh*t with the “Batman has to be in every set” mentality.

What This Means to Me as a Marvel Fan

I’ve never really liked the Fantastic Four to be perfectly honest. Reed has always been a douchebag in my opinion, and Sue is rather boring to read about. Johnny is a little fun but his powerset has been multiplied so many times that I don’t feel any attachment to him. The only one of the four I really care about is The Thing, and I’m sad to not see a new Thing for another few years. There was a terrific story by Jonathan Hickman (which one? They’re ALL good) where Reed built The Bridge and discovered the Council of Reeds from all different universes. I would LOVE to see that implemented into Clix.

More than the family, I’m sad we can’t get new versions of other characters tied to the license. Doom for example; he’s fantastic and there’s a lot that can be done with him. His last piece from Galactic Guardians (Zombie Doom isn’t a real Doom in my opinion) is bloated and overcosted quite heavily, so we don’t have a good Doom to use. There’s also the incredible Infamous Iron Man, Victor Von Doom post-Battleworld realizing being a villain hasn’t gotten him anywhere and that after literally having everything and recreating the entire world in his image, he still lost, so the only logical answer is redemption was surprisingly fantastic to read, and I would love to see him in Clix. I liked that version so much that I customized my Avengers/Defenders War Super Rare Iron Man to be Doom.

But more than anything; more than Doom, more than Galactus, there’s Silver Surfer. It depresses me that Surfer has never been done justice in this game. The argument that Silver Surfer is too powerful to properly build and make him cost less than 300 points is nonsense. If Uni-Mind can work, Silver Surfer can, too. It’s a travesty that one of the coolest characters in Marvel can’t be made because of this embargo that’s over but not over. Every version of this dude is a bloated nightmare of crap, moreso than the Galactic Guardians Dr. Doom by a longshot. This guy deserves a killer dial, much like Beta Ray Bill deserved and got. Heroclix has been around for 15 years; it’s about damn time we got a good Silver Surfer.

What This Means as a Content Creator

With a lack of unique characters that have recognition and good dials, there’s a limit to what kind of articles I can write and what teams I can post about. Who wants to see 15 Captain America builds, or 12 different Avengers theme teams?

I’m sure you’ve noticed this, but the higher rarity figures and usually those with the best dials are almost always big-named characters. When I write articles around a set release and build teams based on what’s in that set, I usually only have about 5-7 builds I can make for that set before the next set comes out if I don’t want every article I write to be a team build. That means I can only pick 5-7 figures from each set to talk about, and if they aren’t good characters, no one wants to read about that team. So inevitably, the lack of characters that make it into sets means I have less unique builds to create.

Sure, it isn’t the end of the world, and there’s always something to talk about with Heroclix, but it does throw a wrench into things. This ties into a lot of what I’ve already set, but the lack of variation in what WizKids puts out affects what creators like myself have to talk about.

It’s interesting that a section of Marvel that maybe quite a few people don’t like is responsible for so much of the stagnation we’re seeing with the game. You might not like the FF, I might not like the FF, but I think we’d all be a lot happier with some more variety and some of our favorite characters coming out to play again.

Before I end this article, I want to make sure you guys don’t misunderstand; I don’t blame WizKids at all for not including the Fantastic Four. That’s Marvel’s deal and at the end of the day, WizKids can’t control what Marvel wants them to print and what they don’t. However, I do blame them for including Battleworld now when they could have waited and made it the killer set it should have been. There’s already some great pieces that we’ve seen, but the point is that no matter what the set holds, it could have been better.

What do you think about the 1-2 year wait before we start seeing Fantastic Four? Do you think I’m on the money here, or do you think I’m blowing things way out of proportion? Let me know in the comments section below.

I’m going to try and pass this funk I’m in, but there may not be an article next week on Two Clicks From KO. I’m finding it hard to write about the game right now, but at the same time I don’t want to be an unreliable creator. I’ve always found it difficult to stick with a website that promises content and then doesn’t deliver, so why should I expect any different?

Take care everyone.